“Oh, it was all of a thousand marks,” answered she.
Her husband rocked with merriment. “And do you realize that you gave him all of twenty-five cents?” he said.
Miss Talmadge, so Schenck wrote, was aghast at this disclosure of her cramped style in benevolence. “And, pressed as she was for time,” he concluded, “nothing would do but that she should go out early the next morning and hunt the fellow she had wronged by her twenty-five-cent donation. When she did find him—believe me, he got something real.”
From a being so swayed by the claim of the moment—a being, too, so young and beautiful—you would predict perhaps a less stable domestic situation. Mr. Schenck, one of the finest men I have ever known is some years older than his wife and, in addition to this, he is what is known as a practical type. Yet Miss Talmadge’s devotion to him is one of the salients in her life. The evening when she could hardly wait to tell him of her triumph over Clara Kimball Young is, indeed, indicative of her whole attitude. Everything, both in pictures and out, is talked over with Mr. Schenck, and her manner when she is with him reflects always that deep content which an emotional nature feels often in stability.
Yet Mr. Schenck represents much more than a mooring for this brilliant personality. Remembering his efforts in her professional behalf from the moment when he so proudly showed me that bracelet on his office desk; acquainted, too, with the absolute devotion which he has subsequently given to her career, I often wonder how it would have fared with Miss Talmadge had this element in her life been lacking. Certainly she would have risen by sheer force of her talent and her beauty and her enthusiasm without any such concentrated interest. But I very much doubt if her ascent would have been either so swift or so dazzling had this one great constructive force been absent.
Chapter Twenty
GOOD OLD WILL ROGERS
It is a far cry from the greatest emotional actress of the films to one of the world’s most infectious comedians. Yet I have set aside chronological considerations in order to save for last my recollections of a man whose comedy touches brightened the Goldwyn lot almost as much as they did the Goldwyn screen.
It was Rex Beach and I who brought Will Rogers into pictures. After our approach he confided to us that he had been somewhat mystified by the delayed recognition of his talents on the part of the picture world.
“I used to think it was funny,” said he in his own inimitable way. “Here motion-pictures were booming along. They were getting in trained dogs and trained cats and grand-opera singers and everybody in the world but me. I couldn’t make it out, and now after all these years you fellows have come to.”