MARY PICKFORD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4043, 4 May 1938, Page 3

MARY PICKFORD

HER WORK BEHIND THE .SCENES. STILL HAS MANY ADMIRERS. The following comments by Sir Cedric Hardwicke upon his Hollywood observations, make interesting reading for all picture-goers:— Mary Pickford may be often out of the limelight these days, but I find that she is very far from being a back number in Hollywood. On the contrary, she is an exceedingly active force in picture politics. Since her retirement from the screen she has developed her business talents to such good purpose that today she has the respect of the highest business executives here, all of whom, so far as I can discover, arc only too ready to pay tribute to her abilities in this direction. She asked my wife and me to dine with her at “Pickfair,” her sumptuous home—it is often referred to here as the Buckingham Palace of Hollywood. The other guests were mainly financial people. It was fascinating tc me, an actor, to hear the “big money” people talking, among them Adolph Zukor anti Walter Wanger (pronounced Waynjer). Mary Pickford talked to them all on equal terms, as expertly informed as any of them. It was clear that her opinions are respected. In fact, 1 had the impression that she is playing almost as important a part behind the scenes in movieland as she did in the old days on the screen.

But to an astonishing number of people she continues to be the muchloved heroine of the silent days. She still has a film fan mail of considerable proportions. She was on our train going west from New York. At Chicago an old negro porter took my bags, as we were changing trains. I was following him along the platform when he suddenly stopped as if mortally ‘stricken, put down the bags and started to weep. “Look, look!” he gasped, the tears streaming down his face. “There she is—the world’s sweetheart.” It was a perfectly genuine expression of emotion, and this is an entirely unembcllished record of it. It is not easy to explain the quiet, homely, English atmosphere of “Pickfair,” but it is there unmistakably, none the less. This in spite of the fact that you dine off gold plate and that an army of servants waits on you. Mary Pickford is a most accomplished hostess. She still wears the well-remembered curls, and if she grows older, her smile does not, though it must seem to her now a very far cry from the days when, as Mary Gladys Smith, she was discovered by David Belasco, and renamed Mary Pickford by him, because Smith wouldn’t “register.” At “Pickfair” I couldn’t help noticing there is every device ever m vented for exercising and keeping up a high standard of health. That, too. probably belongs to another and an earlier phase of Mary’s life. But she told me that she is all for keeping fit. Her chief preoccupations, apart from her interests in the film business, are Christian Science study and broadcasting. She goes on the air regularly from “Pickfair,” and her talks bring her an enormous additional fan mail. Dogs owned by Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Richard Dix. Harold Lloyd. Clark Gable, Alice White, and Walt Disney have been discovered “vacationing” at a luxurious new canine pleasure resort, as it is called, opened at Big Bear Lake, a hundred miles from here. As a result of the publicity given to it, there are protests, having in view “the potential resentment in it“ effect upon the unemployed in these United States.” . One of the newspapers refers talkie-town dog's “jewel - collared, steak-fed, and aired in limousines,' being sent there to recover “from indigestion brought on by too much caviare, and French pastry, fed them by well-meaning but thoughtless guests at cocktail and other parties.” I read that at the resort in question the dogs have their own midget bungalows and keep to a programme of daily recreation —rabbit-chasing, swimming in a special lake, and bonehunting in the forests. Also that a luxury bus, fitted with separate compartments, as a concession to dog snobbery, calls for the guests and delivers them back at their homes. To cap the lot, I discovered that there is a dogs’ newspaper the “Barkers’ Post”; subscription, readers’, ten cents a copy; dogs, one bone a year. It was also in Sunset Boulevard that I came across Millie, a wonderful dog' of great local renown. She

is a German sheepdog, and you find her in a bookshop kept by a blind man, whose “seeing eye” Millie is Her owner has trained her to recog nise his various regular customers and to anounce them by barking in a different way for each. He assures me that Mlillie knows the “bad” customers as well as the good ones, and that she growls when his worst “risks” heave in sight. Millie, he said, became so much in earnest about the question of giving credit that finally she wouldn’t let one customer, notoriously difficult, enter the shop at all.

The more I had to do with Hollywood the more amazed I became at the nervousness that is behind the making of every big picture. This’is natural enough, I suppose, remembering the vast sums of money involved. From the moment it actually goes into production until the cutting of the picture has been completed, every one connected with it seems to be in a continual state of tension, as if the whole world were on the edge of some great happening. At such a time one hears, behind the scenes, of all sorts of explosions of temper among the executives, of the top man in this on* that department being fired and then.taken back again.

As often as not this general feeling of jumpiness communicates itself to the stars, and then one hears lurid accounts of the actress who threw the script in the director’s face or of the actor who told the producer exactly what he had been thinking of him since they first met. All, mark you, for a picture that may be forgotten by millions of picturegoers from the moment they leave their seats. Strange place, Hollywood.

Dined with Fredric March. And made the discovery that he had once been a model for a firm of commercial photographers. “There was a girl working there the same time as I -posing for advertisements at a few dollars a week One of them, I remember, was for a new make of motor tyre.

“She doesn’t remember me being theiXs at the same time. I don’t remember her. So much for our respective personalities. This girl’s name was Norma Shearer.” One of the world-shaking events that I often wish I could have been present at was the presentation of the first talkie. It was on the night of August 6, 1926, and a producer friend of mine told me about it. Obviously it will never be forgotten by those who had the good luck to be there. According to my friend, the first talkie speech was: “My friends, no story ever written for the screen is* as dramatic as the story of the screen itself!” —spoken by Will Hays, czar of the motion picture industry in America.

Unknown to the enormously thrilled audience, three men sat well back in the darkness, biting their nails most of the time, and fidgetting with apprehension—Harry Warner, and his two assistants, who had sunk, or been responsible for someone else having sunk, £2 million in what everybody predicted was history’s biggest gamble. The shadow of Will Hays faded away, and in its place came a picture of an orchestra playing real music. Then a conventional screen drama was presented -with sound. Before the end was reached the audience let go their uncontrollable enthusiasm. The great film revolution was on.