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"B" AS IN BARNUM 283 not be used suggestively in connection with Johnny's remark 'Can I help?'" DeMille had an untamed weakness for injecting little sur- prises in his movies, often causing both innocent observers and censors to fall into exasperating traps. He numbered among his choice tidbits such seeming blunders as Roman soldiers shoot- ing dice, Joan of Arc using a safety pin, Scottish Highlanders in kilts lifting the siege of Ft. Pitt. In a transport of secret joy, he sent to Hungary for a replica of the famous bent crown for the player who portrayed King Nicholas in The Crusades. As he predicted he received in- dignant letters calling attention to, as one writer put it, "the old second-hand crown with the bent cross." H. B. Warner literally felt the weight of this fondness for authenticity. Portraying the Christ in The King of Kings he was called upon to carry a cross weighing 160 pounds, just a few pounds lighter than the original. DeMille was rhapsodic over one revelation by Dr. Corydon M. Wassell. In the film a brown-skinned character named Tremartini does a native dance which smacked more of Harlem than Java, where the customs are largely pre-Moslem. DeMille set his critics straight. The character was authentic, being an exact counterpart of a Javanese nurse. As to her outlandish hula- hula dance, Dr. Wassell was the authority: "Java girls do a sexy hula as a result of having seen Betty Grable pictures." DeMille was unhappy over the chronic refusal of censors and critics to take his pictures at face value. What one saw in a DeMille picture one could believe, a motto of the DeMille office which the public never quite raised to the dignity of a maxim. Through the years he had demonstrated an academic fervor far beyond the needs of the moment, spending thousands of dollars tracking down these bits of historical lore. He would complain moodily, "I spend $100,000 on research but along comes a critic who has just read a paragraph out of some