The stars (1962)

WALLACE REID Wallace Reid as he appeared in Joan the Woman opposite Geraldine Farrar and under the direction of DeMille in 1917. Beautiful Wallace Reid came to Hollywood with his father, Hal, a playwright, thinking he might like to become a cameraman. Someone, however, had the wit to strip him down to a breechcloth to play an Indian in The Deerslayer. Then Jesse Lasky spotted him playing a blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation, signed him and kept him under contract for the eight years it took him to rise and fall. He had, Lasky recalls, "a keen sense of humor, a good singing voice, he played the saxophone and piano and was altogether the most magnetic, charming, personable, handsome young man I've ever met. And the most cooperative." In short, he was a nice guy, an average sort of man, with the average man's total lack of equipment for coping with sudden success. His screen personality was very like his real one, and he generally played good-natured, brotherly sorts. He made no strongly individual statement as a star. He was merely the best of the chisel-chinned, perfectly profiled, heavily brilliantined young leading men of the time. The combination of an ordinary manner with extraordinary looks was then, as now, a screen staple. It was both flattering and reassuring to the audience. It was probably this very ordinariness that was Reid's undoing. Under pressure, he made too many pictures too quickly, and his life as a star was too difficult for him to fully comprehend and manage. His end began in 1920 in New York, where he was making Forever. Suffering from insomnia, exhaustion, anxiety and the bootleg booze he had been using as a prop for his ego, he began taking morphine so that he could face the camera (and the heat and glare of the klieg lights, which bothered many screen performers in those days) with some degree of poise. Before long, he was hooked. The story of his addiction broke simultaneously with the trials of Fatty Arbuckle, the adroit Mack Sennett comedian charged with manslaughter, and the strange, rumor-ridden murder of William Desmond Taylor, a top director. Qf the two cases, Arbuckle's was the more sordid. In the course of a midday drinking party in San Francisco, Arbuckle had escorted a minor actress named Virginia Rappe into another room and there had had sexual relations with her. Four days later she died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. The state charged that Arbuckle, in the course of his sexual adventure, had induced the fatal wound. It took three trials (there were two hung juries) to clear Arbuckle of the criminal charges, and in the course of them the courts heard, and the press lovingly reported, a succession of ex 56