In about the second year of the Lasky Company’s existence, Mae Busch, a little Australian girl with big hazel eyes fringed by incredibly long lashes, was acting in one of Lasky’s vaudeville companies. For some reason or other she bolted the show in Los Angeles, and soon after this she made her first appearance in pictures as one of Mack Sennett’s famous bathing girls. While she was in Sennett’s organization she became involved in a drama of love and jealousy and revenge which had nothing to do with screen performance. The situation, familiar to many of the Hollywood colony, resulted temporarily in her professional overthrow. A pathetic little figure, she wandered from studio to studio in search of work. Unable to find it, she finally married. Perhaps, as one of her friends has suggested, the marriage was the result of gratitude on her part to the man who did not let the world’s desertion shake his love for her.
Be that as it may, the marriage proved disastrous, and for some years the pretty little Australian girl went down under the deep waters which have submerged so many others in the profession. Poor, unhappily married, the victim of several severe illnesses, who would have believed that Mae Busch would ever come back?
Those who found this belief difficult did not reckon with the mettle which is her distinguishing quality. One day she said to herself—this is the story as she tells it—“This has got to stop. Others are getting away with it. Why not I?” This crystallisation brought her to Von Stroheim, who gave her a part in “Foolish Wives.” Small as the part was, she made it stand out. Von Stroheim praised her work. So, too, did no less a person than Charlie Chaplin. The latter, in fact, promised her a big part in his next picture.
It was about the time when she had come to an agreement with Chaplin and the Goldwyn Company was absorbed in the problem of finding an ideal Glory Quayle for its production of “The Christian.” This search is an answer to those who complain that the picture organisations are content with inferior dramatic talent and with types falling short of any real characterisation. We literally sifted the country for Hall Caine’s heroine. Beautiful and near-beautiful, famous and obscure, East and West, young and middle-aged—all were represented in those four thousand women of whom we made tests.
Of course everybody in the industry had heard of our search, but it was not until the contest had been going on for some time that the idea of entering it occurred to Mae Busch. When she did finally come to the studio she has often said that it was with no expectation of being victorious. Nobody was more surprised than she herself when out of those four thousand applicants we chose her for Glory Quayle!
How did she do it! This is the way she herself tells of the experience: “When they told me I’d have to be a fourteen-year-old girl in one test I just almost swooned. Imagine me—after all I had been through—trying to look a kid like that. But I thought to myself, “Well, you’re here now and you might as well stay by.” So I put on the short dress and—funny!—I guess I was just in the mood for it—but when I stood in front of that camera I got to feeling just exactly the way I did when I was a youngster out in Australia. Of course,” she adds quickly, “there was a great deal in this. I didn’t really care whether I won out or not—I mean I wasn’t all keyed up and nervous about it—for, you see, Charlie had promised me that part and so I didn’t have everything at stake.”
These last remarks draw attention to one of the acid experiences of the screen performer. No matter how often he or she has been subjected to these tryouts, the latest challenge always seems to make them feel as uneasy as the first. They become rigid with fear of what the new director may think of them and so, naturally, defeat the very results they so much desire.
In speaking of Mae Busch, Charlie Chaplin once said, “I always remember Mae at a party one evening when she suddenly thumped herself on the chest. ‘It’s here,’ she said fiercely, ‘something inside me—something I’ve got to get out!’ That impressed me a whole lot,” added he, “for I haven’t heard so awfully many screen actresses in my time complaining of any inner weight of talent oppressing them.”
It was, of course, this real fire of histrionic energy which burned down every obstacle before it. That together with all the suffering she had undergone counts enormously in her work on the screen and removes her many degrees from the puppet types which have cast discredit upon the profession.
The moment you meet Mae you recognise her as “good copy.” This is so because she is perfectly natural, and being natural with her means saying exactly what she thinks. She says it graphically, pungently, often slangily, so that almost every sentence she utters lingers in your mind as a vivid picture of some phase of experience. Far from being a highbrow herself, she is one of those vivid types in which the real highbrow delights.