Screenland (May-Oct 1931)

26 SCREENL AND HOW TO BEHAVE THOUGH FAMOUS. 1 Garbo is past mistress of the art of public life. She has mastered it partly by accident but mostly by sheer intelligence and good management. Living up to your public's illusions is an art. Ask any smart and successful screen star By Allen Erwin P UBLIC life is an art; just like learning to dance on your toes, or making the world's best cornbread, or playing tbe piano like Paderewski. It has much in common with marriage ; it gets you both coming and going. Having chosen a public career, it enters into your existence without being invited. If you ignore it, or if you overdo it, it's likely to prove your undoing. You can work at it conscientiously and never be quite certain of the results. And what is it? "The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit farther." Clever, isn't it? Much as I'd like to take a bow I can't because it isn't original. So I'll give credit where credit's due, to Saki, and lie awake nights trying to think up one as good. Of course, you know I'm not going to waste a perfectly good quotation. Certainly not ! In these days of Hollywood unemployment I'm not wasting anything, not even quotations. So we'll take Saki's aphorism (Effie rises to remark that by any name it's still just a smartcrack for her ) and apply it to the movie personages, than whom there is no class of people who have public life thrust upon them quite so forcibly, nor who practice it with such varying degrees of success. Let's start with Garbo and be stylish. Every story should start with Garbo. And end with Garbo. The Great Allure is like the weather ; when the conversation lags you can offer your own solution of the Garbo mystery or wonder if it's going to rain. Only I'd advise sticking to Garbo because what with having such reliable weather bureaus and the elements refusing to assume any glamor though goodness knows how many centuries they've frit tered away without acquiring it (or It, as you will) , Garbo seems a shade smarter. A varied assortment of diverse opinions notwithstanding, Garbo is unquestionably past mistress of the art of public life. She has mastered that elusive art partly by accident but mostly by sheer intelligence and good management. People who met her when she first came to Hollywood say that she was then a shy, lonely girl. The stories written about her recorded these facts and made the pattern from which she was to fashion her public life. We've had a few lonely idols before but instead of emphasizing the situation with tact they forgot to stay in character and spoiled the whole effect. W hite whales and lonely idols are rather at a premium. Garbo soon realized that her silence was not only golden but that if she would, as the aphorism admonished, go a bit farther and make it absolute, it would probably become a platinum silence rather than one of mere gold. There are those, of course, who insist that Garbo shuns interviewers because she doesn't want publicity. Just the same she receives reams more by not talking. She could probably cut the amount of her publicity material in half by seeing press representatives. If interviewers could see her they would write their impressions and there would be little more to conjecture about. Neither is the Swedish star afraid of interviewers. If she couldn't talk intelligently she might well shun the press, but those who have been granted special dispensation to pump the Magnetic One all agree that she talks most intelligently. Nor is her attitude a pose ; the young actress merely slid into Hollywood and showed the local boys and girls that you don't have to tell the press about