HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 661, 14 January 1933, Page 24 (Supplement)

HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

{By

MOLLIE MERRICK.)

HOLLYWOOD, December 14. Discussed and Admired. The two newest noses of Hollywood —Alice White’s and Sidney Franklin’s —are being much discussed and admired. The Brooklyn matador is very proud of the artificial profile and, although he is only seen briefly in “ The Kid From Spain” (Eddie Cantor’s film) it served to give him his screen experience and will be the forerunner of a picture in which he will appear as the centre of interest. This screen play will be made from Franklin’s own life story. Norma Shearer’s Views. Because Norma Shearer is entirely of the screen, her reactions to the stage, the screen, the legitimate players who come to the screen, and to the. puely motion picture product, are most interesting. Norma Shearer should be the best actress in the world, because so far as the eye can see and the mind can reach, she does everything in life perfectly. She wears her clothes with great elan; she has a perfect complexion, perfect health, perfect poise, perfect manners

and a perfectly good sense of humour. She is the very capable mother of a lovely baby who doesn’t interfere at all with her work, her travel, or her wide range of interests. When not making pictures Norma is capable of doing high diving stunts with

Helen Hayes of a morning, giving a luncheon on the Ambassador Terrace, half-way across town at one o’clock, rushing back to the studio at two in the afternoon for an interview and then taking the baby back to town for the monthly medical inspection. This is all part of a day every angle of which interests this modern actress, who is never bored and never discontented. I wanted to know if she didn’t long to appear in a stage play. With so many of the legitimate stars usurping the screen players’ rights so capably, it would seem only fair to have a picture player long to get behind the footlights and show New York audiences a thing or two.

“ While I am lost in admiration for the legitimate players and their splendid success in pictures, I have never thought it would be an easy thing to reverse the technique that we of the pictures know, and supplant it with the so-different one of the stage,” says Norma Shearer. “ The first thing we are taught in pictures is suppression of extraneous gestures and the capitalisation of thought. Much of that is lost behind the footlights—is certainly lost to everyone but the few in the first four or five rows. There are no back seats at a motion picture, so we never have to think of the people far away. Close-ups take care of our most intimate emotions. Style, such as a stage player may have quite successfully, is a handicap with the camera; there are no stylists in motion pictures. “ One reason for this is the fact that we are so much closer to our audiences than legitimate actors and actresses are. A legitimate star makes a ‘hit* in a play and it runs for a year, say, on Broadway. Then it may go to London—or on tour —the player may do two seasons in it. But the film actress makes about three pictures a year—sometimes more—and her public get to know her dangerously well. “ I make three pictures a year. People often wonder why I change my coiffure so often—sometimes it is not so becoming as the way I usually wear it. I am aware of that; but at least it is different, and we must try to be different even if being different is a sacrifice to beauty, to charm sometimes, or to apparent popularity. In the long run, variety pays. “ I think it is fatal to play the same type of character all the time. Ido not reach out and fight for my pictures —I let the executive board decide on what I shall play because I feel that the actor or actress is always the last one to know what he or she really does well. However, I am never reluctant to take over a new type part. Ido not reach out for the superb tonal effects so many of the legitimate stars are capable of because I think that the film-trained actress should try to make the part as natural as she possibly can—strive for sincerity and make the audience forget the camera, the crew, the screen, the theatre and technique. A motion picture should be an intimate glimpse at the lives of the people in it.” Her New Hole. Constance Bennett receives the most pretentious role of her career in “ Our Betters,” which is being prepared for her and which she will begin the moment she returns to Hollywood. Anita Loos will have a very fine part in this also, easily the best of her lifetimeRetuming to England. Charles Laughton spends his last days in California lounging about the Mirador pool. He is waiting for retakes to be finished and then he will return to England for a play in which his wife, Elsie Lanchester, appears. Laughton has made the most instantaneous “ hit ” of any new actor to come to Hollywood. He “ stole ” the show in “ Devil and the Deep ” (with Tallulah Bankhead) ; his Payment Deferred,” brought famous dramatic critics to the film theatres in Chicago; his episode in “If I had a Million,” now known as the famous “ Raspberry Sequence,” directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is a tour de force; the stars of Hollywood crowded on to the set to see him as Nero in “Sign of the Cross,” and more than one Paramount star found an excuse to go over to Catalina Island to watch Charles Laughton as the sinister Dr Moreau in “ Island of Lost Souls.” Now, waiting for retakes of this last film, he spends his days in perpetual sunshine on the desert sands with Richard Arlen and Jobyna Ralston. In the Desert.

It used to be slacks and shorts, half and half in the desert, but the long and the short of it is that the long of it has lost out. Shorts —and the briefest of them—are worn from morning to night with luncheon and breakfast being eaten outdoors—by the pool preferably, with everyone baking slowly in the hot sunshine. The desert has done everything to make life interesting for visiting film stars if they so wish—and these ladies generally wish—they may buy the

smartest frocks in their houi-s away from the sun hunt, for the shops there smack of Paris. The casino is gay with brown backs and flashing jewels and ladies go from bicycling to baccarat with nonchalance. The Biggest Job. Making herself glamorous is the biggest job that confronts a Hollywood actress—acting runs third, since in between the two comes that so-necessary thing known as developing the sexappeal and building up the box-office appeal. The business of making Katharine Hepburn, newest Hollywood sensation, into a glamorous lady furnishes one of the interesting stories of the colony. The New York office hired a rangy young woman who made a “ hit ” in “ The Warrior’s Husband ”, and sent her out to the West Coast to make pictures. Imagine the consternation of the wardrobe-producing-make-up department at being confronted with a slender young woman with reddish hair pulled straight back into a washerwoman’s knot at the nape of her neck (said knot crucified with a few protruding hairpins), a liberal sprinkling of freckles on her thin unpowdered face, a world of nonchalance and a tantalising tendency to the grotesque in clothes.

Hollywood, accustomed to seeing its blondes water-waved, eyelashed to perfection, faultless mouths drawn on with firm hands, and the conventional revealing garments patronised by filmland, gasped in consternation. A meeting was called and the make-up department furnished the clue to the situation.

They painted the Hepburn mouth for the first time; but only for the camera—the Hepburn mouth goes untouched in the street, just as the lovely star travels in an imported car with a chauffeur the while she wears overalls, smock, sandals and no stockings. The studio took the Hepburn hair out of its prim haircomb and put it into that Garbo cut with a parting on the left side, and the studio thought out glamorous eyebrow-lines for Katharine Hepburn. The story of the Katharine Hepburn transformation from girl to star is equalled only by the story of Greta Garbo, who emerged from the hands of the rehabilitation crew an enigmatic beauty with power to command a world; but every time they begin a picture Garbo is groomed from shampoo to grease paint; and generally over her loud protests. It is probable that this first long holiday experienced by the “ glamorous Greta ” will give the studio plenty of work when she returns.

Karen Morley was just another slim girl with a great deal of acting talent. Lionel Barrymore pays her the compliment of. this salutation: “ Hello, actress! ” It is a greeting he pays no other girl on the Metro lot. When Karen Morley comes into a room these days she dominates it; but she deliberately cultivated the glamour which fairly seeps from her photographs, from her films and from her finger tips. She became slimmer than Nature intended originally; she had a

hard time adjusting her health to the terrible standards demanded by slender Hollywood; she imitated nobody —but combed her hair and held her head in a way calculated to make people notice her. Then she threw good acting into all that glamour for full measure, and she became instantly one of the most interesting players in the motion picture profession. Hollywood didn’t think Gwili Andre had sufficient glamour for the films when she came here first. As a fashion model, Gwili Andre looked the perfect lady —but, to paraphrase Hollywood —she needed “sexing up a bit They gave her a Garbo haircomb, but modified it somewhat so that

it came nearer r o the Marlene Dietrich type. Her

make-up is very much like that of Dietrich also. She is far more glamorous than the girl who first arrived here to make films, but not so close to the conventional idea of Park Avenue chic. Hollywood is eminently satisfied with its handiwork, and now it’s up ot the public to decide what glamour is.

A Denial Greta Garbo, who antagonised ft whole world of interviewers to whom she had refused statements by suddenly authorising her sentiments in a “ fan ’* magazine, now cables her manager that she had nothing at all to do with the article, did not write it, and knew nothing about it. Particularly annoying was the concluding phrase of the published Garbo story: “My private affairs are very private/’ Thi* actress, who has lived like a hermit in Hollywood, rarely facing the public even to have luncheon away from her studio dressing-room or her home, has had more than her share of publicity, due, perhaps, to just the fact that she avoided public gaze. Frequently Greta Garbo has been known to leave a restaurant hurriedly when some of the adjacent diners discovered her presence. But avid sleuths have found out the name of every person she meets. Her servants have more times than once been spies who later furnished information for articles, despite the fact that Greta Garbo invariably sought Swedish help and tried to trace their contacts carefully before employing them. Another item of news about la Garbo is that she has fallen off the caloric menu which M.G.M. arranged for her with much difficulty—Garbo preferring fattening things and liking food very much—and will return here a happier and fatter girl.