Part 13

“Yes,” he heard her reflect after a moment of such pained scrutiny, “you have It--but, ah, my dear boy--your boots and your hair! If I could only send you to my London bootmaker and have some one wise cut your hair!”

Although I do not vouch for the authenticity of this tale, I do say Mrs. Glyn’s part in it is thoroughly consistent with several other incidents of which I have first-hand knowledge. Does she really mean such things or does she say them for effect? I myself believe that she plans her personality quite as carefully as she does her stories. When, for instance, arrayed in the most superb evening attire and accompanied by the handsomest man she has been able to find in the assemblage, Mrs. Glyn sweeps slowly through a ball-room; when she murmurs soulfully, “Orange, orange, how I love it! Often I sit in a room by myself and think orange. I fill my whole soul with its beautiful, warm rays--I drink them down into my heart--ah, orange!”--then she is showing her supreme ability, not only as the writer who can tell a popular tale, but as the writer who knows how to get herself constantly before the popular mind. I once said of her that she was a great showman, and when she heard my comment she was exceedingly gratified.

But underneath all this pageantry of manner is a heart overflowing with the warmest interest in her fellow beings. One of the waitresses at the Hollywood Hotel, where Mrs. Glyn lived for some time, once said to me, “Of all the people I ever waited on Mrs. Glyn was the nicest and kindest and most considerate. I never knew her to be cross--not even at breakfast.”

And, after all, the only trustworthy epitaph is composed by the person who serves us our breakfast.

* * * * *

It was after this flock of authors had alighted in Hollywood that M. Maurice Maeterlinck came to America. He brought with him the pretty little wife who had supplanted in his affections Mlle. Georgette le Blanc. Also, a lecture. Neither of these impedimenta prepossessed this country in his favour. Most Americans were ranged solidly with Mlle. le Blanc, abandoned at the peak of fame to which she had faithfully encouraged the Belgian author. As to his lecture, the delivery of this in English, a language of which M. Maeterlinck knew scarcely a word, still lives in the memory of many New Yorkers who went to pray and stayed to laugh.

In spite of the criticism attached to Maeterlinck’s visit to the United States, there was so much publicity inherent in this criticism that I felt the Goldwyn Company might benefit through a professional association with the distinguished foreigner. So, arranging an interview through M. Maeterlinck’s American manager, I had my first talk with the visiting author in the Goldwyn’s Company’s New York offices.

As he entered I was struck by the placidity of that rather large face. It was round and calm as a lake on a still August day. All our conversation was conducted through an interpreter, and in this manner I gathered that M. Maeterlinck viewed the cinema with enthusiasm and was confident that he would be able to convert his art to its uses.

“Very well, M. Maeterlinck,” responded I, “I am anxious that we should procure exclusive rights to your works, and I am willing to make the same contract with you that I have previously made with Mary Roberts Rinehart.”

The Belgian lifted his eyebrows in childlike bewilderment. It was quite evident that the name of our American novelist aroused no slumbering chord of memory.

“The same then as Gertrude Atherton’s,” I ventured.

This effort at impressiveness failed as ignobly as my first. Indeed, mention of all the writers we had assembled called from him only that vacant smile, that politely groping gaze of a man being addressed in Choctaw or Sanskrit.

It is sad but it is true that the eminence of our Eminent Authors had never been detected by M. Maeterlinck. He had not heard of a single name on our list.

“Very well, then,” I surrendered at last: “I mean I’ll give you ---- thousand dollars.”

And then at last M. Maeterlinck’s face beamed with intelligence. The dollar was one contemporary American author with the works of which he seemed thoroughly familiar. Indeed, I am compelled to record that invariably in all our subsequent intercourse the utterance of this word dollar acted very much as a pebble thrown upon that lake-like expanse of countenance. It created widening circles of comprehension and cheer.

Apart from the work which we hoped M. Maeterlinck might do for us, we featured him in a brilliant publicity scheme. We procured a special car for him and on this we sent him and his pretty little wife speeding to California. The verb used here is rather misleading. As a matter of fact, the lingering element in his journey was the essence of our calculation. For at every city and important town the special train stopped and the populace was afforded a glimpse of the celebrated author. Needless to say, the advertising which we obtained through the news columns of papers in visited localities was quite overwhelming.

When M. Maeterlinck finally arrived at his destination his train of thought proved even more halting than the one which had brought him. From this latter, indeed, he never landed at all--not on the screen. His first attempt at camera material revolved about a small boy with blue feathers and, as I remember, a feather bed. While admitting the importance of “trifles light as air,” the scenario department rejected this absolutely.

“Write us a love-story, Monsieur,” suggested my associate, Mr. Lehr, “You see for some reason or other the fairy-story has never been popular on the screen.”

Mr. Lehr’s information, I may interpolate, is rooted in professional fact. The screen adaptation of M. Maeterlinck’s most popular fairy-tale was, for example, not a success. As for financial returns it was certainly not the “blue bird for happiness.”

The foreign author thereupon set himself to a less fanciful theme. This time he submitted a love-story, but alas! the type was anything but censor-proof. When we called his attention to this flaw he looked at us with a pained, bewildered, almost shocked expression.

“You ask me to write a love-story,” he remonstrated, “and then you object because my hero or my heroine is married. Yet how can you write about love when you have no triangle?”

And I don’t think we were ever quite successful in shaking him from this Continental orthodoxy. I dare say he will always think of two parallel lines as exceedingly provincial.

While he was in Hollywood M. Maeterlinck had a home with a tennis-court in the rear. To this court clings one of the most cherished memories of Hollywood, for on it frequently appeared Mme. Maeterlinck, and on Mme. Maeterlinck always appeared, not a skirt, but bloomers. She is a charming little dark thing, years younger than her husband, this Mme. Maeterlinck. The pair seemed always very happy together, but one day I heard something which opened up an inevitable vista before me. On that day the American manager of the foreign author came to Mr. Lehr and asked him if there was not some employment in the studio for Mme. Maeterlinck.

“Why, no,” responded Mr. Lehr; “I can’t think of a thing she would do.”

“Not some little job?--it really doesn’t matter how small,” urged the other.

“But, my dear fellow, why should the wife of M. Maeterlinck be wanting any kind of a job?” questioned my associate, still untouched by this new plea for Belgian relief. “Her husband is far from poor, you know. Hasn’t he an estate and investments abroad--those and all the royalties he is getting? Besides, of course, he have given him an advance on his contract with us.”

The manager shrugged and then he smiled--a sapient smile. “To be sure. But madame--well, there are times perhaps when she longs for a little money of her own so she can snap her fingers at Monsieur.”

This dialogue, taken in connection with other phases of my association with Maeterlinck, persuades me that this creator of reverent prose and mystic drama is afflicted with the same economic fixation--I borrow the term from psychoanalysis--which manifests itself so often among those whom some art has enriched. Screen stars and actresses, comedians and tragedians, singers and writers--often in thinking over those whom I have met I have been struck by the number who would be capable of instructing Benjamin Franklin in the ways of thrift.

I remember that once I asked a man who had long been associated with Ben Turpin, the widely known cross-eyed comedian, what sort of chap Turpin really was.

“Well,” said he laughingly, “he’s this sort of a chap. He makes a lot of money and he keeps almost as much. He has an unpretentious little home manned with not more than one servant, and in the home there is a suite of parlour furniture. It’s gilt, I think--anyway it’s quite showy, and the Turpins are very much concerned over its welfare. They keep it covered up except when somebody calls, and even then they’re not reckless. For they say that when the door-bell rings some one always peeps out of the window to see who is there. If it’s a stranger, off come the furniture-coverings. But if it’s a friend, the insurance is kept on.”

This amusing story is always linked in my mind with the one which Will Rogers is fond of telling on Chaplin. “A girl went riding up in the Hollywood mountains,” says he, “and was thrown and lost for two days. When it was thought they weren’t going to find her, Charlie offered a reward of a thousand dollars in all the papers. It looked at that time, mind you, as if they weren’t going to find her. But they did. So the people that found her offered five hundred of the thousand to anybody that would find Charlie.”

For me one of the most amazing revelations regarding M. Maeterlinck concerns his indifference to music. It was in this country and while he was with the Goldwyn Company that he heard for the first time a rendition of the opera “Pelléas et Mélisande.” One of my publicity men sat near him in his box at this performance, and he reported that from the large placid face those ethereal strains which Debussy wove about his own play drew not a sign of response. It was quite evident that the Belgian author perhaps considered Dr. Johnson somewhat too broad-minded when he said that music was a sound more agreeable than other noises.

When I was in England several years after the formation of the Goldwyn Company I made a memorable call upon another playwright whose pen moves in a different tempo from that of Maeterlinck. I had long been an admirer of Mr. Bernard Shaw and, in spite of the fact that the quality of his plays rather repudiates the suggestion of screen adaptation, I was interested in conducting the experiment.

Mr. and Mrs. Shaw entertained me at their London apartment with much brilliant talk and the inevitable tea. The playwright’s wife, a very cordial hostess indeed, is one of those fresh-coloured, vigorous types of womanhood which you meet at every turn of Hyde Park. She was deeply engrossed that day in the Irish question, and her sympathies were brought into relief by a call from Sir Horace Plunkett, then just returned from a visit to the United States.

I recall that during the course of the talk Mrs. Shaw told a story of an Irish lad sentenced to be hanged in the Tower for his revolutionary activities. Before his execution they came to him and promised that if he would give the authorities information regarding certain leaders in the movement his life would be spared. To this the lad, only about eighteen years of age, replied, “Gentlemen, you are wasting your time and mine.”

Mrs. Shaw quoted this speech with great fire. “How,” she concluded, “can you conquer a people with a spirit like that?”

When we drifted away from the Irish situation Mr. Shaw and I had a chance for a talk about motion-pictures. To my surprise I learned then that he was a picture enthusiast. He told me that there were two people whose films he never missed--Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Regarding the former, he was especially enthusiastic. I found, in fact, that he was as familiar with Chaplin’s work as am I myself.

The affectionate courtesy displayed toward each other by the playwright and his wife is bound to impress any one familiar with some of Shaw’s iconoclastic utterances upon the domestic situation. Certainly the atmosphere surprised me. The pair did not address each other as “Father” and “Mother,” but, aside from this failure, they seemed to be as tolerant and contented and settled as a hardware merchant of Topeka and his wife.

Toward the latter part of the afternoon I saw Mr. Shaw look frequently at his wrist-watch. Ultimately he mentioned that he was due to deliver a lecture that evening.

“And have you decided yet what you are going to speak about?” queried Mrs. Shaw when at last her husband rose to depart for this engagement.

“Not yet,” he retorted; “I dare say I shall decide on the platform.”

I always think of Mr. Shaw as he looked when he made this reply. His eyes, which are, I think, the clearest and most living blue I ever saw, so sparkled with merry perversity, his figure was so erect and spare and vigorous--there was so much spring in both face and physique--that he seemed to me--this man past middle age--the very embodiment of electric youth.

I suppose that he had that same expression of merry perversity when on the following day he told a newspaper reporter who called upon him to learn the outcome of his conversation with me, “Everything is all right. There is only one difference between Mr. Goldwyn and me. Whereas he is after art I am after money.”

Whatever the explanation, Mr. Shaw never came to America, nor did he do any work for the Goldwyn Company. I was no more fortunate in the result of my call upon Mr. H. G. Wells. He, like Mr. Shaw, had me at his home in London for tea. Here, however, the conversation focussed, not upon Ireland, but upon India, a direction determined by the fact that a young East-Indian was calling upon the author that afternoon.

The foreigner was very earnest in his expressions of admiration for Mr. Wells’s “Outlines of History,” and it was indeed a privilege to me, who had just read this presentment of history, to hear such first-hand comments by both the author and a representative of that mellow civilisation which Mr. Wells has compared so favourably with our Western achievements.

During the course of this conversation the Indian told the author that no other English writer held so high a place in his country as the one occupied by Mr. Wells. Although the latter must have spent many hours of his life in listening to similar tributes, he responded to it as gratefully as if this were a fresh experience.

When we came to talk of pictures I suggested to Mr. Wells that he visit California and write some stories for our company.

“Oh,” said he, “I should like to come, for I know I should enjoy the California sunshine and meeting Charlie Chaplin. The only trouble with me is that I never could write on order. I haven’t been able to do it for magazines or publishers and I should certainly fail abjectly when it came to doing it for the screen.”

I thereupon urged him to come to California as my guest, look over the situation. But, although I assured him that such a visit would leave him perfectly free to decide whether or not he cared to enter the picture lists, Mr. Wells did not accept my invitation.

As I left his home that day I remembered suddenly that twenty-five years before, I, who had just been entertained by the most celebrated of the younger English novelists, had wandered without home and without money through these very London streets. There was no self-congratulation in that swift contrast of present and future, but there was a deep wonder at the mysterious flux of life.

Another feeling dominated this wonder. It was my gratitude to the work which has so shaped and coloured my destiny. To motion-pictures I owe all the wide range of contacts which have made up to me for a boyhood handicapped by so many unfavourable circumstances. To it I owe also the greatest blessing which can befall any one of us--an impersonal interest so vivid and compelling that it survives any personal grief or maladjustment.

Almost every one who has been connected with picture-production understands the fascination which it exerts. I always think, indeed, of the answer which Charlie Chaplin once made to somebody who asked him what he most wanted from the future.

“More life,” said Chaplin promptly. “Whether it comes through pictures or not--more life.” And then he added half sadly, “Still I can’t think of myself out of pictures. Whatever I do, I find myself wondering, ‘Now, will that be good for my work or not?’”

Although, in comparison with this great creative artist, my own sphere is so humble, my understanding of this one dominating interest is sufficiently complete to justify me in applying his words to myself. Like Chaplin, I can not think of myself out of pictures. For to do that would be to turn my back on the far horizon which has always called me to it.

In the ten years since I entered that little Broadway motion-picture theatre with its static Western drama, its player-piano, and its far-flung peanut-shells, giant changes have taken place. Then film-production attracted few men and women of real intellectual capacity. To-day we see a former member of the United States Cabinet presiding over its destinies. Then the motion-picture theatre was as sporadic as it was stunted and disfigured. To-day the smallest hamlet puts up its first motion-picture theatre at the same time that it erects its first church, and in the larger communities costly edifices have followed in the wake of the costly picture. Eight years ago the twenty thousand dollars which the Lasky Company expended upon “Carmen” was considered a vast sum. To-day the Goldwyn Company is investing nearly a million in its production of “Ben Hur.”

With the development of our industry has come a corresponding development in the life of the country. Motion-pictures are, in truth, the magic travelling carpet on which those in the most remote village may fly to distant lands, to other ages, to realms of romance hitherto denied them. No other agency, not even the automobile, has combated so successfully the isolation of the rural communities. When I think of the glow which pictures have brought to so many lustreless lives all through the world, I am tempted, indeed, to overlook all the defects of the industry and to dwell only upon its perfections.

Yet defects there certainly are. Undoubtedly the ten years to come will do much to remove them. My own faith in the next decade is a firm one, and to this new era of expansion I wish to dedicate whatever of ability, whatever of judgment I have gained from the experiences set down in these chapters.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Some simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

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