A GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE
When you go to the theatre, sit in a comfortable seat, and look at the gay, laughing girls who are doing all sorts of stunts in the front row, you are evidently under the impression that their lives are simply one unending series of revels and that they live in luxurious ease. In your fancy you see them going to magnificent apartments to enjoy late dinners washed down by high-priced wine; you think, perhaps, that they dress just as you see them on the stage, and that all they have to do is ask for anything they happen to want and it is theirs.
Your imagination paints you a wonderful picture of love behind the scenes, but like children’s fairy tales, half is a dream.
You are simply bringing into existence a mental painting in very attractive colors, and if you could make it real it would be a very fine thing for the girl who makes up that she may look well from behind the footlights.
There are few short cuts to the stage and the roads are for the most part hard and tiresome. The woman who gets there, and by that I mean the one who finally lands with a reputation, usually has a past that would make interesting reading—if it could be published, which is out of the question.
To-day there is a woman in New York who is a star.
So far as real talent is concerned she ought to have been a star years ago, but there was some hitch and she failed to connect.
She’s all right now, however, and when she pulls down her fat bundle of bills every week she doesn’t think of the old days on the Pacific Coast when she was doing one turn an hour in the mining camps, and well content if she got enough at the end of the show to pay for her room and give her a balance on the side to keep up her wardrobe—stage wardrobe, I mean—for she didn’t seem to care much how she dressed when on the street, and so far as that was concerned, she was on the street very little, for reasons that are obvious.
She was a nice looking little girl in those days, full of ginger and all that sort of thing, and she had the kind of magnetism that made a good many men think they couldn’t live without her. She was bright and saucy, and happy-go-lucky, taking things as they came, singing her songs with an abandon and grace that went a long way toward filling up the house.