Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

52 Every Move a Picture! "Aloma of the South Seas"* introduces to movie stardom Gilaa Gray and her turbulent torso. By Malcolm H. Oettinger "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, If my singin' doari getcha, my shimmy must!" THE husky voice sobs down to a wailing whisper, drowned by a crashing wave of jazz — saxophones moaning, trombones strident, drums bumping. The woman with golden hair stands in the glow of the spotlight with her shoulders rippling, and her torso trembling, to the slightly mad, always barbaric beat of "Beale Street Blues." She dances, yet her feet move ever so little. This is the shimmy, a tremulous agitato movement in a symphony played from the waist up. This is the shimmy, elementary body shuffle borrowed from the savages of Lahore and Rangoon and Bombay. And this, of course, is Gilda Gray, unchallenged queen of the shaking shoulder and the restive hip. She stands spotlighted in a gown of black velvet, with fantastic ostrich feathers at her hips. Singing the doleful blues and swaying her rhythmic white shoulders, she makes her debut on Broadway. Others have danced on Broadway before, others have received the accolade of the makers and breakers. But this is a new figure, bizarre, fascinating, daring. A little sister to Little Egypt. The rajah's favorite in a Callot gown. Barbary Coast on its good behavior. She quivers until the blase city quakes ; she becomes an irresistible magnet, drawing the nighthawks to the Rendezvous after the theater ; she shivers her way into the electric sign announcing the "Follies ;" she takes the country by storm in a quick, resultf ul tour ; she becomes a Modjeska of the movies! Perhaps this is climax. Perhaps. But surely drama is here. Gilda Gray was driven to a discovery of her special talents by an ill-chosen husband. When in his cups, he was abusive to the point of brutality. Thus it was that Gilda, after standing all that a good wife should, and probably more, decided to throw up the sponge — in this case the bar mop. Renouncing matrimony as practiced in Chicago, she bade her spouse farewell. Discovered singing in a Loop tavern, she was placed under contract to appear briefly in "The Gaieties," just another Shubert revue. In the midst of the vaudeville turns and symbolic ballets peculiar to such extravaganzas, Gilda sang her "Beale Street" rhapsody, shook her tintrammeled shimmy, and stopped the show. As she sobbed her lamenting blues and throbbed her dance, the first-nighters fairly cheered, encoring her until the following acts were held up. I met her when "The Gaieties" reached Philadelphia. Gilda was bitter. There could be no doubting that. "The toast of New York," she told me, "and getting only seventy-five a week \" More, it seemed, had been offered by others, but her contract was ironclad. That, she explained, was the irony of it. *Scenes from "Aloma of the South Seas" may be found on page 78. "I could be getting five hundred if it wasn't for this rotten contract. Keith's are paying a girl a thousand, and she imitates my shimmy. She doesn't do it right. She does it this way." She illustrated graphically. I watched, attentively. "It should be done this way." Again I stood spellbound as the demonstration proceeded. But, for all her growing fame, Gilda was unhappy. That was as obvious as the dimple in her shoulder. Time dealt kindly with her, however. Following the demise of "The Gaieties," Gilda was installed as the chief attraction of the Rendezvous, a night club which fast became the midnight Mecca for the knowing, and in due course, the not-so-knowing. When Frederick O'Brien discovered the romance hidden in the South Sea Islands, and people began to discuss him and them, Gilda cleverly seized upon the opportunity to introduce a nautch dance which she chose to call the "arearea," which she explained was inspired by "White Shadows in the South Seas" — and perhaps a wily press agent. In any case, Gilda Gray and the Rendezvous became the smart thing. It was in the order of events that next she should adorn New York's premier revue. It was just two years after her Manhattan debut that the astute Mr. Zeigfeld corraled her to lead his "Follies" in company with Will Rogers, Ann Pennington, and other specialists. Here Gilda chanted "South Sea Moon," with accompanying illustrations in her own inimitable shredded-wheat manner, Urban settings framing the scene. Then, "Come Along" was introduced by Gilda in high-brown make-up. This was a compelling syncopation of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," positively hypnotic as Gilda rendered it. She has no voice, musically speaking, but her singing sways you with its primitive power. Although less apparently responsible, her husky contralto is as much a part of the Gray allure as are her eloquent hips. The seasons in the "Follies" were succeeded by a European jaunt, then a United States tour of the grander cinema palaces, to make money as well as to demonstrate in black and white the drawing power of the name "Gilda Gray" on the front of a theater. This resulted in a small fortune for the dancer, and a Paramount contract specifying fifty thousand dollars per picture plus an incredibly large percentage of the net profits. And so to Astoria, Eastern home of Paramount, where I found Gilda happier than she had been in Philadelphia. And a shade more restrained. She was making the concluding scenes of her first picture, "Aloma of the South Seas," most of which had already been filmed in Porto Rico. Regarding her tour of the movie emporiums she was becomingly modest, yet withal convincingly statistical. Figures were at her shapely finger tips, box-office grosses in her mind's eye. "I don't want to seem to boast," she prefaced, "and I ain't bragging, but I did wreck box-office records from coasta coast." And she did, foremost among her EVEN IF YOU HAVEN'T ever seen Gilda Gray do her fa= mous South Sea Island dance, her fame is so widespread that the news that she was to be starred in films must have roused the interest of every moviegoer. Malcolm Oettinger visited the Paramount studio while she was in the midst of her first picture, and the impressions he gives here, in his characteristically vivid style, of this girl who, in but a few years, has risen from poverty to an income of over a thousand doI= lars a day, cannot fail to be of interest.