How Alice Terry Lost Her Smile (1926) 🇺🇸

Alice Terry was home again. Since Rex Ingram picked up his megaphone and moved to southern France to make his pictures, Alice, being Rex’s dutiful wife as well as the heroine in most of his films, has been something of a stranger to these shores. So when the news spread, in midsummer, that she was on the high seas bound in this direction, there was a rush to the docks to meet her.

by Frances Rule

Alice’s last visit to her native soil had been a year ago, when she had brought us Rex’s beautifully photographed Mare Nostrum. This time she had the print of The Magician tucked under her arm. I was among the unfortunate few who were not at the docks to meet her, but I did see her before she hastened off to Hollywood. We tea’d together at the Biltmore.

Tea for Miss Terry, by the way, consisted simply and solely of iced lemonade. “I must keep thin,” she remarked, then smiled and added, “The battle cry of the movies!

“Viola Dana, you know, says that in her early struggles she used to long for the day when she would be making enough money to buy herself a square meal, and now that she has the money, she still can’t have the square meal, because she has to keep thin!”

As is the way with interviews, I set out to discuss a particular thing with Alice and ended up with something I hadn’t expected. In steering her onto the subject of how she and Rex got along working together so much, I bumped into a small but interesting confession of a personal weakness. But we’ll get to that later.

Every one knows, of course, that Alice adores Rex Ingram and thinks him a wonderful director — many times in the past has she said so — but I was curious to find out whether she didn’t get a little tired sometimes of having that husband of hers so constantly for a boss, and how she felt about it in general. Her situation is really unique. Wives have been directed by their husbands in films before, but there is no other movie couple of quite such prominence as Rex and Alice who have worked together quite so exclusively as they have, as director and directee. Rex started directing Alice long before he married her, long before either of them had made names for themselves.

They rose simultaneously to fame with the release and great success of The Four Horsemen, and have gone hand in hand ever since, except for occasional interims.

Didn’t it get a little monotonous sometimes, I wondered. Didn’t they ever have fights while working together? Rex Ingram, fastidious to a fault about details and almost stubborn in his ideas of how things should be done, has the reputation of being something of a tyrant to those who work under him. Did he seem just as domineering to Alice, or was there a sympathy and understanding between them that made things easier for her?

So, as she and I sat idling over our lemonades on the aforesaid afternoon, I put the question bluntly to her. And she took it quite calmly. In fact, I can’t imagine Alice being baffled by anything — I don’t know which I admire the more, her marvelous complexion or her perfect composure. She just leaned her head back, rested her elbows on the table, squinted through the smoke of her cigarette, and thought a minute.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve left Rex — cinematically speaking — several times and tried working with other directors, and have thought at first that I liked it better — I seemed freer, somehow — but I’ve always returned to him. For the roles I’ve played under his direction have nearly all received more praise than those I’ve done under any one else. I suppose it’s because he knows my peculiarities, knows how to handle me, and therefore can get the best out of me.”

A hand wandered up to the broad black brim of her hat and from there to the bit of dark, reddish hair that peeked out under the side.

“And of course,” she went on. “I know him equally well. I think I’m the only person who works under him who isn’t simply terrified of him. The others on the set don’t dare speak, he scares them so. But even if he weren’t my husband. I could never be afraid of him, because I first knew him when he was just nobody at all.

“Besides, he knows perfectly well that if he makes me mad, that’s not the end of it! He knows that it will be carried into the home, that he’ll have to fight it out with me later. Not that I ever dispute with him over how I am to play my roles. I let him be absolute master there, even against my own views. That’s only fair. It would be an impossible situation if I took advantage in the studio of being his wife and undertook to argue with him or to interfere in any way with his direction of me.”

With her serious, gray-blue eyes — set wide apart — looking straight at me or wandering off toward the near-by tea dancers, Alice talked on — smoothly, easily, quietly — through an endless succession of cigarettes. Once in a while, a smile — it comes suddenly and spontaneously, lighting up for a moment those calm eyes, and then as suddenly goes away. Very rarely, a laugh — low and easy, like her voice. No, I could never imagine Alice Terry being discomposed by anything. She has by nature the same perfect control that she showed in the never-to-be-forgotten execution scene in Mare Nostrum.

But every Achilles has his heel, and Alice is not an exception. She was full of reminiscences that day, and there it was that the unexpected secret leaked out. She confessed to me her Achillean heel — the one thing that can upset her. Have you ever noticed how rarely Alice smiles on the screen, how very serious and solemn she usually is? Well, that’s not by accident — there’s a reason.

“I’m all right,” she says, “so long as I have a perfectly straight-ahead, dramatic part to play, but let there be just one word in the script to the effect that the heroine threw back her head and tossed off a gay laugh, and I’m lost. I’m much better about it now than I used to be, for I used to live in perfect terror of having to smile before the camera. And it was Rex who made me overcome that complex. He helped me there as no other director could have, for he knew exactly what was the matter.”

And what Was the matter, I urged, my curiosity roused. How did she come to lose her smile?

It seems that the whole trouble began with a bit — a light, capricious bit that she was supposed to play with Tom Moore, way back in the days before The Four Horsemen, when Alice was having rather rough sledding. That bit was the first part she had been given in many, many moons, and such a to-do was made over it that, for two weeks in advance, she heard of nothing else. Every one concerned took turn in telling her just how she ought to play it, so that when the crucial day at last came, she was in such a state of nervous panic that she was literally paralyzed. She stepped before the camera and couldn’t do a thing.

“Smile?” she says. “I couldn’t have smiled if my life had depended on it. Unfortunately, that bit did depend on it. The whole point of the scene was for me to be gay and smiling.

“From that day to this, I’ve never completely got over it. For the longest time, I couldn’t even pretend to smile before the camera. Whenever I was asked to, something inside me froze up. It was the queerest sensation — my face became absolutely taut.

“I came very near not playing in Mare Nostrum because of that same old complex. I hadn’t wanted to play that role anyway — thought I wasn’t suited to it. But Rex had insisted, so I had finally given in.

“And then, on the first day of shooting, we did a scene in which I was to come downstairs smiling at Tony Moreno [Antonio Moreno]. And I simply went to pieces over it, couldn’t do it at all. That evening, I wept for hours, told Rex that I knew I couldn’t play the role and that I absolutely wouldn’t. He argued and argued with me until he finally succeeded in making me snap out of it.

“The next day, he shot some other scenes first, then when we came to the troublous one, he suddenly said that he was tired, and suggested that we go out and get a bite to eat. While we were out, we talked about everything under the sun except Mare Nostrum. When we went back, Rex quietly began shooting the smiling scene, and there wasn’t a single hitch!”

So there certainly are advantages in having your husband for a director!

Before the film was finished, Alice had become quite keen about the role that she had so reluctantly undertaken.

“In every other picture I had played in,” she said, “I had always been just a passive heroine being rescued from trouble that some one else had started. In ‘Mare Nostrum,’ it was / who was making all the trouble. I like a role with some character to it like that. I wish I could play more like it — but evidently the critics didn’t agree with me, they knocked me so.

“I began to feel, though,” she said, with a smile, “that I had at last become a success, for they had never bothered even to knock me before!”

A school girl and boy danced by our table and did a tricky little dip. Alice’s eyes rested on them and followed them. They dipped again.

“That dip fascinates me!” she said. “It’s so unexpected.” We ceased talking entirely and watched the two youngsters. What a thrill it would give them, thought I, if they but knew that they were being watched by Alice Terry! But they didn’t know it, for they didn’t recognize her in her own auburn hair.

The chief purpose of Miss Terry’s visit to America was to play the lead opposite Ramon Novarro in The Great Galeoto.

“I like getting back to Hollywood,” she said, “to see my old friends and to get all the gossip, but Europe is a much nicer place to live in and work in. They take things so calmly over there. It will be a long time, I think, before any one will be able to tear Rex away from it. He adores it. As he says, simply to walk down one of those old European streets gives you dozens of ideas.”

So Alice will go back in a few months, after Rex has decided what story he will do next, and will composedly take her place once more before her husband’s camera — composedly, that is, unless the script says, “Smile!”

What an ideal existence — to go on peacefully making pictures with a sympathetic husband in such inspiring surroundings!

Since this conversation, Rex Ingram has returned to this country for a short stay, and may film his next picture here.

It was in her early days that the incident occurred that robbed Alice of her screen smile. This photo shows her in one of her best roles — the Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda.

When off the set, Alice finds no difficulty in smiling — particularly not if she is with Rex.

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Fanning Through the New Pictures — Pauline Frederick in Devil’s Island

A new Pauline Frederick drama is always an event. Pauline is one star who may be depended on every time for an outstanding picture. It must be that she has free reign in selecting her stories, for her latest, Devil’s Island, like her others, stands out from the usual screen plays as Bill Hart [William S. Hart] from a drug store cowboy.

Devil’s Island is the French penal settlement for life prisoners that has kept bobbing up in the newspapers since Captain Dreyfus was sentenced there long before there were any motion pictures. The strange customs of this little known, tropical island provide an intriguing background for Leah Baird’s stirring story.

Pauline Frederick, as the wife of the Devil’s Island convict, is perfect. She makes the most of every opportunity, and even her wonderful Madame X didn’t give her the chances for emotional acting that she has in this Chadwick picture.

Marion Nixon and George Lewis, the youthful lovers, are altogether charming. Richard Tucker, John Miljan, Harry Northrup, Leo White and William Dunn complete the cast. Some cast!

Let me know how you like Devil’s Island. It will be playing at a theatre near you soon.

Fanny

Chadwick Pictures Corporation

729 Seventh Avenue

New York City 

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, November 1926