New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play always
the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not required even
to follow the logic of the story. For a while she would play a bit in
a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would
play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene in that
scene. It might be a year further along in the story. It was exciting.
Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up as
a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third picture
was as nearly the same as possible.
Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold
newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was a
rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted canvas
walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it.
There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, pouting with
starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.
She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back. The
scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes to and
from.
An officer of the “Cruelty” came and took her from the garret. That was
the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage with a
multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of the story was
taken.
She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She came
in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter. Her
father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing.
Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went in the motor to a
dismal street where she was shown coming out of the tenement, and going
back to it gin-laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was
photographed going in with her young millionaire.
The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted
in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and
she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers on a
corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but the change
incessant.
The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played on
the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in a closed
automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the home of some
wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies on the bribe of a
gift to his favorite benevolence.
There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching
herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or
gorgeous, sad or gay.
One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it is
always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to one and
curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe and feel is
magic unbelievable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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