We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
310 Yes, Mr. DeMille chased a $15,000 mink coat for Gloria Swanson to wear in a pic- ture, explaining, "The audience will love it and Gloria will be enchanted. How could she fail to give me a good performance?" No cost was spared if it meant such elegance as flowing drapes, gowns of spun silver bought by the pound in Egypt, or gold goblets purchased from an European treasure house. "The audi- ence/' he had said, "little knows what treasures there are in my pictures." If, as his critics cried out, his people were unreal, there was no lack of reality in the things about them, down to the smallest details—real fruit, real wine, real roast pheasant (a distressing problem on our sets was the disappearance of edi- bles; many a feast prepared for a Roman orgy 30 B.C. was con- sumed piecemeal by Americans circa 1930 A.D., requiring the posting of guards). Once the boss learned that a head photog- rapher, Whitey Schafer, was applying a kind of lacquer, known as "sex oil" around the lot, to the face and arms of one of his principals, Carol Thurston, to create a sort of glow. It impinged on the boss's concept of natural feminine allure and word was dispatched to Schafer—"Mr. DeMille asks that you stop putting canned sex on Miss Thurston." Many observers of the DeMille complex accepted what they saw at its face value. One phrase was both obvious and irre- sistible: "a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/' This dual temperament at one time or another has baffled virtually everyone, even inti- mates. They were never sure what land of human being he really was down deep. After Mr. DeMille's death a staff member of fourteen years of close association wrote for the press that he was "essentially a sincere and humble man," while another ob- server a few years back regarded him as "a charlatan, trickster, and a man of no real resource," The editors of a film magazine sent a writer on an interesting mission in the summer of 1930. They asked him to clear up the