He had a remarkable love for motion pictures. This was partly due to the fact that at Rushmore there was hardly any other diversion. But it was likewise because actors who first appeared to him only as people who moved about the screen suddenly became real and interesting to him. Anyway, he used to go to the theaters in Rapid City several times a week whether they changed programs or not. He saw Jeanette MacDonald seven nights in succession in Naughty Marietta, and Grace Moore, Irene Dunne, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and others of the sisterhood with less concentration.
Almost as much as the glamour girls he loved the pictured cowboys. Not that he cared whether the cowboy was a good hand or bad, but he liked the horses.
For more quiet relaxation he enjoyed Wild West stories of the good old dime-novel kind. He and Mrs. Borglum used to read them aloud to each other on long cross-country trips. Although there are countless Wild West story magazines on the newsstands, they discovered that only one is recognized by connoisseurs. In the sparsely settled regions of the West—even in San Antonio—this magazine was hard to find, and Gutzon sometimes used to lay out a trip so that on a special day he would be at a place where it would be available. Thus he would miss no time getting to the next installment of some continued story.
Gutzon used to look for stories by Max Brand on the ground that his literary style was superior. Long afterward he discovered that Max Brand was actually a well-known writer who had made a fortune writing under different pseudonyms.
In meeting friends new or old the sculptor’s outstanding trait was his unworldly attitude, totally unaffected by praise or blame, by newspaper gossip or radio commentators. This is exemplified in a story that he used to tell on himself.
During his early days in New York the actress Blanche Bates, who had known him in California, invited him to a matinee where he found himself the lone male in a box of women. He noticed that opera glasses were being turned on the box, presumably because of the exceptional beauty of the woman beside him, and tactfully he withdrew into the background.
As he was filing out after the performance he overtook Miss Bates and asked, “Who was that striking woman sitting next to me?”
Her laugh was spontaneous as she called to her friend, “Oh, Lillian, here’s one man in the world who never heard of you!”
He had been spending the afternoon with the most glamorous woman in the world, Lillian Russell, and he hadn’t realized it. He was not embarrassed. He never liked to be told in advance the names and positions of people he was likely to meet.
“I don’t care to be hampered by other people’s opinions—or guesses,” he said. “I like to discover people for themselves. And I do.”