And when she began to work nothing seemed to tire her. At four o’clock in the afternoon, that hour when the average screen performer begins to wonder if she’ll melt before she takes root or take root before she melts, the great prima donna was as radiant with energy as she was at eight o’clock in the morning. The explanation of this sustained vitality lay deeper than her undoubted physical strength. She herself voiced it one day during her second engagement with the Lasky Company.
She was then making “Joan the Woman.” It was during the most intense heat of the California Summer. During this particular set she wore a suit of armor which must have been about as soothing to her feelings as wrist-warmers to a resident of Bombay. The set, which had been called for one hour, was not actually taken until more than four hours’ later. This wait, so characteristic of a studio day, was rendered more oppressive by the thud of adjacent carpentry work and by experimentation with the glaring electric lights.
While all this was going on a lady of the court of Charles VII. sat with her make-up box on her knee and from time to time dabbed with powder beads of perspiration rising above the surface of grease-paint. This manifestation of warmth was not unprovoked. For the lady wore a velvet dress with heavy trimming of fur and her head was engulfed in one of those gigantic coiffures prescribed for mediæval times. No wonder that as she administered her powder she made sweet moan about the hardships of life on “the lot.”
“People that think this life’s easy,” she muttered at last, “let them try it on a July day—let them wait around for hours all tucked up in these hot-water bottles of clothes. Whew! Say, are they ever going to start shooting?”
“Cut out your grouching,” retorted a more stoical fellow sufferer, “look how Jerry’s taking it.”
“Jerry” presented, as a matter of fact, anything but a wilted appearance. She was talking, now to this person, now to that. Her eyes were sparkling, her white teeth flashed in a frequent smile. Piqued by such revelations of fortitude, the first lady of the court walked over to her.
“Won’t you tell me how you do it, Miss Farrar?” she asked. “Don’t you ever mind anything; the heat or the long waits or anything?”
“Jerry” threw back her head and laughed heartily. “Not a bit of it,” she answered, “I’m too much interested all the time to know what’s happening on the outside of me.”
It was during the production of this same play that some gentlemen of the court of Charles VII. availed themselves of a contemporary solace. A long shot had been taken of the French court and it had been taken, according to custom, four times. None of these occasions had revealed anything wrong and it was only when De Mille “saw the rushes”—the technical term describing a first view of the previous day’s shots—that he discovered an anachronism which would have made Sir Walter Scott’s offenses in this direction seem blameless.
“For Heaven’s sake,” he cried, “look at that! The gentlemen of the fourteenth century are chewing gum!”