Screenland (Sept 1922–Feb 1923)

36 tried to make me take a diamond ring. Some day when I'm hungry I may regret that I didn't let Polly give me a restaurant. She did give one, or rather the money with which to start one, to a fine young chap in whose business career she became interested. Petrova gave me a book of poems once. She would have given me a dozen had I let he*. She has plenty more. She wrote them herself. But much as I have enjoyed the poems since, I have liked none of them better than I liked one line that she spoke to me" on the afternoon when she handed me the volume. It was back in the days when everybody around the studio had to call her "Madame," back when she had a carpet laid for her from her dressing room to the set, back in the days when as a poseur she could give Nazimova half a block start and beat her a block. "Madame," breathed I respectfully, "do you find that your work is adequate compensation for the labor you put into it or do you sometimes sigh for the footlights again?" She of the most wonderful figure that ever has .been in pictures looked at me keenly for the shadow of a second. "Suppose we don't bunk ourselves?" she asked. "Don't you think there's enough bunk in this business as it is?" I thought there was. I said what I thought and we've been real friends ever since. Petrova never was remarkable for her excessive consideration of others, but she was such a shrewd business woman that she never permitted her disregard for those others to interfere with her determination to enlist the interest of people that she needed. She never snubbed anybody who could be of the least possible use to her, and when she wanted to be friendly she could be very friend Q ly. Even people who thought that her thoughtfulness where they were concerned was the result of calculation rather than of impulse had to admit that shewas thoughtful when she wanted to be. Hollywood ScREENLAND Caii£*»i» interview the young lady. I had talked to her on the telephone the day before and she herself had set the hour. I was at the house at the time when she had said that it would be best to be there and there I sat for one hour and a half. She was asleep. The servant that admitted me would not call her and it was not until after her mother came into the room that I got a chance to communicate with the star. Mary does what her mother tells her to do and as her mother, like most mothers whose daughters have been on the stage, has a fair idea of the value of publicity, she brought Mary down in a hurry, but my point is that Mary should have kept the engagement herself. If the former chorus girl of Ruth Hale's story ever asked Mary Miles Minter: "Dearie, ain't you ever com moving-picture star ever got. Naturally enough, she likes her own handiwork and Mary likes it, and if the parties of the other part, the producers who, under the contract, pay Mary a great deal of money, are not quite so infatuated with the terms of the agreement their lack of enthusiasm does not prevent them from handing Mary the checks as they become due. This interviewing life would be a great life if they were all as nice as May Allison. She does not let the interviewer do all the work. She has ideas and knows the English language well enough to be able' to express them, and she is so genuinely interested in people that to sit and talk to her or listen to her is a delight. She told me how proud she was of her husband when he told the servants that they had to stop calling his wife "Miss Allison" and begin to call her "Mrs. Ellis." "He's a regular man," she said. She knows that a moving-picture star can't get any farther without publicity than a fish can without water, and even if she had not found this out for herself her husband could have told her, for before he became a leading man and a director he was a newspaper reporter in New York. Yet another star whose husband also was a reporter does not seem to have learned the secret. Mae Marsh has about her own importance ideas that are not shared by everybody. I know they are not shared by me. Mind, I don't say that she is not a clever actress. There are few women — or men either — who could have been with Griffith as long as she was and not have learned something, but what I mean is that she is not quite so overwhelmingly wonderful that she should put on airs. "I realised the greatest ambition of my life I happened to be on the set one when I became Douglas Fairbanks' leading Sunday when she was working in woman, was all that Marguerite DeLa Motte a scene with Eulalia Jensen and would say. Site seemed to have forgotten several others. Neither the direc M. .ARY MILES MINTER could learn a lot of Petrova. Once at considerable inconvenienc to myself I went out to the Minter establishment in Beverly Hills to nearly ci'erything else that she knew." mon?" she would still be waiting for the answer. Mary Miles Minter would not remain in the same room with such terrible talk. Her sister is a much more human person and the mother is a treat. Mrs. Shelby has to her credit the negotiation for Mary of one of the best contracts that any tor nor Miss Jensen nor any of the others wanted, to be there any more than Miss Marsh did, but to hear her complain, I thought that she regarded this shooting on Sunday as a hardship aimed directly at her. She kept saying: "But I don't feel this scene. If Mr. Griffith were directing me and (Continued on page 62)