Rogers still loves to dwell on these fictitious pangs of a slighted talent, and he always adds, “Well, there was a movement on foot for making fewer and worse pictures and so they hired me.”
Certainly if his coming into picture activities was the result of any such urge, we were woefully misled. For his “Jubilo” was one of the best pictures ever produced by the Goldwyn Company.
Around his selection for the chief character of this story Will weaves one of his choicest monologues. “Sam had bought a tramp story,” he relates, “and he was looking around the lot one day for somebody who could play the tramp. Well, he happened to see me in my street clothes and he said, ‘There is the very fellow to play the tramp!’ Of course,” he adds, “I love to play a tramp—you can act so natural and never have to dress for it.”
Whether this story is historically correct or not it does bring out one of Will’s claims to distinction in the Hollywood community. An old slouch hat pulled down over his eyes and some kind of nondescript trousers uncreased as a child’s brow—this is his inveterate costume. Clad in this wise, he used to stand around the Goldwyn lawn and, surrounded by a crowd of cowboys and extras, would amuse himself by throwing the lariat at our “Keep off the Grass” signs.
The reader may imagine what a personality like this did for a studio somewhat overcharged with the artistic temperament. Temperament itself seemed to find relief in those droll remarks with which Rogers meets almost every issue of the day. Numerous times I saw Miss Farrar and Miss Frederick talking with the comedian, and both gave every sign of an unshadowed enjoyment in his conversation. It was one of the two, I think, who asked Will one day whether he liked pictures as well as he did the stage.
“Oh, sure,” drawled he with the unsmiling face which always makes his verbal twist the more irresistible. “Why, up to the time I went into pictures I had never annoyed more than one audience at a time. This is the only business in the world where you can sit out front and applaud yourself. Now I was getting to that place on the stage where that feature appealed to me.”
Incidentally, one of Rogers’ most amusing memories of the stage implicates Miss Farrar. I shall let him sketch this with his own pungency of style. “I made one picture Doubling for Romeo,” he relates. “The reason we made it was that we could use the same costumes that Miss Geraldine Farrar and a friend of hers (at that time) had worn in some costume pictures—all these Shakespearian tights and everything. I don’t say this egotistically, but I wore Geraldine’s.”
There may be those in the screen world who are overridden by emotions, who are played upon by gusts of alternate personal attraction and repulsion. Not so Rogers. He is essentially a home man, and the first thing he did when he came to Hollywood was to invest the savings of years in a house for his family. This residence of Bill’s is on Beverly Hills, and its location imposed upon its owner a heavy social responsibility.
“You know,” I heard him telling somebody the other day, “my principal occupation in California is not making pictures—it is official guide. I live on the same hill as Uncle Doug and Aunt Mary—only I live much lower down the hill than they do—in fact, I live at the foot of the hill in a swamp. It’s right at the forks of two streets, and all I do all day long is to tell tourists where Mary Pickford lives. I will be out in the yard going through my daily work—maybe licking my second kid—when some Iowa car will drive up and say, ‘Can you tell us where Mary Pickford lives?’ So I stand and point it out—just point and say, ‘Mary Pickford lives right up there.’
“You want to know why I came back to the stage for a while—why, just to get a rest. I was so tired pointing. Now, I have played for every charity affair that was ever held in Los Angeles, and their people are very appreciative, so when I die they are going to give me a benefit and take the money and erect a statue of me with the arm pointing toward Mary’s and a sign on it, ‘Mary Pickford lives right up there.’”