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168 Ye*, Mr. DeMille and found lie couldn't make expenses that way. While I am a great believer in human kindness, I never heard of anyone doing anything for nothing so I refused his offer and waited to see what would happen. Other studios had signed up with the old guy and a few days later he came back and offered to do it for nothing. Then he said he would pay me twenty-five cents a tank. I eventually told him I would not sell the stuff at all but would go fifty-fifty with him if he let me in on his secret." He paused, opened a drawer of his desk and withdrew a glittering little ingot. c Tve kept it all these years as a reminder to be careful when someone wants to buy something from me. Well, it's solid silver. You see, this man had discovered that the silver in the hypo could be reclaimed, I learned his secret and it paid most of our chemical bills for quite a while/' There was much of the mule trader in DeMille, a trait that ran like a golden thread through the fabric of his business con- tracts. The native shrewdness was observed by a Federal court in a tax suit against the DeMille corporation in the early 1930's. In the action the Government claimed the company had ac- cumulated a surplus far beyond its corporate purposes, and de- manded additional taxes on more than a million dollars. The Government lost, and DeMille preserved his company's capital-gains advantages. In an obiter dictum, the court took time to take a perplexed and admiring glance at DeMille's way of doing business. It commented on the company policy of in- vesting no money of its own in film productions and using the facilities of other studios. As a bargainer, DeMille had a rule of thumb: "Cut the price in half, then argue like hell." He enjoyed a tactical advantage in the case of actors eager for a DeMille picture "credit" on their record, and was able to press this advantage with con- siderable effectiveness among up-and-coming stars. During the casting of Greatest Show on Earth James Stewart,