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.
In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.
There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's expectations and made her pantomime singularly legible. The modulations of her thought from one extreme mood to another were always traceable. This was true of the least feelings. Ferriday would say: “Now you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate, you telephone, a girl answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile.”
Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each gradation of thought. “I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd better not. Yes. No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central! Hurry up! Gramercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816? Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No, there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very severe. Hello, Harry.”
All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all she told it, and adored her.
Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her on the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character. It was delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or girlish malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She was so pretty that she could afford to act ugly.