Part 2

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Thompson Buchanan, Lasky scenario chieftain, is encouraging Helene Chadwick in her film career.

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Kathleen Clifford, clad in sports clothes and sandals, steps nights with a handsome dark stranger.

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Herbert Rawlinson, with a couple of minor actor friends in tow, spent a month at Catalina. Roberta Arnold, Herbert’s wife, seemed to be “somewhere on location” for she was not in those parts. The adoration of some hundreds of grammar school girls seemed centered on handsome Herb and his marvelous physique.

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Marshall Neilan’s “all in a minute” scenario writer, Lucita Squire, is still in the game.

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We know nothing about the scenario business but it is reported from the camps that Gouverneur Morris has discovered one of those “all in a minute” scenario writers in Ruth Wightman, and that she is now adapting his stories for the screen.

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May McAvoy and Eddie Sutherland are stepping about together.

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Clara Kimball Young is playing the navy.

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The same day Charley Chaplin was being carried on the shoulders of his admirers in London, that other world’s famous film comedian, “Fatty” Arbuckle, was being shouldered along to jail by policemen for his connection with the death of a motion picture actress in a San Francisco hotel.

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Jackie Saunders and Hubby Horkheimer haven’t been bathing at Long Beach of late. Some of the Iowans who inhabit the “metropolis” become “Infant terribles” when the name Horkheimer is mentioned.

Many of them are putting up their noses and saying, “I told you so!” Now, due to the publicity which centers around the mixup of Mr. and Mrs. Horkheimer, all because a few years ago the Horkheimer retinue of directors and players, in pursuing film art at the Balboa Studios at Long Beach, cavorted too fast and furious to suit the simple minded and puritanical Iowans, and Iowa sniffed long and loud and shrugged shoulders when the Horkheimer Company withdrew from that scene of piety.

Ho, hum!

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Apropos of the recent reports of a Geraldine Farrar and Lou Tellegen matrimonial “tangle,” Whiz Bang’s astute investigators have heard some interesting gossip among the imported French actors of Hollywood’s colony.

They report a story, which went the rounds in Paris just before Mr. Tellegen’s marriage to the great prima donna, to the effect that Lou was much infatuated at one time with an actress of the French capital, but that this “Love” was then on the struggling rung of the ladder of fame and with her name yet to make.

Of late our Frenchie friends are saying this actress has attained fame and fortune in Paris, which brings up the speculation as to the possibilities of Lou’s wayward thoughts returning to the scene of early days. Then again all this talk may be plain bull of the press agent variety to advertise Tellegen’s new play “Don Juan,” which soon will open in New York.

After the failure of Lou’s play, “Blind Youth,” on the stage to startle the public, he announced his intentions of devoting talents to the cinema art. Subsequently he played and directed at the Lasky and Goldwyn lots, but the Pickfords and Chaplins continued to hold a monopoly on the “silent applause.” Now Lou is returning to his former art before the footlights, and we wish him much luck. Lou is a good actor as everybody knows, but we can’t all be on top, as our friend Owen Moore might remark.

Everyone who has had any close association with the premier song bird, Geraldine, loves her. When she lived in Hollywood her sweet strains were heard as early as five and six o’clock in the morning. Often she was up at daybreak to practice for a concert tour. Frequently she arrived at the studio before eight o’clock and played all day and in the evening entertained friends with opera selections. In spite of the very busy life she led, Mrs. Tellegen (Geraldine Farrar) always was good natured and radiant with enthusiasm, and she has been placed among America’s most remarkable women. Geraldine has never been known to “high-tone” studio menials, and it is said that Geraldine is of a forgiving nature for any flirting by Lou when they are apart, but that she insisted on Tellegen keeping to the home fireside when they were lucky enough to be in the same city. There is much speculation as to the final outcome of the Tellegen and Farrar ventures.

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The Agony Column

(From London Winning Post.)

_Author, command of scathing English, would write memoirs for any Lady or Gentleman in society wishing to pay off old scores._

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The old-fashioned mother who used to be a clinging vine now has a daughter who has no more clinging qualities than a sapling.

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Truth at Last

During the week of the Fair there occurred an incident which is worth recording. A big six-foot bully was shooting off his mouth in the rotunda of a hotel, evidently having had a snifter or two, announcing that he could lick anybody in sight. A quiet little man came from a seat in the corner, and, walking straight up to the giant, called him a four-flusher. The bully thereupon handed the little man a biff on the jaw, a smash between the eyes and lifted him two feet off the floor with an uppercut. The little man was carried upstairs and put to bed.

(We apologize for the unhappy ending of this story, realizing that it should have been the other way about. But truth must prevail in these columns at all costs.)—Bob Edwards’ Book.

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This Ain’t So Good

“Wait a minute, lady,” said the garage attendant. “You owe us a dollar and a half—your battery was fixed. Pay me please.”

“Indeed,” snorted the fair driver, “my husband told me to have it charged!”

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“The doctor says you may have a little whisky. He says the dose will be—”

“Never mind what he says. I know all about the dose.”

Limber Kicks

Revamped Neckery

The other night I met a girl, She was dressed without a speck; A clean white dress and nice white shoes— But, oh, my Gosh, her neck!

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Cheer Up!

It’s the songs you sing, And the smiles you wear, That’s making the sunshine Everywhere.

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“Hurry Now!”

_The tempting curve of your full, sweet lip,_ _Shows you full ripe, and well should you be tasted,_ _Make use of time, let not advantage slip;_ _Beauty within itself should not be wasted:_ _Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime,_ _Rot and consume themselves in little time._

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The Best Firm

By Sherwood.

A pretty good firm is Watch & Waite, And another is Attit, Early & Layte; And still another is Doo & Dairet; But the best is probably Grin & Barrett.

Sporty New Orleans

BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL

Pastor of People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.

If you want to take a course of study in the liberal sciences of gayety and godlessness, go to New Orleans, the Crescent City of climate, Creole, carnival, cotton, conventions, cane-sugar, cafes and cemeteries. Though there are more than thirty grave-yards, it is not a dead town. I found week-day races and prize fights on Sunday, as well as other religious services. It has been called the great winter resort of the United States, and there are enough “resorts” by day and night for all the good and bad who care to patronize them.

Pleasure is the big word in the dictionary of New Orleans life. Her morals, as well as her markets, are French. She is the commercial gateway to the Panama Canal. Her citizens have improved the city sewage and water supply, paved the streets, erected fine hotels and public buildings, and enlarged her port facilities. If she mends her ways as much morally, she will be a safe place for pious as well as political and carnival celebrations.

One night after I had taken in three dozen oysters and washed them down with French drip coffee, I took in a night-court where people of black skin were sentenced for cracking and breaking some of the laws; a gambling-hell where money was stacked up and pulled down on the turn of a card; a cafe and cabaret where the colored man was outshining his white brother elsewhere; and then strolled through a shady district of all shades of color and character. The denizens of the vice dens started a street fight. They threw stones and shoes which I dodged, and hurled hard, vile names which deeply impressed me. Girls, not cursed with an incorruptible chastity, in tempting dishabille, tripped along the street and ogled me. The doors of some of these places of contraband amusement were wide open to welcome the visitor, while others were shut and bore a placard with some such reassuring information that “MABEL IS ENGAGED—CALL LATER.” During the war this Broadway to Baal, Avenue to Avernus, Hell’s Highway, and Promenade to Perdition was temporarily closed for moral repairs and sanitary improvements. Degradation slope was graded, and a curb set up for evil-doers. But far be it from me to injure the reputation of New Orleans for wantonness and frivolity. The fact that these places were officially closed for a while need not deter those who journey here today for these simple pleasures, and from easily finding them. No war order can change the leopard spots of the city. The Epicurean motto, “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” prevails according to time-honored custom. I attended a theatre which offered a bill that would not be tolerated in any other city of the United States. Jokes and clothes were “pulled off” in a way to make the blase blush.

The Crescent City is cosmopolitan and has all the races, but the most flourishing is the horse-race. Betting was the main thing. The horses were fast, but the women at the track were faster. A petite Parisian petticoat invited me to take her out here every day to bet on the races—but I thought I better not. During the Mardi Gras Waterloo’s “revelry by night” was outdone. Streets were a riot of rogues and rampant ribaldry a mad pageant of music, masks and merriment, a mob of men and maidens. Whatever the parade seemed to be outside, it was plain the Devil’s spirit was inside. If one is afflicted with naughty propensities, this is a fine place to get rid of them. I attended a Bal Masque. The manager lamented the passing of the good old times when drinks were allowed to be sold and dancers got stewed, yet said his real estate ventures in =_maisons de joie_= were flourishing. The dancers, jumping to the accompaniment of the jazz, acted no more like dancers than the blare, blow and crash of the jazz seemed like music. They jerked about like automatons and marionettes, “hesitated” like victims of locomotor-ataxia, hopped like grasshoppers, and moved with a stop, spring and shuffle, a squirm, a swerve, a swirl, a slide and a slip. It was enough to make Terpsichore sick. The players made hard work of it and the dancers should have received good wages for such strenuous labor, for it was simply a dance “haul.”

In New Orleans, earthly gastronomy and not heavenly astronomy is the science most studied in its “courses.” Many are the toothsome taverns in this Lotus-eating town. I remember one time-eaten cafe where there was a di-“stink”-tive garlic atmosphere, and where the soup was seasoned by falling plaster. Over the tattered table-cloth, evidently changed for every hundredth guest, French drip coffee had dripped. Antique china and silver service had served their day and long since should have decorated the windows of a curio shop. It was old with cracks, nicks and dents. What jokes were cracked over them? What sweet stories had the ears of the sugar-bowl listened to? With what wide astonishment had the mouth of the pitcher gasped at off-color stories? What hands had caressed the neck of vinegar and oil bottle? What cutting remarks and thrusts the knives and forks suggested! What spooning of callow couples the spoons had witnessed! The table was superannuated, shaky on its pins, and subject to ague-fits, while the chairs had felt so many rounds of pleasure that they were nearly all in with broken backs, twisted feet and elliptical legs. The old lamps had looked down on eyes of beauty whose light had been shut out by death, and the weather-stained walls echoed to steps that led down to the grave.

Passing through the French Market, with its dingy stalls, dogs, dirt, cobwebs, spiders and poverty, I came to the old Absinthe House, the refuge rendezvous of the picturesque Bordeaux blacksmith, pirate, smuggler and slave-trader, Jean Lafitte, the bold, bad buccaneer who loved beauty, booze, and blood, and had barrels of money to spend for them. Standing at the little old marble bar, I drank a befitting toast to his memory in absinthe. “Look not upon the absinthe when it is green,” yet I tasted it here and in Paris, though never sufficiently to get the full benefit of excitation, hallucination, terrifying dreams, delirium and idiocy. I left these spirits to call on those of the Haunted House nearby where of yore colored slaves were found mutilated, held in sharp, spiked iron bands, and chained to the wall.

The old time Southerners are gone. They did not have five-reel thriller movies, horse races, prize fights and carnivals, but they did have some innocent pastimes with which their simple natures were satisfied—pleasures that beguiled the worn and weary hours. Public executions and hangings were quite the rage then; pirates were hung on the square for decoration; the heads of negroes were stuck on spikes at the city gates. At the Calabozo there were whipping posts and hot irons with which the fleur de lis was burned on culprit’s breaking some of the laws; a gambling-hell where money was staked up and pulled down shoulders. The only hangings I saw were of idlers hanging around the corners. Then the old Plaza was the center of social and commercial life, military fete and the fate of criminals who were shot, nailed alive in their coffins, or slowly sawed in half. The attractions were sometimes varied by hanging women on the gallows and breaking men on the wheel.

In those days there were no Sunday jazz bands or vaudeville circuits, but in Congo Square in the open air there were dancing carnivals with half-naked girls, and real Voodoo dancers at Ponchartrain, of the old tom-tom fiddle and gourd drum variety, who danced themselves crazy and fell into a frothy fit.

What modern social balls can compare with the Indian balls where saffron sirens with sweet look and voice led the dance through love’s labyrinth of jealousy! Now there is horse racing and private and polite gambling—then there was wide open faro and roulette, and later the Louisiana lottery.

Women did not possess the face and figure characteristic of modern New Orleans belles, but there society was very select, in fact, they were “selected” from hospitals and correction homes. Later there came a shipment of “casket girls,” poor girls sent over from Paris by the King as wives. They brought their trousseau in a chest of clothes. This seems very primitive to us now, yet today men pick wives no better than these, and some they choose do not wear clothes enough for a shroud in the coffin.

The city was once a sink or swamp filled with deported galley-slaves, trappers, miners, gold hunters and soldiers whose profession was dice, dueling and idleness. Today it is the big, busy, commercial city of the South. Once there was fever, filth and filibusters, but these things are no longer in fashion. New Orleans now buys white rice, cotton and sugar—in early days she bought black slaves from San Domingo and Guinea.

Charles Lamb liked old things—he would have enjoyed the old part of town with its bizarre balconies, mountain-peaked roofs, hill-shaped sheds, begrimed, battered stairways, open flowery courts, shady portieres, quaint doorways, and ramshackle, rickety rows of houses marshalled on both sides of the streets like awkward squads of soldiers. In the quiet streets one looks in doorways where the inhabitants, listless lazy lovers of pleasure, are dozing away Life’s afternoon. Here you find the beautiful and bewitching Creoles, coquettish damsels whose baby years were cuddled and cradled in sentimental songs such as “I love you as a little pig loves the mud.”

The pleasure-seeker is “stuck” on New Orleans with its lasses, molasses, lassitude and laissez-faire morals.

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Thash Our Stashon

The conductor and a brakeman on a Montana railroad differ as to the proper pronunciation of the name Eurelia. Passengers are often startled upon arrival at the station to hear the conductor yell, “You’re a liar, you’re a liar.” Then from the brakeman at the other end comes the cry, “You really are, you really are.”

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Lawn Mower Missionaries

In the South Sea Islands women are arrayed in grass aprons, but after while the missionaries will invade their peaceful haunts and they won’t wear much but the garb of civilization.

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No Indian to Guide Her

Following the example of Clara Hamon, Mrs. Stillman, of divorce fame, is being offered a starring contract in the movies. How about a nice feature film such as “No Indian to Guide Her?”

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Why, of Course Not

“Bullet Strikes Girl’s Knee Without Puncturing Skirt—Police Baffled,” says a headline in the Philadelphia Record. The police are so stupid!—Grand Rapids Press.

Whiz Bang Editorials

“_The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet._”

Tiajuana is a small town in Mexico just across the border from San Diego. It is the Havana of the west coast. The other day a theatre had just opened up to show the films of the Carpentier-Dempsey fight when the building caught fire and burned film and all. It was a tough day for the movies also in San Diego, for the “cops” at a nearby beach resort chose the day for raiding a playhouse that was screening a South American film called “Adam and Eve.”

According to the police there was an undue exposure of the feminine anatomy in the case of Eve. Mebbe so! We have not had the pleasure of seeing this tid-bit. But, it must have been some exposure if it had anything on the Aphrodite of the galleries and the halls of sculpture that are accepted as the product of “Art” and held immune from the incongruous draperies of Gothic prudery.

On our bathing beaches, too, everything goes on and off, and more than mere legs is visible to the naked eye unashamed. Why then, is the feminine form divine the most indecent product of the Creator’s handiwork? We have asked Gus and he says that all the girls of his acquaintance are bow-legged. That lets Gus out of the symposium. Perhaps some of the prude morality mongers can enlighten a poor, hard-working farmer from Robbinsdale.

Feminine modesty may be only shoe-high and roll-top stockings an incitement to masculine pruriency—but, thank heaven, most of us are not fashioned that way. The censorial Puritan may blush like an over-ripe tomato at the complete revelation of the feminine knee-joint.

However, no masculine connoisseur is going to do an emotional handspring over such a trivial, especially when it is common observation that three-quarters of the lower quarters, and other quarters that one sees parading down Main street nowadays, are too fat or too skinny or too gnarled to raise much of a ripple on a regular guy’s masculinity.

Immodesty is a relative term and a silk stocking, properly stocked, is not our idea of indecency. Therefore, we don’t incline to the grannies’ view that the bare leg on stage or screen is immodest for the very reason that the fat leg and the skinny leg and the bow-legged leg don’t get there. Or, at least, they don’t stay there long.

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Why does a man, having spent his years from the time of puberty to young manhood in an orgy of flagrant living and self-indulgence, demand of the honored girl whom he makes his wife that she be of virginal purity? And why in the name of all that is civilized should he adhere to the idea that no matter how degenerate he becomes, his wife should bring to him an unimpeachable chastity?

Our average young wife seeker, following the action of Diogenes, conducts a vigilant search and after a time he finds the girl who is his conception of the perfect feminine and marries this most fortunate young lady. Then in the course of events he discovers or thinks he discovers a shadow in his wife’s early career, a shadow occurring before he illuminated with his presence the horizon of her life.

In a great display of righteous indignation he rises upon his hind legs, lays back his ears and in a loud voice fairly quivering with holy wrath and outraged decency, he verbally and sometimes physically flays his wife.

And then to secure balm for his wounded spirit he hies himself with all possible haste to the divorce courts, where he assures the world that he is a worthy young man of impeccable character; that he, a paragon of virtue, has been tricked into a marriage with a creature of the streets and that he is ineradicably besmirched. Is he not a member in high standing of the Y.M.C.A. and the B.Y.P.U. and therefore blameless?

After he has succeeded in establishing his claim to godliness through the process of dragging his wife’s name through the mire of the courts he feels the need of consolation; so cranking his trusty automobile, he flivvers down some shady avenue, inviting passing flappers to share the honor of his society and the pleasure of his car.

Puritanically speaking, such a standard of morality was considered quite the proper thing but Puritanism flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which time incidentally, is far removed from the present.

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Far be it from us to harp too much on styles. We believe if a girl has shapely limbs and a sparkling pair of eyes she has as much right to show one as the other and as an anonymous writer in a Minneapolis newspaper says, “There is no such thing as immodest dress—it is all in the mind.”

Samuel Butler says: “Even Euclid had to assume something before he could prove anything. Truly we live by faith.” Thus it can be said that it is all in the mind. But I do submit that what a thing is to anyone, lies in his reaction or response to it not in the thing itself. If in a painting, a statue or a shapely pair of legs beneath a short skirt, one person sees only the beauty, an esthetic reaction to grace, perfect proportion or symmetry, while another “sees red.” Where lies the cause? The object viewed is the same. Therefore, as someone so aptly put it, “it is all in the eyes of the beholder.”

If short skirts and low necks arouse sex instincts, why howl about it? Rather be happy in the knowledge that one is normal, for the sex instinct is a natural one. When sex desire stops, the physical manifestations of life will cease. Those thoughts may require self-control, but since that element is a necessary concomitant to civilized society, the exercise of it will be beneficial. The trend of human progress, while almost imperceptible, appears to be toward the ideal in human relations and away from the cocoanut throwing hit-her-on-the-head-with-a-club status, and if some men can’t withstand the sight of bare knees they are insufficiently advanced in the scale of civilization.