HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue LXI, 12 July 1930, Page 5 (Supplement)

HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

GOSSIP OF THE STUDIOS.

(By MOLLIE MERRICK.)

HOLLYWOOD (Cal.), June 5

Lina Basquette, very much harassed by that old davvil gossip in the village which ascribes infant desertion to her, tells the local public that she has merely allowed the Warners to take guardianship of her child —not to adopt her. There is the matter of three hundred thousand dollars involved. And most any mother would like to see her infant get that. The Warner dynasty keeps its fortune within the Warner name. The brothers are incorporated so to speak, and widows Warner receive incomes from a trust fund. Lina, the widow of Samuel Warner, received eighty-five dollars a week for her baby. About a year ago she married Peverell Marley, local cameraman. Twenty-nine years ago Florenz Ziegfeld, now in Hollywood, was managing a strong man in a vaudeville act in this same sunshiny spot. It would never do to have the elite of moviedom tell what were their occupations twenty-nine years ago. Most of them weren't that near to theatrical careers. <

"My interest in talking pictures was great enough to lure me from retirement in London. After almost half a century before the footlights, I decided I had had enough of the stage and that I would sit back and take life easy. Then talkies came into existence. I was mildly interested at first, but soon that interest grew in intensity. Something new and tremendously big had entered the world of the drama. I wanted to be in it. So here I am." Cyril Maude, in his bungalow at the Ambassador Hotel, was seeing studio executives and the Press an hour after the train had brought him back to movieland after fourteen years absence. His business here this time is to play the name lead in a Paramount version of "Grumpy," the play he made famous on the legitimate. Maude left a village in very truth at the conclusion of his amazing experience making Peer Gynt for the silent films in what was then, the pioneering days of the industry in star material.

Frankly admitting that silents never really intrigued him, the English actor, with a merry twinkle in his eye, recalled his former adventures in Hollywood and admitted that they seemed more amusing when softened by the perspective of fourteen years.

"Just at the time, it wasn't so funny," he said. "A star was rushed through his part of the picture with a zest which demanded superhuman physical endurance on his part. I left a village—a hamlet, and return to find a vast city." Mr. Maude will find, after a bit of investigating, that Hollywood is still Hamleting at the old stand.

They lave ways and ways of producing a new song in Hollywood. Harry Tierney put over one of the most original methods of late when a melody hit for which he had been waiting 'bobbed into his head whilst he was taking a week-end off beneath the pines at Lake Arrowhead. He hied to a telephone, and la-la'ed the tune to his lyric writer on the lot in Hollywood. In the morning his lyric arrived via telegraph. And inside of twenty-four hours, the finished number was on strip and neatly coiled away in a tin can.

Glen Hunter found Broadway too lonely so it's Hollywood for Mm once again. Jim Craze will direct Mm tMs time. The indefatigible Cruze ia about to give Rosooe Arbuckle another try in cinema. Hunter is charming when cast as a wistfuHy-ihoumorous youth. His first incursion into the geletine kingdom came during the silet regime. Hunter, with a trained voice, felt then that pantomime did not .give him full scope for his talents. This second attempt will probably have more satisfying results.

Richard Walton Tully is going to give "The Bird of Paradise" its celluloid initiation. Eighteen years of litigation having established that Tully is author of the play, village scenarists will probably rewrite it into something new and strange.

And the net result will be the signal for an avalanche of island material We have survived the gangster epidemic, the war furore, the back-stage stuff and innumerable other cycles, including the circus fever. It is high time the grass skirts were taken out of the costume company's storerooms and given their spring airing.

The native story was unfailingly successful in silents. And with the advantage of sound and talk, the charm of Hawaiian music, this eho'uld make excellent talkie material.

Arthur Hammerstein, on the eve of his departure for New York and Europe, expresses his plans for his next talking picture to be made in Hollywood next November. Hammerstein hopes to produce a feature that will run the length of a stage play, two and a half hours. He believes that dialogue, music and entertainment value of sound films warrant this.

This producer embarks on a project which, for the next few months, will concern only the needs of the legitimate stage. His summer plans and early autumn conferences will be in preparation of this next sound film, which will not be begun for the greater part of a year.

Talking films are stabilising themselves. A year ago no one could prophesy what they would be doing in eight months' time. Pictures progressed eo rapidly that those who made them were often stunned by results. Now and again audiences were stunned also —but not in the same way. It's been a surprise affair for everyone concerned. Janet Gaynor returns to Hollywood to be bridesmaid for her very good friend, Irene Mayer. She returns to astudio from which she took French leave when she preferred not to play a role thev had chosen for her.

Just how many antics of this sort may be indulged in during the run of a film career is doubtful. Shenanigans on this particular lot have met with drastic demotions in the past. Janet Gaynor, the little exquisite of ''Seventh Heaven" isn't so breathtaking when ehe talks. There is a tendency to whine monotonously, despite the fact that her studio heralds her as "the voice with a soul." The little Gaynor may have to standi in the corner with her face to the wall. The modern studio revue as it is novi visited on audiences assumes all the boring features of old-time parlour entertainment. Before people learned that talk may be interesting or that card-playing is infinitely more diverting than the feeble efforts of one's friends, everyone at the party had to contribute to the entertainment.

We had the old-time recitation; the piano-piece with all its painful vicissitudes; the off-tenor and off-baritone—all the boring phases of non-professional talent. Everyone just had to do something. And that is -why the spirit of old-fashioned entertainment, dominating the studio revue, makes it seldom a good evening's diversion.

Every staff member of the company is included in the show. Some of them are not equipped for revue needs. Result, a bad ten minutes for the audience, although the producer has put over his ad. in his own persistent way. When revue-makers use such talent on the

: lot as are equipped for revue stuff and go off the lot to supplement those with people equipped to really entertain, the revue will be less of a trial than it now is. Printed taftVta in canary and gold and bronze emphasised Ina Claire's blonde loveliness at her last Hollywood appearance. For the first time since the ClaireGilbert nuptials, the village is unanimous in voicing their belief that the present separation of Ina Claire and Jack Gilbert (she is in New York) is due to business exigencies and not to any coolness between them. The weathervane of talk in this colony swings queerly and surprisingly. But how it keeps swinging! Ladies of the past provide the colony with romance. Pauline Frederick and Agnes Ayres slip into that never-failing spotlight of cupid. although the spotlight of professional acclaim has been growing dimmer these late years.

Polly Frederick's marriage to Hugh Leighton, president of the Interstate News Company of New York, will be her fourth matrimonial venture. She has alternated her interests of late between the stage and screen. Her Hollywood experience carried her into the shadowy purlieus of Poverty Row in the pre-talkie days. That term is anathema now.

Some of the lads who created this row of squat, shabby buildings in which silent pictures were made by hook or crook (or any implement save money), hiss back at one who terms them Poverty Rowites.

Talkies didn't swing Pauline Frederick into the front rank of the profession, although she has always been a clever actress. Willard Mack, one of her exhusbands, on the other hand, has had signal success in the new art.

And Agnes Ayres' engagement to Lewis Milestone recalls the fact that the beauty was Rudolph Valentino's leading lady has had but little success outside of an occasional vaudeville tour these several years.

Slim now—fat was the instrument of her divorce from the cameras—the profession of which she was once a shining light has passed into other hands largely. That is why those en rapport with the colony get a bit feverish over comebacks. They are the modern miracles.

Bill Powell's English is something to think about. In a recent revue he appears in a mystery skit which includes Clive Brook, Eugene Palette and Warner Oland. The words suspect and premature are used by all members of the group. But Powell's pronunciation of the two words is the correct one. See how you "see" them and then look them up for yourself. You'll, never forget it.

Hollywood does things in rushes. The Santa Barbara Road is now black with cars from the colony all rushing up to Dr. Rafael Sansum to be put on one of his dietary regimes. If you're fat —the Sansum fixes that. If you're too thin— vice versa. He even improves the disposition, it seems. Louise Fazenda has spent some time there of late. The comedienne is a bit overweight, now that her talkie roles often include almost straight interpretations. Time was' when Louise Fazenda never got out a black sateen waist and a gored skirt with bell flounces.

One of the outstanding things about the Sansum reducing dietary is the fact that skimmed milk is given at every meal. There is a noticeable absence of the grapefruit, which was the star element in the 18-day diet which swept the country a while back with, in many cases, disastrous results.

. Sansum's diets vary with the - individual. Mary Miles Minter took off some 30 odd pounds under his direction. Her diversion these days is voice culture. But reducing still remains the popular indoor sport of Hollywood.

Clara Bow's present.weight is 1071b. Reduced from 127. Nor is she haggard and wan. Never perkier.