Charles Clary — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1912) 🇺🇸
All that Charles Clary wanted was to be let alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea; alone on a desert isle; alone — well, alone anywhere that the feminine gender is not, and that is all that is necessary to make Mr. Clary’s content quite complete.
by Mabel Condon
Hence his utter unhappiness as he offered me the one good camp-chair in his dressing-room, at the Selig studio, and hoped I’d refuse. I not only accepted but opened my coat and took off my gloves in anticipation of a lengthy and enjoyable session. You see, I realized, the minute I met him, that he is the kind of a man who is scared stiff of girls, so knew that the pleasure of the ensuing half-hour was to be all mine.
“But I’ve never been interviewed by a girl in my life,” protested Mr. Gary, and seized upon a vest-pocket comb and ran it frantically through his hair.
“Really! How remiss of your press agent!” I comforted as I straightened my hat in accordance with a suggestion volunteered by an opposite mirror.
“S-so you see, I don’t know a thing about it.” “No?” in a voice which might have been reassuring had not the door just then squeaked its disdain of a prop and violently shut out the comforting sight of passing fellow beings to whom Mr. Gary might have appealed in case of emergency.
“Trapped!” agonized Mr. Gary’s brown-gray eyes as their owner sank in the general direction of the one vacant camp-chair but remembered in time that it had a broken leg and was wiggly, so placed his two hundred pounds down upon it very carefully.
“Well, now that we’re here, what are you going to talk about?” my victim wanted to know with a heroism false but sustaining.
“Me? Oh, you’re to do the talking.” then, to lessen the shock, “but, please, Mr. Gary, don’t be afraid of me! Why, I’m so tiny —”
“That’s just it,” put in Mr. Gary, and turned clear around on the wabbly chair to do so. “If you were big, I wouldn’t be afraid of you. You never knew a big man yet who wasn’t afraid of a little woman, did you? It’s the little ones who are dangerous.”
“And, please don’t blush so, Mr. Gary. I assure you I’m not dangerous; honest. I’m not.”
“Well, I don’t know,” he grudged, though he seemed somewhat reassured. “I’m not married, but, for goodness sake, don’t say that I’m on the market; for I’m not. I have a mother, sister and nephew to look after and that keeps me as busy as I want to be kept.” I promised, then asked what Mr. Clary thought would improve motion pictures.
“Unlimited film footage,” was the prompt and relieved answer. “Pictures will be more complete and satisfactory to both audience and player if the action of the story were allowed to go its own natural way with the speed-lid off. At present the director has to hurry some scenes and lengthen others, or, more often, hurry all of them in order to get them into the number of feet allotted.
“Consequently, the actor can’t always give his part the consideration it ought to get and the story is lopped off at one thousand feet when it deserves to be run to fifteen or eighteen hundred. So, you see, the limited footage adherence hinders both producer and actor. Too bad! Too bad!” The great Clary shook his head and fingered his watch-chain.
“Too bad!” I echoed and counted the Clary gray hairs while waiting for the next announcement. It came on the forty-third count and before I was half through.
“I feel confident, though, that drawback to the making for better pictures will not be the order for very long, and there will be increased satisfaction for everybody concerned when that time comes.
“But the motion picture life is a fine one,’ he enthused in response to a mental telepathy suggestion. “I like it better than the legitimate. Why? Oh, for many reasons. It makes one more versatile; you learn composure and learn to condense. The work is equally as hard as, or harder than, that of the legitimate and it lacks the monotony of the latter. I like to swim and to ride horseback, and motion pictures give me lots of opportunity to do both.
“Dangers? Yes, a few. I’ve waded with watersnakes in Florida, have run through swamps as an Indian, and have swam with sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. But I never thought of danger and have never yet met with a serious mishap. I skinned my arms and kn-elbows. the other day, though, in falling from the third floor of a burning building down into the basement.”
“Mercy! Of course, though, you came down on a dumb-waiter.”
“Of course, though, I did not,” he corrected. “That’s just it; people think that anything that looks dangerous is faked. I’ve been in picture houses and seen films in which I had acted and heard the person next to me say, ‘He never did that; I wonder how they made it look that way?’ That’s one hardship of the picture actor; he takes his life in his hands to entertain the people and then the people won’t be convinced that what they see actually happened.” And the much-wronged Clary hitched his chair into another position to reflect upon the ingratitude of the unappreciative people, but the broken side of the chair sagged, so he sat still.
It was my turn to take my life in my hands, and I did so with the query. “Honor bright, though, Mr. Clary — wasn’t there a dumb-waiter?” and he laughed a what-a-pest-you-are kind of a laugh that showed two rows of lovely, lovely teeth that would be reason sufficient for a laugh a minute, were he the least bit vain.
“No, there wasn’t a dumb-waiter, but there was something else —” the people being vindicated, I was interested not any in what the “something else” might be, so the subject was buried by mutual consent.
“This is my third year with the Selig house,” ruminated Mr. Clary. “I left Mrs. Leslie Carter, for whom I was leading man, to take up picture work. Much advancement has been made in pictures even in that short time; for one thing, it is not necessary to have so many announcements and the players use less gestures.”
“Because the people have become educated to films,” I suggested, thereby earning a patronizing look which encouraged me to ask the height of the looker and remark that his pictures show him younger than really. He gave his height as six feet one-half inch, and Mr. Twist entered in time to hear his claim to thirty-three years. Mr. Twist laughed; so did I. Mr. Clary obligingly added two years. Again Mr. Twist laughed; I didn’t, for thirty-five sounds a lot more interesting than forty, so we let Mr. Clary be thirty-five.
“Did he show you his shoes?” Mr. Twist inquired, and explained, hurriedly, “Charlie’s hobby is shoes; he owns fifteen pairs this minute. He buys a pair a week —”
“And sells them to us at a half more than he paid for them,” put in Harry Lonsdale, who based his right to enter the Clary dressing-room on the strength of a half-ownership. “Charlie” looked his utter bashlessness and selected a pink-striped navy blue tie from a hundred or more others on a convenient rack and dexterously exhibited it over two fingers, haberdasher style (the tie, not the fingers).
“Hideous,” I murmured.
“Photographs well,” was the Clary reason for its desecrating presence.
“Coming down-town to lunch?” queried the overflow meeting outside the door, in the person of Frank Weed, so I said, “Good-bye, Mr. Clary; I’ve had a lovely time,” and Mr. Clary regained a shred of his reputation for truthfulness by not echoing the sentiment. But the big man who had played the title role in “The Landing of Columbus,” and had “stripped to a gee string” in the part of Osceola, smiled a friendly smile as he shook hands and said, “You can say I’m a crusty old bachelor!”
“Well, not crusty, Mr. Clary,” I returned.
“And yet they give women the palm for a wholesale denial of age!” I soliloquized, apropos of the numeral thirty-five as the Ravenswood “L” rocked me officewards.
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“The Millionaire Vagabonds,” December 18. Copyright, 1912, Selig Polyscope Co.
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“Punch” Is Latest Film Name
Light comedies will be the specialty offering of the new “Punch” films. Nettie Grant and Herbert Rice, both of vaudeville fame, are the leads in the new pictures and will be seen in comedies only. Rice is especially funny as, though a grown man, he is but the size of a small child, and thus takes parts that inspire laughs at everything he does. “Oh, You Baby” and “Poor Finney” are among the first “Punch” offerings.
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A business man in a South American country informs an American consular officer that he wishes to purchase 600 theater seats. Quotations and catalogues should be in the Spanish language and the prices given c. i. f. city of destination. Address File No. 9917, Bureau of Manufactures, Washington, D. C.
Collection: Motography Magazine, December 1914