The difference of degree in the attitude of Mary Pickford to pictures and that of Mabel Normand is indicated by their varying response to European travel. Chaplin once said to a friend of mine, “You know, I was in Paris with Mary and Doug and often they really seemed lost without their pictures.” Far from this state of mind, so familiar in the American business man temporarily implicated with a gondola or a ruined temple, is the eagerness with which Mabel Normand returned last Autumn from her first trip abroad.
“Oh, how I enjoyed every minute of it!” she told me. “Pictures, music, all the funny outdoor cafés, all the funny people!”
She has always been an inveterate reader. This, of course, is at present one of the fashionable claims of the screen star, and in some cases I am obliged to say that the claim rests on very flimsy foundations. Right here, indeed, I feel compelled to anticipate by telling a story illustrative of this point:
One day Charlie Chaplin went with me to a Los Angeles hospital where a friend of mine was recuperating. Left alone in the corridor, he wandered into a little sitting-room. It was filled with books representing the most advanced taste in fiction, poetry, and criticism.
“Whose room is this?” asked Chaplin of the nurse hovering over the scene.
Quite evidently she did not recognise him, for she replied without a vestige of embarrassment, “Oh, this belongs to Mrs. Mildred Harris Chaplin.”
Charlie’s face underwent a number of changes.
“Oh, indeed? And is she reading these books,” he finally inquired.
“Oh, no,” returned the nurse in a matter-of-fact tone. “The books she really reads are in a little closet in her bedroom.”
Mabel Normand, however, does not regard books merely for their furnishing value. She really gets into action on “literachoor.”