Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

Manhattan Medley 59 on their diplomas, they have won their spurs, and the result is awaited in the studio with keenest interest. What a Wig Will Do. This is the story of a Spanish girl, a charming Castanet player, with big, lustrous eyes, the charm of the Latin, and the grace of the dancer. She is the heroine in Thomas Meighan's "Blind Alleys." Thomas sought a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty to play her. Emissaries scouted in the highways and byways of casting offices, Broadway plays, and obscure places. And then the blonde Greta Nissen got the part. George Washington did it with his little hatchet — Greta did it with a black wig, ensconced over her own flaxen tresses. The wig man will tell you he has transformed many a modern girl into a Colonial dame, but this was his first experience in converting a Scandinavian maiden into a Spanish senorita. Mary Brian on the Air. Mary Brian is being initiated into the ways of progress. It's not enough for a girl to be a movie star these days — she must needs be a public speaker, a politician, and a business woman to boot. Already Mary has tried the role of public speaker. Richard Dix took her ~~~~~ by the hand one wintry evening and led her into the jaws of a microphone, before whose silent majesty he and Mary enacted a scene from their latest film, "Knockout Riley." Richard avers he had the time of his life, but Mary announces that she afterward found her first gray hair. A Girl of Sixty. She is sweet sixty if she's a day — and proud of it. She has every reason to be proud — she has lost neither that schoolgirl complexion, the joy of living, nor the fashionable silhouette. When she buys a dress, she asks for "size fourteen, misses'." And she weighs one hundred pounds, is as busy as a bee, and has a whale of a good time. In case you've missed her on your rounds, ask Grannie. Like Dad, she knows. Grannie and this perennial flapper started out in life about the same time. J Photo by White Studio Helen Chandler insists that the pleasant prospect of the location trip to Florida had nothing to do with her deserting "The Constant Nymph" for "The Joy Girl." Photo by Ricbee Warner Baxter was in New York to play in "The Telephone Girl," but was impatient all the while to get back to the cabin home he has built high up in the California mountains. "What," Grannie will say, fold§ ing up her knitting, "Fanny Ward? | Well, when I was a girl " I But Fanny is a girl still, a mod1 ern girl, who dances all night, I works all day, trots off to Europe two or three times a year, and is a walking example of what the welldressed girl should wear. And how does she do it? "Why, there isn't a day," she says, "when I miss doing at least ten persons' work and three or four persons' play. If I come in from a dancing party — and I dance almost every evening — at four a. m., I am up and on the go at eight o'clock just the same. Feeling like a million dollars. I've spent virtually all of my grown-up life collecting ways to beat Father Time, and I believe I've made a fairly good job of it." Fairly good job! One must see Fanny Ward at sixty to realize even half of the miracle she has wrought. Is she letting down with the years? Is she doing a lot of resting? Is she slowing up? Hardly. She has undertaken a tremendous business enterprise which will keep her commuting between Paris. London, f