I
I see a piece in the paper where that ex-leading headliner of the old German Big-Time Circuit, William Hohenzollern, him that used to appear in the spiritualistic act known as "Me and God," claims he had no hand in starting those fireworks in Europe which has recently ended in a Fourth of July celebration. And although myself a good American and looking with doubt upon any statement known to be German, I am sort of inclined to believe him. At any rate, to believe that he was not the whole cheese in the matter, but only a sort of limp limberger, or swiss, and full of holes. Because it's my experience personally myself, that a strong personality with a clean-cut idea can usually get a thing done if they elect theirself boss and stick on the job until it is finished, but if they call a committee meeting and discuss the action before them, the whole idea is likely to get stalled. Why, look at Congress! Not that I, being a mere lady of the female sect, know why or how they get stalled, or on just what. But it's a cinch they do and are, and you can prove it by any editorial page in the country. And it seems that Billy the Bone-head, confessed to the reporter, which managed to get this Sunday story printed, that a committee meeting of Yonkers or something was called about the war, he, Bill the Badman, not having the bean to go to it alone, and it was them ruined the war, or so he says. Which goes to show that not alone in the theatrical and moving-picture worlds do the heads of departments alibi their flivvers, but also in the King-business, and it's a habit which may even yet ruin the former, as it pretty near has the latter, unless they quit shirking and deliver better goods. Because if the Head Has-Been had had any real thinker and had thought up the war all by his little self and forced it on his book-keeper, cashier and so forth, he might of got away with it like Napoleon and Rockefeller and Eva Tanguay and a lot of them which has thrust riches and success upon theirselves.
But no committee can ever do that sort of thing. It takes a single-handed personality, and I guess mabe the biggest bluff Germany has had to confess to is her ex-leader. He seems the A-1 example of how true it is that well-known tailors' ad, "Clothes make the man." Also it inspires me to invent a quotation to hang beside the famous one of Shakespeare's, I think it is "Do it now!" which you see so often, mine being "Do it yourself!" Well, you will if you are the able one on a committee. Everybody which has served on one knows that every committee is composed of the one which does all the work and three to six others which uses most of their vitality and imagination in thinking up excuses and offering them.
Well, anyways, the foregoing is why I simply eliminated the other members of my Theatrical Ladies' Committee of Welcome to Our Returning Heroes. And eliminating them was so simple, too. I just didn't call any committee. And why would I, what with the knowledge I had gained through former experiences? Believe you me, a lady which learns by experience is a great little time-saver, although admittedly rare, but in my line you don't fall out of a air-plane more than once, and any successful picture actress and dancer like myself will tell you the same. So as to committees, none for me, thanks just the same, as the man said to the soda clerk the morning of July first, 1919 A. D., which is Latin for Anti-Drinking. Not that I will ever again try to get into the strong-character class with the aforementioned celebrities, for a reputation for doing anything well is as good as a signed contract to do it. And my advice to young girls is, don't let it be known you can do anything well or you'll have to deliver constantly. Look as ignorant as possible whenever anything is suggested except the thing you are burning to get after, or your time will be taken up with a lot of useless side-lines that get you nowheres. There is a person for every job if you just let the job alone until the right person finds it. Did you ever notice the way simps which can't do a thing always get it done for them? You have! Well—from this on, here's where I look like a poor fish whenever anybody outside of a motion-picture magnate or a theatrical manager makes a noise like work to be done.
All the amateur stuff can be taken care of by the sweet womanly women who ain't got anybody to support except their dressmakers, and not by a mere professional earning near a hundred thousand a year like I. My final lesson on working with volunteer boards and committees is a un-wept memory, and believe you me, that Chateau Terry battle had nothing on some of the War Relief Committee board rooms I seen in executive session and keep the home fires burning is right, we done it, especially the White Kittens Belgian Relief, which it's a fact we nearly split over whether we'd print our postcard appeals on pink or yellow cards!
Well, anyways, I suppose these relief committees was a big help to them that was on them if not to any one else, and after all a lot of money somehow got left to do good with after expenses was paid. But the biggest relief I know of come from relieving ourselfs of them relief committees, and the last of all was the Welcome Home one.
I wouldn't of gone on it in the first place only I was so low in my mind. And who wouldn't be a little low even with my cheery disposition after such a morning as I went through, first commencing with the loss of Maude.
Not that I had ever liked her nor 'Frisco, her husband, either, but losing her was worse than living with her any day, and when Ma come in and broke the news I wasn't in any mood for it, struggling as I was over the joint contract which Goldringer had just sent on from Los Angeles as a nice surprise and welcome for Jim which we were expecting to hear he would be leaving France any day now. It called for seventy-five thousand per each of us for six joint pictures, our expenses to the coast, and I was holding out for a car while there and a special publicity man of our own to be paid by them, but chosen by us, meaning Rosco, which has so faithfully let the public know every time I sneezed these last five years and has a way of disguising a two column ad so's the editor thinks it's a news item.
Well, anyways, I was reading through all that foreign language portion of this contract and had waded past about a page of "to wit, viz.: party of the first part" stuff, which sounds like it didn't mean anything, but is where they sometimes slip one over on you, when in come Ma with a big home-made cruller partly in her hand and partly in her face. She was dreadfull agitated but had to get rid of the first part of the second party before she could speak, and I put in a few seconds of watchful waiting, wondering how could she do it, for Ma had put on at least thirty lbs. the last few months and believe you me, she was no slif before then, weighing some amount she would never tell just what and anybody knows what that means with a woman. But up to just recent she had gone through spells where she was making at least the faint motions of dieting, or when not that, sighing and saying she hadn't really ought to over every second helping but taking it. Do you get me? You do!
Since she had heard Jim was coming back, however, she had taken to eating everything in sight regardless. It give me real pleasure to think of any mother-in-law feeling that way about her daughter's husband and dancing partner coming back, for with many mothers it is nothing of the kind. So I made no remarks upon the cruller, and finally Ma give a gulp and gasped out the bad news.
"Maude is gone!" she says.
"Gone?" says I. "Whatter you mean, gone?"
"I can't find her no place!" says Ma. "And I looked everywheres!"
This give me a most unpleasant feeling down my back, and I got to my feet in a hurry.
"Are you sure she ain't hid?" I says, "like the last time," I says.
"Come and see for yourself!" says Ma, and I went, you can bet on that! And sure enough, she wasn't in the box. Ma lifted the wire off the top and lifted out the two old sofa cushions we had put in for comfort and only Maude's husband, 'Frisco, was there. He was as usual lying in about five coils like a boiler-heater, with his wicked-looking flat head on the top, and he stuck out his oyster fork of a tongue, and give us a little hiss, much as to say, why was we always disturbing him. But no Maude.
"Ma!" I began, catching a guilty look on her face. "Ma Gilligan, you left that snake out again! After all the times I ast you not to!"
"Well, it was just for a minute!" she says. "I was playing with her, and then I thought maybe the crullers I had made was cool by then and I went and got a few and when I come back she was gone!"
"Well, she's got to be found, that's all!" I snapped. "All this comes from you insisting on keeping in with them low circus people and boarding their acts for them!"
"But Madame Estelle had to stay with her husband when he fell offen the trapeze and they so devoted!" says Ma. "And I didn't take the big snakes—the substitute is using them—but only her own dear pets which the landlady wouldn't leave her have in her room."
"And now one of them is loose in my room!" I says, "which is the general result of charity which, as the poet says, had ought to begin at home," I says. "And you know, Ma, how I feel about snakes. There's nobody in the psycopathic ward got anything on me. If only they had even a few feet instead of so many yards, I wouldn't mind them so much."
"Well, now Mary, I'm real sorry," says Ma. "But not half so sorry as Madame Estelle will be if anything happens to Maude! I'm real fond of the little beauty myself, and if you had been with a circus all the years I was, you would understand her better!"
Well, believe you me, it wasn't a lack of understanding with me, it was a religious conviction, and why not, for hadn't them beasts made trouble beginning with the original eviction of undesirable tenants, and was I to think it likely that our own janitor would be any more lenient if Maude was to get, say, as far as the elevator? Keeping snakes never got a tenant in right yet and loose ones might set the first of May forward as many months as was necessary. Not to mention my own personal feelings in the matter, which it's a fact I once broke a contract on the Small-Time years ago because a snake-charmer come off just as I was going on and I used to meet her and them in the wings every time.
Well, anyways, I will say it for Ma, she certainly turned in and helped me make a thorough search for Maude, which was going some for a lady of her figure. Looking for a vanished snake in a apartment means considerable gymnastics, because nothing can be overlooked with safety, and I didn't want that parlor-eel slipping anything over on me—especially her cold stomach in the middle of the night across my face, for instance.
So I and Ma looked under all the furniture and in the pedalcase of the pianola and in the vases and behind the steam radiators, back of the big gold clock, inside the victrola, under the rugs, back of the pictures on the wall and every place:—but no Maude. Finally we even took a look out in the hall, although we knew nobody had opened the front door, and after that we opened the wall safe where we keep our diamonds in a stocking, this being a compromise between Ma's habits and my common-sense. And then we had a peep into the ice-box where Ma found a saucer of pudding which she had someways overlooked at supper but no snake.
And after we had felt under the bath-tub with my best lavender umbrella which what with the limousine it was the first use I ever had for it, and then taken a forlorn hope into the soiled-clothes hamper, we give it up, and sat down with ruined georgette blouses and perfectly wild looking hair and all heated up like a couple of wrestlers. Any one coming in then would of thought we had been indulging in a family discussion of some kind, and for a matter of that it's the truth. I said a few raw remarks about the kind of a home she run for me and I working as hard as cider to keep it and now she left snakes around, Gawd knows where, and how would a artist like myself get the rest to do justice to my work on the bomb-explosion scene in the last reel of "Bosh or Bolshevik?" which I was going to be shot in only the next day, and if she had to support me instead of I her, she would have a right to leave any animals or minerals around she chose, but this was my flat and although Gawd knew she was welcome, pretty soon we would have none if I was to be made a nervous wreck out of instead of the biggest nerve in pictures. Yes, I said that and a lot more pretty mean stuff as only a daughter can—for even with my refinement I am but a mere human after all, and under the glittering success of my career is several common human failings and at times I act no different from any less well-known female in the bosom of my family.
So I had the last word and Ma was in wrong and went to get lunch without a come-back out of her. Alas! Had I but canned that foolish chatter of mine! But how could I know she was going to act like she done later because of it? You can't remember forwards and if a person could, it's ten to one they'd quit before they was off the bottle and go back to Heaven whence they come, life being so full of mistakes you could of avoided if only you had done something different from what you did!