There is nothing waspish about Rogers’s fun-making. Such a quality of humour as his implies, in fact, a true sense of life’s values, a very wise and mellow spirit. Nothing shows this more clearly than a communication I received from him not very long ago. “Dear Sam,” it read, “when you first announced that you were going to write this book of memoirs I must say it didn’t create much of a stir in movie circles till they learned what memoirs were. Then when they found it meant truths, everybody, including myself, commenced to get leery and wondered if you were going to remember _everything_. Now, I don’t know what you are going to put into this catalogue of yours, but I do hope for the salvation of the Infant Industry you don’t tell all--especially not what some of my pictures grossed. “But if you’ve got to say something about me, say this--they were the two happiest years of my life that I spent on the old Goldwyn lot. We had some great troops there in those days--all of them good fellows. There was Miss Frederick, whom everybody that ever met her liked; Miss Madge Kennedy, than whom we have no sweeter character of stage or screen; Mabel Normand, the ‘kidder’ and good fellow, friend of every soul on earth, whose quiet and not-seen charity has helped many a poor soul in need; Tom Moore, as good an Irishman as ever lived, and not stuck on his looks either. “Also say this: I made in the two years I was on the lot twelve consecutive pictures--all with one director, Clarence Badger. That, I think, is a record--to be with the same director. And if there is anything worth while in any of them, it was certainly due to his efforts, as I am no actor. But he is patient, capable, and the finest man I ever met.” I have saved this communication because nothing else could reveal more forcibly the tolerance, the modesty, and the quick appreciation of anything good in us frail mortals which form the source of Will Rogers’s ever-welling humour. _Chapter Twenty-one_ SOME AUTHORS WHO HAVE TRAVELLED TO HOLLYWOOD From previous chapters of mine it is evident that Mr. Emerson’s suggestion about hitching your wagon to a star is fraught with certain dangers. I had harnessed the Goldwyn Company to that steed, and my ride had been anything but a smooth one. Is it any wonder, indeed, that after the various disappointments attending my exploitation of “big names,” I began to distrust the wisdom of my course? Gradually there grow up within me a belief that the public was tiring of the star and a corresponding conviction that the emphasis of production should be placed upon the story rather than upon the player. In the poverty of screen drama lay, so I felt, the weakness of our industry, and the one correction of this weakness which suggested itself to me was a closer co-operation between author and picture-producer.