Motion picture actors and actresses; Motion pictures
Quick as a flash Miss Farrar sent her maid to her residence in
Hollywood to obtain a costume from her own personal wardrobe. And
when she put this raiment into the extra’s hand it was for keeps. She
sometimes lent her fine jewels to people in the cast, and her frequent
“small” gifts to those about her were what most of us would call large.
Such donations were always performed with a certain splendour of
gesture that made one think of a mediæval prince taking off the gold
chain around his neck to give to somebody who had chanced to say, “What
a beautiful piece of jewelry you are wearing.”
If, indeed, Miss Farrar is a captain of industry, she belongs to that
particular branch which flourished in the Florence of the fifteenth
century.
While she was making “Maria Rosa” there befell Miss Farrar the great
romantic adventure of which the world has heard so much. As a result of
my interview with Mr. Lou Tellegen he was engaged by the Lasky Company
to go to Hollywood during the Summer of 1915. He was not playing in
Miss Farrar’s productions and it was not until after some days spent in
California that the two met.
Mr. Fred Kley was responsible for the introduction. Here at this
widely known figure of the film world I feel bound to pause for a few
words of tribute. Kley, who now occupies an important position in the
organization of the Famous Players-Lasky organization, had gone to
California with Cecil de Mille. He it was who had selected the original
site of the livery-stable, and after the Lasky Company moved there he
had attended to a wide variety of details.
He kept books--often on the back of stray envelopes; he hired extra
performers; he assembled properties, and when De Mille imported several
rattlesnakes for the production of “The Squaw Man” it was he, I
believe, who ministered to these pets. I am sure that Briareus with his
hundred hands never accomplished more than did honest, faithful, Fred
Kley with his limited equipment.
I shall give Mr. Kley’s own account of the introduction, for certainly
nothing could be more vivid. “Mr. Tellegen happened to be with me one
day,” he recounts, “when Miss Farrar, still in the Spanish costume she
had been wearing in ‘Maria Rosa’ walked across the lot. ‘I want to meet
Miss Farrar,’ said Mr. Tellegen, ‘Won’t you take me over?’ I did and
I’ve never seen anything like it before nor since. It was just as if a
spark came from his eyes and was met by one from hers.
“They began speaking in French right away,” adds he, “and of course I
couldn’t understand. But, believe me, there’s a whole lot in a tone,
and their tones gave them away as much as their eyes did. He walked
across the lot with her, then to her dressing-room. And after that
you’d see them together all the time just the minute they could get
away from a set.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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