saw that dear face of yours again to-night in All For Love! So noble and manly you were in the sawmill scene where first you turn upon the scoundrelly millionaire father of the girl you love, then save him from the dynamite bomb of the strikers at the risk of your own. Oh, my dearest! Something tells me your heart is as pure and sweet as your acting, that your dear face could not mask an evil thought. Oh, my man of all the world! If only you and I together might—"
It seemed enough. Ma Pettengill thought so too. The others were not unlike it. The woman then read me a few of the replies of J. Harold Armytage to his unknown worshippers. The famous star was invariably modest and dignified in these. Tactfully, as a gentleman must in any magazine of wide circulation, he deprecated the worship of these adoring ones and kindly sought to persuade them that he was but a man—not a god, even if he did chance to receive one of the largest salaries in the business. The rogue! No god—with the glorious lines of his face there on the cover to controvert this awkward disclaimer! His beauty flaunted to famished hearts, what avail to protest weakly that they should put away his image or even to hint, as now and again he was stern enough to do, that their frankness bordered on the unmaidenly?
I called Ma Pettengill's attention to this engaging modesty. I said it must be an affair of some delicacy to rebuff ardent and not too reticent fair ones in a public print, and that I considered J. Harold Armytage to have come out of it with a display of taste that could be called unusual. The woman replied, with her occasional irrelevance, that if the parties that hired him should read this stuff they probably wouldn't even then take him out on the lot and have him bitterly kicked by a succession of ten large labouring men who would take kindly to the task. She then once more said that the movies was sure one great business, and turned in the magazine to pleasanter pages on which one Vida Sommers, also a screen idol, it seemed, gave warning and advice to young girls who contemplated a moving-picture career.
Portraits of Vida Sommers in her best-known roles embellished these pages. In all of the portraits she wept. In some the tears were visible; in others they had to be guessed, the face being drawn by anguish. Her feminine correspondents wished particularly to be told of the snares and temptations besetting the path of the young girl who enters this perilous career. Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point. They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them, and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions unbearably cramping to their aspirations?
And Vida Sommers told every one of them not to consider the pictures but as a final refuge from penury. She warned them that they would find the life one of hard work and full of disappointments. It seemed that even the snares and temptations were disappointing, being more easily evaded than many of her correspondents appeared to suspect. She advised them all to marry some good, true man and make a home for him. And surely none of them could have believed the life to be a joyous one after studying these sorrowful portraits of Vida Sommers.
"That's my little actress friend," said Ma Pettengill. "Doesn't she cry something grand!"
"You've been cheating me," I answered. "I never knew you had a little actress friend. How did you get her? And doesn't she ever play anything cheerful?"
"Of course not! She only plays mothers, and you know what that means in moving pictures. Ever see a moving-picture mother that had a chance to be happy for more than the first ten feet of film? You certainly got to cry to hold down that job. Ain't she always jolted quick in the first reel by the husband getting all ruined up in Wall Street, or the child getting stole, or the daughter that's just budding into womanhood running off with a polished shoe-drummer with city ways, or the only son robbing a bank, or husband taking up with a lady adventuress that lives across the hall in the same flat and outdresses mother?
"Then it's one jolt after another for her till the last ten feet of the last reel, when everything comes right somewhere on a ranch out in the great clean West where husband or son has got to be a man again by mingling with the honest-hearted drunken cowboys in their barroom frolics, or where daughter has won back her womanhood and made a name for herself by dancing the Nature dance in the Red Eye Saloon for rough but tender-hearted miners that shower their gold on her when stewed. Only, in this glad time of the last ten feet she still has to cry a-plenty because the clouds have passed and she's Oh, so happy at last! Yes, sir; they get mother going and coming. And when she ain't weeping she has to be scared or mad or something that keeps her face busy. Here—I got some programmes of new pieces Vida just sent me. You can see she's a great actress; look at that one: 'Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?' And these other two."
I looked and believed. The dramas were variously and pithily described as The Picture with the Punch Powerful—The Smashing Five-Reel Masterpiece—A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations—Six Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the tiny golden-haired girl is reproaching her father in evening dress. I read the opening lines of the synopsis: "A young business man, who has been made successful through his wife's money, is led to neglect her through pressure of affairs, falls into the toils of a dancer in a public place and becomes a victim of her habit, that of drinking perfume in her tea—"
But I had not the heart to follow this tragedy. In another, "The Woman Pays—Powerful and Picturesque, a Virile Masterpiece of Red-Blooded Hearts," Vida Sommers is powerfully hating her husband whom she has confronted in the den of a sneering and superbly gowned adventuress who declares that the husband must choose between them. Of course there can be no doubt about the husband's choice. No sane movie actor would hesitate a second. The caption says of Vida Sommers: "Her Love Has Turned to Hate." It may be good acting, but it would never get her chosen by the male of her species—the adventuress being what is known in some circles as a pippin.
I studied still another of these documents—"Hearts Asunder." Vida Sommers has sent her beautiful daughter to the spring for a pail of water, though everyone in the audience must know that Gordon Balch, the detestable villain, is lurking outside for precisely this to occur. The synopsis beautiful says: "The mother now goes in search of her darling, only to find her struggling in the grasp of Gordon Balch, who is trying to force his attentions on her." This is where Vida Sommers has to look frightened, though in a later picture one sees that her fright changed to "A Mother's Honest Rage." The result is that Gordon Balch gets his, and gets it good. The line under his last appearance is "The End of a Misspent Life." Vida Sommers here registers pity. As Ma Pettengill had said, her face seemed never to have a moment's rest.
While I studied these exhibits my hostess had not been silent upon the merits of her little actress friend. Slowly she made me curious as to the origin and inner life of this valued member of an exalted profession.
"Yes, sir; there she is at the top, drawing down big money, with a nice vine-clad home in this film town, furnished from a page in a woman's magazine, with a big black limousine like a hearse—all but the plumes—and a husband that she worships the ground he walks on. Everything the heart can desire, even to being mother to some of the very saddest persons ever seen on a screen. It shows what genius will do for a woman when she finds out what kind of genius she's got and is further goaded by the necessity of supporting a husband in the style to which he has been accustomed by a doting father. She's some person now, let me tell you.
"She spent a week with me in Red Gap last fall, and you'd ought to seen how certain parties kowtowed to me so they'd get to meet her. I found that about every woman under fifty in our town is sure she was born for this here picture work, from Henrietta Templeton Price to Beryl Mae Macomber, who's expecting any day to be snapped up by some shrewd manager that her type is bound to appeal to, she being a fair young thing with big eyes and lots of teeth, like all film actresses. Metta Bigler, that teaches
