Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

83 Do Clothes Make the Actor? A good wardrobe seems to have had something to do with the success that Bobby Agnew has had up to date. By Mona Gardner TWO years ago, some one let the world know that Bobby Agnew -was "the best-dressed juvenile on the screen" and Bobby, an unassuming and well-meaning youth, hitched his wagon to a tailor shop and started a pace that often kills. As a juvenile who is impeccably groomed for every scenario occasion, Bobby has undoubtedly attained the ultimate, for the only things he hasn't included in his wardrobe are fur-lined pajamas and ermine "chaps." As an actor— that seems to be an entirely different matter. During all these months that he has been dutifully buying the latest quirk in neckties and the mostdesired cut of waistcoats, there's just a bare possibility that he has lost sight of his goal. There is one self-evident test. Do directors, in casting the part of a voting son of wealth and culture, say, "Let's call Bobbv Agnew— he looks and dresses the part?" They do," again and again. But on the other hand, when it comes to a more difficult role, highly emotional or of delicate humor, do they say, "This part calls for an actor, a thoroughly capable, sensitive actor. Let's call-in Bobby Agnew?" Maybe; I wonder. Bobby has emphasized his clothes and appearance for so long that directors are forgetting the boy himself. Thus we complete the cycle — for all studio purposes, clothes are making this man. Yet clothes most emphatically and positively do not make the real Bobby Agnew— the Bobby that people know off the screen. It's his ready wit, his ever-present, twinkling and dimpled smile, his utterly lovable boyishness— in short, his radiant personality— that makes him the pet of the film colony. Young girls adore him. Mothers beam in delight when he dances with their daughters. And the women just a few years his senior seek his company, delighted to indulge in any of his whims. But all of this is lost on the screen. Bobby may admit this state of affairs to himself, but he hasn't yet consented to admit it to others. Rather he takes a defensive attitude, the attitude a man invariably assumes when he is up against a mental wall, talking emphatically to convince others, so that he may convince himself and thus restore some measure of his faith in his own abilities. He cloaks his defense in a gay, insouciant manner tinged with a bit of satire, another weapon of the man making his last stand. "Tailor's dummy, am I? Well, it isn't every one who can wear clothes effectively. I'm not handing myself anything as an Apollo, I'm just saying that when a fellow can do it and get away with it in a fairly decent way, he's a fool not to. 3 But it's his wellstocked wardrobe, he says, that gets him a good many of his screen engagements. It's Bobby's personality — not his clothes — that makes him the pet of the film colony. Why, I know dozens of kids dabbling around in pictures who can wear clothes to perfection, yet they haven't sense enough to know what a good business investment they are. "There has been so much talk about miracles happening in the movies — as, for instance, a director seeing a handsome youth in a mob and suddenly handing him a contract on a silver platter — there are such a lot of such blah-blah stories that people are apt to lose sight of the pluggers. Doggone it, if you force me to catalogue myself, maybe that's what I am, just a plugger. It's a darn sure thing that I'm not a meteor and I've certainly done the dickens of a lot of plugging. Just the same, I may finally get somewhere and stay there, while some of your art-for-art's-sake juveniles won't. "Of course, unusual things do occur now and then. I really know about some of them and Heaven is my witness that I've heard of a lot more. But the point is that it hasn't happened to me. When I first went on the sets, I spread myself all over the foreground trying to get the director to look at my handsome map. I should probably still be in the atmosphere group if I hadn't decided upon this stock in trade — clothes. I let it be known that I had a complete outfit for Continued on page 104