Screenland (May-Oct 1940)

You can't get Spence to help much in making parallels between himself and Edison but — and it was like drawing so many teeth — I did extract these few tidbits from him : "Well, we both had funny sleepinghabits, Edison with his cat-naps and me w ith my insomnia. He was very careless about his clothes, too. His wife had to buy them for him. Same here. Thanks to his indifference to clothes, I only have five changes throughout the entire picture. Don't have to bother with hair-cuts much, either. That comes natural. Edison had a sort of shoe fetish. He couldn't pass a shoe store without buying shoes. I'm like that about ties, ties and shirts. He used to like to swap stories with his cronies. I have the same liking. He liked music. Songs like Sweet Genevieve and I'll See You Home Again, Kathleen and O, That We Tu'o Were Maying were his favorites. They were mine, too, long before I knew they were his. He used to play the organ with one finger, _for relaxation. I poke at the piano with one finger. He used to go to the movies quite a lot. He didn't like 'problem' pictures, he liked pictures with 'happy endings.' Same with me. The gay, white lights didn't attract him ; same here. In his later years he liked to go fishing off the coast of Florida. That's what I do whenever I can get away, go fishing off Catalina. Edison was a great reader. So am I. I read a lot nights, when I can't sleep. He was a window-gazer-outer. So'm I. His teacher once told his mother, 'the boy is addled' — they'd call it 'whacky' today. Teachers used to intimate the same to my folks. He burned his father's barn down when he was a kid and was publicly spanked. I upset the ice-box on my brother and was privately spanked. I don't say that both experiments were for the same creative cause !" I can add one or two parallels without Spencer's help. Edison in the picture kept a huge assemblage waiting at a banquet to be given in his honor at the home of his friend. Henry Ford, while he gave an interview to two students for their high school paper. Spence once kept a very big movie producer waiting an hour and a half while he talked to one of the kids from Boys Town. Edison couldn't have been As soon as work on "The Sea Hawlc" was completed, Errol rushed to his ranch pets. He's the first American breeder of Rhodesian Lion Dogs. Below, a duck joins the feeding party; right, two new arrivals— the kid was born on the ranch, too. called a religious man in the sense of being a church-goer but he often spoke of the trees and flowers, often said "there must be a Great Chemist behind all this somewhere." Spencer doesn't say much about religion, either, but Father Flanagan would tell you that the Golden Rule is written on Spencer's heart. Spencer isn't the kind of a man, no more was Edison, to go about declaiming a Message for Humanity. If I should write, in this article, that Spence has a Mission in Life, he'd murder me. Just the same, he has. He believes that he, and other 'film stars, should use the influence their screen popularity gives them, for the good of humanity. He'd like to use radio, for instance, as a means of talking to people on matters that vitally concern them, wage such good fights on the air as Paul de Kruif fought against social diseases in the pages of magazines. Spencer wants, now, to make pictures that may be stimulating and inspiring to others. He hopes that his role of Father Flanagan in Boys Town may make the world newly aware that "inasmuch as ye do it unto one of these little ones" ... he hopes that his Stanley in "Stanley and Livingstone" may have pepped up other men who are covering "tough assignments" . . . that his Major Rogers in "Northwest Passage" may give boys of this push-button world an influx of the red blood of those men whose entrails were the guts of giants . . . that, now, his Edison may remind us that patience and the humanitarian ideal are not just musty words, embalmed in mothballs. In other words, he'd like to feel that he gives something more than forty or fifty cents worth of casual entertainment to the people who see his pictures. So again, Spence wasn't just talking to hear himself talk when he said: "Edison cared about whether others benefitted from his work. His first invention, the vote recorder, was turned down in Washington because, he was told, it was exactly what they didn't want, it eliminated delay and filibustering, the very means government representatives used to defeat bad legislation. He resolved, then, never again to invent anything that was not necessary to the community at large. He never did. Pretty good thing that he didn't. Try to be necessary to the community at large might be a good yardstick for us all. Why, if it wasn't for Edison, we w.ouldn't be filming the story of his life, we wouldn't be filming anything, for that matter. He invented the electric light without which interiors couldn't be photographed. He invented the motion picture camera without which my pal Gable would still be logging, most likely ! He invented the talking machine, generators, electrical plants, storage batteries, the dictaphone on which scripts are recorded, Portland cement which makes sets practical, the fluoroscope, the electric railway — I could go on indefinitely — thingis, office workers, doctors, dentists, builders and contractors, railroad employees, automobile mechanics, everyone who works with any kind of electrical appliance, employees of the telephone company (he made the telephone practical, you know) all hold their jobs, thanks to the Wizard of Menlo Park. The worth of his inventions is estimated at 40 billions of dollars and because of his inventions there is a billion dollars a year revenue into America. "Makes you kinda stop and think, don't it? Makes you think that maybe if we give some thought to how our work affects others we may get somewhere. And even if it is 'just money' you're after," grinned Spence, "it's well to remember the sizeable fortune Edison left. If he'd kept full rights to everything he invented he'd have died the wealthiest man the world has ever seen. He didn't keep full rights to everything because, in the early days especially, he always needed money for the next thing. So he'd sell an invention, outright or in part. He wasn't a good business man. Like when he invented the stock ticker and was asked what he thought it was worth, he said 'Three thousand dollars.' They paid him $40,000 for it. You can get somethingout of that, too, I mean, Edison had faith in himself, he also had faith in his fellowmen. Not a bad idea to believe that if you're on the level with people, they'll be on the level with you. It's good common sense to hold that thinking about the other fellow brings the other fellow's money into your pocket because when he has confidence in you, you've got everything he has. "Make people trust you, that's not bad advice for man or boy. Maybe we do think too much about ourselves, about what our work will do for us, whether we will reap the rewards. Maybe we don't think enough about the other feller, about humanity. Someone once said, 'You can't be greater than the system of which you are a part.' Well, maybe you can't ignore the system of which you are a part, either. Maybe what you do can't just be for you, ever think of that? The other way seems to pay dividends," said Spencer, "in cash, in the tangible rewards — and in other things, too. It would be kinda nice," Spence added, slowly, "to think you'd given light to the world." 77