Black Friday 2015

The Silent Film Quarterly・!1

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The Silent Film Quarterly ——————————————————————————

Autobiographies of the Silent Stars Black Friday 2015

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Table of Contents The Autobiography of Pola Negri

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Originally published in Photoplay from February to April, 1924

My Life Story, by Tom Mix

Originally published in Photoplay from February to April, 1925

My Life Story, by Clara Bow

Originally published in Photoplay from February to April, 1928 ————————————————————————————————————

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Editor’s Message

This special edition of Silent Film Quarterly was inspired by the “In Their Own Words” column in the first two issues of this magazine. Reprinting the original words of silent film stars is just as important to me as publishing new writing.

Through numerous research projects I have come across the series of autobiographies that Photoplay magazine ran in the 1920s. Often split over three issues, these feature articles were widely-celebrated for offering a detailed look at the lives of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

While many actors and actresses were profiled in Photoplay, not just anyone was asked to write their autobiography—it was an honor reserved for the top tier of stars.

Subjects included Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, and the three stars included in this publication. Each of the three—Pola Negri, Tom Mix, and Clara Bow— were chosen for different reasons, but it is my belief that all of them highlight unique aspects of stardom and celebrity during the silent era.

Clara Bow is arguably the most obvious choice, as her stardom has been rekindled in recent years. However, her story is, in some ways, the least interesting of the three—or at the very least is the most well-known. The stories of Tom Mix’s service in various wars, and of Pola Negri’s childhood performance for Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, are unbelievable captivating and seem at times as if they could be cinematic plots in their own rights.

Hopefully collecting these three disparate stories in one work will help to bring attention to the personal lives of some of the silent era’s biggest stars, while also providing a glimpse at what the average fan magazine subscriber had to look forward to every month in the 1920s.

As always, thank you for your continued support! Next stop, Issue 3…

Your editor, Charles Epting

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The Silent Film Quarterly・!2

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daring. From him I inherit my restless temperament. He came from Budapest into Poland and became engaged in the Written for Photoplay Magazine manufacture of paper. Then he met and married Eleanora von Kielesewska, my Originally published in three installments, mother. from February to April, 1924 They were prosperous when I was born, with a comfortable country place ・・・ surrounded by great trees and gardens. But Part I t h e r e s t i ve n e s s a n d r e vo l t w h i c h Poverty and suffering in my childhood characterized my father’s nature drew him and tragedy always. into ardent sympathy for the Polish cause Before I knew happiness I saw death. against Russia. He became a leader of the Death, imprisonment, the black plague and revolutionists.

Cossacks killing, killing. Torture and The Polish revolution of 1905, when I oppression, war and revolution, starving was eight, took my father away among the children and frantic mothers, and friends volunteers. I remember the volunteers shot down by my side. The Four Horsemen passing our house, my mother giving them always riding over my country. food and drink. There were high hopes for The Cossacks! To mention them Polish independence, but these were soon makes me shudder. Yet they are my first broken. My father was arrested and taken recollection. Tales of their fiendishness to the dreadful Pavilion Citadela. the would seem to you as incredible as fairy prison for murderers in Warsaw. We went stories. But I, with my own eves, have seen to see him several times. I shall never forget them riding like mad through the streets of the last visit. It was in the evening. My Warsaw with wild cats under their arms; I father was unusually silent. I kissed him, have seen them fling these cats into a clinging to him, and then I felt his tears fleeing, shrieking crowd of people, and I over my face. Frightened, as by a have seen the exes torn out premonition, my heart of faces. broke and I sobbed until Happy days of my they took me away. At childhood. I can repeat midnight that night my that platitude only in irony. father was sent away. He I am twenty-six years old. had assured my mother But I have lived, it seems, a that he would escape, and hundred. she lived hopefully, but we A t Ya n o w a , n e a r never saw him again. He L i e p n a u , i n Ru s s i a n went to Siberia.

Poland. I was born—a My mother and I returned Polish patriot—in 1897 to our home, and my and christened Appolonia mother continued to work Chalupec, daughter of the in secret for the Polish r e vo l u t i o n i s t G e o r g e s cause. Then, one night, the Chalupec, who was exiled Cossacks! They came to death in Siberia. dashing up to our house, M y f a t h e r w a s a At the age of fourteen, Appolonia Chalupec firing at the windows. We Hungarian g ypsy, the who, as Pola Negri, was to thrill the world hid, but they dragged us handsomest man I have —danced before the Czar and Czarina in out, looted our home and, the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg. ever known, dark, fiery and before our eyes, burned it

The Autobiography of Pola Negri:

The Silent Film Quarterly・!3 to the ground. In response to my mother’s cries they only said: “You are the wife of the revolutionist Chalupec.”

Broken in spirit and in health my mother went to live with my aunt and uncle, who sent me to the Countess Plater’s school in Warsaw. A little later my only brother died of the black plague, and for two years my mother was insane…

That was my childhood…

I was nervous, impetuous and violent of temper, a very had pupil, although I did study. When I was twelve I read and spoke four languages, Polish, German, Russian and French. While mastering Italian I fell in love with the works of Ada Negri, the Italian poetess, and when later I went on the stage I took her name, combining it with Pola—the diminutive of Appolonia— which I was always called from a child.

I was fourteen when I decided that I wanted to go to the ballet school. The stage had fascinated me at first sight when I saw a performance of “Cinderella.” As it was necessary for me to earn a living, my aunt consented and. eight months later, look me to the Imperial ballet school in St. Petersburg.

The training for the Imperial ballet was terrible. We were treated like young animals. The masters did not hesitate to beat us, and many times I winced under the whip. Nevertheless, I loved the work and my one sustaining inspiration was my mother. I wanted to give her every luxury and care that I might revive her interest in life and restore her to health.

There were glorious moments, too, when we danced before the court. I worked nine hours a day, specializing in Oriental dances, and was rewarded by being made a principal in the company.

The Czarina paid several visits to the school and presented us with little gifts. I revered her as a saint. She seemed to me the loveliest creature on earth, delicate, aloof and ethereal in her sadness. When, years afterward, I heard that she was killed with her husband and children at

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Ekaterinenburg I was deeply moved, for she was, to us dancers at least, “the little mother.”

I also had the honor of being presented to the Czar, and on the occasion of his birthday anniversary I received a beautiful gift.

My most vivid recollection of those days in regal Petersburg is of a matinee for the court when Chaliapin sang. It was a great scandal.

Chaliapin sang the national anthem with all the power and fervor of which he is capable. The nobles applauded him enthusiastically, and he was invited to the Czar’s box to partake of champagne and r e f r e s h m e n t s. I m a g i n e, t h e n , t h e consternation when he reappeared on the stage for his next number and, with neater power and feeling, commenced singing the great revolutionary song! Imagine how we fell standing there in the wings as we heard the cry of rebellion soar in the silence like a death knell to that aristocratic assemblage.

Pola Negri’s mother who, with her little daughter, was driven from home by the Cossacks when her husband was exiled to Siberia. Miss Negri writes touchingly of “this only friend of mine.”

The Silent Film Quarterly・!4 It was glorious! My heart exulted, for I was a rebel, hating the government with all my soul.

Chaliapin did not have a chance to finish the song. The nobles were infuriated by his daring, and he only escaped severe punishment because he was too great an artist to sacrifice to Siberia.

It was with tragic disappointment that I heard the school physicians advise my aunt to take me out of the ballet. My lungs were delicate, and they said that if I continued the strenuous exercise my health might be impaired permanently.

I was not dissuaded from my stage career, however, and upon my return to Wa r s a w I e n t e r e d t h e d r a m a t i c conservatory where in one year I completed the three-year course.

On October 1, 1913, I made my debut in Hauptmann’s “Hannele” and Pola Negri was proclaimed an actress. I was dazed with the ecstasy of success. I felt as though I were enjoying another’s triumph. It was not Pola Chalupec, but Pola Negri who received the flowers and the praise and the kisses from friends. But it was Pola Chalupec who crept, weeping with happiness, into the arms of her mother in the little four-room apartment on the seventh floor of the Sanatorska Uliza. My mother was herself again, and her health was rapidly mending. Such happiness after such suffering seemed to me a divine gift.

The next great thrill was when I received my salary at the end of the month. It was ninety rubles, amounting to something like forty-five dollars in American money at the rate of exchange before the war. Ninety rubles was a fabulous amount in my eyes. I rushed out to buy an armful of the most expensive flowers for my mother. When I burst into the room and threw them upon her, she scolded me severely for my extravagance. It was the greatest moment of my life.

My year of repertoire at the Kleines theater was strenuous, but through it I gained a contract to play at the Imperial

Above: At the age of twelve the wistful little Pola had already passed through tragedy. A student at the Countess Plater’s school in Warsaw, she had mastered four languages—Polish, Russian, German, and French.

Below: Pola in St. Petersburg. “We dancers were treated like animals,” she writes. “The master did not hesitate to beat us.”

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The Silent Film Quarterly・!5 theater with a salary of one hundred and fifty rubles a month. So I did not mind rehearsing all day and working all evening on the stage.

The thunder crash of war interrupted our season. Polish patriots, while detesting the yoke of Czaristic Russia, rallied to her colors in time of trouble. Troops were mobilized against the Germans, and there were wild patriotic demonstrations in the squares. The theater was converted into a hospital, and I volunteered as a nurse for the Red Cross.

The reopening of the theater four months later took me back to the stage, but I continued to serve in a hospital by day.

Ah, what a drama I entered when I entered that hospital! Great, lovable peasant soldiers of Holy Russia, so brave, so ignorant, like children. They couldn’t write, so I wrote for them, little love letters, simple, halting, pathetic..they broke my heart into pieces.

Then one day a terrible thing happened to me. I had seen the eyes of death, the miseries of women, children and soldiers. I had withstood it all. But one day a soldier, just a big peasant Russian boy, was taken into the operating room. When they brought him back his right arm was gone; it had been amputated just above the elbow. I went over to his cot to comfort him. He asked for a glass of water. I brought it to him. He looked up, and smiled. Then he reached for the glass…he reached with the arm that was gone! The glass dropped from my hand and broke upon the floor. I collapsed utterly. That one little pathetic gesture nearly killed me.

My health had not been good. The strain of work and trouble had so unnerved me that I was not fit for service.

Romance and Another Tragedy A few brief months and I had developed from a girl into a woman. I made my debut at the Imperial theater at the age of seventeen in Sudermann’s “Sodom’s Ende.” The favorable criticisms

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appearing the next morning established me, and I continued in repertoire at the Imperial.

It was during my second year at this theater that a young painter came seeking permission to do my portrait. I sat for him, and during the sittings I experienced, for the first time in my life, a deep and moving love. I think I loved him more than anyone I had ever known because he was more idealistic. We became engaged before the portrait was completed.

But happiness was not for me. Again my fate intervened. It is my fate to be unhappy in love. We were planning our marriage when he suddenly took ill with consumption. Without a thought of career or friends or money I dropped everything and nursed him…He died in my arms one terrible December night.

I was desolate. I rebelled against my fate. He was the only one who had given me a real conception of love. For weeks and weeks was inconsolable, not caring to return to my work or even to my old circle of friends. I had known a great deal of misery, but it was out of this suffering that I gained understanding and philosophy.

When eventually I did return to the theater I was a greater actress.

My success as the Slave of Fatal Enchantment in “Sumurun,” which Richard Ordynski directed, gave me my first idea of entering pictures. Then I saw an American film and was captivated by it. I thought the cowboy hero fascinating…I wish I knew his name, for I was as enamored as any schoolgirl fan.

Filled with a desire to try my pantomimic talent in pictures—as I had tried it on the stage in “Sumurun”—I set about overcoming obstacles. There was no technical equipment in Warsaw in 1915, but there was a motion picture camera. I secured it, rented a photographer’s studio and commenced production of “Love and Passion,” a terrible story which I wrote myself. Indeed, I was producer, director, scenario writer and star. The interior

The Silent Film Quarterly・!6 scenes were made by daylight in the studio and the exteriors in a garden, which I secured by agreeing to employ the owner’s daughter in the picture.

I completed the picture within a month and exhibited it. The crudity of the production so discouraged me that I sold the entire rights for one hundred rubles, about fifty dollars. The man who purchased it made a small fortune exhibiting it in Poland and in Russia. Bad as it was, it had little competition in those days.

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onto the stage and went through my part.

For seven agonizing nights we played in that empty house to the accompaniment of shell-tire.

This nightmare passed. The Germans drove the Russians back and restored order in the town, and life went on as it had before.

While I endured the worst week at nervous tension the cumulative effect of my experiences told on my health, and I was able to continue only under a doctor’s care.

My nervous breakdown might have had serious results had I not been rescued by an offer from Max Reinhardt to appear in “Sumurun” in Berlin. I accepted gratefully, frantic to get away from the scene of my greatest suffering. Without once considering the difficulties that might confront a Polish actress in the Kaiser’s capital, I set out for Berlin, arriving in January of 1917.

Acting Before the Enemy In 1916 the Germans entered the city of Warsaw. The Russian forces, too weak to offer further resistance, had w i t h d r aw n t o P r a g a , across the river from which they steadily bombarded the city for a week.

That week was the most terrifying of my life.

Thousands were killed in ・・・ the street. Bullets rained Part II through the air, and the An ominous gloom was windows of our apartment over Berlin in 1917, like building were shattered. the chill of approaching My mother and I had to death. The city was more live in the cellar. depressing than nerveThrough it all I was Pola Negri as the Slave of Fatal shattered Warsaw. Had I compelled to act. The Enchantment in “Sumurun” created a not been plunged instantly Ger mans ordered the theater to remain open, sensation on the stage of Warsaw, and later into work I should have captured Berlin in the same role under the t h e p e r f o r m a n c e s t o direction of Reinhardt. It was her success in returned to my mother. continue. Never will the this pantomime that inspired her for pictures. Never in my life did I work harder than under Prof. experience of that first Reinhardt’s direction in rehearsals of night of acting under shell-tire be effaced “Sumurun.” As the Slave of Fatal from my mind. On the way to the theater I Enchantment I had earned praise in Warsaw saw bodies of German soldiers and of during the season of 1912 to 1913, but I civilians in the street. never knew its full possibilities until I The theater was empty, except for a essayed it in Berlin. few German officers. None of the Prof. Reinhardt rehearsed me every townspeople dared to attend. We had to act day for a month, and under his tutelage I before those hundreds of vacant chairs and felt myself inspired. It was with exultation those few officers. Terror-stricken I crawled

The Silent Film Quarterly・!7

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bred of confidence that I read placards under Reinhardt. I thought if people saw about Berlin announcing “‘Sumurun’—with me in that picture they would never again Pola Negri.” consider me seriously as an actress. To my Although I realized that I had amazement, the picture heightened my developed tremendously under Prof. popularity, and Paul Davidson, general Reinhardt’s direction, the opening night at manager of the U.F.A.—the Union Film the Kammerspiele theater was one of Alliance of Germany—offered me a awful agitation for me. I was before an contract at a salary twenty times greater entirely new public; I was a Russian- Polish than I was receiving at the theater. actress before German people; and I was My first German-made picture, “The on trial as a provincial actress, seeking Polish Dancer,” was a dismal failure. The recognition in one of the most story was bad, and the direction worse. My discriminating art centers of Europe. second, a Russian story, “The Yellow The reception given me by the public Ticket,” which was also presented on the and the press was overwhelming. The stage and on the screen in this country, critics were most enthusiastic in crediting caused the public to express interest in me.

Prof. Reinhardt with a discovery, and their It did not please me, however. predictions concerning my future gave me While playing in “Sumurun” I met a new incentive. young man of Polish extraction, by the The play settled down for a successful name of Ernst Lubitsch. He played an old season, and I took up my home with a woman, a grotesque character, in the maid in a small apartment in the pantomime. When “Sumurun” closed he Emserstrasse. Berlin was suffering from went to work in the studios making one food shortage, and oftentimes I did not and two reel comedies in which he played a have enough to eat. Warsaw, although comic Yiddish character. I saw him under German domination, was in much directing these slapstick farces and was belter condition than Berlin. My mother impressed by his understanding of sent me a basket of food every week. characterization and drama. So, acting Whenever it arrived I gave a party, and a with characteristic impulse, I went to Mr. most popular hostess I was. One week the Davidson, the head of the U.F.A., and package failed to arrive; insisted upon Mr. Lubitsch the next week when I as my director. opened it I found it filled The idea seemed with stones; my mother p r e p o s t e r o u s . M r. was send- ing food Davidson explained that regularly, but it was being the company had signed intercepted. I couldn't me at a high salar y, complain; thousands were believing in my ability as suffering greater privations an emotional actress; they than I. would not consider risking While playing in my reputation at the hands “Sumurun” I was of an unknown comedy distressed to learn that my director. cheap little film, “Love and Ta k i n g o n e o f t h e s e Passion,” had been secured “temperamental” stands by a theater in Berlin, the for which I have been so “‘Carmen’—called ‘Gypsy Blood’ in m a n a g e r p l a n n i n g t o America—put Lubitsch and myself at the s e ve r e l y c r i t i c i z e d , I capitalize on the refused to think of any top of the motion picture profession in Europe.” reputation I had achieved other director. I had my

The Silent Film Quarterly・!8 way. Mr. Lubitsch was engaged. Our first picture, “The Eyes of the Mummy,” was a tremendous success, and “Carmen”— called “Gypsy Blood” in America—put us both at the top of the motion picture profession in Europe.

Although generous in their praise of my work in “Carmen,” American critics considered the production shabby. It was shabby, but Mr. Lubitsch and I were working under the greatest difficulties. The picture was made during the fourth year of the war; everyone sensed impending disaster; and our technical equipment was pathetic compared to yours in America.

Nothing in my career has been more gratifying to me than the discovery of Mr. Lubitsch. I think him the greatest directorial genius in the world. After “Carmen” we separated, but neither of us did as well apart. I made “Camille” and again displayed a “temperamental” whim, this time in regard to casting the part of Armand. None of the actors I knew satisfied my conception of the character. I have always contended that a star’s characterization suffers if there are flaws in the cast. Next to her own performance,

“I had boundless enthusiasm for the role of ‘Du Barry.’ Next to ‘Carmen,’ I like that role the best I’ve ever played.”

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that of the leading man is of the most importance to a star.

While attending the opera one evening I suddenly noted a man in a box opposite.

After observing him for a few moments I exclaimed, “There is Ar mand!” I immediately sent one of my party to him to say that I would like to meet him. When he was presented I asked him at once if he would like to play Armani to my Camille.

Naturally he was astonished. He was a Hungarian engineer! That was nothing to me. He represented my ideal of the part.

Today that Hungarian engineer is one of the most celebrated actors in Europe. His Armand was excellent.

The Polish revolution of 1905, the great war, then the Kaiser’s abdication and the revolution of 1918…My life truly has been a drama of great scenes.

When I saw Karl Liebknecht, the g re at e s t C o m mu n i s t i n G e r m a ny, addressing the Communist mobs from the palace balcony, where, at the opening of the war, the Kaiser had made his great speech. I was particularly struck by the irony of human events. Although order was restored very quickly after the Kaiser’s abdication, the government never losing control completely, conditions were such that work in the studio had to be suspended during the winter months.

It was at the suggestion of a Berlin dramatic critic that M. Davidson finally undertook the production of “Du Barry,” retitled “Passion” in the United States. The critic believed I was particularly qualified for the role of the little fate-tricked milliner.

A play of French historical background seemed the height of folly at that time, with feeling so bitter between Germany and France. However, Europeans are singularly free from prejudices in matters of art. So, just as we in Warsaw presented the German play “Sodom’s Ende” while the Germans were surging toward our gates, Mr. Davidson and the members of the company courageously undertook “Du Barry.”

The Silent Film Quarterly・!9 I had boundless enthusiasm for the character of Du Barry. How I knew the soul of that little milliner! Like me, she was the daughter of an ironic fate. Next to Carmen I like the role of Du Barry the best of all I’ve played. I read every available book in which she figured. Never have I known a company to work with such harmony and inspiration as for that production. We were a family. With Mr. Lubitsch directing, Emil Jannings playing the king, and an assemblage of the best players in Germany, my ambition was fired. There was no “star,” we were one for all and all for one.

I do not believe in star pictures; each part should be played for its worth. A star does not gain public favor by holding the major footage of a film. On the contrary, I would rather have less than my legitimate share so that people might go away wishing they could have seen more of me. In “The Spanish Dancer,” my favorite American picture, I deliberately sought an all-star standard. My success on the screen was achieved as an actress playing a role, surrounded by actors of such calibre as Emil Jannings, whom I regard as the possessor of genius. Roles were not refashioned to display my talents, no foolish “sympathy” was injected to ensnare regard for me personally. I played my part for what it was worth and so I received credit as an actress rather than as a personality.

We had terrific obstacles to overcome in making “Passion.” There was a scarcity of materials, general discontent among laborers, and a political situation that made any investment hazardous. To balance these handicaps, we had a triumphant zeal and faith in our success.

But I never dreamed America would receive me as she did. When the echo of the reception given me at the Capitol theater in New York reached Berlin, I was overcome with pleasure. I had had sufficient confidence in myself to believe I might become famous as an actress in

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Europe, but never did I dream of winning America in so short a time.

I was bewildered by the congratulations, the flowers and the offers I received from representatives of American film companies. Only once before had I experienced such joy in success—that was on the night of my debut in Warsaw.

After completing “Passion,” I went to Warsaw for a visit with my mother. I had become a celebrity, and was received by the people as a queen. Naturally I was haughtily indignant when I was halted at the Polish border, upon my return trip to Berlin, and brusquely informed that I could not take my jewels out of Poland. It was one of those curious arbitrary rules that sprang into effect during the chaos following the war.

I was so indignant at the injustice that I demanded to see the commandant. When I entered his office I was furious, prepared to indict him in no uncertain manner…

Instead, I married him a few weeks later!

Count Eugene Dombski was a charming gentleman with estates at Sassnowiece in Poland, and then I came as his wife, following my completion of the film “Sumurun,” exhibited here as “One Arabian Night.”

I was married just a year and a half.

My husband wished me to give up my work and take my social position as the countess. I could not do it. Happy as I was during the first few months of marriage, I felt constantly the urge of my ambition.

My work was really my first love. It had lifted me from poverty, restored my mother to health and comfort and me a position in the world of art that I loved.

As I have said, in work I find my philosophy of life. I am not speaking in the manner of Pollyanna when I say that service is the solution of life. I am speaking practically as one who has found the greater happiness in service. With me it has been service in art; but the object does not matter, it’s the serving. The finest work I ever did was writing letters for those

The Silent Film Quarterly・!10 Russian boys in the soldiers’ hospital, because I regard it as service in the finest cause. That is why I call it the loveliest moment of my life.

Perhaps the time will come when I wish to give up my work. The right to change one’s mind is the particular prerogative of woman. I would like a home, but it is difficult to serve two masters, and now my work possesses me.

I met Charlie Chaplin the first night of his visit to Berlin during his trip abroad.

I was with a party of friends, including Mr. and. Mrs. Albert Kauffman, at the Palais Heinroth, a fashionable Berlin restaurant, when Mr. Chaplin was presented to me.

Although I had heard his name, I did not know his position in the film world and I had never seen one of his pictures. During the years of war no American films came to Berlin, and Chaplin, along with the other American stars, was practically unknown. Inasmuch as he complimented me upon my work, however, I told him that I thought him one of the world’s greatest artists. I thought I was being very clever in my diplomacy; I learned later that he was quite as clever—he had never seen any of my pictures!

Mr. Chaplin has great charm of personality. He is boyish, enthusiastic and delightful in conversation. We met at

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“My association with Mr. Chaplin in Berlin, far from being romantic, was quite casual. I admired him as a personality and an artist.”

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several parties and I enjoyed seeing him give impersonations at several little affairs.

He is always the actor, never losing an opportunity to indulge in mimicry or burlesque.

Our association in Berlin, far from being romantic, was quite casual. I admired him as a personality and as an artist. Indeed, at that time, I was charmed by all the American men I was meeting.

Their deferential attitude toward women is quite different from the attitude of the European man. Americans treat every woman as though she were a queen. That I like!

I have since learned that the American press was amused by my salutation of the famous Mr. Chaplin. I squandered all the English I knew upon him in one magnificent outburst. I called him “little jazz boy Charlie.” Wishing to pay me a compliment in German he asked Mr. Kaufmann how to say “I adore you.” But what he really said to me was “I think you are a piece of cheese.” Naturally I was astounded and angered by such impertinence…and Charlie was more astounded by the effect his intended compliment had upon me. The amusement of our friends soon revealed the trick they had played on us; Mr. Kaufmann had given poor Charlie the wrong phrase!

About this time I was suffering terribly from the criticism directed at me by the German press. They knew, of course, of my Polish sympathies, and, next to the French, the Polish people were the most unpopular with the Germans directly following the war. When they learned that I was giving money to Polish organizations, they took the opportunity to attack me openly. They said I was making my money in Germany and giving it to Germany’s enemy, Poland. In vain I explained that I was giving it, not to the Polish militaire, but to charity, just as I had given to German charity. They misunderstood me, and I was deeply hurt, for I did appreciate the

The Silent Film Quarterly・!11 patronage they had given me. At the same time I felt I had a right to dispose of my money as I chose.

Perhaps I was tactless. In any event, I felt I could no longer endure the unfriendliness in Berlin, and I went to the estates I had purchased at Bydgosses— called Bromberg by the Germans—in Poland. There I was given a welcome so truly affectionate that I forgot all my troubles, for it was there I had been spending most of the money. I had established on my estate an orphanage for Polish children.

The first money I received from America under my American contract I used to take care of two hundred war orphans. It was little enough to do, considering what Americans did for the unfortunate people of my country. I still maintain that orphanage on my estates, supervised by my mother.

After rest and happiness with those who loved me, I returned to Berlin to start work on my American contract in “Montmartre,” directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

“Montmartre” was the last picture I made in Germany, but it was not scheduled for release in America until after “The Spanish Dancer.” The part I play in the picture is one of my favorite roles, perhaps because my heart was so gay while doing it. I was going to America. The promise had been made, and for four months I studied English in preparation.

I was asked upon arriving in America what picture had impressed me most. I replied, “Broadway at night.” Next month I will tell you my impressions of America, of New York and of Hollywood. ・・・ Part III My life has been one revolution after another, and Hollywood was the worst.

It was not easy to leave New York for California after the cordial reception I enjoyed. America is the goal of virtually every European artist today. Nowhere is

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Miss Negri as “The Spanish Dancer.”

the aesthetic impulse so vigorous. Art requires patronage, and New York is the most magnificent patron in the world today. Consider the success of the Moscow Art theater, the reception accorded Duse, and the support given to the Metropolitan Opera year after year. New York has always been my goal, and I was not disappointed when I arrived.

I viewed the New York skyline breathlessly. What grandeur, what color, what aspirations in marble! The skyscrapers, like the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, seem striving heavenward at the urge of man.

The first glimpse of New York from the bay awed me with its loveliness, the first view of it from within thrilled me with its drama. The rushing, seething, noisy turbulence of its streets is the dramatic expression of America. I love it. Of course I couldn’t work there; I’d go mad. But I do

The Silent Film Quarterly・!12 want to work at a studio near the city, in touch with its power and beauty.

The most beautiful picture in the world: New York at night. Times Square, robed in jewels, is a pageant unrivaled in the achievement of man.

I was not prepared for the ovation that awaited me. While I knew of my success on the screen in “Passion,” I never realized how much New York was interested in me.

When a boat came out to meet the steamer with a banner inscribed “Welcome Pola Negri,” and I heard the orchestral serenade in my honor, I was surprised and touched.

I waved my greeting and then suddenly found myself surrounded by reporters and cameras.

During the eight days I was in New York, before starting toward Hollywood, I was entertained at dinners, luncheons and theater parties. Then Hollywood and another lovely greeting. A little newsboy presented me with some roses, the sweetest greeting of all. Everyone was charming, and I felt that it was all a dream which could not last. People are human; where there is great generosity there is also jealousy and selfishness.

The heat was terrific the day of my arrival, and it continued so for a week. I despaired of becoming acclimated. For the first four months I suffered under the most frightful depression. I could scarcely arise from my bed in the morning; it seemed an effort even to think clearly.

T h e c l i m a t e w a s s u f fi c i e n t l y depressing, but the criticism was worse. I was a foreigner unacquainted with the customs. Everything I did, every move I made was criticized. It seemed to me as though nothing I did was right. Perhaps I had been spoiled by the attention given me in Europe and by the reception of New York. Perhaps I was tactless. All I know is that for every mistake I made I paid twenty times in suffering.

I learned that I was being called “the competition,” my house “the competition house” and my car “the competition car.”

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Interviewers sometimes asked me such personal questions that I misunderstood the motive. In Europe they ask you about art; here they asked me, what is the dangerous age of a man and of a woman! I did not know that every other star was interviewed the same way; I thought it was something personal.

There were stories printed so absurd, that they were beneath denial. Until now I have never replied to criticisms and have never sought to show my side.

There was, for instance, the story of the cats. Some one who evidently disliked me terribly printed a story to the effect that I ordered the cats killed or removed from the studio. And the story was reprinted everywhere! It was absolutely untrue. Even had it been true, it was too petty for the attention of an intelligent person.

Every time I expressed an opinion contrary to the accepted or made an objection of any sort I was heralded as “temperamental.” I refused to do “The Cheat,” it is true. In the first script they had me jump from an airplane into the water, from the water on to a motorcycle and from a motorcycle on to a moving train where I was to run along the roofs of the coaches. They wanted me to do all the things that have made Eddie Polo famous. I did not feel I was qualified.

When the acrobatics were deleted, I finally agreed to do the story, although I protested that I was not suited to the role.

It was not my milieu. I am not so conceited that I think I can play all types with equal effect.

I did not like “Bella Donna.” The original story, yes, I liked that, but when they found it necessary to alter Mrs. Chepstow’s character by making her sympathetic, in order to please exhibitors, censors and the public, I knew I was lost.

What could I do? All these problems were new to me. I did not wish to be dictatorial and unreasonable. I realized I had a great deal to learn about the motion picture situation in America fairly well, and I also

The Silent Film Quarterly・!13 know exactly what I intend to do. No more “sympathy.” I don’t care what people think of me personally. I don’t care whether they like me or hate me when they leave the theater, but I do want them to say, “Pola Negri gave a marvelous performance.”

I am ambitious to achieve success as an artist, not as a personality. I despise the word personality. I’m told that the public often prefers personality to acting ability; that more money can be made as a personal favorite than as an artist. That may be true. Very well, then I shall make less money. I do not care for money; I have all that I need. I have been penniless and hungry and I have had luxury and adulation, and I know that neither poverty nor wealth has anything to do with happiness.

I know from experience that happiness is the exception rather than the rule. My favorite philosopher is Schopenhauer—he helped me a great deal in Hollywood! The greatest joy I have experienced has been in struggle.

When an artist ceases to struggle, he ceases to be an artist. I shall always struggle because I shall never achieve my goal. The artist never arrives; he always owes to his ideal.

Although I suffer great loneliness, I must be alone. I crave solitude. Sometimes I feel that I would like to go away far into a strange country, into a peasant’s hut and close the door. I have never liked the superficiality of society. In Berlin and in Warsaw I found recreation in the opera, the theater, a few friends at dinner, and in reading the books I like. Social affairs bore me.

I did not care for Hollywood parties, and, as I had no friends. I kept to myself with my books and music. This attitude brought more criticism. I was thought haughty and snobbish.

But there is something my critics never knew—that I cried day after day and night after night behind closed doors. When I went out my head was high. It will always be high. I never bow to my enemies. They

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“I did not care for Hollywood parties, and, as I had no friends, I kept to myself with my books and music, and my dogs. For that I was called snobbish.”

could never humble me. Although I am very sensitive, criticism cannot make me turn aside. I am not discouraged.

The avalanche of publicity that fell upon me when I was reported engaged to Charlie Chaplin caused some people to say that both Mr. Chaplin and I were seeking publicity. I can hardly blame anyone for this assumption; the importance of the affair was so magnified that the reports must have become as tedious to the public as to us. By this time, however, I had learned that everything connected with a celebrity is news in America, and I did not resent the publicity, although I tried to evade it.

I have tremendous ambition, first to accomplish all that is possible on the screen and then on the stage. My first enthusiasm is for the motion picture because it is a new

The Silent Film Quarterly・!14 art form in development. As a medium of expression it is limited only by the dearth of artists.

Shut off from the rest of the world during the war, I have not seen all the best pictures. Of those I have seen, “Quo Vadis” was the first to create a deep impression upon me. However, I think “The Birth of a Nation” the greatest. And I love “Way Down East” for its human treatment and sincere characterization.

Lillian Gish I think the greatest actress on the screen in America. She is sincere in everything she does. Not versatile, but supreme in her genre. Of the actors, I admire most John Barrymore.

I already have said that I think Ernst Lubitsch the finest directorial genius in the world. With him I created my favorite role, that of Carmen in “Gypsy Blood,” and Du Barry in “Passion,” also under his direction, is second in my preference.

Two other directors whose work interests me very much are Eric Von Stroheim and D.W. Griffith.

The chief handicap of screen progress in America as I see it is arbitrary restriction. Rules of censorship, policies of companies and of exhibitors, all combine to limit and standardize expression.

Nevertheless, we shall have variety. An artist can express himself even with the most vigorous restrictions because he is capable of subtlety.

I am happy now because I have the opportunity of doing stories as great as those I did in Europe. I understand the motion picture situation more clearly, and I feel that I am better understood, both as an artist and a woman. “Madame Sans Gene” was secured at my request, and I feel that sincere effort is being made toward creating artistic work. I am the severest critic of my own pictures. In the past when I objected to certain things about them I was told that they were, nevertheless, big box office attractions. But the argument that a picture becomes a box office attraction through flaws in artistry is

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ridiculous. “Passion” was a work of art and also a commercial success. If I thought that I could not make pictures of as high an order in America as I did in Europe, I would return to Europe instantly.

This year I plan to visit my mother in Bromberg in Poland. I will take her to the home I have purchased on the Riviera in France, where the climate is delightful.

Then I shall return to America. Here is the place for work; here is the great opportunity for the artist of today. While I naturally love Europe, particularly France, I am fascinated by the spirit of energy in America. It is so alive in every nerve that it generates and inspires the creative mind.

Although I feel New York is the place for me, I have come to like many things about California. Next to music and books, flowers are my hobby. My home is always filled with them, and in California I have them all about me.

The dream of every European child is America. My dream has been realized. In spite of great unhappiness and many disillusionments, I have found satisfaction.

If I can earn favor with my work and continually progress, I am close to as much happiness as there is in the world.

In her latest picture, “Shadows of Paris,” Pola Negri is an Apache, a type of role in which she won fame in Europe.

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The Silent Film Quarterly・!15

My Life Story: Written by Tom Mix for Photoplay Magazine Originally published in three installments, from February to April, 1925 ・・・ Part I Friends, I do not pretend to be an author. I have always believed in letting every man rope on his own range and I am not what my fellow cowboys in the old days used to call a “literary gent.” Therefore, in putting down these facts about my life, I hope you will take into consideration that I don’t aim to adorn the tale with any gems of language. I’ll just try to set it down like you and I were sitting around the campfire and I was spinning a yarn for you.

Such educational advantages as I have hooked up with have been mostly in the school of experience, as you might say, but I was considerably too busy as a youth to spend much time in school houses.

It’s funny, too, when you set down and take pen in hand to unveil your past as far back as you retain any impressions at all, what fool things a man’ll remember. My life has been pretty full of action, one way and another. I have been a cowboy, and a soldier, a scout and a sheriff and a U.S. marshal, a Texas Ranger, and an enforcement officer, and in childhood I was a swipe and a lumberjack and a football player and a bicycle racer. And I find it’s hard to pin down some right important fact and maybe a whole sequence of events will have departed complete, while all sorts of trivial and unimportant ideas keep popping up, making you laugh and cry right unexpected. If I had known I was ever to be called upon to write my life story, I reckon I’d have kept one of these diaries, but usually things were moving too fast for any such endeavor, even if I had considered it, which I never did.

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Anyway, my plum first recollection is of my mother using a shotgun in an argument with a mountain lion. I guess I must have been about two and a half or three years old when that little fracas took place. And I can recall, all right, how I began my career in the face of danger, because when mother opened up the crack in that window and began welcoming those cats with a few rounds of buckshot, I got right down on my little stomach and crawled under the bed. I reckon you could rightly call it a bed, though it was used for a couch, too. in the day time. But it had one of those ruffles hung around it, and I felt safer there, somehow, and I could peek out and watch mother squint along the gun barrel, and then pull the trigger. Every time the gun would go off, I’d hide my face and then when it was quiet, I’d peek out again.

I don’t mind relating this because I was pretty young at the time and perhaps later happenings will wipe the stain off my

Our hero at the age of three and a half. Even then he had his own lariat and made life miserable for every domestic animal around his parents’ log cabin in Texas.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!16 name. But there’s one funny thing come out of that. A cat animal knows I am just his natural enemy. I can’t get along with cats, not any way at all. Don’t make any difference whether they’re big or little, either. Even house cats that belong to my wife’s friends get up and leave the room when I come in. And when I worked with the old Selig company and had to be around the lions and tigers, we both knew right off the bat that we weren’t going to be friendly.

I was born in that log cabin in Texas, in 1879. It was a mighty lonely spot, up north of El Paso, and in those early days our neighbors were a long ride away. My father built that cabin with his own hands, and it was snug, and weather-tight, but it was as small and primitive as any pioneer cabin ever was. Anyways, I got the right start in life, because I’ve heard a lot of times since that being born in a log cabin is one of the best ways to cinch success later on in life. It’s now regarded as a heap more lucky than being born with a gold spoon in your mouth. A lot of men would have laid the scene of their entrance into this sphere in a log cabin if they’d been writing their own scenario.

Father was off on the range most of the time, either looking after our stock or riding herd for the other ranchers or working for them, and my mother and I and my sister, and my half-brother and his sister, lived alone in that cabin. We were snowed in a lot of the winter, at least we had to dig paths wherever we wanted to go, but in the summer we had the run of all the hills and prairies for miles around.

There was plenty of game around there and plenty of excitement, too, because those were sure enough pioneer days. It was a long ride into town, and the town itself was typical of the early West. It was a long ride to anywhere, for that matter.

My mother was part Scotch and part Cherokee Indian. Her grandfather lived on the White Eagle Reserve and he must have been a marvelous old buck in his way. He

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was looked up to by everyone on the Reserve as a grand type of our redskin Americans, one of the greatest races that ever inhabited the face of the earth. More than that, he must have been an intelligent and educated man, because he translated the Bible into the Osage language, which stacks up as a job that took some doing.

Most folks feel they’ve done their duty if they get to know the Bible in English, let alone trying to put it in—to Osage, which is a mighty difficult language. I learned to speak four Indian dialects during my life in the West, and Osage is one of the hardest.

I am proud of that great-grandfather of mine. He represented all that was best of that glorious race of outdoor braves upon whom we now may all look with admiration and pity.

My Dad was mostly Irish and now that I stop to think of it, looks to me like I started life with considerable of what you might term inherited pepper —Irish, Scotch and Cherokee. I suppose that’s responsible for the way I was always looking for a war, or a new territory that was opening up, or something like that.

Adventure was the thing that was drilled into every boy’s head in those early days in Texas and the border region was always alive with gunplay and private feuds and law and order hadn’t been established to any great extent.

My Dad was once a captain in the 7th U.S. Cavalry and he was pretty well known in Texas in the early days as a man of parts. Everybody knew him and respected him. That’s why when there was some talk of me being adopted by Buffalo Bill and taking the name of Cody, I couldn’t quite see it. I thought a lot of Buffalo Bill and he was all right, but I was born with the name of Mix and I’ve got every reason to be proud of it. We’ve had something to do with making this country of ours. We were pioneers and endured the hardships and fought the battles against odds that every pioneer family fights. The name Mix stood

The Silent Film Quarterly・!17 for square-shooting and fearlessness in Texas when Texas was pretty rough and ready, and so, I’m satisfied to die as I was born—plain Tom Mix. It was sometime while I was living in that log cabin in Texas that I learned to ride and rope. But I’ve got to admit I can’t just remember how nor when nor any of the circumstances surrounding this part of my education. My mother says I could stick on a horse considerable before I could navigate safely on my own pins, so I guess I got saddle broke right early. I can only tell you this—I can’t recollect any time when I couldn’t ride and a horse has always been intimately associated with my thoughts of childhood. A horse to me, as a kid, was a necessity, like your own legs. I never could conceive life without horses. It was a long ride to town and I used to have to make it when I wasn’t but five or six, to bring stuff from the store for mother, and I always felt perfectly safe as long as there was a horse under me. I reckon if I’d been alone I’d have been scared half to death.

I can still see the big room of our cabin, rough finished inside. About half the room was taken up by the big stove, and one little thing about that stove comes back to me and I shouldn’t wonder if—like the wild cats—it left its impress on me and that’s maybe why I’ve never used tobacco. I had an uncle that wasn’t accounted to be a very respectable citizen. Most every family’s got one of those blots on its escutcheon, I’ve noticed. Well, the game law was out on uncle most all the time, and mother didn’t have any too friendly a feeling for this old coyote, but she was awfully loyal to her folks, and she used to let him come in off the range and sit in front of the big stove and warm up. The snow’d be packed up tight outside the cabin and the fire’d be blazing away, and every few minutes uncle would open the door and spit tobacco juice on that bed of red hot coals. He wouldn’t do another thing all day, and it fascinated me so I’d

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creep closer and closer to watch him. But it sickened me of tobacco.

We kids ran pretty wild in the summer and we had all kinds of exciting adventures. I remember one time my sister and I—we were awfully good pals—were playing busting bronchos in the corral and I saw a big black thing hanging on the corral fence. The pony I was busting had been acting up and I thought this was a long, black whip and would be exactly what I needed to throw a scare into him, so I went over and grabbed it. Just then I heard a shriek from my mother and she came prancing in there like a wild woman and hit this thing with an ax. Then I discovered it was the biggest black snake you ever saw. Sure did look enough like the whip they called a blacksnake to fool me.

We chopped him in half and then watched and waited for the sun to go down, because we knew if we didn’t watch him close until after sundown he’d join himself together again. Then we buried him.

When I was about seven or eight, the first circus come to El Paso, and we rode over to see it. It was Buffalo Bill’s, and my goodness, I don’t reckon I’ll ever get such a thrill again, no matter what happens to me.

I was crazy about the wild west show, of course. They had a lot of the best broncho busters and I knew them all by name and they were my heroes, just like Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson are heroes to kids nowadays. But what got me most was a knife-throwing act they had there. I’d never seen anything just like it before and the way the man flipped those knives fascinated me. I could have watched him all night. He had a lady in red silk tights that stood up against the wall and he’d surround her with knives, not missing her more than an eighth of an inch anywhere.

Young Tom Decides to Be a KnifeThrower I decided right then and there I’d been mistaken in my calling. I didn’t want to be a cowboy. I wanted to be a knife-thrower in

The Silent Film Quarterly・!18 a circus. And one day my father came home and found my sister tied to the cellar door and me practicing knife throwing on her. I had a couple of jack knives and a butcher knife I’d swiped from the kitchen and I wasn’t paying any attention at all to the yelling my sister was doing when I’d sling one of these knives and just miss her right eyebrow. Well, father was pretty emphatic in exhibiting his disapproval of my conduct, so I had to abandon my career as a knife-thrower. That was one of the few times father ever laid me cold, but thinking back I can’t see my way clear to blame him much.

When I was eight, we moved up to Pennsylvania. Dad had a good job offered him up there, caring for the stock in some lumber and construction work. We lived in a regular house and I went to school for the first time. But school didn’t appeal much to my ideas about life. Besides, there was just as much work to do in Pennsylvania as there’d been in Texas. When I come home from school, I’d start throwing down hay for the mules and horses and tending them generally. I had some stable work to do, but I felt pretty much at home because it was around horses. They had some real thoroughbreds, too, that be- longed to the man that owned the place and my heart was won by them without wasting any time at all. Every minute I had a chance I made trail to the thoroughbred barn, and it was a big day for me when I got to be a swipe and had wages of fifty cents a week for doing it.

A lot of motion picture stars have started their careers at pretty low wages, but I reckon I get the booby prize with fifty cents a week. But then I was only nine. But don’t get the idea that that was pocket money. I worked as hard for it as a stoker.

It was around that time that I got into a real scrape. I was pretty proud of what I could do with a rope. Pennsylvania was quite a place, but the boys around there hadn’t had my advantages in education, the way I looked at it, and I daresay I was a

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little cocky when it come to showing them the stunts I could do with a rope. But I discovered to my amazement that ropes weren’t the common thing in Pennsylvania they had been down Texas way. Rope was considered something to tie things up with, or lead horses around by, and that was all.

Everybody didn’t have lariats, the way I’d been accustomed to think they should. So I started out making me a collection of ropes, so’s I’d be safe. And the best rope I saw around there was the one on the flag on top of the ball park. Seemed to me it was wasted up there and so I climbed up on the roof of the grandstand and nearly broke my neck getting it down. There was quite a riot when the folks discovered it was gone and Dad’s eagle eye lighted on it right away, where I had hidden it away in a stall under some hay. I had to give it back, all right, and beside that, Dad sure took a lot of elbow grease explaining to me how it was bad form and bad manners to go climbing roofs taking what didn’t belong to you.

Tom Yearns for Texas Pennsylvania was all right, I guess, but I always had a hankering for Texas, all the time I was there. The West was in my blood. It was the life I loved and was always to love best, the life to which my whole work has been dedicated. So, as soon as I was old enough, I started back to Texas. I’d saved up some money from my fifty cent pieces and what other money I could earn and so when I was fifteen I was back on the range, working as a regular cowboy and getting along fine. I was pretty young but just the same I was a good hand and folks were more than willing to hire me.

The next months of my life were wonderful. I’ve never forgotten them. I was happy as only a boy can be happy. I had no responsibilities and all the things I loved best. And those were the days when the West was the real West. A cowboy was a right romantic figure in those days. Guns

The Silent Film Quarterly・!19 were just as much part of a man’s equipment as his shoes, and his lariat was as important to his wardrobe as his toothbrush is today.

The ranches were enormous places, big as a lot of these European principalities where they have kings and queens, and the herds were mighty herds and the roundups were stupendous affairs never to be forgotten. They had a majesty, and a danger, and a thrill all their own. We had some of the finest horses down there that any man ever put a leg over. There was plenty of danger, too, and I was a good shot and learned to take care of myself, even if I was the youngest cowboy on the Texas ranges. I slept in my blankets by the camp fire, under the bright Texas stars. I rode miles every day, on one of the best ponies that ever wore a saddle. I got into a little disagreement with a couple of Mexicans and came out on top. I measured myself man to man against my fellows, and sometimes I won and sometimes I lost, and the code of the West and of the ranges was that you must be a good loser and a good winner both. Altogether, those days stand out in my memory as being rare and fine.

But my folks got anxious to see me again, and I began anyway to think about seeing something of the world beside Texas, even if that was the best spot on the globe. When I was young I had the wanderlust some, I reckon. A man ought to travel around some, and get an idea what a big place the world is and then there isn’t much chance of him getting any exalted idea of his own importance. So I thought I’d go and make my folks a little visit, though as a matter of fact I wasn’t ever home to live with my folks after I went back to Texas that first time. I always took care of myself and earned my own bread from the time I left Pennsylvania on.

I went to work in a foundry when I got back there, and that was hard work. I was what was called a pincove boy and I had to go round with my wheelbarrow, supplying the men with pincoves to put in the red hot

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A fancy Mexican costume which Mix donned to participate in a rodeo, at fifteen years of age, in Texas.

At this time he could rope or bust bronchus with the best of the riders of the Lone Star State.

molds when they needed them. And, believe me, they needed them fast and frequent. Those foundry workers were what you might term rough and ready customers, too. They were a fine set of men, but I couldn’t exactly recommend them for delicacy of speech or anything like that. When they started to bellow for the pincove boy it was like a lot of pirates yelling for the cabin boy. But it was good discipline. It made a man out of me; I guess. And it taught me a right good lesson that has stood me well many a time since.

And that’s how far a little joke and a smile and amiable ways will go with folks. I was a good-natured kid, husky and well-set-up, too, and life was a lot of fun to me. So I

The Silent Film Quarterly・!20 nearly always could think up something to say that’d make ’em laugh and they liked me and my work was easier as I went along.

It was while I was there that I first played football. We had a team at the foundry, and I got to be regarded as a fairly good player. It’s the game I like best—and it’s sort of a regret to me a man can’t play football by way of recreation afternoons, the way they play golf and tennis and such fiddling games as that. Funny, Andy Smith, who is now the coach for the California Bears that hold the Western football championship and have held it for four years, was on that team with me. He was pretty good, too, having some intelligence about the matter and depending on his head as well as his feet to get him down the field. Now he’s regarded by experts as one of the biggest authorities in the game and whenever he comes to Los Angeles with his wonder teams, he comes out to my ranch and we ramble along talking about old times. I played end, then, because being still in my ’teens I was pretty light. Later, I developed into a half, and when I was in the artillery in the army and played on the championship army team in 1901, I got to be a fullback. That’s the position I liked best.

Off for the War Now it was just about here that the Spanish-American war broke out, and that was the biggest thing that had ever happened in my life. I don’t suppose I’d been praying for a war, exactly, but deep down somewhere I’d surely been estimating that a war would be a heap of fun and excitement.

I was working as a lumberjack when this come off, cutting lumber up in the Pennsylvania forests. And it’s my private opinion that there isn’t anyone in these here United States recalls the day of April 25th, 1898, any better than I do. I was way up on top of a mountain, swinging my ax and plum deaf and dumb to everything

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around me, calculating on what I’d do next in life and where I’d better go to find me a little excitement. Up comes the little tram car that brings us our news and supplies.

After if stops, I hear the men give a big yell and commence dancing around, and first thing I know somebody hollers over to me, “Hi, Tom, America’s declared war on Spain and the President has issued a call for volunteers.”

It must have dazed me, being as I wasn’t expecting anything like that, for I didn’t exactly keep up with international questions in those days, and I just stood there like a plumb idiot, and pretty soon the little tram car turned around and went back. That woke me up. America was going to war with Spain. That meant we would send troops to Cuba. It meant—and right there in my thoughts I took my ax and threw it as far as I could and I started running down that mountain like a pack of coyotes was after me.

The Navy Decides it Doesn’t Want Tom When I got to the little town that had been our lumber headquarters I started figuring what I’d better do and pretty soon I come to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do was to enlist in the navy.

Goodness knows why a man like me that hadn’t ever seen the ocean, besides being fairly expert and familiar with horses and guns like I was, should have picked the navy. But it was something I’d never done and besides it seemed to me the navy was pretty apt to be sent over there and get in the excitement. I knew about the Maine, and that sounded to me like where the real scrapping was going to be was in the navy.

The big difficulty that confronted me then was that I didn’t have any money. The only thing I had any legal ropes on was a bicycle and all my savings had gone into that. You see, bicycle racing had become quite the thing and it was considered to be a sport that a man could compete at and gain himself quite a lot of glory. In those

The Silent Film Quarterly・!21 days, anything like that appealed a lot to me, and so I’d been indulging therein some frequent. I had grown to be estimated as one of the be-t bicycle rider- in that neck of the woods and I’d won quite a few races.

Being some set up over these aforementioned victories, I’d squandered all my pay on a racing bicycle. I was buying it on the weekly installment plan, so I went to the man and asked him if I could sell my share of it for enough to get me to Philadelphia. That’s where the navy headquarters were that I wanted to reach.

He said all right, so I sold him back the bike.

And then, by gosh, they wouldn’t let me enlist in the navy.

I pretty near landed in jail trying to convince those officers they were wrong. I was pretty argumentative, one way and another, being that I had always been able to back up my differences of opinion with my gun or my list, and I was all for fighting the whole navy right there and then. It seemed that they didn’t need any more people in the navy that had never been to sea before. I don’t even remember how I got on board, but I recall distinctly that I was standing up fighting it out with a lot of officers on a big warship and they had enough gold braid on them to decorate a band, so they must have been influential.

Anyway, they were influential enough to keep me out of the navy.

I was awfully sore and disappointed.

But I wasn’t discouraged. I was plenty filled up with determination that I was going to be in that war somehow. If they wouldn’t have me in the navy, maybe the army wasn’t so particular. President McKinley was calling for volunteers, all right, but the thing that was worrying me quite a bit was getting into a regiment where I’d see some active service. I wasn’t looking any to get stuck somewhere and carry a musket on my shoulder on parade grounds, or play chambermaid to a lot of army mules while the other boys were hunting the Spaniards in Cuba.

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I didn’t have but five or six dollars left, but I was willing to gamble my last chip that the best thing to do when things are a little scrambled and don’t seem to be going your way, is to go to headquarters and talk to the boss. So I started for Washington to interview the adjutant general. I’d made up my mind that he’d know where the fighting was going to be pulled off and if I could get him to share that information with me I’d know where I ought to try to be.

As it turned out, the adjutant general was right sympathetic and when I told him the experience I’d had with horses and guns, and how I’d lived in the border country and knew Spanish well, and my father had been an officer in the cavalry, he sent me right down to see Captain Grimes.

He said his battery of artillery was sure to see service at once, and if there was a vacancy left and I could get Captain Grimes to take me, I’d see all the fighting I wanted.

Tom Gets Into the Artillery I got it and it wasn’t long till I was a full fledged member of Captain Grimes’ battery. I think if I hadn’t been taken in there, I’d have busted.

We went to Tampa. Florida, on the 21st of June, sailed at once for Cuba, and saw our first lighting in the battle of Guaymas. soon after we landed. We were with the Rough Riders at Cristabel Hill, where things were pretty hot and heavy for a while. And then, because of my knowledge of the language, I became a scout, and was made courier to General Chaffee who had known my father well in the old days.

Being a scout and a courier was great sport and was pretty near enough action to suit even me. The island was a tough place to get around and I had a lot of little skirmishes one way and another. I can’t tell you a lot of detail about those months of fire and fight. It all blends into one in my mind. But it was great. It was pretty much hand to hand fighting, raiding nests of

The Silent Film Quarterly・!22 Spaniards that were hidden in all sorts of impossible places. We fought hard and the climate was hell, and the living conditions were terrible, but nobody cared. We’d come out to do a job and we were doing it.

From it there shines in my memory the thought of a man I only saw once during the service, but that once at Cristabel Hill was enough to stamp him forever upon my thought as my idol and hero—Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.

It was a great experience and great training for any man.

After the Spaniards had surrendered in July, I was picked with the scouts who were sent out to bring in a lot of promiscuous Spanish sharpshooters that didn’t seem to have got word that the war was over. They were always popping folks from behind things along the hill roads and stirring up considerable trouble and inconvenience for everybody. So we started out to explain to them that it was all over and they could come in and be good.

I remember I was going up a hill looking around to see if anything was likely to happen and I decided I’d never seen such a peaceful, quiet-looking place in my life. And just then a shot came right at me from a mango tree.

A Close Call from a Spanish Bullet The shot wasn’t a bit peaceful and it blew a good-sized hole in my sleeve, but I couldn’t see a thing. No man likes to have something shooting at him that he can’t see to shoot back at, but all I could do was to open up on that mango tree on general principles. Well, we had a lively little argument for a few minutes, and he poked his head out like a turtle, and I started to yell at the fool not to be silly, the war was over. I had just got my mouth open to holler when he fired his last bullet at me and got me in the roof of the mouth.

I’ve always been grateful that bullet was going plenty fast, because it came out the back of my neck and lit somewhere on the Cuban landscape, which was a letter

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place for it than hatching trouble in my head.

I toppled over and some of the other scouts ran up and settled the bird in the mango tree and carried me down to camp.

They took me to the hospital at Santiago and I was laid up there better than a month, and that being the first time I’d ever spent anything but the night in bed I nearly went plumb loco. I still have the scars from that sharpshooter’s final argument and there are just a few words I can’t quite say on account of something it did to my tongue. I don’t reckon anyone else would spot it, because there are only six or eight of them, but when I start to use one, I have to rope something else out of my vocabulary pretty quick.

Well, I got back to the States in September and I thought I was a grown man sure enough, having been to war and not done so badly for myself, besides being

Tom Mix, aged twenty-two, as a top sergeant in the artillery, after his return from the Boxer uprising.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!23 mentioned a couple of times and getting wounded.

I tried to settle down then, but I couldn’t. Soldiering had got into my blood.

Everything else seemed so almighty tame and quiet to me after what I’d seen in Cuba. And I liked the companionship of the men. It was the only life I’d struck since I left Texas that suited me and it seemed to me like it was a good chance to get a look at some more of the world.

So I hadn’t been mustered out of service many months when I joined up with the provisional army again in the artillery, for service in the Philippines and started back across the water, not knowing, however, that I was going to see some of the most exciting and desperate warfare the world has ever known in the Boxer Rising in China before my return to United Stales soil. ・・・ Part II I saw two real wars after we’d settled things with Spain, before I settled down to private gunplay in what was then in truth the wild and woolly west—the Great West of Yesterday.

The first of these, as I mentioned last month, was the Boxer uprising in China and it included some mighty snappy and promiscuous shooting, and some guerrilla warfare after the Indian fashion which I have never seen bettered.

Now a regular battle, to my way of thinking, is not exciting. Folks that haven’t been personally present at one probably can’t comprehend that statement, but what I'm getting at is that there is so much noise and confusion about a battle, and the action being en masse, sort of prevents you from appreciating the high lights of the occasion. But trying to build a railroad across open country in full sight of the enemy has more thrills to a mile than any serial ever made.

Now I reckon most folks remember the Boxer uprising, which enlivened the first

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couple of years of the present century. The Boxers were a lot of religious fanatics over in China who had an idea that anybody that thought different than they did hadn’t ought to be allowed to live—leastways not in their country. So they got together and decided to run all other kinds of folks out of China. They were egged on some by the Dowager Empress, who held similar ideas, and pretty soon they made the mistake of selecting a few American missionaries and French priests and British officials for their victims.

The foreigners had to hide in the hills, and those that were close enough took refuge in the British Legation in Pekin and then the foreign powers began shipping in armies to rescue their people and to subdue these crazy Chinamen.

I was shipped over there pronto, with the 9th Infantry, in charge of a Gardiner gun and took some little part in the long and famous siege of Pekin, which was pretty dull most of the time, though the day our victorious armies marched into the fallen city was about as fine a sight as I ever saw. It was a beautiful old city, and different from anything I’d ever seen, and as a good deal of my sight-seeing had been done during wars I’d learned to keep my eyes open.

But the real excitement was when we were laying the new railroad between Pekin and Tien Tsing. It was mostly flat, open country, with only some bushes and an occasional tree, and those Boxers knew every inch of it and were roaming about trying their best to keep us from making that little strip of road. I was with a gun guarding the men at work, and every hour or so they’d begin popping at us from behind some bushes. They were just the color of the ground anyway, and they could crawl along on their stomachs like snakes. We had some tough skirmishes and lost a lot of men, but eventually we got our work done.

It was outside the walls of Tien Tsing, while we were besieging that city under

The Silent Film Quarterly・!24 Colonel Listenn, who was killed there, that I was wounded seriously again. The gun I was with was pounding away at one of the gates, when all of a sudden a shell busted right in front of us. It blew up the gun carriage and one of the wheel spokes was split right in two. It shot through the air like a knife and came right over and scalped me just as neat as an Indian chief could have done it. It peeled the top off my head and skinned my forehead right down to the skull bone and left my eyebrows hanging over my eyes.

I tumbled over into a ditch with a lot of other fellows who’d been wounded by the shell, and after a while they carted me off to a hospital and shipped me home on a hospital transport. I spent the next few months in a hospital in Washington, while the top of my head grew back on. I’ve still got the scars to show for that.

Right here I’d like to tell you a funny little incident about that ditch. Just a short t i m e a g o I w a s i n t ro d u c e d t o a

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distinguished French army officer. The minute I looked at him I started pirooting around in my memory to find out where I’d seen him before, and he had that same feeling about me. We got to visiting and gassing like men will, and pretty soon we discovered where we’d met before. We had both been mixed up in that same ditch outside the walls of Tien Tsing, and had tried to help each other with our wounds.

When I finally got well I decided that for a while I’d hook up with more peaceful pursuits, because I didn’t like hospitals a little bit. So I got my disability discharge from the Army and wandered up to Denver, which was still pretty rough and ready in those days. A man I knew up there had a big business breaking horses and selling them to the British government— the Boer war was on by that time—and he gave me a good job breaking bronchos for him.

In the interests of truth, I got to state that we weren’t any too fussy about the way

Tom was some soldier. He was severely wounded in the Boxer uprising. He is seated at left. The picture was taken just before he went to China.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!25 we broke those horses. Seeing they were going over to England and get into a war right away, and we’d probably never see them again, we mixed in a few outlaws in every load, too, just to sort of clear the country of them. We’d take them out to the corrals and spend a couple of days quieting them down sufficient to pass the inspector, and off they’d go to the war.

Pretty soon I got to thinking I’d never been to South Africa, where this little argument with the Boers was in progress, and maybe I’d better go and see what it was all about, for the sake of my education.

So I shipped over with a boat load of our horses, getting a place as a hostler.

We landed in Africa just about the time the trouble was starting around Ladysmith and I took my string down there.

Those horses, as I’ve admitted, hadn’t been broke so that a lady could ride them by any means, and being on shipboard so long they’d plumb forgot what little they had been taught. Moreover, those horses had been broke by cowboys without any artillery hung on them and entirely devoid of sabres.

I want to tell you that when those Tommy Atkins, with sabres a-rattling and all sorts of other instruments and buttons jingling, mounted my bronchs, it sounded in two minutes like somebody had thrown a dozen kitchens down the side of a mountain. Those horses had no sabres in their curriculums whatever, and they objected to them with what you might call ostentatious vim and vigor. The British army was busier with those cayuses for a few days than they were with the Boers.

But pretty soon we got them all rounded up again, and I started in breaking them right and proper.

The Tommies were crazy about American riding, and I used to give exhibitions on the parade ground in the afternoon, combining my work with their pleasure, because some outlaws in that outfit sure needed right smart attention

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before they could be brought to see life in the right way.

Just the same, my sympathies were with the Boers and I decided, they being the underdog as it were, that as soon as I got my work cleaned up I’d go off and join the Boer army. Being on the sidelines was getting a little tiresome.

Tom Is Taken Prisoner Well, I want to tell you right now that the most flabbergasted I ever was in my whole life was when I first saw part of the Boer army. I never saw so many whiskers in my whole life. All I could see in every direction was whiskers. They weren’t just little beards, they were full length muffs, those were. I got an idea at first maybe they gave out the best jobs to the biggest whiskers because General Cronje and Oom Paul Kruger, president of the Dutch Transvaal Republic, had the two finest sets I ever saw. They were short, round, little men and didn’t look much like our American troops, but they were grand fighting men, with the courage of lions.

I didn’t turn out to be much help to the Boers, though, because in my very first battle, the battle of Spinecob, we were overpowered and forced to surrender and I w a s t a k e n p r i s o n e r. T h e B r i t i s h government didn’t know exactly what to do with us at first, because while we were prisoners of war—there were quite a lot of Americans who had been captured with the Boers—we were still American citizens.

So they decided that the best thing to do was to ship us back to the United States, which they did. There were about a hundred of us, and I don’t mind telling you that it was a pretty wild bunch of young adventurers and soldiers of fortune.

When we landed at the Philadelphia navy yard and I showed my honorable discharge papers—some of the boys had left the United States Army without stopping to say good-by to Uncle Sam—I started back west, and joined up with the

The Silent Film Quarterly・!26 101 Ranch outfit, owned by the Miller Brothers.

From then on until I went into motion pictures in 1910, I lived my life on the plains and in the mountains of the Great West. And the Great West it was—a land of adventure, of danger, of rich reward. It was a new country and law and order were by no means fairly established. The West of Yesterday has made unbelievable progress in the last quarter of a century, and its great ranches, its vast herds of cattle, its romantic and picturesque cowboys, its miners and its raw, wild little towns are gone forever. They had to go, to make way for the advance of civilization, but their passing makes many of us a little sad.

With them, has gone the cowboy of the old days, the most picturesque figure this nation ever produced—the cowboy sitting so loosely and gracefully in his saddle, with his bronzed face and keen eyes, his bright handkerchief and big chaps. I hope the people of this country won’t soon forget him, and I reckon they

As a Texas Ranger, Tom Mix played a great role in subduing cattle rustlers who threatened the very life of the great west.

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won't, for no one has been more splendidly sung in song and story and poetry.

I haven’t room here to tell you much of the life we led. We worked hard, long hours. We slept under the stars. If I had a good horse and enough to eat, I was happy.

And I learned there the simple philosophy that has never failed me and that will never fail any man—to keep my mind and my body clean; not to eat too much; to sleep plenty in the open air; to keep myself physically fit always; to respect all women, shoot straight, play fair, care for the weak and overcome the evil.

I roamed all over Texas, Oklahoma, C o l o r a d o, A r i zo n a , N e w M ex i c o, Montana, Wyoming and the two Dakotas. I worked on the ranches, I drifted back to the 101 Ranch outfit and went out with their Wild West show, I did exhibition riding and shooting and won a few contests, and I was an officer of the law in this great new country in a lot of different places.

Tom Meets “T.R.” It was during those years that I met Teddy Roosevelt again—in San Antonio. I was sitting around singing some cowboy songs, or I guess it’d be better to say I was trying to sing them. The Colonel came over when I was through and said, “I am Teddy Roosevelt. I enjoyed those songs a lot.” And I said, “Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I am Tom Mix.” Well, if he didn’t remember me, and when he came out to Oklahoma once to do some hunting, he asked me to be his guide. That was the biggest honor I ever had, and I’ll never forget the man—the big man—I saw in those days. He typified all that was best of the Great West that he loved. When he was inaugurated, I went up to Washington to see it. I was so proud I reckon I acted like I’d been made president myself. And he hadn’t forgotten us and entertained me and my gang that I’d brought along.

It was early in those days, too, that I got married for the first time. She was the

The Silent Film Quarterly・!27 daughter of a rancher in Oklahoma.

Young folks make some queer mistakes like that. We did. And later my wife got a divorce—and the second time I was the luckiest man that ever lived, but I’ll come to that later on.

Most of my really thrilling adventures came while I was acting as officer of the law, and because of that and before I tell you about a few of them, there’s one point I’d like to make. Those were the days of the war against the cattle thieves, the rustlers, and I suppose to folks nowadays it looks like we handled them in a pretty summary fashion. Well, I’ll admit we didn’t mince matters any with those birds, and we handed them out justice in severe and large doses. But it was necessary, and much as some of us hated it, it had to be done.

I expect our courts were kind of crude, but we never forgot our point and we had to settle things quick or we’d have been wiped out ourselves. We were fighting for our very existence in those settler days, and fighting against great odds, because cattle stealing was profitable and because of the vast stretches of unpopulated country it was easy and so the rustlers formed great organizations, and what was almost civil war prevailed. Cattle thieving had to be put down or the west could not survive.

Distances were tremendous. Population was mighty small. The rights of property had to be guarded above everything, if we were to advance.

After the first great years, cattle raising was a hard toilsome business and a man was ruined if he lost many of his animals.

Often, too, a man’s life depended upon his horse, and to steal a man’s horse was to aim at his life, so that horse thieves also were treated to swift punishment.

The cattle rustlers menaced all that was good in the west and feeling against them ran high.

At different times, I was sheriff of Montgomery County, western Kansas, of Washington County, Oklahoma, and of Two Buttes, Colorado, city marshal of

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D e w e y, O k l a h o m a , a n d s p e c i a l enforcement officer in the same state, and I was a marshal in Montana. New Mexico and Arizona and a Texas Ranger. I allied myself with what looked to me was right, and I went ahead and acted for what seemed best under trying circumstances.

I guess when some of us look back now we wonder how we ever did some of the things we did, but in those days danger was so ever-present a man never gave it a second thought. I got a reputation for being pretty fast with a gun, but I reckon they thought I was better than I was. I was pretty quick on getting the drop, but a man had to be or he didn’t last long. I could break a piece of thread held horizontally at thirty paces, but there were plenty of other fellows could do that, too.

I guess the biggest feather in my cap in those days was when I captured the Shonts brothers single-handed. They were a couple of famous desperadoes and rustlers down in New Mexico. And one spring they shot a couple of ranchers and run off the herd of horses they were waiting to bring down and sell for the round-up. That was the last straw and there was $750 reward offered for their capture.

Now in those days, $750 was a lot of money, so there was a posse formed and we started up into the Capitan mountains, where they were hiding, after them. Well, every fellow had his own ideas, and was looking to get the glory and the reward for himself if he could, so several of us left the posse to follow trails of our own. I was pretty sure I knew where they’d headed for and I wanted to bring them in myself if I could.

As it happened, I was right, and the next day I came upon their camp hidden down in a canyon I remembered. I hid up on the mountain that night, watching the smoke from their dugout and trying to keep warm, because there was a little snow falling, and along about dawn I slipped down into the corral. I knew there were two of them, and a cook, and I knew I’d

The Silent Film Quarterly・!28

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Here is Tom winning the title of champion steer thrower of the world at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle

have to get the drop on one of them so I’d only have one to fight, because I never did see a cook that was any good at fighting.

Both the Shonts boys had the reputation of being quick on the trigger and dead shots, so I wasn’t taking any more chances than I could help.

On the Trail of Outlaws I hid behind a little shack in the corral and pretty soon one of the brothers came out to water the stock. He looked around, but the snow had kept on falling and covered my trail down the hill, so he didn’t see anything to make him suspicious. I waited until he came in the corral and then I told him to stick up his hands quick. Well, in spite of me having the drop on him, he reached for his gun and I knew him too well to take any chances, so I had to let him have it and I damaged him quite a little.

The shot brought the other brother running with his gun in his hand. The sun was just coming up, and on the snow it made an awful glare, so that for a minute

when he opened the door it blinded him completely. He had on a belt buckle that caught the light, and showed him up to me like he’d been a target. I shot low. and got him through the leg. It brought him down hard and his gun flew out of his hand. I collected their guns then and took them into the dugout.

Well, I couldn’t move them, because of the way they were shot up, so I had to stay in their dugout with them for four days. I’d told the boys which way I was going, and I figured when I didn’t show up they’d come looking for me. I didn’t trust that cook, so I had to cook and nurse those men alone and I didn’t dare to go to sleep.

I knew they were desperate—capture meant death—and would take any chance.

They were part of a gang, too, and their men might come before mine did. So I couldn’t go to sleep, and being shut up in a dugout for four days with men who want to kill you, even if you have got the drop on them, isn’t good for the nerves.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!29 At the end of four days my posse arrived and we made out to take them back to town.

I got the seven fifty reward all right, along with a lot of compliments, but it didn’t do me much good, because I found out after those two boys had gone further west a whole lot than New Mexico, that they had a mother. And she hadn’t known they were bad, and they’d always taken good care of her. It left her pretty flat broke, besides breaking her heart, and being as I was responsible for one of her boys going and indirectly for the other, too, I made her a little present of the money. It wasn’t anything, because I didn’t need money in those days, anyway.

Shot by a Woman That reminds me, that I got shot once by a woman. Can you beat that! It happened over in Arizona somewheres.

There was a white man over there who had an Indian wife, and he’d been sticking up trains and stages a little too frequent and yet nobody had seemed to catch up with him. So one time after he’d stuck up a train and scared a lot of women into fits and shot the engineer, we made a concentrated hunt for him. It took me a couple of weeks to locate his hideout, which was a good one, and then I stayed up on the hill for three days with a pair of glasses, watching him. I wanted to learn his habits, and figure out how was the best way to come at him, because he was a dangerous customer and one of the greatest shots in the West.

I noticed he came out real early every morning to feed his horse. So one night I crept down—it took me most all night, because I know men like that don’t sleep very sound and if they saw a shadow they thought hadn’t ought to be there they’d sure take a shot at it for luck—and I hid in the manger.

When he came in, in the morning, I sure had the drop on him and there wasn’t anything for him to do about it. I put him on a pony he had and tied his hands to the

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pommel of the saddle and his feet together under the horse and started him down the trail to get my own horse.

Well, I had sure overlooked his squaw complete, but in about two seconds I remembered her and I’ve never forgotten her since. She let go at me with a shotgun from the cabin, and it ripped a furrow along my back that looked like the Erie canal. It dropped me, stunned, and the horse with that bandit tied on him ran off down the trail as fast as he could go.

I lay there feeling sort of sick and scared to raise my head for fear this time her aim would be better, but everything was quiet and I decided she was through. I began working my way down the trail, and finally found my own horse. I rode on until I met a cowboy, and I deputized him and we started hunting this train robber. We found him, and he was pretty glad to be found. Nobody likes riding around on a horse he can’t get off of and can’t stop. We took him into town and I got my back washed up and everything was all right.

One little row I was in is pretty well remembered by old-time Westerners—they call it the affair of the Lone Tree Ranch— but it really didn’t amount to so very much.

At that time I was sheriff of Two Buttes, a Colorado town about 36 miles from the railroad and close to the Kansas border. It was right in the heart of the cattle country, and we were having a lot of trouble with organized rustlers.

It was funny how I got onto this man Blair, and how that battle actually started.

There was a man and his wife named Driscoll lived in Two Buttes, and one afternoon while Mrs. Driscoll was coming home, three Mexicans insulted her. Well, I didn’t hear anything about it then and that evening while I was standing in the saloon talking to the proprietor, Driscoll came in.

He never said a word, just walked right through and out the back door, into a little room behind the bar. There wasn’t anybody around—it was just about closing time. In a minute the barkeeper says to me,

The Silent Film Quarterly・!30

Being a cowboy wasn’t all riding and shooting.

Tom also had to shoe his horse as well as ride him and here he is doing it.

“Tom, there was a shot fired in that back room.” I says, “Well, if there was they must have used a cap pistol, because I didn’t hear it.”

Just then the door swung open and Driscoll came back in. He looked kind of white and had his hand held close to him and I saw a little blood on it, but he didn’t say anything and I thought he’d just got shot in the hand and wasn’t hurt bad. I said, “Say, what’s going on in there?” He says, “Three Mexicans insulted my wife and I found out they were in there, but— they got away.” Well, I didn’t stop to listen.

I started into that back room and out through the window, looking for any greaser that had insulted a white woman.

One of them I caught up the road aways, and I dropped him with a bullet in his ankle so he couldn’t run. But it was an awful dark night, and there were barbed wire fences everywhere and the other two got away. I took this one Mexican back into the saloon, and there I found Driscoll had been shot through the stomach and was dying. I got the lights pulled down quick and stuck the Mexican under there so Driscoll could see him, and he identified

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him all right, and told me who the others were. I says to him, “Driscoll, why didn’t you come and tell me about this, instead of taking the law in your own hands?” But he just looked at me, and I understood. It was his wife. He died that night.

As I came out of the saloon, a fellow came up and said he’d seen a Mexican hiding in a big mortar mixer down the street. We looked, but he was gone, but the next day I saw a Mexican riding out of town and he had mortar on his shoes, so I brought him back.

Well, I was busy with the trials and hangings for a couple of weeks, I had to testify and all, and couldn’t get started out after the third murderer. When I did, strangely enough, it led me right into the biggest gang of cattle thieves that I was ever mixed up with. I found out that this Mexican was pretty smart and was a sort of lieutenant for a man named Blair.

Among Cattle Thieves Now Blair owned the Lone Tree Ranch, and I’d had my eye on him and it for some time. It was a bum ranch that had been practically abandoned before he took hold of it, because of its location. But it was near the borders of two other states.

This man Blair was suspected of being the head of a lot of rustlers, and a sort of fence for the cattle thieves. I was sure all the stock he had was stolen, but he was an oily customer and none too easy to trap with the goods. He was a dangerous man to handle, and he had his gang pretty well organized as I soon found out.

I was pretty sure he was driving four or five steer off at a time, from across the state line, butchering them right on the Lone Tree Ranch, and selling the meat at outrageous prices to the big railroad grading camp down the road, and finally one day when I was trailing this Mexican that had shot Driscoll. I got evidence that satisfied me and that I reckoned would satisfy any Colorado jury that ever sat.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!31 I rode back into town that night looking for some of my deputies to start out, because I wanted to move fast. But it just happened that there wasn’t a soul I could lay my hands on. They were off on other jobs. I know this Mexican suspected what I’d got, and if he got to Blair in time, they’d either get away or they’d barricade themselves in the ranch so it would mean a lot of people would get hurt when we tried to take him. So I decided the best thing to do was to ride over quick and quiet and try to take Blair myself, and take a chance on rounding up the others afterwards.

I started off at dawn on my horse Old Blue—he was the most wonderful horse that ever lived and I loved him like a brother—crossed the creek north of Two Buttes, and started cast. It was a cold, bright February morning, and it was awful rough country. There wasn’t much use trying to make time on those trails, but Old Blue knew I was in a hurry and he did his best. Along about noon I got a peek at the big old pine standing up all by itself against the blue sky—that’s where the ranch got it’s name.

I slowed up and looked around cautious, but the place seemed deserted. I rode up as casual as I knew how and knocked on the door of the ranch house with my six-shooter. Nobody answered and I got suspicious and pretty sore, for fear they’d beat me to it and got away. I knew Blair was one of the worst men and the biggest influences for evil in the country and I wanted to take him.

As I came around the corner of the house to the side that faced the barns and corrals, something hit me like an express train and knocked me off my horse. As a matter of fact, there were fourteen slugs of buck shot in me, and they all hit me right then.

Well, I was sure shocked and enraged, not only because it hurt like blazes, but to think I’d ridden into it, like some tenderfoot, and let those low-lived cattle thieves plug me that-away. It sure riled me

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worse than I’d ever been riled before in my life.

It happened that when I’d fallen off Old Blue I held onto my shot gun—had that much sense left anyways. And while I lay there on the ground with it under me, cussing myself, I looked up through Old Blue’s legs and saw something moving cautiously in the corral. I didn’t know what it was, but I reckoned it must be evil or it wouldn’t be around here, so I moved my gun under my stomach and shot. Well, it seems I got old man Blair right there and then. He thought he’d killed me when he saw me fall and was starting over keeping me covered when I fired. He had cashed in his whole stack of chips right then.

Tom Does Some Shooting The two Mexicans ran into a kind of tool shed and barricaded themselves and I got up and started for it, shooting everything I had for all I was worth right at them. I shot so fast and so hard I made a kind of screen for myself I guess. I was plumb crazy by that time anyway. That buckshot was driving me loco and I was convinced that one of those men was the Mexican I wanted.

I kicked the door in shooting all the time, and then I jumped in sideways, quick, so they couldn’t get me while I was in the light They both shot, one took some of my hair off and the other went through my left side.

I think it must have dazed me, for a second. Because I just stood there—it was very dark—thinking how sorry I was for those two poor ignorant souls. Low and ornery as they were, I felt sorry because I knew wrong never paid, and even if they killed me now. someone else would kill them later, and maybe they’d never know any better.

And then, like a flashed warning, I saw in the man’s eyes that he had located me and was going to shoot again. I must have moved pretty quick. One of them had climbed up onto a rafter, and I let him have

The Silent Film Quarterly・!32 it from my six-shooter just as the other guy fired. The man on the rafters fell and spoiled his partner’s aim, and as they went down I shot again.

I got on my horse and rode the six miles over to the grading camp—Old Blue doing most of the work and going as easy as he could because he knew there was something mighty wrong with me. We got there all right, and they took care of me, and finally shipped me up to Denver where they dug the lead out of me and in a year I was as good as new, though there were plenty of times in there when nobody would have offered you a white chip for my next breath. I was too tough to be killed by cattle thieves.

But maybe that was one of the things that started my mind to working on the trail that eventually led me into motion pictures—a sort of desire to settle down. ・・・ Part III It was sort of funny how I happened to go into motion pictures.

I’ve observed that destiny has got a mighty odd way of bringing some little thing to pass just at the psychological moment that’ll revolutionize a man’s whole life. That’s the way it happened to me. If that telegram had been presented to me at another time in my career. I might have paid no more attention to it than to wonder what motion pictures were, anyhow. As it was, it brought me into a line of business as foreign to me then as could be, to a lot of success I was pretty far from dreaming I’d ever have, and to the woman I love.

It arrived at a time when excitement and danger had begun to pall upon me a trifle. After some of those little episodes I have mentioned to you previously, I had begun to realize that no matter how good a shot a man is, sooner or later the luck is bound to go against him. What with bullets flying around so promiscuous, it’s against nature to suppose a man can always be absent when they arrive in his vicinity. And

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I kind of hated the thought of ending my career by being picked off while an innocent bystander to the alcoholic furor of some rough neck. Also, it was dawning upon me gradual but powerful that I was spending a heap too much time in hospitals, and that was dampening my enthusiasm for romance and adventure some.

I averaged up the sheriffs and rangers and marshals I’d known and most of them had ended their careers sudden and violent.

Well, I was sort of ruminating along these lines, when I went up to Cheyenne.

Wyoming, along in 1909, to take part in the contests they were having up there as part of the Frontier Day celebration. I’d won the National Championship in contests that year, and I was figuring to do pretty well.

One morning I went into the bank at Cheyenne to cash a check that had been handed to me as a prize in some event— rope throwing, as I recollect it, though it might have been bull-dogging steers.

A man named Stone was the head of this Frontier Day. committee, and he was likewise president of the bank, and when I come in he says, “Tom, you’re just the man I was hoping to see in here this morning. I got a telegram here might interest you and if it does you can make your own play concerning it.”

I walked over by the window and read the telegram.

It was signed by the Selig company, and it asked Stone, he being the main one of the Frontier Day affair, if he knew a man that could do some real cowboy stunts in some motion pictures, and if so they’d like to hire him, and maybe, if possible, rent his ranch and some of his horses and cattle, if he happened to have any. They stated mighty plain that they wanted a real cowboy, that was familiar with ropes and steers and broncs from actual experience.

Now I had a little ranch down in Oklahoma that I’d been fussing around

The Silent Film Quarterly・!33

Tom with Tony when he bought the famous horse.

Tom paid only $12 for Tony, then the ugliest colt in the corral.

with in between being sheriff and marshal, and Stone knew that. He said, “Tom, you’re heading back for Oklahoma anyways, now that the celebration is about to conclude, so why don’t you stop off down at Chicago and find out just how this game lays. Might be something you’d like. I am not familiar much with motion pictures myself, but I’ve heard considerable talk about them lately.”

I says, “Well, I have seen a few of them and it looked to me like most of their cowboys learned their trade through a correspondence school. I can see how maybe they could use a man that has some personal acquaintance with horses and the west.”

It wasn’t much out of my way, so I pulled up in Chicago, and went up to talk the matter over with the folks that had sent the telegram.

The first thing they did was to offer me a hundred dollars a week. I spent the rest of the time trying to get out of that office as fast as I could, without being ornery, because I made out they must be crazy sure. I told them I’d let them know later, and I went down and stood on the street corner and I said to myself, “Tom, these men are crazy and no mistake. You better not get yourself mixed up with them anyways at all. Anybody that’d talk about paying a cowboy a hundred dollars a week is plumb loco.”

I went back to my hotel and pretty soon they begun calling me up, talking about this and that, and finally they come

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right out and says, “If it’s salary that’s standing in the way, we’d be willing to make it a hundred and fifty, providing you’ll use your own horse and take care of him.”

Well, that settled any lingering doubts I might have had about them being crazy. I knew they were crazy then. But when I started figuring about it all, I decided there must be some way of finding out about these things, though I wasn’t much of a business man. But I knew no business man would mix himself up in such a deal without being convinced proper that these lunatics could make good.

So the next day I went back and put my cards on the table. “Can you give me any sort of assurance whatsoever about this hundred and fifty dollars being paid every week and where it’s coming from? I don’t like going into any play blindfolded.”

They asked me if I knew what Dun and Bradstreet was, and I said I’d heard tell that it was a kind of financial pedigree book. They brought out one then, and showed me where Colonel Selig was rated at a credit of a million dollars, so I said that was all right with me and I was now prepared to go ahead with it.

I went back down to my ranch in Oklahoma, and pretty soon two or three of these gentlemen came down and looked my place over, and then a lawyer showed up on the scene, and he looked it over, and then he brought out a contract and I signed it. That was my first motion picture contract and I made my first screen appearance in 1910. In my whole career on the screen I’ve only been with two firms —Selig and Fox. The troupe was to come down to my place and make some pictures, and when I got the telegram saying they were coming, I began to get sort of panicky. I had seen some of those theatrical companies that barnstormed the west in those days and I had sort of a picture of a lot of blondes with plumes in their hats, and gents with checkered vests and fancy shoes. I began to

The Silent Film Quarterly・!34 feel right guilty about importing a bunch like that into Oklahoma, which up till then hadn’t had anything worse than some gun fights and a few raids and such like pastimes, which are legitimate in a new country.

The whole town and most of the surrounding country went down to meet the train, and I was there, too, but well in the background. I was sitting on an express truck back of the station with a clear track between me and my horse, that’s where I was. I had made up my mind if they were too awful, I’d just make myself scarce by leaving precipitant for parts unknown.

But when they got off the train they weren’t a bit like I’d figured them, but were just aver- age human beings, so I got down off the truck and went over and introduced myself. Otis Turner was director of that company, and with him was Kathlyn Williams, and Myrtle Stedman, and William V. Mong and Charles Clary, and some other folks, as well as a lot of cameras and things.

They stayed down on my ranch about six months making pictures, and I got my first experience with acting, and I'm here to state that I didn’t fall for it then to any appreciable extent. I didn’t mind carrying out my own line of work, such as riding and roping, but I was sure distressed when I had to take any part in the actual picture story.

First thing we had a row about was me putting on any make-up. I’m a right easy cuss to get along with mostly, but in that instance I set myself like a mule and said no. Until I came with Fox and got to be a star, I never had a make-up on but once, and when Colonel Selig saw that picture he wired back to know was I sick or something. When I was a star and had to be as particular about the acting as anything else, they finally convinced me I ought to put on a make-up, and I do it now, but I have never got so I am very crazy about painting my face. It don’t seem quite

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the thing for a big, rough man like me to do.

Well, we surely made a lot of pictures and fought a lot of wars on my ranch in those six months. Sometimes I got killed as many as seven or eight times in one picture. There was one scene I got so familiar with I felt real comfortable about it, and could do it without any protest from my inner conscience. That was the one of dying on the battlefield with my horse. Just at the end, while the battle was raging all around us, the old horse would raise up and look me in the face, and I’d crawl over and put my arm around his neck tight and say, “Good-by, old pal.” Then we’d both keel over—or maybe only the horse—and the smoke of battle would drift around and hide us from view. I bet we used that scene as many times as George Cohan has used the American flag.

When they’d used up all the scenery that was around my place, we left there and went up to a location I knew in Colorado.

While we was there I had a little difference of opinion about something with the company, and they fired me. I reckon I was sort of hankering to get fired, though, because the boys had been writing and asking me to come back and be city marshal of Dewey, Oklahoma, where they were having a little trouble one way and another with some boy s that thought they were right bad. It seemed like a pretty good idea to me, so when I got fired that-away I went back to Dewey.

I hadn’t been working at that very long, though, when the first revolution broke out down in Mexico. That was in 1910, you recollect, and it caused considerable commotion. Diaz had been elected president again—he’d been president so long all the fellows that voted for him the first time were dead and it was their sons that were electing him now—and a lot of people thought he was getting too old and that corrupt men under him were running things to suit themselves. Anyway, it was what you would call an autocratic

The Silent Film Quarterly・!35 rule and the people were crying for a little better treatment and a little more freedom.

Anyways, the Liberals got together under Francisco Madera and attacked the government, and the fireworks started. The way it sounded up in Oklahoma I thought it might be worth going to see what it was all about, so I resigned and started for Mexico I joined the Madera forces and was with them when they captured Juarez, which brought about the resignation of Diaz and the election of Madera as president. It was open warfare of the worst kind and no better and no worse than what I’d been used to, but I did have one experience while I was down there that I can’t say set any too well. I faced a firing squad for the first and, I hope, the last time. Of course it’s been done a lot in pictures and is considered old stuff now, but when it actually happen and you’re the chief actor it has a lot of excitement connected with it.

I was accused of breaking the military law. I don’t know whether you’ve had much experience with revolutions, but as a rule both sides are fighting among themselves as well as fighting each other and little smallportion revolutions are apt to break out most any time. It was one of those things I got caught in, and after a sort of comic opera trial that I reckon wouldn’t be considered as having been con- ducted strictly according to Hoyle, I was condemned to be shot.

Anyway, they had marched me out and were getting all ready to use me for a target, when some witness that had testified against me got troubled in his conscience, and there was another upset in the ruling powers, and when he admitted the truth they set me free.

But that sort of took the edge off my ardor about the Mexican revolution, so I got five hundred dollars in gold from Madera for my services and started back for El Paso to have a good time. But I hadn’t even got started on my celebration when a man I knew came rushing up,

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yelling at me like he was going to a fire or something. Well, he was what they call the exchange man for the Selig people, and it seems like they had been wiring him every fifteen minutes to locate me and ship me pronto to Chicago, being that they needed me pretty bad. In fact, it seemed like nobody but me would do.

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Back in Pictures So I went back to Chicago, and it didn’t tike long to find out why they’d had a change of heart like that and were so cordial.

It is no use to mention any names in telling about the following episode, because I don’t aim to hurt anybody if I can help it.

But this is the way the thing was— An actor had come on from New York and sold himself to the Selig company with a great idea, a story he had in mind. He said he could do it easy, and maybe he thought he could. He wanted to make this picture about a young man that had been ruined by the wolves of Wall street, and just had to come out west. While he was there he learned to be a man, it seems, and he got in a fight with a real pack of wolves, and the idea was that he was to be attacked by this pack in a lonely cabin, and whip them with his bare hands. Then, you see, having conquered the real wolves, he could start back to lick the wolves of Wall street.

This leading man allowed he had fought wolves like that and maybe he had.

However, when it come to doing it in the picture it just seemed like he couldn’t manage it right, so he decided maybe he’d rather not and they had better get a double. There was a lot of money tied up in the picture and they wanted me to be the double and fight the wolf pack.

It didn’t appeal to me exactly, but wolves are mostly cowards and I thought maybe I could choke a couple of them so they’d be quiet and the others would take a lesson from that and it would do for the scene.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!36 So we started. We built an iron pipeway for the wolves to come into from their cage, and put the mouth right at the window. When I rushed in, like the wolves were at my heels, and bolted the door, they were to jump through the window. It all come off according to schedule, except that the biggest wolf came first, of course, and I guess he wasn’t pleased with the layout, because when I made a grab for him, he jumped over and took a hunk out of my arm.

That made me mad. I got him by the hind leg and he kept twisting and snapping and trying to get at me again, and I never did see a wolf act up so mean. By that time the rest of the pack had tome through the window, and they were scared to death and slunk off in the corners and watched me and old granddaddy wolf having our little run-in. I kept on hanging onto his leg and he kept on trying to get at me and we sure waltzed all over that set.

In those days they built sets out of something that wasn’t much stronger than tissue paper and glued them together and there wasn’t a thing in that room was strong enough for me to get hold of. On the wall was a cupboard full of dishes and there was a table that looked like it had strong legs. I kicked the table over and sure enough one of the legs fell out. Then I rapped old daddy wolf through that cupboard, and it tore open and all the dishes fell on his head. That stopped him a second, and I grabbed the table leg in my left hand and tapped him on the bean with it.

I’ve still got a mass of scars on one arm where he got to me.

Well, I was mad clear through and I’d for gotten all about being a double and being supposed to keep my back to the camera, but funny thing was the scene looks all right in the picture. They brought the real leading man down then and he was supposed to stand with his foot on the wolf while he made his noble resolve about going back to Wall street. They told him

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the wolf was dead, but it wasn’t dead at all, only stunned, and when he put his foot on it, it wiggled and looked up at him, and he fainted.

The humane society or something got after me about beaning that wolf, and I had to explain how it all happened, and how I hadn’t started with any intention whatsoever to hurt him, but when it came to being either him or me, I naturally chose me. As a matter of fact, the folks around where I work say I'm too kind to animals— that I spoil them. Maybe I do. Especially horses. But I don’t regard horses as a heap different from human beings, only some a little better.

There’s only one way to handle horses, and that’s to be kind and firm with them, and I’d like to kill any man I ever saw abusing a horse. Once or twice, I have felt it my duty to reprimand men for not treating their horses right—but that’s another story.

Well, I got my job back with Selig all right, and after that I stuck and I have been in pictures ever since. Mostly for a while I doubled for leading men, and we went down to Florida to make those jungle pictures with Kathlyn Williams, and I did a lot of everything. Maybe you remember Lost in the Jungle and some of those.

Right here, before going into some of the adventures that befell us in Florida, I’d like to say that Miss Kathlyn Williams was a wonderful woman and that it sure was a privilege to work with her. It wasn’t only that she was a mighty brave woman, but she had a fine disposition, and she was sweet and smiling no matter how tough the going might be, and sometimes it was pretty bad, for we worked under great difficulties and most of the time lived the same way. Making that kind of pictures was a heap different than the things they do nowadays and the animals were the chief part of it, too.

I remember that we had a troop of leopards with us, and their trainer allowed that they were tame leopards, but I have

The Silent Film Quarterly・!37 seen a lot tamer things in my time. We had built a great big corral, or cage of wire, and we worked inside that, with all the tropical atmosphere, but still where the animals couldn’t get away. I had one experience with a leopard down there that was like what you read about in books but that is the only time I ever saw it happen in real life.

We wanted to show on the screen, the leopard finding Miss Williams asleep under a log and springing on her. And the way we planned to get it was like this—Miss Williams laid down on one side of the log, right close to it, and on the other side was the leopard. We had a chicken pegged on the same side as Miss Williams, and we’d move the chicken and the leopard would leap high in the air, right over Miss Williams, and land on the chicken. Then we’d cut with him in midair. Then with another leopard trained for the part would continue the fight.

It went great the first time. The second time, just as the leopard started to spring, the breeze caught Miss Williams’ hair and blew it around. It caught his attention and before anyone could move, he had sprung right on Miss Williams, one paw putting five deep cuts in her head. She fainted.

It was so quick no one could realize it.

My gun was some five feet away, and I was afraid to move, for fear the sound would make him strike instantly. I was only a few feet from him, and right in front of me was his tail. I could see it twitching back and forth, back and forth, like the tail of a cat with a mouse.

As I told you, cats are my natural enemies, and for a second I didn’t know what I could do, that wouldn’t make him kill Miss Williams, or maim her, before I could stop him. Then an idea came to me, and I just reached forward and with all my strength grabbed that moving tail and swung. He was a big leopard, but I just managed to lift him clean, and someone snatched Miss Williams.

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He turned on me in a fury, and we stood there, looking at each other, just staring. Some folks that was watching, thought I was right cool and collected on that occasion, but the truth was I was just paralyzed with fear, though I was trying to figure out if maybe I couldn’t get him by the throat when he sprang.

And then, as we stared, that leopard suddenly began to shift, dropped his head and his tail, and slunk away into the trees.

The worst thing that ever happened to me, though, was when I was playing a northern spy, one time. I was the villain in that piece, and Miss Williams was supposed to come riding over a bridge and find me trying to bar her way, and knock me off into the river. It was a pretty good-sized river, and a drop of eighteen or twenty feet from the bridge to the water.

She pushed me off the bridge all right, and I managed to hit the water intact. I went down and come up easy, and found myself face to face with the biggest alligator you ever saw in your life. Maybe he was only yawning, but he had his mouth wide open and I thought he had made up his mind to swallow me whole. The way I went up tho~e piles onto that bridge, I reckon the alligator must have thought I was just a streak of some kind.

As I come over the side the director yelled, “Hey, you stay down in the water till it’s time for you to come up.”

“Alligators Don’t Bite” But that didn’t have any effect on me whatsoever. I took him by the hand and led him over and pointed out the alligator, and I says, “Maybe some folks won’t mind waiting down there in such company until you get ready but not me.”

He says, very airy and bright, “Why, Tom, you don’t need to be afraid of him.

An alligator will never bite a man while he’s in the water.”

I says, “That’s great, but does the alligator know about it?”

The Silent Film Quarterly・!38 got.

Anyway, that was one scene they never

We had a big, old lion down there with us, that had a reputation for being pretty ferocious. One day we had to let him loose to chase a horse. Now the lions were fed on horse meat, and so you can pretty well count on them chasing a horse most anywheres. I was to sit on the sidelines, and rope him when they’d got all the chase they wanted.

The old boy came galloping by me after that horse like so many pounds of speed done up in one package, and I threw for him. But I hadn’t roped many lions, and this wise old bird just jumped right through my loop like a circus clown. All I got was one hind leg, and the old boy seeing me sitting there on top of a horse, charged at us roaring. Well, I turned and give my horse the spur, and all I could do was to keep moving fast enough to keep that old lion at the end of my rope and every time I’d slack a little he’d come after me with the evident intention of getting up on that horse.

So round and round we went, and if you’ve never had a large and unfriendly lion on the end of a rope that you didn’t know what to do with, you don’t know how I felt. I kept yelling for somebody else to rope him, and after a while one of the other boys managed to get a rope on his front leg. So we had him. but we couldn’t get any closer to him than before, and then I let go my rope, and gave him another throw and got him by the neck, and we tied him up and put him back in his cage for his trainer to untangle.

And I want to tell you right now that the trees around there rained folks for hours after that. One actor had actually got two miles from camp, though he must have beaten Charlie Paddock’s record to do it.

After that, I began to make my own pictures, and I was director, and story writer, and actor, and cameraman and props, and scenic artist and most everything but the horse. And I want to tell

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you right now, that there’s no foundation in the world for a man’s business like knowing it from every angle—knowing what can be done and what can’t be done, and all the difficulties the other fellow is undergoing. I still keep up my camera work, and over in my workshop I’ve managed to work out some stunt camera stuff that we’ve used in our pictures, and some devices for cameras that have helped us a lot. And knowing about direction, and stories, has helped me one hundred per cent in my work in recent years.

Pretty soon after I came out to Hollywood, there happened to me the biggest thing that has ever happened in my life—the thing that has made everything else worth while, that has made the hard work easy, and the success glorious. I fell in love.

I did about as thorough a job of it on first sight as I guess any other young man has ever done, because two seconds after I first saw Victoria Ford she had me roped, tied and branded for life. That was ten or eleven years ago, and that feeling I had when I first looked at her has never changed except to grow bigger and finer as the years progress.

Tom’s Courtship It was in a little motion picture theater over at Glendale, that I first saw Victoria.

Her mother, a character actress, had been making some pictures with me, and I went to see one. Outside, she introduced me to her daughter, Victoria, who was just a girl in her ’teens then, with a lot of golden hair, —a little thing, she was, too, not much bigger than a minute. I just stood there looking at her and wondering how I’d lived all those years without her and how I was ever going to live another day longer if she wouldn’t have me. I expect I’d have started proposing right there and then if I’d had the nerve.

I found out she was working at the old Universal studio in Sunset Boulevard and the next day I took this automobile I had

The Silent Film Quarterly・!39

Above: Tom rescuing Victoria Ford, who later became his wife, in an early Selig Western Below: Tom and Mrs. Mix, formerly Victoria Ford, in a scene from an early Selig western. It was a case of love at first sight with Tom and they have been happy ever since—one of Hollywood’s ideally matched couples.

bought, it was a second hand one and big as a house, and I commenced driving up and down in front of that studio, hoping maybe I’d get just a glimpse of her. I was so busy trying to peek inside the door that I ran into a roadster that was standing at the curb and it cost me two weeks pay to get it fixed up.

It wasn’t the whirlwind courtship I would have had it, because Victoria was young, and one thing and another interfered, but when I went down to Arizona and established a studio there to make a series of western pictures, she and her mother went with me. Victoria as my leading woman. Perhaps you remember her in some of those early westerns.

We have been married eight years now, and I know we are pointed out frequently as one of the ideal married couples of Hollywood. I know that we are one of the happiest couples that ever lived in Hollywood or anywhere else, and I guess I’m more grateful to God for that than for anything else—that and its crowning joy,

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our little d a u g h t e r, Thomasina, who came to us nearly three years ago.

This is not a history of the motion picture i n d u s t r y, s o I shan’t go into a lot of detail about my picture career.

After making a lot of westerns for Selig, I went with Fox in 1918 and I have been with them ever since and I have just signed a contract that makes it look like I’d be with them as long as I make pictures. In the years that I have been with them I have had every chance to make western epics, and I’ve tried to do it, and gradually they have grown in favor and popularity with people. I’ve tried always to make clean pictures and to show the west as I know and love it. I have been responsible for seeing that every angle of my pictures was done and done right, and though it’s kept my nose at the grindstone it’s been worth it.

Sometimes I reckon I get to laughing over the fact that I quit being a sheriff to lead a quieter and less dangerous life.

Making western pictures hasn’t been exactly a quiet and peaceful life. I had three ribs broken one day in a shuffle; I had to have nine stitches taken in my head when somebody hit me with the wrong chair; a spur tore the whole side of my head open one day when I was doing a fight and the man’s leg flew up; a horse crushed my toe; I was filled plumb full of pieces of shot when a bomb exploded; I had a tooth smashed in a scene one day.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!40

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Those are just a few of Tom was greatly disappointed because his the things that happen. I’ve baby was not a boy. He wanted a Thomas had to jump horses thirty Mix, Jr. The only thing he could do was to feet into a lake. I’ve had to name her Thomasina. She is shown below with Mrs. Mix and right in her riding togs. jump them through plate glass windows and from the roof of one building to another. I’ve ridden up and down fire escapes. So sometimes I’ve thought it wasn’t much of a change.

As I heard a kid say to his mother in a theater one day, when they were showing one of my pictures, “If Tom and Tony aren’t careful, they’ll get seriously killed one of these days.”

(By the way, did you know I bought Tony for twelve dollars, out of a bunch of colts, and he was sure the worst looking one And I went over to my desk and wrote of the bunch.) a letter to one of the finest men I have ever The other night while I was sitting in known—William Fox. And in that letter I front of my fire, a great feeling of gratitude spoke of my life as it is today, and of all came over me. I saw my home, with its these things which have so blessed me, and comforts and beauties which are so dear to I told him how wonderful it was to me. I saw my beloved wife, sitting opposite remember our long association in business, me. I thought of my cars in the garage, my unmarred by any disagreement or horses, all the possessions which make life discontent.

And I said, “Some folks may so full of happiness. Above all, I thought of say that if you hadn’t done all this for me, that little girl of ours asleep upstairs, and I somebody else would have. But the fact thought of her future, which will be remains that you did it, and I feel mighty protected as far as loving parents and grateful.” That’s true, I tell you. education and money can protect it.

And so I can just end by saying that I I thought of the great opportunity that thank God for all his goodness, for the fine has been given me to be a little influence work I have to do, for the love folks have for good in the lives of the boys and young been kind enough to shower on me, for the men of this country, and remembered how appreciation they’ve given my efforts, and not long before I had spoken to the boy above all for my dearest blessings— scouts, and to other groups of fine future Thomasina and Victoria. And just let me citizens. I thought of the fine health I have say this one word—the greatest happiness kept, because I have tried to take proper there is in the world is in doing right, trying care of this machine we call the body—not to live straight, have the respect of your giving it more fuel to take care of than it neighbors and a true and faithful home life. can, always keeping it tuned up to its best pitch.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!41

My Life Story: Written by Clara Bow for Photoplay Magazine Originally published in three installments, from February to April, 1928 ・・・ Part I

way. But I do. When I have told you about my short life, maybe you will understand why, in spite of its incongruity, I am a madcap, the spirit of the jazz age, the premier flapper, as they call me. No one wanted me to be born in the first place.

And when I was born, at first they thought I was dead. They thought every spark of life had been strangled out of me during my long and stormy entrance into this world. They fought for hours, fanning the poor, feeble little flame of life that was in me, and it would flare up and then die down again, quite as though I didn’t want to stay.

Everything was against my coming here at all, everything was against my staying here.

There have been a great many times when I wish they hadn’t fought quite so hard to keep me here. But I don’t feel that way any more.

Poverty and suffering in my childhood and tragedy always.

When I write down at the very beginning that I am twenty-two years old, I can hardly believe it.

I feel much older than that. I feel as though I had lived a long, long time. That is because I have suffered so much, and suffering makes you feel old inside, just as happiness makes you feel young even when your hair is white.

I think this story will surprise you very much. It isn’t at all the sort of life story you would expect to belong to Clara Bow. For you know the Clara Bow who has been driven by misery and loneliness to clutch at joy and merriment almost wildly.

There is only one thing you can do when you are very young and not a philosopher, if life has frightened you by its cruelty and made you distrust its most glittering promises. You must make living a sort of gay curtain to throw across the abyss into which you have looked and where lie dread memories.

I think that wildly gay Clara Bow, at the people are usually hiding from age of two and a half years. This something in themselves. They photograph was dare not be quiet, for there is no peace nor serenity in their taken in Brooklyn, the borough of souls. The best life has taught babies and churches. them is to snatch at every And Clara grew up m o m e n t o f f u n a n d to be one of its most excitement, because they feel famous babies. sure that fate is going to hit Somehow or other, them over the head with a club the church influence at the first opportunity. passed her by.

I don’t want to feel that

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The Silent Film Quarterly・!42 I don’t know an awful lot about my ancestors or relations. It isn’t really strange if my memory is not good, if I am not very definite about facts and dates. I have been trying all my life to forget, not to remember. Besides, young people aren’t much interested in family history. At least I wasn’t. I don’t like my relations, anyway.

They never paid any attention to me until I was successful and they weren’t kind to me or to my mother when we needed it so much. I try not to have resentment against them, but I don’t care anything about them.

My father is the only person I care for, really.

My mother was a very beautiful woman. She came of a good family in New York State and her mother was French and her father was Scotch. They lived on a country place a few hours from New York City. I was never there, because it was gone before I was born. But from what my mother told me it must have been quiet and beautiful and prosperous.

Perhaps that was the reason that my mother didn’t want to marry. She idolized her father and loved the home where she had been born and brought up, and that was all she wanted from life. Marriage frightened her. She felt no need of anything more in her life than her father and mother and the quiet life she led in the country.

On an adjoining farm lived a family named Bow. They had always been neighbors. The Bows were Scotch and English, of the kind I guess that make landed farmers and squires in the old country. There were thirteen children in the Bow family and my mother had always played with them. The youngest of them was a boy, Harry Bow. And he was the darling of the family and just about my mother’s age. He was a handsome, talented boy who captivated everybody. He just made people like him so much that they didn’t stop to think much else about him.

He had a merry laugh, and he could ride

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and play and was always good-natured and happy.

My mother’s mother adored him.

When she knew that she was dying, she called my mother to her and told her that this young man had asked for her hand and that she must marry him. My grandmother was very old-fashioned, very French in her thoughts and traditions, and she did not believe that a girl could be happy unless she was married. She said she couldn’t die happy unless she knew that her daughter had a husband to care for her and provide for her later years.

They promised.

They were married shortly after she died.

I do not know all the story of what happened here and it is too painful for my father to speak of.

But you see my father had been terribly spoiled. He had neglected his opportunities for education and training.

He often speaks sadly now of his wasted youth and I know that is what he means.

He had a quick, keen mind, he had imagination, he had all the natural qualifications to make something fine of himself. But he just didn’t.

His people thought him too young to marry; they realized he was not able to face the world and take care of himself and a wife. They were very unjust it seems to me, for after all his life had been in their hands.

But they cast him off after his marriage.

My mother’s people had gradually lost what money they had—they had never been rich—and I think my grandmother must have been the business head of the family, for after her death things went to pieces very quickly, and the home my mother had loved was sold.

So, soon after they were married, my father and mother and her father moved to Brooklyn and my father started a small business there. They lived in a very small place to begin with, only two rooms, and it was hard on them both. My mother had

The Silent Film Quarterly・!43 always been accustomed to country life and she always hated the city. My father had never worked and he had always had money and attention. My grandfather was unhappy over the loss of his wife and his home and over being dependent upon them.

I do not think my mother ever loved my father. He knew it. And it made him very unhappy, for he worshipped her always. His devotion to her, his unfailing gentleness and kindness all through the years of her illness is like a miracle to me.

There were two children born before I came along, both girls. One lived two hours. One lived two days.

My mother came forth from the tragedy of that second death a woman broken in health and spirit. I don’t think that in the midst of so much misfortune she ever recovered from those two terrible illnesses, nor from the sorrow and horror of losing her two first born babies.

The doctor told her she must never have any more children. And she said over and over that she didn’t want any more.

They might die, as her two little girls had died. They might leave her without any reward for all she had gone through, without the comfort of a baby’s presence which wipes from a woman’s mind the suffering of such times.

She didn’t want me. Terror possessed her all the time before I was born. Would she die, as the doctor had said? Or, if she survived the ordeal that had nearly cost her her life twice before, would the baby die, as the two others had died? If so, would she lose her reason? She was almost mad with apprehension and fear.

I don’t suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life.

From that day to the day she died my mother never knew a moment free from ill health of the most shattering kind. She

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idolized me, but with a strange, bitter love, almost as though she was afraid to love me for fear I, too, would be snatched away from her. She used to watch me when I ran about the house as a little thing, never taking her eyes off me, and in their depths were many things I was too young to read.

I loved her terribly. Her beauty to me was something divine. She had long golden hair that hung way down below her knees, the most beautiful hair I have ever seen. It shone like pure gold. I used to make up fairy stories about it. And her face was pale, almost transparent, with fine, chiseled features.

The pain had worn her face thin, but it hadn’t lined it, and still, to me, in spite of all that happened, the word beauty brings up a picture of my mother’s white thin face under that mantle of gleaming hair. She was tall and slim and carried herself like a princess, so I think it must be true that she had good blood in her. No woman could have carried herself like that in the midst of so much misfortune unless she had.

When she was mean to me—and she often was, though I know she didn’t mean to be and that it was because she couldn’t help it—it broke my heart.

I wasn’t a pretty child at all, in spite of the fact that both my parents were and such a contrast to each other. My mother so slim and fair, my father a squat strong man, with black hair and twinkling black eyes. My eyes were too black, and my hair was too red.

But I was sturdy and healthy. When I was little people always took me for a boy.

We lived then, and all the rest of the time we stayed in Brooklyn, in the upstairs of a house on a side street in an ordinary neighborhood. I went to the nearest public school and played in the streets like the other children. I always played with the boys. I never had any use for girls and their games. I never had a doll in all my life. But I was a good runner, I could beat most of the boys and I could pitch. When they

The Silent Film Quarterly・!44 played baseball in the evening in the streets, I was always chosen first and I pitched. I don’t think I had very good clothes, they were rougher and older than the other girls’, and the girls used to say snippy things to me and shout “carrot-top” and things like that. Outwardly, it seemed as though I were just a rough, strong little tomboy. But tragedy seemed to mark me early for its own.

I was about five when the first thing that really stands definitely in my mind happened. Clear, with all the little details.

All children have those memories, I guess, but oftenest they are happy. Mine are not.

My grandfather, who lived with us, was very dear to me. Father worked so hard and mother was always ill, always strange and de pressed, sometimes smothering me with kisses and without a word of any kind for me. My grandfather was the one who played with me and taught me little things and sometimes told me stories. He must have been a very good and gentle old man, for he used to look after mother and me both.

He had built a little swing for me. I used to sit on the floor and watch him while he was making it. He fixed it so that you could pull it up out of the way, on hooks. There wasn’t much room, you see.

We thought it was a very famous contrivance and perhaps it was. On cold winter days, when I couldn’t get out to play, grandfather used to swing me and we had great fun that way.

It was very cold on this particular afternoon. Snow lay everywhere, the whole outdoors was white with it. It was even a little cold in the house. We had always to economize on coal. Sometimes we had to economize on food, too. There was usually enough of these things, but never just plenty, never all you wanted. Scrimping the corners, that’s the way it was in our house.

I was cold and lonesome. I went out into the kitchen, looking for something to do. My mother was washing and she didn’t

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speak to me. Her face looked desperately ill, white and weary. I felt she shouldn’t be washing. She was washing a red tablecloth for the kitchen table. While I stood there I saw tears dropping from her eyes and splashing into the soapy water. I felt like crying, too.

I went back in to my grandfather and asked him to swing me. He got up and pulled down the swing and began to push me, and pretty soon I forgot I was cold and that mother was crying again, and began to shout with glee. Then, suddenly, the swing gave a violent twist so that I nearly fell out and then it stopped, and I heard a kind of dull fall behind me.

I looked around and my grandfather was lying on the floor. His face was purple and his eyes were open and staring.

My screams brought my mother to the door. In her hands she still held the red tablecloth. It dripped water all over the carpet. She threw it down and ran to my grandfather, saying over and over, “Father, speak to me. Speak to me.” She looked so wild I was frightened and ran downstairs and called a neighbor.

They brought a doctor, but it was too late to do anything. He had died instantly, while he was pushing me in my little swing.

That was my first encounter with death and I didn’t believe it. I was quite sure they were mistaken.

The first night as he lay in his coffin in the dining room, I crept out of my bed and lay down on the floor beside him, because I had a feeling that he might be lonely. My father found me there in the morning, almost frozen. I said, “Hush, you mustn’t wake grandfather. He’s sleeping.” But I knew that he was dead. I missed him very much.

That was a terrible blow to my mother.

There had existed a great love and sympathy between them. He was the only one who could make her laugh and talk naturally. Often, when they sat together talking, I would see her pass her hand

The Silent Film Quarterly・!45 across her head, as though something cleared away.

After his death, she was sad for a long, long time. She wanted to die, too. She often spoke of it. But she never mentioned suicide. Her courage was too high for that.

Though she suffered all the time, more and more, and was depressed, and couldn’t seem to rise above it, she went on as best she could.

My school life in those earliest days didn’t seem to make much impression on me. I have no distinct impression of any of my teachers, or my school mates.

I had one little playmate, though, to whom I was devoted. He was a little boy who lived in the same house with me. I think his name was Johnny. He was several years younger than I was and I used to take him to school with me, and fight the boys if they bothered him. I could lick any boy my size. My right was quite famous. My right arm was developed from pitching so much.

One day after school I was alone in our house upstairs when I heard a terrible noise downstairs. For a minute if curdled my blood, then I ran down wildly. Johnny had gone too near the fire and his clothes had caught and were burning and he was screaming with pain and fright. His mother was standing there, wringing her hands and screaming, too, like a crazy woman and not doing a thing.

When I came tearing in Johnny screamed “Clara, Clara, help me.” He ran over and jumped into my arms.

I had just enough sense to know what to do. I laid him on the floor and rolled him up in the carpet and tried the best I could to put the fire out. The poor little fellow struggled and screamed all the time.

I shouted for his mother to get a doctor and she ran out. I stayed alone with Johnny, holding him in my arms rolled up in the carpet and trying to soothe him and quiet him. I was crying all the time myself and pretty nearly crazy, too. I seemed to feel the fire on my own flesh, and every

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time he cried out it seemed to me I couldn’t bear it any more.

The doctor came. He couldn’t do anything. The little fellow died in my arms.

He was just—just all burned up, that’s all. I tried to pray then, begging God not to let him suffer like that. The last thing he said was “Clara—Clara—.”

When I knew he was dead I went upstairs and cried for hours. I have never cried but once like that since. That was when my mother died. It seemed to me that life was just too terrible to be borne.

When my mother came in I was asleep. I had cried myself into complete exhaustion, and I was ill for several weeks. The shock had been too much. For months I used to wake up and think I heard that little fellow calling “Clara—Clara—help me.” Things like that are terrible for a little child to go through—I was only about eight or nine, I guess.

As I got older, I played with the boys more and more. I still was an awfully plain kid. I was shy and nervous around girls.

They were always hurting my feelings and I thought they were silly anyway. I wore plain clothes and kept my hair tied back out of my face. I was as good at any game as any of the boys. And just as strong. They always accepted me as though I had been one of themselves.

We used to skate together and play baseball and all sorts of rough games in the street and I never felt there was any difference between us. At night sometimes we would build a bonfire and sit around it after we had skated awhile, and the boys never noticed me. They talked about everything just like they were alone. That was where I learned what boys really think.

I knew how they judged girls. I knew which ones they could kiss and how they made fun of them. I was mighty glad they didn’t think I was a sissy. I’d do any darn thing to prove I wasn’t. We used to hop rides on trucks and get lost and do all sorts of crazy stunts. They let me take care of myself, too,

The Silent Film Quarterly・!46 just like I’d been another boy. Once I hopped a ride on behind a big fire engine. I got a lot of credit from the gang for that.

All this time my mother was growing more ill. She had always been subject to fainting spells and they grew gradually worse. They weren’t fits and they weren’t regular fainting spells. Often they would happen two or three times a day, and then maybe she would be free from them for a long time. When she felt them coming on she would look at me so pathetically. Like a woman caught in some trap. Then her eyes would grow glassy and she would start to gasp for breath. It was just as though she were being strangled. She would fight and fight for breath.

Usually I was alone with her, and I would run to her and massage her throat to try to make her breathing easier. I’d say, “Mother, mother, don’t—please don’t.”

When father was there sometimes we’d cry together, because it is terrible to see someone you love suffer like that and not be able to help them.

We never had much money, you know, and so we couldn’t consult any specialists.

Our own doctor told us it was a nervous disease. My father said her mother had once told him that when she was a child she had a bad fall on her head. When I was four years old she fell again, on the stairs, and it opened up the old scar. They had to take stitches in it. Probably advanced brain specialists today would tell us that that had a lot to do with it. Perhaps they might have helped her, but we didn’t know what to do.

Of course when she was having her bad times I had to do most of the house work and the washing and cooking. Father had had a lot of bad luck. Everything seemed to break against him. He worked as a carpenter or an electrician, or at any odd jobs that he could get to do. Everything seemed to go wrong for him, poor darling.

He wanted so much to do more for us and he worked so hard, but just bad luck followed him all the time. So I had to do

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the best I could taking care of mother and the house, but I wasn’t very good at it. I never had any knack about housework, or cooking. I got to be a pretty expert nurse for mother, but it always frightened me when she got bad and I dreaded seeing her suffer.

When I first started to the Bayside High School in Brooklyn, I was still a tomboy. I wore sweaters and old skirts made over from my mother’s. I didn’t give a darn about clothes or looks. I only wanted to play with the boys.

I guess I was about fourteen or maybe fifteen when my mother had quite a long spell of being almost herself. Her health was better and things brightened up quite a good deal. Then she began to take a little interest in my clothes and my looks. She combed my hair a new way, so the curls fell around my face, and she made me a pretty dress, that was cut in at the waist and showed pretty plainly that I wasn’t a boy after all.

Right away there was a change in the boys’ attitude toward me. Oh, I was heartbroken. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t want to be treated like a girl.

There was one boy who had always been my pal. We always fought each other’s battles and he used to catch on the baseball team I pitched for. Well, one night when we’d been out skating, he kissed me on the way home.

I wasn’t sore. I didn’t get indignant. I was horrified and hurt. It seemed to me that the end of everything had come. I knew now that I could never go back to being a tomboy. The boys wouldn’t let me.

They’d always liked me so well, I’d always been their favorite. Not to kiss or be sweet on, but because I was game and could run fast and take care of myself. They’d always liked me better than those sissy girls that put powder on their noses.

Now that was over. No matter how much I wanted to be a tomboy still, I couldn’t. The boys wouldn’t let me.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!47 I wasn’t ready for the dawning of womanhood, for the things that would take place of what I had lost. I’d been cast out by my pals. The girls still made fun of me for being a tomboy. I was absolutely alone.

I had never liked to study. I was just skimming along because I was naturally quick, but I never opened a book and the teachers were always down on me. I don’t blame them. I guess I must have looked pretty hopeless. But I often think now, when I come of myself to realize how I love reading, how much I want to know things, that it wasn’t all my fault. If they had made me see what I see now, by myself, I know I would have been good.

In this lonesome time, when I wasn’t much of anything and hadn’t anybody except Dad, who was away most of the time, I had one haven of refuge. Just one place where I could go and forget the misery and gloom of home, the loneliness and heartache of school.

That was to the motion pictures. I can never repay them what they gave me.

I’d save and save and beg Dad for a little money, and every cent of it went into the box office of a motion picture theater.

For the first time in my life I knew there

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was beauty in the world. For the first time I saw distant lands, serene, lovely homes, romance, nobility, glamour.

My whole heart was afire, and my love was the motion picture. Not just the people of the screen, but everything that magic silversheet could represent to a lonely, starved, unhappy child. Wally Reid was my first sweetheart, though I never saw him except on the screen. He was Sir Galahad in all his glory. I worshipped Mary Pickford. How kind and gentle and loving she was. Maybe there were people like that in the world.

A great ambition began to unfold in me. I kept it hidden for fear of being laughed at. I felt myself how ridiculous it was. Why, I wasn’t even pretty. I was a square, awkward, funny-faced kid. But all the same I knew I wanted to be a motion picture actress. And I can say one thing, right here. If I have had success beyond my own greatest dreams, it may be that it is the reward for the purity of my motive when I first dreamed that dream. For I truly didn’t think of fame or money or anything like that. I just thought of how beautiful it all was and how wonderful it must be to do for people what pictures were doing.

Left: Clara Bow’s first professional photography, taken at the age of sixteen, when she won the contest that put her on the screen.

Right: One of Clara Bow’s first portraits, made by Muray just after winning the contest.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!48 One day I saw in a paper an announcement of a contest. Not a beauty contest. I wouldn’t have dared to enter that. This said that acting ability, personality, grace and beauty would be judged in equal parts.

I went to Dad. Shyly, I told him my dream. He was so kind. He always understood. He was harassed and miserable and overworked, but he was kind and understanding always.

He gave me a dollar. I knew, even then, what a sacrifice it was to him. I went down to a little cheap photographer in Brooklyn and he took two pictures of me for that dollar. They were terrible.

Without daring to tell mother, I sent them in to the contest. And sat down to wait and pray. ・・・ Part II Hope is a funny and wonderful thing.

Every bit of reason I had, every logical thought process I followed, told me I had no chance to win any contest to enter motion pictures. It was silly to even dream of it. There wasn’t a single person who knew me, except my Dad, who wouldn’t have laughed long and loud at the mere idea. Why, the contest was open to everyone in the United States. The world was full of beautiful girls, girls with clothes and education and advantages of every kind, who wanted to go into pictures. They would enter such a contest.

What chance would I have?

I lay awake night after night telling myself all these things, preparing myself for what I felt was an inevitable disappointment.

Yet hope went on singing in my breast.

Sometimes I think that is why hope was included with faith and charity by St. Paul, as the greatest thing to possess. Hope is the thing that enables us to try to accomplish the impossible, that urges us on to heights

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that, without the encouragement of its music, we would never dare attempt.

Finally, a letter came. My hands were cold as I opened it. I don’t think I breathed for several minutes. I was afraid to look. At last I did. It told me to come to the magazine offices.

That didn’t mean anything. The judges in this contest were Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher and Neysa McMein. Judges of beauty, all right.

No fooling them. Still, it was one tiny step nearer.

My school work was going all to pieces under the strain. I couldn’t keep my mind on it for a second. I was just one big pulse of hope and excitement. Every teacher I had—I was in my third year—was sour at me. But I couldn’t help it.

On the day set, I went to the contest offices. I sat rigid all the way. It seemed that ages passed. I had a fantastic idea that my hair would have turned from red to white by the time I arrived.

The office was full of girls and my heart just flopped when I saw them. Every bit of hope and assurance oozed right out through my boots. Oh, they were pretty girls. To me, they seemed the most beautiful girls in all the world. Blondes and brunettes, no vulgar little redheads. They were elegantly dressed, perfectly groomed, with lovely manicured hands and slim, delicate legs in sheer stockings. They had poise.

I hadn’t dressed up because I had nothing to dress up in. I had never had a manicure nor a pair of chiffon stockings in my life. I had never even been close to the scent of such perfumes as filled that room.

I wore the one and only thing I owned. A little plain wool dress, a sweater and a woolly red tam. I hadn’t thought much of that angle. I had only looked at my face, and that was disappointment enough.

But now, in this gathering, I was painfully aware of how I was dressed. I felt presumptuous to be there at all. Shame and humiliation overcame me.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!49 Those girls didn’t leave me much room for doubt that the impression I made was as bad as I thought it would be. Eyebrows went up, noses elevated, there were snickers here and there. At first I wilted. Tears came up and choked me, but I beat them back somehow. I had learned not to cry in a hard school—on the pavement of Brooklyn with a gang of boys.

But slowly rage began to well up in me. Why should they look at me like that?

Why need they be so unkind? I wasn’t much, but I knew I wouldn’t be as cruel as that to anyone that was worse off than I was. Suffering had taught me how bitter suffering can be, and I never, never wanted to inflict it on anybody else.

So I managed to keep my chin up and my eyes began to blaze and for a moment I reverted back to the little street tomboy and wanted to sail into those pretty, painted, perfumed girls.

Just then the door opened and some men and a couple of ladies came out. They walked around the room, looking everybody over, very carefully, as though they had been so many statues. I tried to keep out of sight, I didn’t know who the people were and I was too busy trying to keep from crying to have an idea of posing or making an impression.

Suddenly one of the men said, “There’s an interesting face—that kid with the red tam and the gorgeous eyes.”

I looked around. I was the only girl with a red tam. The blood came singing up and nearly suffocated me. The words kept ringing in my ears. “Interesting face.”

“Gorgeous eyes.” Me—me—little Clara Bow. They went back in. Several girls went in, came out. Pretty soon, I was called. A few minutes before I thought of how I’d ritz those girls, if I should happen to get a summons. But when they called me I was too excited to remember a detail like that.

They talked to me. What made me think I could act?

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Well, I couldn’t exactly tell them. I don’t know why I can act—if I can. Only, in the many hours I had spent in motion picture theaters I had always watched intently and I had always had a queer feeling about actors and actresses on the screen. Sometimes what they did seemed just right. Again, I felt they were doing it wrong. I knew I would have done it differently. I couldn’t analyze it, but I could always feel it. It just threw me right out of the feeling of reality about a picture when an actress made a gesture of used an expression that seemed wrong to me.

I tried to explain, and they all laughed a little, but kindly. And said I should wait for a test.

I think there were about twelve girls who had made tests that day.

They all wanted to do it first. I didn’t.

So I never said a word. I sat there, though, through every one of those tests and watched everything that was done, everything they were told, every mistake they made. They all had to do the same thing—walk in, pick up a telephone, laugh, look worried, then terrified. I got it finally so I knew how I was going to do it and just what I was going to think about while I was doing it.

Gradually, little by little, the tests narrowed down. I went back and forth, making new ones as more and more were eliminated. Each time I expected to be the next one to go—but I didn’t. It was tough getting the carfare and I had only the one dress.

I had been out of school a lot, going over to New York, and the teachers had been complaining and telling me I was sure to flunk. What did it matter? If I failed in this, I’d go to work somewhere.

The day I went to the offices—it had in some marvelous fashion narrowed down to a statuesque blonde beauty and me—I got home about five o’clock.

Mother was sitting motionless in the dining room. Her face was white and I had

The Silent Film Quarterly・!50 never seen her eyes look like that, even when she had her worst spells.

She said, “Where have you been?”

Just that in the most awful, cold tone.

It seems that one of the teachers from high school had been there to tell her how much I was absent and that I would fail if something wasn’t done about it.

Well, I told her where I had been and what I was doing. I told her it looked as though I had a chance to win this contest and if I did it meant a job in the pictures and a chance to make good and I could do a lot of things for her.

She fainted dead away, not one of her choking fits, but just a dead faint. I was so scared I hardly knew what to do. I ran and tried to lift her up and threw water on her.

She didn’t come to for a long time and when she did she just cried and cried.

“You are going straight to hell,” she said. “I would rather see you dead.”

I had never dreamed she would feel like that. I hadn’t told her because I didn’t want to disappoint her and put her through the strain of waiting, she was so nervous.

Besides, I was ashamed. I knew she didn’t think I was pretty or clever, and I thought she’d say I was a fool.

Dad came in just then and we tried to soothe her, but she just sat and stared at me, with those awful, burning eyes, and her face was so white and still.

So I cried, too, and promised her I’d give it up right away.

But Dad told her she had no right to ask such a promise of me. He said he knew I had talent. He said I might not be pretty, but I was different, I was a type. He said I had a chance for a real success, with a big future and that outside that the best I could hope for was a job in a store or an office with long, hard hours and little pay and no future. He said pictures weren’t any more dangerous for a girl, they weren’t as dangerous as working in stores and offices and that I had always been a good girl and she had no right to feel that way about me.

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For a long time she didn’t answer, just sitting there white and still, her hands hanging down. At last she said, “All right.”

Three days later they sent for me and told me I had won the contest and would have a good part in a picture and all the publicity that had been promised and everything.

It was hard for me to believe. I kept thinking they’d change their minds and every time the postman stopped at our door my heart stopped beating. They told me the judges had picked me because I was “different” and had a unique personality.

I went back to high school and told them. The girls only laughed at me. Oh, how they laughed. They just decided that any beauty contest I could win must be a bum one. Every time they looked at me they giggled and giggled. So I decided not to go to school any more. It hurt to be laughed at. I thought maybe they would be glad.

Then began a terribly hard time. I guess all contests are like that. For weeks, nothing happened. I waited and waited. I haunted the office. Panic was growing inside of me, driving me crazy. After all I had been through, all my great joy, was this going to be a failure?

But at last I hung around so much they decided to get me a job to get rid of me.

Or maybe they really meant to all the time and were just busy. Christy Cabanne was making a picture with Billy Dove as the star. They took me over to him and explained the situation and he took one look at me and almost had a fit.

“Don’t tell me she won a beauty contest,” he said.

It almost broke my heart.

Anyway, he agreed to give me a small part.

But there was another stumbling block. I had to have four dresses to play the part and I had to furnish them myself. I didn’t have four dresses. I didn’t have one dress. Dad didn’t have any money—yes, he

The Silent Film Quarterly・!51 had enough to buy about half a dress. So then I did something I’d never done before.

I put my pride in my pocket and for the first and last and only time I went to some of my relatives for help.

I had an aunt in New York who was rich. They had a beautiful home and one of the girls had made a good marriage and the son was in Wall Street or something. I had never been in their house, but I went. I told my aunt the whole story. I didn’t need much and I would pay it back out of the first salary I got. It was my big chance and it looked like I was going to lose it because I didn’t have four dresses.

She put me out of the house.

While I was walking away, just sunk, I heard footsteps behind me and somebody called my name. It was her son, my cousin.

He didn’t know me at all, but he had heard our conversation. He was interested in pictures, and he didn’t think about them as his mother did.

“I don’t think you’ve got a chance, kid,” he said, “but I like your spirit. Here’s all the change I’ve got.”

He handed me eighty dollars.

Eighty dollars may not sound much to buy four dresses. It wasn’t. But it was so much more than nothing. I went to a second hand place, to a wholesale place, and I got four dresses. I know now they must have been pretty terrible. But then I thought they were magnificent.

The next day I went to the studio ready to work.

I had never put on a make-up. While I was doing the tests for the contest they had an actress who made up all the girls. Now I had to go alone. But I was encouraged when they put me in a dressing room with four other girls. I thought surely they would help me. But they didn’t. They just laughed. They said, “Go ahead and learn like the rest of us did.”

Sometimes I wonder about things like that. Most of the people in pictures are so kind. It seemed as though fate were just

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throwing everything in my way, giving me every possible obstacle. I don’t think those girls meant to be unkind. They were careless and self-centered. Most of the unkindness in the world comes from thoughtlessness. I am sure of that.

I did the best I could. When I came on the set Mr. Cabanne thought I had gone crazy. I looked like a clown. I tell you I didn’t have to use any cold cream to take that grease paint off. I washed it off with good hot tears. The next day I watched the other girls and learned a little and got by all right.

My part wasn’t very big but I had about five scenes. In one of them I was suppose to cry. Mr. Cabanne didn’t seem to think I could, but I did. It was always easy for me to cry. All I had to do was think of home. He said I had done it well and it seemed to please him. After that he was kinder, and helped me.

When the picture came to Brooklyn I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I asked some of the girls from school to go with me to see it. I guess maybe I wanted to show off a little. I wanted to prove to them what I could do. I thought of those five scenes and I felt sure they’d respect me after that.

I’d be a real movie actress.

We went. They ran the picture. There wasn’t a single shot of me in it anywhere.

The girls certainly made life miserable for me. You can’t blame them. But it was a bitter blow to me.

But not the worst one.

Mother was growing steadily worse and her thoughts seemed to center on me.

She came up to me one day on the back porch where I was doing some washing and she said, “I think I’ll kill you.

You would be much better off dead. This is a terrible world. Motion pictures are terrible. I think it is my duty to kill you.”

I was frightened but—it was more than that. I was so sorry for her, I loved her so. I knew she loved me. I never mentioned pictures to her after that, but every once in

The Silent Film Quarterly・!52 a while she would start talking about how it was her duty to kill me. I told Dad and it worried him terribly and we had a new doctor but he said there was nothing he could do.

Things weren’t breaking for me at all.

Winning the contest hadn’t seemed to mean a thing. I wore myself out trying to find work, going from studio to studio, from agency to agency, applying for every possible part. But there was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat. When I told them that I’d won this contest, they only laughed. They said the woods were full of girls who’d won some bum beauty contest and they were mostly dumb or they wouldn’t have been in any beauty contest in the first place. Which I guess maybe was right. And I couldn’t wear clothes and I wasn’t pretty enough.

But finally I got a job. Elmer Clifton was going to make a picture called Down to the Sea in Ships. He wanted a small, tomboy type of girl to play a second lead. He hadn’t much money to spend and he couldn’t afford to pay much salary for this part. He had been at a casting agent’s office and they had been going over all the people they knew without hitting the right one. The contest manager had sent Mr. Clifton copies of the magazines containing my picture. After the agency visit he happened to open one of them to a picture of me. It was one in the red tam and was part of the publicity from the contest, so you see it did do me some good.

He said, “Who the dickens is that?

Clara Bow. Cute name. That’s what I want.

Send for that kid.”

They sent for me.

But I was terribly discouraged by then.

I was so sick of being told I was too young or too small. So I decided to take a desperate chance. I put my hair up, sneaked one of mother’s dresses and went over done up like that.

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When Mr. Clifton saw me he said, “Great heavens, you’re not the girl I saw in the picture. I wanted a kid, to play a tomboy part. You won’t do at all.”

Just think. I had guessed wrong and nearly missed my chance. I started explaining so fast the words stumbled over each other. I said, “Oh, I’m the girl all right. But I’ve lost so many parts because I was too young that I put on mother’s clothes to see if I couldn’t look older.”

That made him laugh and I went home and got my own clothes and came back and got the part at fifty dollars a week. That was more money than I knew there was in the world.

But we had to go away. They were going to make the picture up in New Bedford. I’d never been away from home a night in my life and I knew mother wouldn’t let me go. But Mr. Clifton arranged for the cameraman’s wife to go along and be with me as a chaperon—so Clara Bow went on her first location with a chaperon.

I went home all happy and thrilled.

Mother was sitting there, and she was very quiet and didn’t say much. She looked well, though, there was color in her face. Father was working and we had dinner and she was quiet, but very pleasant and sweet.

Then I went to bed. I hadn’t told her about the job. I thought I’d wait until father was there. I don’t know how long I had been asleep when I woke up and realized there was somebody in the room. My heart was beating hard and funny. The door was a little open and in the light from the other room I saw mother standing there, in a white nightgown. Her hair was braided over each shoulder and hung down to her knees. In her hand was the butcher knife.

I said, “Mother?”

She didn’t answer. Just came closer to the bed.

I said “Mother, darling, what are you doing?”

The Silent Film Quarterly・!53 She pinioned my hands down. “I’m going to kill you, Clara.” She said very quietly. “It will be better.”

She put the knife at my throat.

The room went all black. I fought to keep consciousness. I knew if I didn’t I was lost—we were both lost. I kept thinking.

“Oh, poor mother, poor mother, how terrible she will feel if she ever knows she has done this. I mustn’t let her.”

I moved. The knife came closer. The hands tightened like steel.

I started to talk, to plead, to soothe, watching her all the time. She didn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes burned into mine. I don’t know how long it was, but it seemed hours. At last, when she seemed to relax for a final effort, I made a desperate spring, as swiftly, as strongly as I could. It knocked her away from me. I ran across the room and out the door and turned and locked her in.

Outside I was so weak I could hardly move. I could hear her inside trying the door. The handle turned. I wanted to go back in and comfort her. But I was afraid to. It was too terrible to stay alone. I went downstairs and asked the lady there if I could sit there awhile. She looked at me, but didn’t ask me any questions and she said I could stay.

I sat there all night. At five o’clock, I heard Daddy’s step. I ran to meet him.

Poor Daddy. We went up together. There was no sound from the room. We opened the door and se was sleeping on my bed, as peacefully as a child, her hands folded, the long, golden braids over her shoulders.

When she woke up she didn’t know anything about it.

I was glad to go away then. She didn’t make any objection, when Dad explained it to her. But the shock had upset me more than I knew. All the thirteen weeks we were on location I was ill. I knew it was only nerves and I fought against it. But I couldn’t sleep. I used to wake up crying all the time.

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When I came home, mother was there.

Dad told me he had had her away in a sanitarium for treatment. They said she wasn’t insane. You couldn’t call her that because she was so intelligent. She could answer any question, talk well, be as calm…Then once in a while these spells came on. But she seemed so much better Dad brought her home. She wanted to be at home.

But she began to be unhappy again about my going into pictures. Once she said, “You don’t take me to the studio with you. You're ashamed of me. You think I’m crazy.” That broke my heart. I was so proud of her.

So I decided to give up pictures.

Maybe mother would be better. I couldn’t bear to make her unhappy like that. So I hunted around and got a job answering the phones in a doctor’s office. I hated it. The trip was long and the pay small, but it was all right.

And then, I started trying to have a little fun. I just had to. I knew a lot of young people around Brooklyn, boys I’d been to school with. They were always asking me to go places. The boys seemed to like me and I liked them, though I had never been in love, not even a kid romance.

I never had a love affair until after I went to Hollywood.

One night I went to a party with some young friends, two boys and a girl. We were having a fine time, dancing and playing the phonograph, just like a bunch of kids will, when the telephone rang.

It was my father and he said I was to come home right away.

I didn’t want to go. I said: “Oh, Dad, please don’t make me. I’m having such a good time. If mother’s having one of her spells, she’ll come out of it all right.”

That was the only time I’d ever said anything like that. But I was only a kid and I wanted a little fun.

But Dad insisted. He said, “You’d better come right away, Clara.”

The Silent Film Quarterly・!54

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And just then, with the particular way fate has of always bringing extremes into my life, my first chance in pictures came. They sent for me to play a little dancing girl in Enemies of Women. At first I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think I could, my heart was so heavy. But there was nothing I could do for mother and Dad insisted that I go ahead. He saw that I was breaking down under those days of silent grief, of being shut up all the time in one room with mother like she was.

It was only a bit in the picture. I danced on a table. All the time I had to be laughing, romping wildly, displaying nothing for the camera but pleasure and the joy of life. As I say, it was only a bit, but no matter what parts I have been called upon to play as a star, or ever will be, not one of them “I am happy—as happy as anyone can be who believes that life isn’t quite to be trusted. I give everything I can to my pictures, and the rest to could compare in difficulty to that being young and trying to make my father happy. I don’t think I’m very role. I’d go home at night and help take care of mother; I’d cry different from any other girl.” my eyes out when I left her in the morning—and then go and dance on a ・・・ table. I think I used to be half-hysterical, Part III but the director thought it was wonderful.

That night, after my father called me One day when I was on the set on the telephone at the party and told me working, in some sort of a little scanty to come home, we went through the dark costume, I looked up and saw father streets in silence. All the laughter and standing there. One look at his face told me gaiety had fled. We were just scared kids. I that the end had come. I walked over to remember thinking then that fun didn’t him and just stood staring. I was paralyzed. seem to last very long, that something I don’t think I had realized until that terrible always happened, and maybe it moment that mother was really going to was best to get all you could out of it when die. And I don’t think I had ever realized you could. how much I loved her.

Mother was on a couch in the living Looking back on it now, it seems to me room. She was white and still. She did not that the day of my mother’s funeral was know me. She never knew me again, the beginning of a new life for me. Perhaps though I used to try so hard to make her. it was the birthday of the Clara Bow that For days she lay like that and I cared for you know. The end of my kid life had her, trying to ease the paroxysms of pain come. Sorrow and disappointment had when they came. been my lot so much that I didn’t believe in anything but trying to get what you could

The Silent Film Quarterly・!55 out of life. I’ve come to a saner philosophy now, But then I was just hard and bitter.

On that day, we went across to Staten Island on the ferry, and I sat absolutely motionless all the way, my hand cold and frozen in my dad's. All feeling had left me.

Loneliness engulfed me. Even during the services, in the church and at the grave, I didn’t cry. Dad said my face was like a piece of marble. Poor dear, he was weeping enough for two of us, but I couldn’t cry.

When they started to lower the coffin into the ground, my heart began to beat again.

Then the clergyman turned and told me to throw the first pieces of earth down upon her I had so greatly loved.

At that, I came to life and went crazy. I tried to jump into the open grave after her.

I screamed and cried out that they were all hypocrites, they hadn’t loved her when she was alive, or cared for her, or done anything to make life easier. I raved and fought like a little wildcat. The thought of leaving her there in that hard, cold ground tortured my imagination beyond bearing.

And then I was overcome with remorse. Just think, when she felt the way she did about pictures, I’d actually been working, dancing on a table with just a few clothes on, when she left me for good. A deep knowledge, perhaps the deepest emotion I had ever had in my life, came to me then of how much she had loved me.

I’d been the only thing she’d ever had to love, she’d poured all the frustration of her soul out upon me. And I’d disappointed her, gone against her wishes.

I felt that I never wanted to see another motion picture. I was very ill again after that. And for a while I stuck to my resolution about motion pictures. But Dad —who is so very sensible, who knows the world well and understands so much— talked it all over with me. I remember he came in and sat on the end of my bed one night and looked down at me.

“Little daughter,” he said, “you’re making a big mistake. You’re very young

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and I know you think your heart is broken.

But it isn’t. You mustn’t allow it to be. You have a long life ahead of you, and your mother—as she was before her illness changed her—would want you to go on and live it to the fullest. She was a very wonderful woman and she expected a great deal of you. It would make her so unhappy to know that your grief is ruining your life.

And at the time when she was herself, she would have understood your ambition, your desire to be in pictures. She loved beauty and all expressions of it. So you must, for her sake and your own and mine —because after all, Clara darling, I’m still here and I need you, too—you must pull yourself together and do your work.”

That woke me up. I hate a quitter and I saw that I was quitting. And I knew he was right, that if mother had been herself she would have understood my picture work. So I started in again looking for work. I don’t believe anybody had a harder time getting started in pictures than I did.

You see, I had to make a niche for myself. If I am different, if I’m the “superflapper” and “jazz-baby” of pictures, it’s because I had to create a character for myself. Otherwise, I’d probably not be in pictures at all. They certainly didn’t want me.

I was the wrong type to play ingenues.

I was too small for a leading woman and too kiddish for heavies. I had too much of what my wonderful friend Elinor Glyn calls “It,” apparently, for the average second role or anything of that sort. I got turned down for more jobs, I guess, than any other girl who ever tried to break into pictures.

Finally I did get a lead with Glenn Hunter. The girl was a little rough-neck, and somehow they thought I fitted into it. I guess I did. I’d always been a tomboy, and at heart I still was. I worked in a few pictures around New York and by that time “Down to the Sea in Ships,” which had been held up for such a long time, was released and that helped me.

The Silent Film Quarterly・!56 About this time, I met a woman in New York who was sort of a casting agent.

I am not going to mention her name in this story because I am trying to be truthful all the way through and I cannot say anything kind about her. Perhaps she did try to help me, but she did so many things that didn’t help and while I try not to hold any hard feelings against anyone, I cannot help feeling unhappy whenever I think of her.

A ny w ay, a b o u t t h at t i m e M r.

Bachmann saw me in “Down to the Sea in Ships,” and he liked my work. He came to talk to me. At that time, he was B.P. Shulberg’s partner and he wired Mr. Shulberg, who was in Hollywood, that he thought I was a “bet.” He suggested that Mr. Shulberg give me a three months’ contract and my fare to Hollywood, at a salary of fifty dollars a week, and give me a chance.

“It can’t do any harm,” he said.

So this agent—I’ll call her Mrs. Smith, because that wasn’t her name—and I came to Hollywood.

We left my Dad in New York, because we didn’t have the money for railroad fares and besides he’d gotten a job down at Coney Island, managing a little restaurant, and he liked it. So we thought we would wait and see how I made out.

Mrs. Smith and I took a little apartment in Hollywood and I started to work. I did nothing but work. I worked in two and even three pictures at once. I played all sorts of parts in all sorts of pictures. In a very short time I had acquired the experience that it often takes years and years to get. It was very hard at the time and I used to be worn out and cry myself to sleep from sheer fatigue after eighteen hours a day on different sets, but now I am glad of it.

The story of my career from there on isn’t so different from the story of all other motion picture careers. I'll wind it up later, but right here I’d like to stop and tell you something of my personal life in

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Hollywood and the three love affairs—or engagements—that have happened to me since I came and that have been so much in the newspapers.

You know enough about me to realize that I’d never “had things.” I’m not going to pretend that I had. Everything was new and wonderful to me. It was wonderful to have the things I wanted to eat, not to have to scrimp on dessert and be able to order the best cuts of meat. It was wonderful to have silk stockings, and not cry if they happened to get a run in them. It was wonderful to have a few dollars to spend, just as I liked, without having to worry about the fact that they ought to be used to pay the gas bill.

Maybe other people don’t realize that, don’t get the kick out of those things that I do. Of course I still can’t exactly understand the money that is coming and is going to make my Dad and me comfortable and happy all the rest of our lives. When I bought my first home, the one I still live in, a little bungalow in Beverly Hills, when I signed the check, I couldn’t possibly appreciate what the figures meant. I knew I had that much in the bank—me, little Clara Bow—and that the home was mine and I’d actually earned it. But the figures were just too big for my comprehension.

But I do know what a hundred dollars is. That used to be a dream to me—to have a hundred dollars. I never thought I would, not all at once —have a hundred dollars, and certainly not to do something I really wanted to do with. So now I get more thrill out of a hundred dollars that I can go and buy a present for a friend with, or do something for Dad, or get myself something awfully feminine and pretty with, than I do out of my salary check.

I guess I’m still just Clara Bow at heart.

I’m getting away from the run of my story, but a life story ought to tell you a little about how a person feels, and that’s

The Silent Film Quarterly・!57 how I feel about the success that has come to me.

Well, a short time after I’d come to Hollywood and Mrs. Smith and I were living in a little apartment and I was working in three pictures at once I met Gilbert Roland.

I’d never been in love all my life.

Funny, because I suppose people think I was born being in love with somebody. But Gilbert was the first man I ever cared about. There isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t tell it, because we were both kids, and we were engaged, and we were very happy. Not a bit in the modern, flapper fashion, but rather like two youngsters that didn’t know what it was all about and were scared to death of it.

We used to sit and just look at each other, hardly breathing, not really knowing each other at all. He called me “Clarita”— he still spoke with a good deal of Spanish accent in those days, and I used to love to hear him say my name, it was so soft and sweet. Neither of us had much money, and we used to do all sorts of silly little things to have a good time, and we used to think it was wonderful when we could go out to dinner and to a theater.

I think we might have been happy together if outside things hadn’t interfered so dreadfully. We were happy, for a year and a half, and used to talk about getting married, and the time when we’d both be stars.

Well, we’re both stars now, but the rest of the dream has vanished, and like every girl, I look back on my first love with tender memories and maybe a tear, though I know it can never come again.

I don’t know just what separated us, but Gilbert was working hard on one lot and I on another, and everyone came between us, and we were both very jealous.

And at last we had a violent quarrel. I don’t think either of us meant it, or dreamed it would be final. But it went on and on, and we were both too proud to make the first

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move, so the breach finally grew so wide and we were so far apart that we never made it up.

Mrs. Smith had been doing a lot of odd things about my business affairs. She kept trying to make me think that I wasn’t making good and that they were going to send me back to New York very soon. I worried about that all the time, and gave her more and more authority and power, because I thought she might keep them from doing that.

Finally, my Dad came West. Mrs. Smith had done a lot of things to make me think that Dad wasn’t what he should be and that he would handicap me in a business way. She said relatives always did and that it would make the bosses sore around the studios if my father came interfering. I believed her. I knew so little about things, and what with working the whole time and trying to enjoy myself in spare moments I was—just dumb, I guess.

When Daddy arrived I had quite made up my mind to leave him out of things and to show him at once that he must not interfere with this great “career” that seemed opening up before me. I felt that perhaps he actually would be out of the picture and—oh, I am ashamed to tell this, but it came out all right and perhaps will make you understand a little of what I went through—when he arrived I was going to be very cool and aloof with him. I was now a successful motion picture actress and I intended to keep my new position and put him in his place.

When we met I just said, “Hello, Dad,” and looked at him. I had on a new frock and, maybe, a new personality. I had learned so much about personality in the months I had been in Hollywood. I had been seeing the world and getting my first taste of success and admiration and money.

I had begun to stand out a little, to hear people say, “That’s Clara Bow. They say she’s very clever.”

Dad just stood and looked at me. He looked a little tired and worn, as though he

The Silent Film Quarterly・!58 had been working very hard. But as he looked the light went out of his face, the light and joy and welcome that had been his at seeing his little daughter again.

And suddenly I couldn’t do it. I didn’t care a—a rap, for Mrs. Smith, nor B.P. Shulberg, nor my motion picture career, nor Clara Bow. I just threw myself into his arms and kissed and kissed him, and we both cried like a couple of fool kids. Oh, it was wonderful. I knew then how lonely I had been for someone of my own, someone who belonged to me and really loved me.

We sat down and had a long talk, and right away Dad started looking into all these things. And soon I knew that Mrs. Smith hadn’t told me the truth at all. She knew that the work I had done was very successful and that they liked me very much. But she wanted to keep a hold on me so she made me think I wasn’t getting over and that nothing but her clever management kept me going.

About this time Frank Lloyd, the great director, was looking for a girl to play the flapper in Black Oxen. He had looked at everybody almost on the screen and tested them, but he had not found exactly what he wanted and finally somebody suggested me to him. I shall never forget the kind way he received me. He didn’t do as most people had done in Hollywood, try to make me think I didn’t have a chance and that they were doing me a favor when they let me work in their pictures. When I came into his office a big smile came over his face and he looked just tickled to death. And he told me instantly that I was just what he wanted.

Of all the people in motion pictures I owe the most to Frank Lloyd, for the chance he gave me to establish myself as the screen flapper in “Black Oxen”, for the direction he gave me which showed me entirely new vistas in screen acting—and to Elinor Glyn, for the way she taught me to

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bring out my personality, and the way she concentrated her great word “It” upon me.

All this time I was “running wild,” I guess, in the sense of trying to have a good time. I’d never had any fun in my life, as you know. And I was just a kid, under twenty, with a background of grief and poverty that I've tried to make you understand, even though I’ve had to bare my whole soul to do it. Why, I’d never been to a real party, a real dance. I’d never had a beautiful dress to wear, never had anyone send me flowers. It was like a new world to me, and I just drank it all in with that immense capacity of youth for understanding and loving excitement, I tried to make up for all my barren, hungry, starved-for-beauty years in no time at all.

Maybe this was a good thing, because I suppose a lot of that excitement, that joy of life, got onto the screen, and was the sort of flame of youth that made people enjoy seeing me. A philosopher might call it the swing of the pendulum, from my early years of terror and lack, to this time when all the pleasures of the world opened before me.

Just about this time I met Victor Fleming, who directed me in several pictures.

Victor Fleming is a wonderful man.

You have no idea how wonderful he is because the public scarcely knows about directors at all. But he is a man, older a great deal than I am, and very strong. He knows the world, he has cultivated a great sense of values through living, and he is deeply cultured. I liked him at once, though I didn’t feel in the least romantic about him.

But soon we became great friends and he had a tremendous and very fine influence on my life. He grew fond of me at once. And he began, with his strong intellect and understanding of life, to guide me in little ways. He showed me that life must be lived, not just for the moment, but for the years. He showed me what a future

The Silent Film Quarterly・!59 I might have as an actress, because I had made a place for myself that people seemed to want. He was very patient, and he taught me a great deal. He formed a lot of ideas that were running around in my mind.

M r. S h u l b e r g h a d g o n e i n t o Paramount and taken my contract, which he had signed a while before, with him. So I was working for Paramount, and they were beginning to do things for me and I could see that I was important to them. If looked as though if I made good in the chances they gave me I would be a big star.

So I began at that time to be subject to flattery, to people who had never paid any attention to me coming around to tell me how wonderful I was, to getting a salary that I didn’t in the least know how to spend or invest.

Under all this I use to feel a little lost.

I’d wake up in the morning and like the old woman in the nursery rhyme I’d wonder if this “could be really I.” I think that sense of things kept me from ever getting fatheaded, as the youngsters I know say.

But it all had to be coped with.

And in this crisis I learned to find the advice and companionship of a man like Victor Fleming invaluable. You couldn’t deceive him with any false glitter. He steered me straight a lot of times when I was going “haywire.”

And gradually our friendship seemed to deepen until it became the great thing in both our lives. I think he cared for me because he knew how much I wanted to get happiness out of life, and yet how frightened, in a way, I was of it,—and still am for that matter. Life has been so good to me. And yet, even now, with all I see before me, I cannot quite trust life. It did too may awful things to me in my youth. I still feel that I must beat it, grab everything quickly, enjoy the moment to the utmost, because tomorrow, life may bludgeon me down, as it did my mother, as it used to do

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to the people I lived with in Brooklyn when I was a kid.

I had had a pretty good education, in spite of lacks in other ways, and while Victor Fleming and I were engaged—we became engaged about that time—I began to read again, and to enjoy music, and to grow calmer about many things.

I was very happy. I was gradually growing more and more successful in my work. I loved it. There is one thing I must say about my work as a picture star. I have worked very hard. I’ve been at the studio terribly long hours. I've had very little time between pictures. It would probably amaze anyone to see how much of my life the last four years has been spent on a motion picture set. But I’ve loved it.

Perhaps the difference in age brought about the severing of the tie between Victor Fleming and me, though we are still the best of friends. Perhaps the feeling I had grown so gradually and under such circumstances that there wasn’t quite enough romance in it. I was young and I needed romance. Perhaps even he found that I didn’t give him the sort of companionship he needed.

Anyway, our feeling for each other became more and more that of close friendship and less and less that of lovers.

Until finally we agreed that it would be best that way, to be friends, nothing more.

Right after that, while I was making a picture once more with my dear Frank Lloyd, a picture called “Children of Divorce,” I met a young man named Gary Cooper. It was his first big part—he’d been a cowboy up in Nevada or something and played a small part in some Western picture. He was to play the lead. Of course he was new to the screen and didn’t know exactly how to do things, though he was wonderful and photographed marvelously.

I always like to help anyone who is new, so

The Silent Film Quarterly・!60

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I was willing to the public desire go over and over and the public scenes with him, imagination. I in rehearsal, to hope they’ll go help him out. on loving me a While we long time. I don’t were doing that, know. we fell in love. If I live in my little I wanted to be bungalow in the Clara Bow Beverly Hills of the screen, I’d with my father. I say—and how! It work very, very was very hard. I like wonderful and yo u n g p e o p l e beautiful while it and gaiety, and lasted. But—I have a lot of can’t altogether both around me explain. It’s very whenever I have difficult to be a time. I like to motion picture swim and ride star and be and play tennis. married. So I have a few many fail at it. I close friends, but have made up my mind The Clara Bow that Hollywood knows. not many acquaintances. I that I shan’t fail when I do “When I have told you about my short don’t have time. I am marry. I shall wait until I’m life, maybe you will understand why I am h a p p y — a s h a p p y a s the spirit of the jazz age.” sure. Gary was—so jealous. anyone can be who I know he wouldn’t mind believes that life isn’t quite my saying that. Anyway, we parted. to be trusted. I give everything I can to my Is that so many romances for a girl of pictures and the rest to being young and twenty-two? Haven’t most girls been trying to make my father happy, and filling engaged two or three times, before they’re up the gaps in my education. twenty-two? Yet just because I am Clara I don’t think I’m very different from Bow and it is always printed, it sounds as any other girl—except that I work harder though I were a regular flapper vamp. And and have suffered more. And I have red I’m not at all. hair.

It seems to me I've said very little All in all, I guess I’ m just Clara about my career, after I became successful.

Bow. And Clara Bow is just what life made But the story of every success is much the her. That’s what I’ve tried to tell you in this same. You work and suffer and battle and story. I’m terribly grateful and still a little starve, and then you get your nose in a little incredulous of my success. It seems like a way and then - you get the break. And if dream. But—I’m willing to work just as you have it in you, you make good. And hard as ever to go on having it. Beyond then you just go on working, getting more that, I haven’t yet evolved any plans or money and loving the fame and the desires. admiration of the public.

After all, I’m still only twenty-two.

Somehow, I had managed to make a That isn’t so very old, is it? niche for myself. I’d created a Clara Bow by being myself largely I guess, who fitted

A special edition of Silent Film Quarterly, featuring the true stories of three of the silent era’s biggest stars…

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POLA NEGRI

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TOM MIX

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CLARA BOW

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