Screenland (Nov 1925–Apr 1926)

SGREENLAND 107 Luck Comes Once Continued from page 27 house on West Forty-seventh Street, New York, is an unusual cafe called the Stage Door Inn. Actresses go there when the tide runs dead against them. They work as waitresses for a few weeks until they have earned sufficient money and courage to tackle the round of managers' offices again. For cash customers like you and me, it's best to enter the Stage Door Inn pretty late, after most of the diners have gone. Those who remain are friends: young actors, an artist or two and fictionwriting denizens of Grub Street who smoke highpowered pipes. The girls dine then. Stars of tomorrow, you'd call them. Conversation is bandied about the tables 'tween bites. "I don't see May here tonight." "No, she's rehearsing. She's got a part with Belasco — well, not exactly a part. She walks on and off; but it's worth fifty dollars a week." "Esther isn't here tonight, either." "No." A pause. "Her people sent her enough money to go home, and she went." Another pause, wistful, half-envious, doubtful. "I wonder what I'd do if my people sent me enough to go home — if I had any home." And that's the Stage Door Inn. The girls are young. But this night an old, unfamiliar face was numbered among them; and with stage or screen folk an old face should not be unfamiliar. You generally remember them. This woman was bafflingly unknown: a figure of gaunt disillusionment, whose gliding smile suggested a hopeless shrug. Somehow we fell into conversation and presently I found myself turning over the pages of a photograph-album containing '"stills." Here she was a toothless hag; again she was a motherly soul; here she could have passed for twenty; in the days of witchcraft she would have been burned at the stake for her appearance on the next page. There were a hundred such characterizations, all perfect. She mentioned her name, and it registered instantly as that of the best-known character woman in English motion pictures. In New York she was .stranded and unrecognized. She wanted to return home; she sought just one engagement that would give her enough to pay her passage back. What I could do was little enough; I could give her a letter to the manager of a New York studio, not that letters of introduction mean anything. She understood that, but the next day she presented her credentials. Any luck? When I dropped into the Stage Door Inn the following evening to inquire about her, she had gone. No one could say where. Just one year afterwards, exactly two hours before I sat at my typewriter to relate these whimsies of Lady Luck, in fact, I wrote that woman's name very large on the design for one of those huge posters which flaunt fame from the bill-boards. Obviously I cannot tell her name. But please recall the two character actresses who have sprung suddenly into prominence, and decide for yourself who's who. At the studios she had earned her passage money home, but instead she traveled west to Hollywood and surrendered herself to Fate. Fate — Kismet, as the swarthy Easterns say. "This is my Day of Days wherein I shall roam the skies and plumb the abyss of my destiny." A fifteen-cent "still" set Ben Lyon on the road to stardom. Older actors can tell a dozen stories of how Opportunity came to them; but I prefer Ben's tale. It's true, because he's still too young to want to dramatize his life. "Besides," said Ben, "I haven't had as tough a time as many of them, outside of having to wait seven years for my chance." For many of those seven years, however, he lived on a dollar a day — car-fare and lunch money — while he pursued Lady Luck from Fort Lee to the Bronx, from studio to studio, without being permitted to pass the gate-keeper. Occasional stage engagements helped; but no one knew him, and his first part in "Potash and Perlmutter" reached him second-or-thirdhand after other actors had refused it. "There was nothing to follow 'Potash' — and I was pretty sick of trying," Lyon related. "I'd scraped up enough money to take a month's vacation and I decided to go to Hollywood, figuring that if I received a chance there I'd accept it; but if not, I'd have had my vacation anyhow. "Now in 'Potash and Perlmutter' I had appeared in just one 'still' and something kept insisting all day that before I left for the coast I ought to have that 'still' — well, to prove I had been in pictures, I guess. "First National had released the film; but from where I was, their offices lay at the other end of New York. I wanted that 'still'. Yet I tried to convince myself that it wasn't worth going so far to get it. In the end I went. Back in the First National publicity department I found the lady who filed the photographs, produced fifteen cents, and bought my own 'still'. " 'You're Ben Lyon, aren't you?' she asked as I was going. "It felt pretty good to be recognized. " 'Why don't you go in and see Mr. Rowland? He might be able to give you an engagement,' she suggested." R. A. Rowland, producing head of First National, is a pretty shrewd observer of screen possibilities, but when an interview was arranged half an hour afterwards, Lyon seemed to make no impression on him. "I left the offices with that confounded 'still' and no prospects as far as I could see," Ben continued. Which only proves that Lady Luck is quite invisible. She walked out arm in arm with Ben and he didn't know it. While he was on the train a telegram shot ahead of him instructing the First National studio officials in Hollywood to give him a seven-year contract. And the officials spent five days telephoning every hotel in Los Angeles trying to locate him — to start him working in "Flaming Youth" immediately — while Ben spent those five days wandering from casting office to castx ing office trying to Jind work. A fifteen-cent 'still' steered him right into fifteen hundred dollars a week. "You bet I'm lucky," grinned Ben through the black beard he has cultivated for his next picture, "The Savage," a South Sea story full of beachcombers and pearlers who know more of luck than any other men. And incidentally that gesture brought back the picture of Old Henderson suddenly surrounded by wealth on the Queensland opal fields. "I'll admit there are times when you can't go wrong. Why, the day the studio instructed me to start raising this beard, the barbers announced they were raising their prices." 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