Beverly Bayne — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1912) 🇺🇸
“Let’s sit over here on the sofa and put the candy between us and then we can chat all we want, …”
by Mabel Condon
… Miss Beverly Bayne suggested, as her dressing-room door shut us in from Augustus Carney, Francis X. Bushman and other Essanay admirers of the pretty Miss Bayne.
“Um-m! Try one like this — it has nuts in it; isn’t that nice?”
“’Licious!”
“D’ye know, I just get dreadfully candy hungry,” went on the dainty figure in green satin as she viewed a chocolate cream at various angles before sampling it. “A little while ago I felt that I couldn’t live another minute unless I had some, so I rushed out to go to the candy shop, and in front of the studio I met one of the men on a horse and right away I said. ‘I’m dying for some candy — simply dying!’ Of course he volunteered to for it and I let him dash madly away, and — here’s the candy!”
After negotiating with a caramel for half a minute, she continued: “Don’t you think our room lovely? Four of us share it, and it’s the nicest dressing-room in the place. Whenever visitors come to the studio, they are sure to be shown ‘the girls’ room.”
“See that gas-light green wall covering?’ A hint green was discernible in the half-inch spacings between photographs. “We put that up ourselves, and this, too,” and she indicated a rose-bordered drape which ran the distance of the “dresser” — a shelf that extended along two sides of the walls. At equal intervals on the dresser stood four white-framed mirrors and in front of each were make-up creams and powders and thing
“Sometimes this room looks simply awful: that’s when we’re all getting ready at once, and it makes me shudder to think of coming back to it and hanging things away; but we manage.” And Miss Bayne passed the candy and took a piece herself with the remark. “You just ought to taste my divinity fudge; it’s delicious. Look just back of you there, in the corner — that’s our kitchenette. ‘Net’ is out, but the kitchen is there, and often, when it rains or is too hot or too cold, we get up a chafing-dish luncheon and have lots of fun over it.”
“Yes, and sometimes we just have a soda for lunch.” put in a voice whose owner was opening the door.
“Oh, Prouty, dear, come here; I want you to meet some one,” and Miss Bayne introduced Miss Evabelle Prout [Eva Prout], whose round blue eyes apologized for her round little mouth’s speech made before she knew there “company” in the room.
“Prouty and I are great chums,” explained Miss Bayne.
“Yes, ‘Beansy’ and I go together,” added Miss Prout with the cutest little lisp as she settled herself on a low chair in a distant corner and proceeded to wait for whatever might happen.
Miss Payne is so prettily girlish and young that it was difficult to think of her as a leading lady. When I told her so she laughed and said she wasn’t used to the idea herself and then told me that she had never been on the legitimate stage in her life, and that all the stage experience she had had before coming to the Essanay company last February was in private theatricals.
“When I came here and applied for a little place in the company I was scared stiff when Mr. Weber said, after he tried me in a scene, that I was the type he wanted, and got out a contract for me to sign right then. I called mother up first, and she said she was satisfied to have me sign, so I did right away, and I’ve been wild about the work ever since.
“I have all varieties of roles assigned me, and they try to blow me up every couple of weeks, but I like being so many different people and don’t mind the dangerous parts, as I always come out all right. The other day, though — see that mark? — I got my hand burned with acid. You’d think I was trying to show off these twin rings, the way I’m exhibiting that hand, wouldn’t you? They belong to Mr. Calvert [E. H. Calvert] and I’m acting as a safety vault for them until he’s ready.”
The door opened and closed with a bang and Miss Ruth Stonehouse was with us. “Girls, I’m in a tearing hurry; I have to be a’wap’in in five minutes!” Her waist landed in a chair, her skirt in a heap on the floor. “My short skirt — where CAN it be?”
“Never mind, dearie. I’ll loan you that little short white one of mine; I know just where it is,” volunteered Miss Prout as she hurried over to the side of the room that served as a clothes press with a curtain across it.
“It’ll be just the thing for you and — Beverly, do you happen to know where that little short white skirt of mine is? I was sure it was right here, but now —”
“Yes. it’s over on this side, dear. No — I’ll get it for you; there it is over on your side under that little dress of Ruthie’s.”
“Oh, so it is; thanks, so much! Here you are, Ruthie, dear.”
“It’s an eternal scramble for clothes here,” sighed Miss Bayne as she resumed her seat on the divan, and then acted as overseer for Miss Stonehouse, who demanded to know if her hair was on straight and if her red waist and brown skirt met at the back. “Nobody’ll notice in the picture,” consoled Miss Bayne as the garments in question resisted all overtures toward a reconciliation, “There! you’re the wappiest looking little ‘wap’ ever,” she complimented as Miss Stonehouse made for the door with the startling remark, “Doesn’t make much difference whether I look nice or not, as I have to get down on the floor and be kicked!”
Miss Trout followed in the wake of the “wap,” and Miss Bayne resumed her comments on the work of a motion picture actress. For the first time she was really serious as she declared her possession of an ambition, and that the desire to mount higher and higher in her work and to lie worthy of the nice things people say about her.
“Maybe you think we get so used to the remarks about us that we don’t mind them; but we do. I love to get criticisms about my work. The good ones are nicest, of course, but the others are acceptable because they help me to do better. Whenever I’m not satisfied with what I do, it makes a little dent here,” indicating a curly lock of her brown hair just over her forehead, “and I never make that mistake again.
“In my home town, Minneapolis — though I think of Chicago as my home town now — the manager of one theater there always announces, on ‘Bayne’ nights, that I used to live in that city, so I have quite a following there,” and the pretty eyes lighted up with new pleasure.
In a flash she was off on another subject. “I had the dandiest horseback ride today. Time for it? I make time by getting up early. I paint a lot, too, in my spare moments — maybe I’ll paint you a head or something, if you’d care for it! Of course, they do keep us pretty busy here, but, at that, we don’t always work every day. We never know, though, until the last minute whether or not we will be needed.
“Sometimes four or five of us sneak off to a matinee downtown, and between the acts we call up as though from the corner and ask if the director is ready for Miss So-and-So yet. When the answer is “No, not yet; but I might need her about four o’clock,” we sit and shiver through the rest of the play and call up when it is over, for then we know it’s too late to use us, so we go over to Plows and have a soda.
“But there’s really no excitement; just the commonplace, ordinary things of life occur and I flit through them like a little butterfly,” and she “flitted” a step or two just to show that she meant it.
We were ready to go upstairs when Miss Cassinelli [Dolores Cassinelli] entered with a yellow-tied, brocaded white satin waist, suspended between her thumb and forefinger. The waist was duly admired. Not that Miss Cassinelli liked it; she didn’t. It wasn’t suited to her complexion, so she was willing to sell it to the first bidder. Accordingly, the waist was left in its tissue-paper wrapping for an early try-on by the four occupants of the prize dressing-room, each of whom, it seemed, had previously expressed a mad longing to become its possessor.
“Oh, Mr. Calvert, here’re your rings!” Miss Bayne sang out as we passed that gentleman’s dressing-room and then proceeded upstairs — Miss Bayne to join the “bread line” outside the cashier’s window and I to catch a loop-bound train, though I had to sprint for it.
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Lighting Picture Theaters a Specialty
The Louisville Lighting Company, Louisville, Ky., has. been conducting a special campaign to secure the business of motion picture theaters. As a result, it has closed contracts with twenty customers of this class and is furnishing electrical energy both for lighting and for motor service for the fans and ventilators. The motion picture theater managers in Louisville are believers in advertising, and every theater served by the Louisville Lighting Company is prominently featured by an electric sign. The Ideal heater, at Twenty-sixth and Market streets, is the company’s latest acquisition
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“Jim’s Vindication,” Oct. 29. Copyright 1912, Selig Polyscope Co.
Collection: Motography Magazine, October 1912