Screen Star's Complex Existence

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 18920, 23 January 1936, Page 10

Screen Star's Complex Existence

DEOPLE say the simple life is the best. Mine is about the most complex, subdivided kind of existence anyone could posibly have—but it's a happy one, writes Charles Farrell, the screen actor who is going to Australia to play the lead in "The Flying Doctor." More than ever, this complex, characteristically American life is coming into the film colony and turning it from a cosmopolitan centre into an American city.

All- the wild-eyed, long-haired foreign temperament and single purpose of soul that used to be rampant around here have given away to a healthy, successful industrial life. Paradoxically, this has resulted in Hollywood stepping up in genuine artistic work and achievement.

Business and sport are the two American •complexilties that have invaded the dusty visions of career, to lend their own healthy and successful viewpoint to a village that, a few years ago, gloried in the fact, that it thought, talked and lived only motion pictures. Every big star of to-day has some thing to interest him or her outside the movie business. Perhaps it is n walnut ranch, an avocado grove or a dress "shoppe" —or perhaps it is golf, or horses, or boating. They've discovered that such a dreamy, idealistic life as that of the theatre needs an outdoor counterbalance for clear thinking and human perspective. The Racquet Club.

My own pet business is a place called the Racquet Club, at Palm Springs. It is owned by Ralph Bellamy and myself, and we are very proud of it. No international business god, no Wall Street speculator could nave been more devout or wrapped up in million dollar holdings than we have been with this little place in the desert, built for the convenience of people who do not exactly know whether they want to play or not. It's bigger now, with a lot of other things besides tennis courts, but it if a howling success for its size, and wr made it work. That little heady bit of confidence gives a person a beatifully clear-cut attitude towards his other work.

The sporting life, with its lady and gentleman patrons, is a vital force in Hollywood, too. Most Hollywoodites have become more or less sun-and-water people. They kmv tho importance of physical condition and appearance and the unqualified effect of exercise and fresh air.

They play all the familiar sports and have organised fox-hunting cricket, lacrosse, Rugby and others not so well known.

Polo is most popular with the men. when they can get away with it. But many a contract is written these days with a definite non-polo-playing clause in it, because of resultant injuries. Baulked at polo, lots of men take up deep-sea fishing, sailing, or hunting, and would speud more time with outboard motors and aeroplanes if contract bans had not gone up on these, too. Thus you see 'that Hollywood is rapidly losing the concerted little frieze of foreign nationalism, for the more individual life of the New Yorker .and the Chicagoan. And everyone seems happier about it, too.