“Good night,” said Gaston, despairingly, to himself. But to Mr. Miles he said, “Now I’ll tell you what you have to do, you must have another actor handy to go on for me to-night, for I cannot take any more chances.”
Well, they took the scene another time, ruining neither Mr. Bell nor his grand new suit, and as this time the scene was static-less, the day was saved for Gaston. But “never again” vowed he. And “never again” vowed the director.
David Miles kept good his promise and when Gaston’s season in Washington closed, he joined Reliance. There he and George Loane Tucker soon became known as the “Hall Room Boys.” For in an old brownstone they shared a third floor back—also a dress suit. And if both boys happened to be going out into society the same night, whoever arrived home first and got himself washed up and brushed up first, had the option on that one tuxedo.
The hall-room days of George Loane Tucker were brief. “Traffic in Souls,” the white-slave picture that he produced for Universal, put him over. An unhappy loss to the motion picture world was Mr. Tucker’s early death; for that truly great picture, “The Miracle Man,” his tribute to the world’s motion picture library de luxe, promised a career of great brilliance.
Mr. Tucker had come rightfully by his great talent, for his mother, Ethel Tucker, was an actress of note and a clever stage director also. As leading woman in stock repertoire at Lathrop’s Grand Dime Theatre of Boston, she had a tremendous popularity in her time. And long years afterward, she too went into “the pictures” in Hollywood, for a very brief period.
Mr. Tucker’s “Miracle Man” brought stardom to its three leading players, Lon Chaney, Betty Compson, and Tommy Meighan.
Tommy Meighan’s leap to fame was surprising to both friends and family. For Tommy had been considered, not exactly the black sheep of the family, but rather the ne’er-do-well. During the run of “Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford,” both being members of the cast, Frances Ring, sister to the lustrous Blanche of “Rings on My Fingers” and “In the Good Old Summertime” fame, had married Mr. Meighan, Tommy becoming through this matrimonial alliance the least important member of the Ring family of three clever sisters, Blanche, Frances, and Julie. An obscure little Irishman, Tommy trailed along, with a voice that might not have taken him so very far on the dramatic stage.
Like weaving in and out the paper strips of our kindergarten mats is the story of the Ring sisters and Tommy. For Los Angeles beckoned, with Blanche headlined at the Orpheum, Frances in stock, and Tommy playing somewhere or other.
Blanche and her husband, Charles Winninger, a member of her company, were invited by Louise Orth for a week-end out Las Palmas way. The week-end proved very significant in results; for through their hostess, who was leading woman at the Elko Studios, a meeting between Mr. Winninger and Mr. Lehrman was arranged the next week which led directly to Charlie’s signing on the dotted line at the fabulous salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a week—to do comedies. But Charlie’s pale blue eyes did not register well enough on the screen, and the comedy note in his characterizations thus being lost, the good job just naturally petered out.
Then Miss Ring, who had now taken over one of Los Angeles’s show places, on the Fourth of July gave a party—a red, white, and blue party at which were gathered more notables than had as yet ever been brought together at a social function in Los Angeles. It was Broadway transplanted. There were David Belasco, Laura Hope Crews, Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Julian Eltinge, Geraldine Farrar, Jesse Lasky, Mr. Goldwyn, Wallace and Mrs. Reid, Mr. Morris Gest, then representative for Geraldine Farrar and Raymond Hitchcock, who viewing from the back piazza the distant lights of Los Angeles was supposed to have said something when he remarked, “This reminds one of a diamond bar pin.”