Screenland (May-Oct 1931)

for July 1931 27 Phillips Holmes' life story — short in years, but packed with color and interest! When I was eight, I attended the Collegiate School on Seventy-seventh Street in New York. The pupils wore military caps, rather like those worn in the Civil War, and flashing swords. I never lost the thrill of wearing those insignia of importance. Each time I crossed Broadway, to and from school, I was quite convinced that, were I to hold up my hand, all traffic would immediately stop and the policemen come to attention. I wanted terribly to try it, but something inside warned me not to — so I continued blithely in my earnest belief. I think that the next in the education series was that interval which stabbed my soul with an agonizingshame. We were in Chicago and Mother sent me to the University for Girls. It is true that they had classes for small boys, but the humiliation of attending a girls' school could not be qualified. I sulked continually, but Mother refused to heed because the French teacher was excellent and I was learning such beautiful French. I remember thinking — "just like a woman !" It was during this period that Ralph, my brother, was born. Dad was playing in "His Majesty Bunker Bean" at the time and his managers wanted Mother to name the baby "Bunker Bean, Junior." Finally, with considerable disgust, she did relent enough to put "Bunker Bean, Junior" in the corner of the announcement cards. The next school was Swift, also in Chicago, where I was subjected to a Navajo coat which I loathed and where a boy named Herbert Cline persecuted me. He was, even then, a clever artist and would draw pictures of me lying on the ground with a black eye and in the last death throes and captioned "This is how you'll look when I get through with you after school !" The terror this instilled in me grew so intense that one day I just wouldn't go to school at all. Finally, Molly wormed out of me what was the matter and urged me to go and lick him. She bolstered up my courage so that I went to school next day and was so fresh that Herbert didn't offer to fight, drew no more pictures and we even became friends. Just a few days ago, I had a letter from him — he is now a promising commercial artist. We returned to New York when I was nine, but I had hardly started in at Collegiate again when Dad signed with the old Triangle company. That meant California and we all trekked across country to make our first acquaintance with Hollywood. New Yorkers all, we turned up our respective and collective noses at the sight of the shabby old Santa Fe Station in Los Angeles and A remarkable study of Phillips Holmes as Clyde Griffi ths in "An American Tragedy," the picturization of Theodore Dreiser' s novel, directed by Josef von Sternberg. In this picture Phil gives a performance that tops his portrayals in "Her Man" and "The Criminal Code." continued to sniff audibly all the way out to the strange conglomeration of orange groves, cheap stores, patches of desert aridness and monotonous bungalows that was Hollywood at that time. Most people, thinking of me as a comparative newcomer, forget that I can stroke a long, white beard and remember Hollywood "when." I think we were here for about two and a half years that first time, but always with trips east every few months. I went to Harvard Military School in L. A. and one of my classmates was Douglas Fairbanks. Junior. It was in the nature of a reunion, since my family had known his family in the east and young Doug and I were already old friends. Ralph and Madeline and I were allowed very little contact with Dad's new trade, the movies, so I have no reminiscences of pictures in The Old Days, although it was then that I was first intro (Continued on pucjc 110)