Screenland (May-Oct 1936)

66 SCRliENLAND Carol Kelly said : "This broiled chicken is grand, the way they fix it! Well, Dorian plays a French courtesan, and I guess she'll do the part kind of well, at that." Carol chuckled and Dill glared at her. "It's sort of a tragedy, hut they say the costumes'll he lovely. Why don't you come in tomorrow, Bill, and mosey around? We'll be doing a rehearsal of the court sequence on stage six." Bill said, "Maybe I will drop by if I can get anybody to mind my newsstand." Carol laughed. "Ask one of the chorus boys to take it over for an hour, but lock up your fairy stories," she said. "Have you any of the five dollars left. Bill ? Can I have a cordial ? I love Chartreuse." Bill said, "You can have anything you want." * * * They were rehearsing on stage six, sure enough, when Bill came through the lot next day. He'd come slowly — stopping to see a knife thrower do his stuff, watching the lithe "bodies of a couple of girls, in Nautch costume, as they sauntered past. He'd even paused to listen to a cowboy quartette, and he hated cowboy quartettes. "I'm like a kid," he told himself, "eating my cake and saving the icing until last. I wonder if Mavis — ■" he called her Mavis to himself — "will be in costume?" There was a tension in the air — Bill could sense it beating against him like a surf — as' he approached stage six. A sound man, who knew him, said — "Howdy, Banton. Coming to see the fireworks?" At Bill's "I don't get you," he explained : "Dorian, I mean. She's raising hell about the sets and the clothes and the props and her director and God alone knows what." Bill said : "Well, a great actress has a right to be temperamental." He shuffled along toward the stage. He pushed open a door very quietly and heard a feminine voice raised in passionate speech. "I tell you," Mavis Dorian was saying angrily to her harassed director, "there's no contrast ! You surround me with a hundred pretty little girls all showing their ankles and their teeth. You put me in a gown like every extra's gown, and expect me to stand out from the crowd. You cover up my hair with a woolly wig, and give me a mask to hold in front of my eyes — what's the big idea, anyway?" Bill drew near the stage. He was appalled by Mavis Dorian's rage — and yet he was fascinated — for she was more gorgeous in her anger than he had ever seen her. The hours he had watched her on the silver screen — the more intimate glimpses he had caught of her as she hurried, face averted, past his stall — had not prepared .him for her amazing beauty. Even the thick make-up she wore didn't detract from that beauty. The abandon with which she raised her clenched fists to the heavens, the way she tossed back her head, the stamp of her foot, were dramatic poetry to Bill. When she flung her magnificent body into a great, carved, throne-like chair, he found himself creeping nearer. He didn't know the simile of the bird and the snake — in fact he didn't see any resemblance to a snake in the sinuous turn of the woman's hips. He was almost at her feet when she started to speak again. "I'm the star of this picture," she fairly screamed at the world of jittery extras, and mechanics, and scenario writers, "and j'ou don't give me a break. What 1 want is contrast. I've got to have background, see? You don't put a diamond in a sea of rhinestones, do you, and expect it to look like a diamond? You don't — " Irene Dunne and her mother as they attended a special screening of "Show Boat," Irene's biggest hit. Somebody to the rear of Bill coughed. Not derisively, nervously. Mavis turned her glorious head in the direction of the cough. She shrilled: "Shut up ! Do you think this is Denver ? Do you — " All at once she caught sight of Bill, standing there. "For the lova heaven," she said, and her tone was even more shrill, "get that cripple out of the way. Broken things make me sick to my stomach !" Bill stared at Mavis Dorian. He had never seen her more alluring. Not in "Flowers of Passion," her hit picture. Not in "Seeds of Despair." He started to turn blindly — a fugitive from her anger and her disdain — and was aware that a little voice, somewhere in the extra ranks, was murmuring: "Bill, Bill, don't you care." Bill, hearing his name, wavered ever so slightly. In the split second of his indecision, somebody nudging somebody else, pushed against him. He stumbled on a step, felt his bad leg crumple under him, reached out with impotent hands to keep himself from falling. He caught at something, felt rather than heard the ripping of some satiny fabric as he crashed to the floor. And then — still feeling rather than hearing — he was conscious of Mavis Dorian's voice. As sharp, as metallic, as robbed of romance, as a steel file. "Idiot," stormed the voice, "that's my dress! You've torn it. I could kill you — you clumsy fool !" The fall had shaken Bill Banton. Worse than that, it had hurt him cruelly. But the knowledge that he had torn his lady's gown — the knowledge that he had merited her scorn — hurt much more bitterly. His eyes w:ere filmed with despair as he raised them to the face of the star. He looked at her beseechingly, aware of the awkwardness of his posture, of his inability to scramble up and hurry away. Something untranslatable in his glance broke the thread of the Dorian rage. The lady from Wisconsin began to laugh. "Damned if he doesn't look like a stray dog, waiting to be kicked!" she giggled. "He's the funniest thing !" Daintily, cruelly, she touched Bill Banton's crouching body with the toe of a silver slipper. There was a stir from somewhere among the extras. A girl's voice cried, with a touch of hysteria, "That beast ! / could murder her ..." But, perhaps fortunately, no one heard the girl. For the director — with a throb of incredulous excitement in his erstwhile weary voices — was speaking. "I never saw anything like him," he said, "He's a natural, if ever there was one. He has a sort of Lon ru-"ey quality. Maybe it's his leg — but m? it's the expression in his eyes — I dunno ..." He paused, cleared his throat, and then — "You wanted contrast, did you, Mavis? Well, you've got what you wanted. There it is at your feet — made to ^rder!" (To Be Continued) Can A Career Kill Romance? Her father was a prominent federal official there and a theatrical future did not loom for her until they moved to California. That was when Rochelle was twelve. She had such an engaging manner that the following year, by accidentally meeting a studio woman friend of a friend of her mother, she found herself under contract. So the truth is that she has had six full years of training for her present opportunity. I begged her to continue with her romantic revelations. Here is someone who knows what's what in Hollywood's younger set. "Well," she said, "getting an agreeable escort isn't easy. Most young men outside the picture industry seem immature. I mean, when they're exactly your age and you've been working since your early 'teens. Continued from page 18 They're cute, but generally too collegiate to be very interesting. "And then there are comparatively few men acting themselves who are eligible. When you come down to facts, Hollywood has always had far more unattached women than men. It's a woman's town. "So the result is obvious, isn't it? The handsome young men who are pleasant, free, and financially able to date — and it does require more than quarters to go to the local popular spots — are keenly soughtafter. Consequently, being so much in demand they are usually inclined to be provokingly masculine. If a girl has chosen to be what is so quaintly described as 'oldfashioned,' there are others, one is told, who aren't !" Curled up on a soft divan in the library of her new house in Beverly Hills, Rochelle during all this frank talk was a vision in satin lounging pajamas of Alice-blue shade. She had met me at the door, too. She doesn't bother to impress, and I would say that candidness is perhaps her most evident trait. She is not in the least fooled by flattery, and she pays one the compliment of speaking her mind in straightforward, sincere fashion. With more urging, she amplified further. "Honestly, it is downright difficult for a girl in pictures to meet a young man with whom she can have a good time. Someone to go to shows with. To dance with. You see, there are two social crowds here. Every girl learns about cliques, and they are as big a probl— +" us here as in any other town. We have h Angeles 'society,' and the film Four hundred. And of course you havt