Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

110 Advertising Section CHELSEA HOUSE New Copyrights Tales of the West, of Love and Mystery and Adventures on sea and land — you can have them now, fresh from the pens of your favorite authors. They are real books, too — no reprints of oldtimers but new books bound in cloth, with handsome stamping and jackets and all for 75 cents. Ask your bookseller to show you some of the books listed below — The Brand of Good Books RED PEARLS Merlin Moore Taylor NICE GIRL Vivian Grey SQUATTERS' RIGHTS George M. Johnson BLACK SKIN AND BROWN Done Waters JUDY THE TORCH Arthur P. Hankins THE ROAD TO BROADWAY Ellen Hogue and Jack Bechdolt WHITE WOLF'S LAW Hal Dunning LOST LOOT Joseph Montague HIS STUDIO WIFE Violet Gordon THE WELL-WISHER Robert J. Horton THE POISON EYE Madeleine Sharps Buchanan LOOT OF THE LAVA BEDS John H. Hamlin FORTUNE UNAWARES Joseph Montague THE RANGE WAR ON VV Emart Kinsburn MR. CHANG'S CRIME RAY A. E. Apple BUCKING WITH BAR C George Gilbert POUNDING THE RAILS Don Waters OUTLAWS OF BADGER HOLLOW G. W. Barrington HUNTED DOWN Robert H. Rohde THE WHISTLING WADDY Donald Bayne Hobart THE ISLE OF DRAMS RANGE RIVALS THE CRIMSON CLOWN RIDIN' FER CROSS T THE I'SLAND WOMAN Joseph Montague John H. Hamlin Johnston McCulley George Gilbert Captain A. E. Dingle EA HOUSE Before — and After Continued from page 61 79-89 SEVENTH AVE-, K£W YORK. CITY lows, was a white fur rug lined with peach crape. In it, Madame Glyn told me, she nestles at night on her balcony. "For twenty years," she told me, "I have been living under Maya. All kinds of tiger skin stunts, all that is meretricious and false, have been attributed to me. Not only my hair is represented as false, but everything else about me. "All this came from a deliberate misinterpretation of 'Three Weeks' by the English press, which has shown great enmity toward me, because in the first days when I began to write they had a feeling that it was the shoemaker taking bread out of the baker's mouth. "They were angry that a society person should have written it. Its success amazed them. Each critic wrote something worse about me than the other. That, I conclude, influenced the American press. Half hit me like the English ; the other half praised me. But none of it has ever mattered to me. "The whole meaning of my existence has been peculiar. I had a thorough classical education, but never had an opportunity to meet literary people. I wasn't brought up with other people at all. I lived entirely with my thoughts." As Elinor Sutherland, she told me, she married young Clayton Glyn, a member of a family as old as her own. She proudly exhibited, as any other woman would, photographs of her two daughters, high-bred types of English beauty, and of her three grandchildren. Likewise a portrait of her mother, a handsome, rather autocratic woman of eighty-five. Since Madame Glyn's marriage she has lived in Paris, visited every court in Europe, and been honored by nearly every nation. "I know life thoroughly now," she declared. "Nineteen years ago, I came first to America to stay with friends in New York. I came back in 1911 and again five years later, at the invitation of Jesse Lasky, to work for him. "I had never seen a moving picture, and found the movie angle difficult to learn. But I set my mind to it. Three months later I wrote the picture 'The Great Moment,' for Gloria Swanson. Then 'Beyond the Rocks.' I was so disgusted with the changes made in this picture that I went back to Europe. A year later I was tempted to return. "I will never make another picture, with somebody else's ideas disrupting the meaning of my charac ters. I object to comic opera being put where it does not belong. It is up to the director to get over the psychology of the characters, and not place a totally false interpretation on them. "I have no desire to have my name as director on my pictures. All I contend is that I am more likely to know the thoughts and psychology of the characters I have created than any other person. "I always draw them from life — some man or woman I know. That is why they ring true. My eventual aim is to put over perfect beauty, to represent life as something not altogather sordid." Madame Glyn's insistence upon "perfect beauty" both in the sets and costumes for her pictures, is very costly to the studios. In the wardrobe department at the Metro-Goldwyn studio I saw half a dozen threeyard trains made of real ermine and edged with lace, that were used in one of the Glyn pictures and have never been used since ! She told me that she writes rapidly by long hand, and rarely makes a change in her "first flush." "I write, curled up on the divan," she said, "with a wooden block on my knees. When I come to a stile and my thoughts are not ready to leap over, I get up, turn on the radio and dance. That makes the whole blood stream run differently, and then I start again. "I always write in the morning, never at night, and only when I feel like it. Though I like money very much, a million dollars wouldn't induce me to write when I didn't wish to." "Do you ever dictate?" "Mercy, no ! I couldn't stand another personality in the room with me." "And yet Madame Glyn isn't a temperamental woman. I wouldn't want an easier one to work with." This interruption came from her young business manager, John Winn, who was admitted just then. He was sent over by the London office of Elinor Glyn, Limited, to look after her American interests. "He combines great knowledge of my business with pretty good knowledge of me," she laughingly explained. "Every morning he comes to early breakfast, when we discuss every detail of the day's business, and he goes to the studio when I go. He looks after all my bills, makes my contracts, and takes large burdens off my shoulders. In all this time we have never fought."