The self-enchanted : Mae Murray : image of an era (1959)

satin tie. He looked like a clown, if he wanted to know, a clown. "Don't let him throw you," Wally said softly. He took her hand and led her through the door, out into nothing. "Watch me," He imitated the action. "Don't move too much." Wallace Reid was already a screen veteran and a popular star. At nineteen, he'd arrived in Hollywood with his dad, Hal, who had been signed to write and act. Wally's idea was to become a cameraman. The casting director at Vitagraph took one look at his handsome face with its blue eyes and strongly curved brows, at his athletic six-foot frame, and put him in front of the camera instead of behind it. His romantic good looks and his torso, almost all of it bared for the role of the Indian in The Deer slayer, launched Wally; but he'd stepped into real notice as the blacksmith in Griffith's The Birth of a 'Nation and had become a feminine heart-throb with his role opposite Geraldine Farrar in Carmen. An easygoing man of twenty-four now, he loved music, played the piano, the organ, the violin, guitar and banjo, the drums, the saxophone and the viola; when he wasn't needed on the set, he played the violin in his dressing room or played records on his portable victrola. Sure of himself, he wasn't intimidated by the studio brass, least of all by Director Melford. "He's just a combustible Irishman but he's broken in more new stars than anyone in the business," Wally told her. "Broken in or broken down?" she said. "Why does he yell so, I'm not deaf." "They call him 'Whispering George' — it used to be you could hear him within a radius of three miles, barring competition from a boiler factory. You should have heard him then! He's calmed down now, he can only be heard for a dozen blocks or so." "OK, Miss Murray, if you dont mind," Melford called sarcastically. "Don't worry, I'll carry you," Wally said. "Keep your chin up." 55