He must have been conscious of the antagonism of these strangers surrounding him, but if he was he gave no sign. Unconsciously as if the many hostile eyes had been directed toward some other person, he went on talking to the woman who was with him. Was he really insensitive or did he command his face to be a mask? Afterward I heard that Von Stroheim is quite aware of the personal odium with which his professional characterisations of brutal German officer and villainous foreign aristocrat have surrounded him. Some say, indeed, that he cherishes this reputation, that not for worlds would he lift his finger to soften the hated impression. Yet as against this I have heard what Von Stroheim has said to his intimate friends. “When Elliott Dexter goes into a café or some other public place,” he once remarked, “people exclaimed delightedly. ‘There he is--oh, isn’t he charming!’ But when I come in it’s ‘Ugh, there’s Von Stroheim’; and if it’s a man who notices me he’s very likely to start off my name with a curse. I must say it hurts a little--in fact, it often makes me feel very disappointed in the American people--to think that they can be so childlike as to confuse me, Von Stroheim, the man, with Von Stroheim, the actor, to imagine that because I play the parts I do I must be that kind of a man.” Of course this confusion itself is a testimony to the excellence of his work, to that dramatic insight which had made numerous fellow professionals regard him as the most finished actor on the screen--with the exception of Chaplin, to whom, of course, because of the different character of their plays, he can scarcely be compared. As to his personal manner this has all the traditional grace of the cultured Continental. But there is more to Von Stroheim than the clicking of heels, the bows, the gestures, the precise phrasing with its slightly foreign accent, the air of attention which isolates the person to whom he is talking from all the world. There are many products of this mould, and, though over the American mind they usually exert the fascination of strangeness, such mannerisms do not explain the arresting quality of his personality. This lies in an expression which, both sad and gay, thoughtful and vivacious, reproduces the blend achieving the charm of his own Vienna. Ex-nobleman and present film star! Surely no story on the screen could present greater contrasts of fortune than this story behind the screen. He himself is thoroughly conscious of it, and one day, sitting in his shirt-sleeves in his office, he remarked to some one I know, “Strange, strange, what America does for you! Do you know that if my old self, the Von Stroheim of Austria, were to have met my present self, the Von Stroheim of Hollywood, he would have fought a duel with him? For I’m everything now that I was brought up to despise.