She's Paying To Act With Garbo

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 247, 18 October 1941, Page 15

She's Paying To Act With Garbo

enough to startle the goose that lays the golden egg is the unprecedented situation which has just developed in Hollywood. Up to the moment, as even Wall Street knows, New York actors have teen lured to Hollywood by money, salaries so high as to top anything the stage | could possibly reach. Not so i Ruth Gordon.

By Charles Darnton

This actress is not out for what hungrily is termed the big dough: nor, so far as that goes, for any at all. Placed on exhibition in a glass case on Hollywood Boulevard, Miss Gordon ought to attract marvelling throngs. At any rate, she'd be sure to draw all the screen actors, popeyed at seeing a New York player, and a good one, who is paying to appear in the picture. First She Refused It all started in Ann Arbor. At that Michigan seat of learning and warm-weather drama. Miss Gordon was busy with rehearsals of "Ladies

in Retirement" when George Cukor telephoned her from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. Recognising the director's vpice and without waiting to hear what he had to say,

the precipitant young actress cried, "Oh George, I simply can't!" Then she hurried on to explain she was booked solid for the summer. "But you don't know why I'm calling you," he protested. "Yes, I do," she insisted. "You want me for a picture. Look, George, it's just impossible, that's all." "I'm sorry, Ruth," Cukor told her, "because it was for the Garbo picture. Goo—" "Wait!" she screamed. "Why didn't you say so in the first place? The Garbo picture, how wonderful! Somehow, I'll get out of these engagements, if it's the last thing I ever do." Prestige of Garbo Naturally, cutting this Gordian knot took a bit of doing. For, after Ann Arbor, there were bookings ranging from Westport to Kennebunkport. This meant Miss Gordon, through her agent, theatre managers, Equity, Western Union, Postal Telegraph, and silent prayer, must not only arrange to have other actresses play the parts she had contracted to play but pay them out of her own pocket and, what's more, in each case pay the agent's commission. To sum it up, Rjth Gordon now actually pays to act with Miss Garbo. Pressed as to why she had done this hitherto unheard-of thing, Miss Gordon said: "I felt it was worth more to me than anything else. It's value could be reckoned solely in the opportunity to grasp something so rare it may come to one only in a lifetime I've got to act; anything is better than not acting. But to act with the best is not only a privilege but a blessing.

"Now, Greta Gafbo is every actor's actress. She might be the greatest actress I ever saw, for she is in the great tradition of actresses. She has the quality that all really great actresses must have: she is apart from all the world. Like Sarah Bernhardt, she couldn't have been anybody's cousin or aunt, just as Edwin Booth couldn't have been any other kind of man. There are very few of these people in the world, and so we must make the most of them."