Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

32 Hollywood's Latest Adventures in Matrimony Jacqueline Logan had known Ralph Gillespie but four weeks when she married him There is a certain fluid grace in the movement of romance here. It is enchanting, trying to keep up, and I am usually two laps behind on engagements, for the scenarios never operate in clockwork fashion nor creak from old age. When I am looking toward a corner from which I may reasonablv expect a flourishing romance, lo ! it sneaks up behind me and bursts from some other quarter. Like phosphorescent fireflies, these loves shame in color the drabness of marriage elsewhere. They have a cardboard picturesqueness which lifts them out of the ordinary rut — for the moment. Hollywood sits atop a flotilla of little balloons that soar this way and that and, punctured, fall in tattered bits of color. Some of her girls and men stand by the guns of their faith, and once in a blue moon realize their dreams, but disillusion is for the most part rampant. We have cynics who have learned how to look at people indifferently, how to watch something dear go, with only a momentary shade of regret. As one caustic and brilliant girl mused one day, "To enjoy while it's here, and when it goes to whisper, 'Thank you for a good time . . . for a few precious hours,' and then to turn the next page to see what's written on it." Life here is not like life elsewhere. In other towns, weeks progress with slow, monotonous tread. Here, the days fairly dance by, marked by those little flares which make the morrow constantly new and alluring. Looking over the ambrosial placidity of Hollywood — its surface, small-town peace — I wonder that such tranquil calm can conceal so many flames that burn for a day and then crumble into embers. Many of those loves are from the outset inconsistent and incongruous and doomed not to last. Only in a town of such contradictor v currents could they be possible at all. Propinquity is both the cause and the death of much Hollywood love. Daily .association strikes the spark of comradeship which quickens into a greater interest. But, often, it eventually bores ; the monotony of hours together palls, and platitudes begin to grate, with the quenching of mystery. The causes of our divorces might be tabulated : Jealousy, when both are professionals and human ego asserts itself , each demanding the spotlight, the applause, the reins of leadership. Absence of the material-dependence yoke — -for selfsupporting wives won't endure much domination. They don't have to. They can pay for their own ermine coats and pork chops. Artistic discontent, which sometimes harries these children of make-believe who have yet to realize that life is a series of compromises and that imaginative work can't be mixed with practical home life. Familiarity, which strips awav glamour and mystery. Temperament — impulsive tempers breaking forth in hot, unforgivable words. Friends, of whom one of the couple does not approve. Relatives cause less discord than elsewhere, as families are usually provided for in separate homes. I suppose it all simmers down to this : the instincts of Adam and Eve. dressed in fancy trimmings and spotlighted for the world's entertainment. But statistics show that during 1925 "Miss Cupid" as they call the clerk at the city hall where marriage licenses are bought, Edmund Lowe and Lilyan Tashman met some years ago in New York, became friends, and were finally married in Hollywood.