Talking Screen (Sep-Oct 1930)

unfortunately, on record. Not long after this, one of the executives at the United Artists studios decided that Alice lacked the poise and dignity that were consistent with his company's publicity department, and Alice was again among the unemployed. She became a script girl, quit to take a small part in a South Sea Island picture, lost the part, and was unable to get the script job back. Alice clerked at Universal City. She addressed envelopes at an ofEce in Los Angeles. She tried real estate again, ringing doorbells to ask owners whether their homes were for sale. A casting agent discovered Alice while she was holding a script on the Charlie Chaplin lot. Naughty Baby and Hot Stuff were two of her first pictures; and that's Alice. Lois Wilson taught school in the Alabama mountains for two weeks. She was fired. Milton Sills wa.' an instruaor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He quit voluntarily to follow the stage. Louis Wolheim was a professor of mathematics at Cornell ; it was football for the dear old Red and White that flattened his nose. Theodore Roberts was once a teacher. Gwen Lee taught dancing after leaving the farm in Nebraska. Anita Page is a talented artist, but she taught kindergarten for a short time at Flushing, Long Island. IT MAY be that Lon Chaney first learned to crawl, and squirm, and climb when he worked as a guide on Pike's Peak. There are a few in the know, in fact, who insist that Lon Chaney really is Pike s Peak. He developed his brawn, no doubt, in his various, subsequent jobs as theatrical property man, transportation agent, and stage hand. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., studied art in Paris before he made his debut in motion pictures. He recently sold six caricatures of screen stars to Vanity Fair. Malcolm St. Clair was a cartoonist, and Ford Sterling's artistic leanings are toward photography. He has a studio now in Pasadena, California, which he operates for profit — as well as for his own diversion. BiUie Dove studied art while she was living in New York City, but she was practical enough to learn before long that posing was far more profitable than painting. and directors, I guess, have told me of similar plans. Ingram and Jimmy Morrison are the only two that have been strong (or weak) enough to pass up the Hollywood dollars. Ingram has a home and studio in Southern France now; Jimmy is writing novels and short stories in Greenwich Village. Renee Adoree first appeared before the public as a bareback rider in a French circus. Her father was a clown, and he prepared her early for her career. Later, after another season or two as an acrobat, she smdied dancing; and, in her case as in the cases of Mae Murray, Joan Crawford, and a score of others, dancing paved the way to the movie studios. Raymond Hatton was also a circus rider, and the trick falls that he introduced into early Mack Sennett comedies were learned under the Big Top. J studio Don't gulp when we tell you Louis Wolheim was a mathematics instructor at Cornell before he became acquainted with movie studios. Incidentally, it was a football game for his dear old alma mater that flattened his nose and gave him his villainous visage. EX INGRAM was a sculpt0r. Motion pictures were always the means to an end for him. He told me at the Christie Hotel in Hollywood immediately after the first showing of The Four Horsemen that he would quit the screen as soon as he could afford to so that he could devote himself exclusively to sculping. Forty stars These two young ladies began their careers in the sweet quietude of a convent. Both Joseohine Dunn, left, and Raquel Torres pursued business courses, but Wall Street suffered a severe setback when the films stole them away. OF E. BROWN did his bit with a circus, too. Joe, as a youngster, was one of the Five Marvelous Ashtons, a troupe of aerial acrobats with Ringling's, Robertson's, and other large circuses. Joe quit acrobatics necessarily when the ground man of the act, because of some petty argument, deliberately let him fall'to the stage. His leg was broken. At seventeen, Joe was a professional baseball player with the St. Paul team. He advanced later to the big leagues, winning a berth with the New York Yankees. Years of vaudeville and burlesque followed and kept him busily occupied until the advent of the talkies, when Joe suddenly found himself a very much wanted young man in Hollywood. Alexander Gray was another venturesome youngster. He is one of the several male stars of the talking screen who sold newspapers. His second commercial venture was gathering water cress which he sold at the Baltimore Lexington market. Then came a job in his uncle's tobacco fields in Pennsylvania. He was leader of the college glee club at Penn State, where he studied engineering, and he sold and demonstrated aluminum cooking utensils to pay his way through school. He scrubbed decks on a British merchant ship to see Europe, and he stoked in Howard Gould's yacht to get back to the United States. Gray was later technical editor of Iron Age, a teacher in a Chicago elementary school and at Northwest Military and Naval Academy, and advertising manager for the Diamond Truck Company. How he first landed a part in Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic is not important; obviously, such a man could land anything he went after. To-day, just to keep himself occupied in his off mo[Continued on page 77] 26