While he was in Hollywood M. Maeterlinck had a home with a tennis-court in the rear. To this court clings one of the most cherished memories of Hollywood, for on it frequently appeared Mme. Maeterlinck, and on Mme. Maeterlinck always appeared, not a skirt, but bloomers. She is a charming little dark thing, years younger than her husband, this Mme. Maeterlinck. The pair seemed always very happy together, but one day I heard something which opened up an inevitable vista before me. On that day the American manager of the foreign author came to Mr. Lehr and asked him if there was not some employment in the studio for Mme. Maeterlinck.
“Why, no,” responded Mr. Lehr; “I can’t think of a thing she would do.”
“Not some little job?—it really doesn’t matter how small,” urged the other.
“But, my dear fellow, why should the wife of M. Maeterlinck be wanting any kind of a job?” questioned my associate, still untouched by this new plea for Belgian relief. “Her husband is far from poor, you know. Hasn’t he an estate and investments abroad—those and all the royalties he is getting? Besides, of course, he have given him an advance on his contract with us.”
The manager shrugged and then he smiled—a sapient smile. “To be sure. But madame—well, there are times perhaps when she longs for a little money of her own so she can snap her fingers at Monsieur.”
This dialogue, taken in connection with other phases of my association with Maeterlinck, persuades me that this creator of reverent prose and mystic drama is afflicted with the same economic fixation—I borrow the term from psychoanalysis—which manifests itself so often among those whom some art has enriched. Screen stars and actresses, comedians and tragedians, singers and writers—often in thinking over those whom I have met I have been struck by the number who would be capable of instructing Benjamin Franklin in the ways of thrift.
I remember that once I asked a man who had long been associated with Ben Turpin, the widely known cross-eyed comedian, what sort of chap Turpin really was.
“Well,” said he laughingly, “he’s this sort of a chap. He makes a lot of money and he keeps almost as much. He has an unpretentious little home manned with not more than one servant, and in the home there is a suite of parlour furniture. It’s gilt, I think—anyway it’s quite showy, and the Turpins are very much concerned over its welfare. They keep it covered up except when somebody calls, and even then they’re not reckless. For they say that when the door-bell rings some one always peeps out of the window to see who is there. If it’s a stranger, off come the furniture-coverings. But if it’s a friend, the insurance is kept on.”
This amusing story is always linked in my mind with the one which Will Rogers is fond of telling on Chaplin. “A girl went riding up in the Hollywood mountains,” says he, “and was thrown and lost for two days. When it was thought they weren’t going to find her, Charlie offered a reward of a thousand dollars in all the papers. It looked at that time, mind you, as if they weren’t going to find her. But they did. So the people that found her offered five hundred of the thousand to anybody that would find Charlie.”
For me one of the most amazing revelations regarding M. Maeterlinck concerns his indifference to music. It was in this country and while he was with the Goldwyn Company that he heard for the first time a rendition of the opera “Pelléas et Mélisande.” One of my publicity men sat near him in his box at this performance, and he reported that from the large placid face those ethereal strains which Debussy wove about his own play drew not a sign of response. It was quite evident that the Belgian author perhaps considered Dr. Johnson somewhat too broad-minded when he said that music was a sound more agreeable than other noises.