Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

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86 Runaways WKo Made Good perienced in life. But I had self-confidence and a very level head. When I had fully made up my mind to the limitation of my environment, I put my head up with the assurance of a millionaire and went forth." She paused a moment before continuing. "I have never told just what happened when I left home. No one is interested in tales of struggle and distress. I fought. That's sufficient. But" — she half closed her eyes as she exclaimed softly, but ominously — "if / had a daughter, and she had notions of running away, I'd lock her up! One place a girl never should leave by stealth is her home. It may sound silly to say this, but it expresses my sentiments. I've had experience, and know." The average runaway girl, who comes to Hollywood, simply aspires to appear on the screen. She doesn't know the courage it takes to compete with the army of unemployed. She doesn't know the initiative employed by successful stars, the dauntless spirit they possess, the pugnacious attitude they maintain. These are the qualities which cause them to assert their personalities and forge ahead, while others falter and fail. The merely "sweet little thing" doesn't have any more chance in Hollywood, than Calvin Coolidge has of trouncing Gene Tunney in a canvas-floored ring. There is the case of Sally Eilers. Sally went to her father and announced that she wanted to go in the movies. And father promptly put his foot down on any such move. "In the first place," he said bluntly, "I don't think you have any talent, and in the second place, I don't want you in the movies. And that's that !" But Sally sneaked out to a studio and got a job as an extra. She worked three days in disobedience of parental orders. Then she frankly told her father what she had done. "All right," he replied, "I'll give you just six months to make good. Now, behave yourself, and if you haven't gained something that looks like a definite place in pictures within that time, you must promise me to quit forever." jt "It's a go, father, dear," said the daughter. Five months later looked pretty dark. Five and one half months, and Sally's prospects began to assume another color. Mack Sennett saw her, took screen tests, signed her to a contract and A N e n a Quartaro's modest entrance into the show world had the sympathy o f her mother, but was kept secret from her father. things A gave her the feminine lead in "The Good-by Kiss." And father, good sport that he is, told Sally to go ahead. Nena Quartaro had a similar experience in New York, but she was aided and abetted by her mother. Nena started playing with a stock company at a theater in Brooklyn, and continued for months before her father knew anything about it. Then one Sunday father was asked to sit in a comfortable chair to hear a piece of news, and the whole story was related. Nena had already won success in a limited way, so the die was cast and father surrendered. Nena began wandering over to the Paramount studio on Long Island, played bits, and was sent West to appear with Esther Ralston in "The Spotlight," after which she was placed under contract by James Cruze. These actresses, now well known, found the call of the footlights or the Kleigs irresistible, but it was their courage and fearlessness which carried them on to achievements. "You get to the point where you feel you've got to go," says Marian Nixon, who was a runaway from Minneapolis in 1922. . Marian got a part in a dancing act with Paisley Noon, much to the discomfiture of her parents, and when Mr. Noon moved on to Winnipeg, Marian went, too. "I was terribly thrilled," she said, "as I boarded the train and we moved out along the banks of the Mississippi, and headed north through the pine woods. It seemed like a great lark. I wrote mother from Winnipeg, saying I wasn't coming back, and we would be working toward the Coast, playing all the larger towns. "But our route suddenly ended in Los Angeles and I found myself broke — fifteen hundred miles from home. Then's when I thought most about mother and Hennepin Avenue and Minnetonka Lake and the like. I sold the return part of my railroad ticket for thirty-three dollars. Then I had to find work if I wanted to exist. I made up my mind that if I ever got back home — but why go into all that ? I got a bit with Monty Banks, then with Mack Sennett, and finally Fox put me under contract. Yet there was that dreadful day when, if I could Photo by Curtis have returned home, I never would have fled from it again." The history of the movies shows that the girls who have made the greatest successes, had to work in order to live. Subsisting on sandwiches, washing their own clothes, and living in cheap lodgings, has irnCont'd on page 114