Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

34 Blanche Sweet Faces Facts Of all the stars she seems freest from pretense or the intentionally picturesque, but when she speaks of her husband, Marshall Neilan, she does allow herself a bit of pomp. By Virginia Tracy ON Fifth Avenue, one Sunday afternoon, a cab stops before a restaurant. The restaurant is one of a chain that used to be noted for cheapness and white tiles ; this latest link has become ecru and expensive, but the tradition of coffee and sinkers will cling round it still, lending it a junketing charm for "carriage trade." A thickset man with a lively face, full of shrewdness, humor, and all manner of Irishness, gets out of the cab. And, if you are a passer-by of an observant turn, you have a feeling of something familiar. Your memory jumps from one magazine photograph to another. Then back ten years — twelve? — to Marguerite Clark's "Mice and Men," and the slim, curly-headed hero. You ask yourself, "Is it Marshall Neilan?" Yes, it is! For the cab now disgorges a young lady, and the young lady is Blanche Sweet. If you are brazen enough you just stop and stare. You enjoy seeing how immensely entertained with each other they are, after about five years of married life; he, talking with the liveliest animation and savoring his subject with a smile of relish; she, as she slips ahead of him, turning back with lifted eyes, blue and very bright, with eager little laughs. But I have an appointment with Miss Sweet presently, to report upon her personality off the screen. And it is rather hindering to find her personality entirely the same as it is on the screen. Particularly when the screen presents her as the pampered daughter of an aristocrat. Under the black velvet hat the hair lies smooth, in an exact wave of shadowed gold ; the slim figure in black suggests luxury of the most conventional and heroinelike sort. So that my heart sinks a little. For what is to be done with golden hair and blue eyes, to distinguish them from the typical heroine of romance that she seems to be ? And now, in a room where four or five people have dropped in at tea time, a girl in a gray-blue dress and hat of rough wool — oh, the very smartest roughness, of course — turns suddenly to greet me, sticking straight out at arm's length a spare little hand, the fingers close together like a boy's. It gives mine a quick shake, hard and sound; then, since its owner has only just arrived, she abandons herself to peeling off her cloak. The whole motion, the whole manner, is that of a neighbor's daughter who has just run in after school. Or, indeed, in that straight jerkin, the brim of the boyish hat pulled to the exact angle of Robin Hood's cap, there is even a suggestion about her that she may be her own little brother. Well, if you prefer Lady Gwendolyn, cleave to her. She was a lovely lady and, though I don't know what became of her, I dare say she is still somewhere about the premises. But as for me, give me Robin Hood. Not, Heaven knows, that there is anything of the intentionally picturesque about Blanche Sweet. Of all mortal creatures she seems freest from pretense. To meet her is to encounter immediately three basic qualities : clearness, candor, decision. For instance : .On the table is a tray of sandwiches. As she comes up to take one her attention is caught by some photographs lying there. She picks out, quickly, several which she admires. "And this one, Blanche? Don't )-ou like this?" "I like that least. It's very fine. But I don't like photographs that are composed in that way, all lights and shadows, to remind you of the photographer. I don't like their being taken so as to make everybody say, 'What a striking piece of work!' instead of making people see what the subject's really like." As she moves away she bites off a bit of her sandwich, quite earnestly, and swallows it. I feel that the photographs are similarly disposed of, that they are swallowed and gone, and that no further attention need be paid to them. Behind all this lies the cool Northernness of her personality, the stubbornness of her mouth and chin, the strength in her slenderness — surely, never was anything at once so fragile and so hardy! — the unmodulated voice, depending upon reason, not inflection. They are all parts of that clear quietude which manages not to be contradicted by the brusque suddenness of her light motions. These are the motions of adolescence. Nothing but adolescence thus flings itself into a chair, instantly relaxed and limp. Nor so instantly coordinates again, fused and eager. Nothing merely human, anyhow. Though now and then a spirited and determined pony will cast upon humanity just such a look of searching appraisal, withdrawing it as imperceptibly as Blanche Sweet does ; or a bird, in one of its practical unflirtatious moods, when it feels itself unobserved, will rouse, turn, change place, just as quickly. And with just the same remoteness and self-containment. No use remembering that she played "The Unpardonable Sin" eight years ago, that Lasky's "The Case of Becky" and the great days of the Biograph came even before that. The most unvarying impression she gives is the impression of first youth. "We came to New York to see the theaters," she said, and like the rest of us, she was delighted with the play "Broadway." "But I don't think any one could say — I can't — just what we find so new about it. It isn't simply the excitement. Perhaps at first the audience feels thrilled because it's being shown such queer people. That's the great thing, anyhow — to show that everybody's different. And yet that all people can ever be is just people. That's what Mr. Neilan always wants to get." When she says "Mr. Neilan" this simple-mannered girl, in whom any sort of pretentiousness would startle you like an elaborate jewel on a sculptor's smock, does allow herself a bit of pomp. Her little head lifts and, while it cannot justly be said that her chest inflates, her voice takes on a quality suitable to one who is now speaking of world interests. When asked her feeling about the present portentous programs of the motion-picture theaters she seems to have nothing against them except that they will not admit two-reel pictures. The two-reel picture, it appears, is a form about which Mr. Neilan feels very strongly. "The distributors say people don't like them. But isn't that because they've never seen them done as modern features are done ? When Mr. Neilan put three of them together and called them 'Bits of Life' people Continued on page 110