“How jolly!” said she, according to report. “This reminds me of the old days at the Biograph when I was getting twenty-five a week.”
If Miss Pickford has, indeed, any vanity, it is focussed more upon her sense of being a good business woman than it is upon her ability as an actress. All of her friends realise this, and Charlie Chaplin, upon whose warm personal friendship with Douglas Fairbanks and his wife I shall dwell in a later chapter, is very fond of teasing her upon this one vulnerable point.
“Where do you get this idea that you’re such a fine business woman, Mary,” Charlie asked her laughingly one evening.
“Why, I am,” she retorted indignantly. “Everybody knows it.”
“I can’t see it,” announced Charlie. “You have something the public wants and you get the market price for it.
“And then,” recounts Charlie gleefully, “I wish you had seen Doug. He looked as if he were going to hit me.”
A year or so ago I was at one of the big hotels in Hollywood with an author making his first visit to the place. He looked around at the dining-room with the faces of so many famous motion-picture folks, and then he turned to me.
“I don’t see Mary and Doug,” he remarked. “Where are they?”
“No,” said I, “and if you live in Hollywood for a year you’ll probably never see them—unless you go to their home.”
Poor chap! If he had gone to Switzerland and been told that the Alps never came out he could not have looked more disappointed.