Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1928 - Feb 1929)

87 What's to Follow? most optimistic of them hopes to vanquish time few of them tell how they feel about the future. Louise Walker Leatrice Joy confided to me that she wanted to write. "I shall have to do something!" she said, with a note of fear in her voice. "This thing takes all your energy — all your thought — for so long. You are on the set from morning till night, day after day. Between pictures you are thinking of your next story, and getting your clothes ready. If you had to stop suddenly, it would he almost as if you had stopped living — the end of everything. "You would have to find some other work, something intense and difficult, to take its place. Writing is difficult, isn't it ? I shall have to occupy myself with something hard to do!"' It occurred to me that by the time Leatrice is through with pictures, little Leatrice will be coming along to the age where she will demand a lot of attention from her mother, whose devotion to the child is f righteningly intense. Leatrice will not lack for something to keep her occupied ! But one thing which makes it so difficult to give up pictures is the inevitable, and eternal, shop talk of picture people. Various girls have left the screen to pursue domestic careers, and have nearly always been driven to an attempt to get back. Mildred Davis Lloyd, who returned to the screen a year or so ago for one picture, after, two or three years of married, and maternal bliss, told me that all the social gatherings had been spoiled for her, because of the shop talk of the people she met at them. "They tell funny things which have happened on the sets," she said. "They talk contracts and breaks and opportunities. They talk of nothing but pictures! All the news I have to contribute is a new recipe for cake, or that Gloria has a new tooth ! I am simply out of their world ! I have to get back!" Recogniz i n g that, some of the more mature actors have made plans which will take them away from Hollywood, and the atmosphere of pictures, when their careers are ended. "To be among picture people, and no longer at work — to be in the atmosphere, and not of it — would be unbearable," Florence Vidor says. She has bought a home in Honolulu, where she plans to live in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, surrounded by congenial souls, who are familiar with pictures only in the theaters. Photo by Louise "It's all an accident, my being an actor," says John Gilbert, who expects to work when he stops acting. Aileen Pringle plans to live abroad, andi write a book. It is truly amazing how many actors plan to write books. Many of them will doubtless be very revealing and exceptionally informative, to a startling degree ! Richard D i x , Richard Dix intends to be a studio executive. who is a business man first, and an actor after that, takes a characteristic view of the matter. I heard him wailing one day about the income tax. "The government does not take into consideration how short our time is," he complained. "They tax us as if our salaries were income from inherited capital. It s not the same. Our salaries are our capital. We just have a short time to go — ten years, maybe twelve — and then we are finished. Our earnings do not pyramid as we grow older, as do those of men in other professions. They stop before we reach middle age. If we don't keep that in mind, and prepare (icr it, we are very foolish !" [Continued on page 115] Florence "Vidor will spend her tirement in Honolulu. re