All the testimony given by Mary at Minden would tend to indicate that the hour in which Owen did not inject a lot of booze into himself, was a rare hour indeed. If Mary asked Owen to come back to her as often as she says she did, figuring he was the lusher as she sets forth, then indeed Owen, if he loves the girl, hasn’t much of a kick coming.
The general opinion appears to be that Moore had the love of Mary very much at heart but through his tendency for liquor, finally lost out. Those who really know Mary Pickford swear by the character of the girl. Those who really know Moore can’t dislike him. They simply figure he was his own worst enemy and that in the desperate moments of her mental torture the girl grew to care for the light-hearted Fairbanks and his blithesome way.
Poor Owen is just now figuring in a suit for damages brought by someone from whom he rented a house. The owners claim that everything was in a mess when they came back and that an overflow of booze has considerably depreciated the furniture.
Another Hollywood “Secret” has been shattered. It seems that a perfectly good married man went on a visit to his “Secret” and before the evening was done he was driving a joyful bunch of other men, with their “Secrets,” in his latest buzz wagon.
Everything would have been O. K. but for the fact that the happy hubby permitted his own “Secret” to sit in the back seat while helping the other revelling benedicts to deliver their “Secrets” home. It appears that the “Secret” of the car-owner went to sleep in her recess in the rear of the car.
The night was foggy. So was the brain of this “perfectly good” married man. He parked the car in his garage, forgetting all about the “Secret” lying asleep in the back seat. Next morning a “perfectly trusting” wife was surprised, when she stepped onto the bungalow rear, to see a “perfectly wild Secret” dashing madly out of the garage, clad in anything but up-to-date morning garb.
The betting in Hollywood is 100 to 1 that Nevada prosecutors or politicians do not break the Fairbanks-Pickford marital relations. Los Angeles herself—that is the heart of it—says, “Let them alone. They’re married, aren’t they, however they managed to do it?”
Maybe Los Angeles prognosticators are wrong. Maybe Nevada means business. But the prevalent sentiment is that, unless their love-ship hits the rocks some other way, Mary and Doug may woo and coo until dooms-day—except at such times as they see fit to invite the newspapers en masse to dinner or load down autos and Pullman cars with scribes who would fain not invade their privacy.
Hanging and wiving go by destiny. For every Jonathan Wild there is somewhere an adequate John Ketch; from the ends of the earth, noose and neck rush to meet each other. For every Jack there is some compliant Jill; from all the plains and valleys the couples scramble up to the difficult ark of matrimony. Sheba travels to Solomon and the event is set down in the book of Kings. Caesar rules over Rome and Cleopatra over Egypt, but the wet sundering leagues cannot separate them.
Nat Goodwin, it is true, never married Lillian Russell, but the universe felt that something had gone amiss. So says an American journalist—one of the kind who knows everything. He continues: Destiny had fallen down. How then should Mary Pickford and Douglas fail to swing into the orbit calculated from the beginning? If she is not queen of her particular Sheba, Sheba never had a queen. If he is not the gayest of Solomons, at least he has written a book, and unquestionably he rules his jovial dominion in his own right. In this wedding the royal line crosses. It is as expected and as gratifying as the conclusion of a feature film.