Books: Merton of the Movies

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"Ask me something hard. I'd say this bird had been tried out in
serious stuff and couldn't make the grade. That's the way he struck
me. Probably he once thought he could play Hamlet--one of those
boys. Didn't you get the real pathos he'd turn on now and then? He
actually had me kind of teary a couple of times. But I could see
he'd also make me laugh my head off any time he showed in a straight
piece.

"To begin with, look at that low-comedy face of his. And then--
something peculiar--even while he's imitating a bad actor you feel
somehow that it isn't all imitation. It's art, I grant you, but you
feel he'd still be a bad actor if he'd try to imitate a good one.
Somehow he found out his limits and decided to be what God meant him
to be. Does that answer you? It gives you acting-plus, and if that
isn't the plus in this case I miss my guess."

"I suppose you're right--something like that. And of course the real
pathos is there. It has to be. There never was a great comedian
without it, and this one is great. I admit that, and I admit all you
say about our audience. I suppose we can't ever sell to twenty
million people a day pictures that make any demand on the human
intelligence. But couldn't we sell something better to one million--
or a few thousand?"

The Governor dropped his cigarette end into the dregs of his coffee.
"We might," he said, "if we were endowed. As it is, to make pictures
we must make money. To make money we must sell to the mob. And the
mob reaches full mental bloom at the age of fifteen. It won't buy
pictures the average child can't get."

"Of course the art is in its infancy," remarked Henshaw, discarding
his own cigarette.

"Ours is the Peter Pan of the arts," announced the Governor, as he
rose.

"The Peter Pan of the arts--"

"Yes. I trust you recall the outstanding biological freakishness of
Peter."

"Oh!" replied Henshaw.

When Merton Gill dared to glance up a moment later the men were
matching coins at the counter. When they went out he left a half-
eaten meal and presently might have been observed on a swift-rolling
street-car. He mumbled as he blankly surveyed palm-bordered building
sites along the way. He was again rehearsing a tense scene with the
Montague girl. In actor parlance he was giving himself all the best
of it. But they were new lines he mumbled over and over. And he was
no longer eluded by the title of that book he remembered on the
library shelf at Simsbury. Sitting in the cafeteria listening to
strange talk, lashed by cruel memories, it had flashed upon his
vision with the stark definition of a screened subtitle. He rang the
Montague bell twice before he heard a faint summons to enter. Upon
the parlour couch, under blankets that reached her pillowed head,
lay Sarah. She was pale and seemed to suffer. She greeted him in a
feeble voice, lids fluttering over the fires of that mysterious
fever burning far back in her eyes.

"Hullo, Kid," he began brightly. "Here's your watch." Her doubting
glance hovered over him as he smiled down at her. "You giving it to
me again, Merton?" She seemed unable to conquer a stubborn
incredulity.

"Of course I'm giving it to you again. What'd you think I was going
to do?"

She still surveyed him with little veiled glances. "You look so
bright you give me Kleig eyes," she said. She managed a wan smile at
this.

"Take it," he insisted, extending the package. "Of course it won't
keep Western Union time, but it'll look good on you."

She appeared to be gaining on her incredulity, but a vestige of it
remained. "I won't touch it," she declared with more spirit than
could have been expected from the perishing, "I won't touch it till
you give me a good big kiss."

"Sure," he said, and leaned down to brush her pale cheek with his
lips. He was cheerfully businesslike in this ceremony.

"Not till you do it right," she persisted. He knelt beside the couch
and did it right. He lingered with a hand upon her pale brow.

"What you afraid of?" he demanded.

"You," she said, but now she again brought the watch to view,
holding it away from her, studying its glitter from various angles.
At last she turned her eyes up to his. They Were alive but
unrevealing. "Well?"

"Well?" he repeated coolly.

"Oh, stop it!" Again there was more energy than the moribund are
wont to manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone
as she went on, "You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you
know well enough what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can't you?"

He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could
conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.

"Well, it'll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your
thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s'pose you and Baird had it
between you all the time, right down to the very last, that I
thought he was doin' a serious play. Ho, ho!" He laughed gibingly.
It was a masterful laugh. "A serious play with a cross-eyed man
doing funny stuff all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes,
I did!" Again the dry, scornful laugh of superiority. "Didn't you
people know that I knew what I could do and what I couldn't do? I
should have thought that little thing would of occurred to you all
the time. Didn't you s'pose I knew as well as any one that I got a
low-comedy face and couldn't ever make the grade in a serious piece?

"Of course I know I got real pathos--look how I turned it on a
couple o' times in that piece last night--but even when I'm
imitating a bad actor you can see it ain't all acting. You'd see
soon enough I was a bad actor if I tried to imitate a good one. I
guess you'd see that pretty quick. Didn't you and Baird even s'pose
I'd found out my limits and decided to be what God meant me to be?

"But I got the pathos all right, and you can't name one great
comedian that don't need pathos more'n he needs anything else. He
just has to have it--and I got it. I got acting-plus; that's what, I
got. I knew it all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it
last night. You could hear fifty of 'em talking about it when I came
out of the theatre, saying I was an artist and all like that, and a
certain Los Angeles society woman that you can bet never says things
she don't mean, she told me she saw lots of places in this piece
that I was funnier than any cross-eyed man that ever lived. "And
what happens this morning?" Hands in pockets he swaggered to and fro
past the couch.

"Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to
sign me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of 'em said not
an hour ago--he's a big producer, too--that Baird ought to be paying
me seven hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of
course I didn't want to say anything the other day, with you
pretending to know so much about contracts and all that--I just
thought I'd let you go on, seeing you were so smart--and I signed
what you told me to. But I know I should have held off--with this
Bamberger coming over from the Bigart when I was hardly out of bed,
and says will three hundred and fifty a week interest me and
promising he'll give me a chance to do that spur act again that was
the hit of the piece--"

He broke off, conscious suddenly that the girl had for some time
been holding a most peculiar stare rigidly upon him. She had at
first narrowed her right eye at a calculating angle as she listened;
but for a long time now the eyes had been widened to this
inexplicable stare eloquent of many hidden things.

As he stopped his speech, made ill at ease by the incessant pressing
of the look, he was caught and held by it to a longer silence than
he had meant to permit. He could now read meanings. That unflinching
look incurred by his smooth bluster was a telling blend of pity and
of wonder.

"So you know, do you," she demanded, "that you look just enough too
much like Harold Parmalee so that you're funny? I mean." she
amended, seeing him wince, "that you look the way Parmalee would
look if he had brains?"

He faltered but made a desperate effort to recover his balance.

"And besides, what difference does it make? If we did good pictures
we'd have to sell 'em to a mob. And what's a mob? It's fifteen years
old and nothing but admirons, or something like that, like Muriel
Mercer that wouldn't know how much are two times two if the
neighbours didn't get it to her--"

Again he had run down under her level look. As he stopped, the girl
on the couch who had lain with the blankets to her neck suddenly
threw them aside and sat up. Surprisingly she was not garbed in
sick-bed apparel. She seemed to be fully dressed.

A long moment she sat thus, regarding him still with that slow look,
unbelieving yet cherishing. His eyes fell at last.

"Merton!" he heard her say. He looked up but she did not speak. She
merely gave a little knowing nod of the head and opened her arms to
him. Quickly he knelt beside her while the mothering arms enfolded
him. A hand pulled his head to her breast and held it there. Thus
she rocked gently, the hand gliding up to smooth his hair. Without
words she cherished him thus a long time. The gentle rocking back
and forth continued.

"It's--it's like that other time you found me--" His bluster had
gone. He was not sure of his voice. Even these few words had been
hard. He did not try more.

"There, there, there!" she whispered. "It's all right, everything's
all right. Your mother's got you right here and she ain't ever going
to let you go--never going to let you go."

She was patting his head in rhythm with her rocking as she snuggled
and soothed him. There was silence for another interval. Then she
began to croon a song above him as she rocked, though the lyric was
plainly an improvisation.

"Did he have his poor old mother going for a minute? Yes, he did. He
had her going for a minute, for a minute. Yes, he had her going good
for a minute.

"But oh, he won't ever fool her very long, very long, not very long,
because he can't fool his dear old mother very long, very long; and
he can bet on that, bet on that, so he can, bet a lot of money on
that, that, that!" Her charge had grown still again, but she did not
relax her tightened arms.

"Say," he said at last.

"Well, honey."

"You know those benches where we wait for the cars?"

"Do I know them?" The imperative inference was that she did.

"I looked at the store yesterday. The sign down there says
'Himebaugh's dignified system of deferred payments.'"

"Yes, yes, I know."

"Well, I saw another good place--it says 'The house of lucky rings'-
-you know--rings!"

"Sure, I know. That's all right."

"Well," he threw off the arms and got to his feet. She stood up
then.

"Well, all right!"

They were both constrained now. Both affected an ease that neither
felt. It seemed to be conceded without words that they must very
lightly skirt the edges of Merton Gill's screen art. They talked a
long tune volubly of other things: of the girl's illness from which
she now seemed most happily to have recovered, of whether she was
afraid of him--she professed still to be--of the new watch whose
beauties were newly admired when it had been adjusted to its owner's
wrist; of finances they talked, and even, quite simply, of
accessible homes where two could live as cheaply as one.

It was not until be was about to go, when he stood at the door while
the girl readjusted his cravat, smoothed his hair, and administered
a final series of pats where they seemed most needed, that he broke
ever so slightly through the reserve which both had felt congealing
about a certain topic.

"You know," he said, "I happened to remember the title of a book
this morning; a book I used to see back in the public library at
home. It wasn't one I ever read. Maybe Tessie Kearns read it.
Anyway, she had a poem she likes a lot written by the same man. She
used to read me good parts of it. But I never read the book because
the title sounded kind of wild, like there couldn't be any such
thing. The poem had just a plain name; it was called 'Lucile,' but
the book by the same man was called 'The Tragic Comedians.' You
wouldn't think there could be a tragic comedian would you?--well,
look at me."

She looked at him, with that elusive, remote flickering back in her
eyes, but she only said, "Be sure and come take me out to dinner.
To-night I can eat. And don't forget your overcoat. And listen--
don't you dare go into Himebaugh's till I can go with you."

One minute after he had gone the Montague girl was at the telephone.

"Hello! Mr. Baird, please. Is this Mr. Baird? Well, Jeff,
everything's jake. Yeah. The poor thing was pretty wild when he got
here. First he began to bluff. He'd got an earful from someone,
probably over on the lot. And he put it over on me for a minute,
too. But he didn't last good. He was awful broke up when the end
came. Bless his heart. But you bet I kissed the hurt place and made
it well. How about him now? Jeff, I'm darned if I can tell except
he's right again. When he got here he was some heart-broke and some
mad and some set up on account of things he hears about himself. I
guess he's that way still, except I mended the heart-break. I can't
quite make him out--he's like a book where you can't guess what's
coming in the next chapter, so you keep on reading. I can see we
ain't ever going to talk much about it--not if we live together
twenty years. What's that? Yeah. Didn't I tell you he was always
getting me, somehow? Well, now I'm got. Yeah. We're gonna do an
altar walk. What? Oh, right away. Say, honest, Jeff, I'll never have
an easy minute again while he's out of my sight. Helpless! You said
it. Thanks, Jeff. I know that, old man. Good-by!"

CHAPTER XX

ONWARD AND UPWARD

At the first showing of the Buckeye company's new five-reel comedy--
Five Reels-500 Laughs--entitled Brewing Trouble, two important
members of its cast occupied balcony seats and one of them
throughout the piece brazenly applauded the screen art of her
husband. "I don't care who sees me," she would reply ever and again
to his whispered protests.

The new piece proved to be a rather broadly stressed burlesque of
the type of picture drama that has done so much to endear the
personality of Edgar Wayne to his public. It was accorded a hearty
reception. There was nothing to which it might be compared save the
company's previous Hearts on Fire, and it seemed to be felt that the
present offering had surpassed even that masterpiece of satire.

The Gills, above referred to, watched the unwinding celluloid with
vastly different emotions. Mrs. Gill was hearty in her enjoyment, as
has been indicated. Her husband, superficially, was not displeased.
But beneath that surface of calm approval--beneath even the look of
bored indifference he now and then managed--there still ran a
complication of emotions, not the least of which was honest
bewilderment. People laughed, so it must be funny. And it was good
to be known as an artist of worth, even if the effects of your art
were unintended.

It was no shock to him to learn now that the mechanical appliance in
his screen-mother's kitchen was a still, and that the grape juice
the honest country boy purveyed to the rich New Yorker had been
improved in rank defiance of a constitutional amendment. And even
during the filming of the piece he had suspected that the little
sister, so engagingly played by the present Mrs. Gill, was being too
bold. With slight surprise, therefore, as the drama unfolded, he saw
that she had in the most brazen manner invited the attentions of the
city villains.

She had, in truth, been only too eager to be lured to the great city
with all its pitfalls, and had bidden the old home farewell in her
simple country way while each of the villains in turn had awaited
her in his motor-car. What Merton had not been privileged to watch
were the later developments of this villainy. For just beyond the
little hamlet at a lonely spot in the road each of the motor-cars
had been stopped by a cross-eyed gentleman looking much like the
clerk in the hotel, save that he was profusely bewhiskered and bore
side-arms in a menacing fashion.

Declaring that no scoundrel could take his little daughter from him,
he deprived the villains of their valuables, so that for a time at
least they should not bring other unsuspecting girls to grief. As a
further precaution he compelled them to abandon their motor-cars, in
which he drove off with the rescued daughter. He was later seen to
sell the cars at a wayside garage, and, after dividing their spoils
with his daughter, to hail a suburban trolley upon which they both
returned to the home nest, where the little girl would again
languish at the gate, a prey to any designing city man who might
pass.

She seemed so defenceless in her wild-rose beauty, her longing for
pretty clothes and city ways, and yet so capably pro by this
opportune father who appeared to foresee the moment of her flights.

He learned without a tremor that among the triumphs of his inventive
genius had been a machine for making ten--dollar bills, at which the
New York capitalist had exclaimed that the state right for Iowa
alone would bring one hundred thousand dollars. Even more
remunerative, it would seem, had been his other patent--the folding
boomerang. The manager of the largest boomerang factory in Australia
stood ready to purchase this device for ten million dollars. And
there was a final view of the little home after prosperity had come
to its inmates so long threatened with ruin. A sign over the door
read "Ye Olde Fashioned Gifte Shoppe," and under it, flaunted to the
wayside, was the severely simple trade-device of a high boot.

These things he now knew were to be expected among the deft infamies
of a Buckeye comedy. But the present piece held in store for him a
complication that, despite his already rich experience of Buckeye
methods, caused him distressing periods of heat and cold while he
watched its incredible unfolding. Early in the piece, indeed, he had
begun to suspect in the luring of his little sister a grotesque
parallel to the bold advances made him by the New York society girl.
He at once feared some such interpretation when he saw himself coy
and embarrassed before her down-right attack, and he was certain
this was intended when he beheld himself embraced by this reckless
young woman who behaved in the manner of male screen idols during
the last dozen feet of the last reel. But how could he have
suspected the lengths to which a perverted spirit of satire would
lead the Buckeye director?

For now he staggered through the blinding snow, a bundle clasped to
his breast. He fell, half fainting, at the door of the old home. He
groped for the knob and staggered in to kneel at his mother's feet.
And she sternly repulsed him, a finger pointing to the still open
door.

Unbelievably the screen made her say, "He wears no ring. Back to the
snow with 'em both! Throw 'em Way Down East!"

And Baird had said the bundle would contain one of his patents!

Mrs. Gill watched this scene with tense absorption. When the
mother's iron heart had relented she turned to her husband. "You
dear thing, that was a beautiful piece of work. You're set now. That
cinches your future. Only, dearest, never, never, never let it show
on your face that you think it's funny. That's all you'll ever have
to be afraid of in your work."

"I won't," he said stoutly.

He shivered--or did he shudder?--and quickly reached to take her
hand. It was a simple, direct gesture, yet somehow it richly had the
quality of pleading.

"Mother understands," she whispered." Only remember, you mustn't
seem to think it's funny."

"I won't," he said again. But in his torn heart he stubbornly cried,
"I don't, I don't!"

* * * * * * *

Some six months later that representative magazine, Silver
Screenings, emblazoned upon its front cover a promise that in the
succeeding number would appear a profusely illustrated interview by
Augusta Blivens with that rising young screen actor, Merton Gill.

The promise was kept. The interview wandered amid photographic
reproductions of the luxurious Hollywood bungalow, set among palms
and climbing roses, the actor and his wife in their high-powered
roadster (Mrs. Gill at the wheel); the actor in his costume of chaps
and sombrero, rolling a cigarette; the actor in evening dress, the
actor in his famous scene of the Christmas eve return in Brewing
Trouble; the actor regaining his feet in his equally famous scene of
the malignant spurs; the actor and his young wife, on the lawn
before the bungalow, and the young wife aproned, in her kitchen,
earnestly busy with spoon and mixing bowl.

"It is perhaps not generally known," wrote Miss Blivens, "that the
honour of having discovered this latest luminary in the stellar
firmament should be credited to Director Howard Henshaw of the
Victor forces. Indeed, I had not known this myself until the day I
casually mentioned the Gills in his presence. I lingered on a set of
Island Love, at present being filmed by this master of the unspoken
drama, having but a moment since left that dainty little reigning
queen of the celluloid dynasty, Muriel Mercer. Seated with her in
the tiny bijou boudoir of her bungalow dressing room on the great
Holden lot, its walls lined with the works of her favourite authors-
-for one never finds this soulful little girl far from the books
that have developed her mentally as the art of the screen has
developed her emotionally--she had referred me to the director when
I sought further details of her forthcoming great production, an
idyl of island romance and adventure. And presently, when I had
secured from him the information I needed concerning this unique
little drama of the great South Seas, I chanced to mention my
approaching encounter with the young star of the Buckeye forces, an
encounter to which I looked forward with some dismay.

"Mr. Henshaw, pausing in his task of effecting certain changes in
the interior of the island hut, reassured me. 'You need have no fear
about your meeting with Gill,' he said. 'You will find him quite
simple and unaffected, an artist, and yet sanely human.' It was now
that he revealed his own part in the launching of this young star.
'I fancy it is not generally known,' he continued, 'that to me
should go the honour of having "discovered" Gill. It is a fact,
however. He appeared as an extra one morning in the cabaret scene
we used in Miss Mercer's tremendous hit, The Blight of Broadway.
Instantly, as you may suppose, I was struck by the extraordinary
distinction of his face and bearing. In that crowd composed of
average extra people he stood out to my eye as one made for big
things. After only a moment's chat with him I gave him a seat at the
edge of the dancing floor and used him most effectively in
portraying the basic idea of this profoundly stirring drama in which
Miss Mercer was to achieve one of her brightest triumphs.

"'Watch that play to-day; you will discover young Gill in many of
the close-ups where, under my direction, he brought out the
psychological, the symbolic--if I may use the term--values of the
great idea underlying our story. Even in these bits he revealed the
fine artistry which he has since demonstrated more broadly under
another director.

"'To my lasting regret the piece was then too far along to give him
a more important part, though I intended to offer him something good
in our next play for Muriel Mercer--you may recall her gorgeous
success in Her Father's Wife--but I was never able to find the chap
again. I made inquiries, of course, and felt a really personal sense
of loss when I could get no trace of him. I knew then, as well as I
know now, that he was destined for eminence in our world of painted
shadows. You may imagine my chagrin later when I learned that
another director was to reap the rewards of a discovery all my own.'

"And so," continued Miss Blivens, "it was with the Henshaw words
still in my ears that I first came into the presence of Merton Gill,
feeling that he would-as he at once finely did--put me at my ease.
Simple, unaffected, modest, he is one whom success has not spoiled.
Both on the set where I presently found him--playing the part of a
titled roue in the new Buckeye comedy--to be called, one hears,
'Nearly Sweethearts or Something'-and later in the luxurious but
homelike nest which the young star has provided for his bride of a
few months-she was 'Flips' Montague, one recalls, daughter of a long
line of theatrical folk dating back to days of the merely spoken
drama-he proved to be finely unspoiled and surprisingly unlike the
killingly droll mime of the Buckeye constellation. Indeed one cannot
but be struck at once by the deep vein of seriousness underlying the
comedian's surface drollery. His sense of humour must be tremendous;
and yet only in the briefest flashes of his whimsical manner can one
divine it.

"'Let us talk only of my work,' he begged me. 'Only that can
interest my public.' And so, very seriously, we talked of his work.

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