Estelle Taylor — On the Set with John Barrymore (1926) 🇺🇸

Live in Washington a few months and a congressman or an ambassador ceases to evoke your awe. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., doesn’t stop traffic in Wall street, nor Henry Ford in Detroit. Chaplin [Charles Chaplin] can dine in peace at most any Hollywood restaurant.

by Estelle Taylor

Despite the flights of imagination in the writings of visiting journalists there is no great reverence visible in the attitude of the less important players in the studios towards the stars whose names are national by-words.

Glamour disappears with close contact. The newspaper critic writing in Louisville may call Colleen Moore a genius, but it would be difficult for Anna Q. Nilsson, who works, perhaps, on the same stage, to do so and keep a straight face. A player feels that he, or she, has a talent for acting just as a physician may have a knack for diagnosis. Other players have the same talent, in a greater or lesser degree, just as other physicians have the same knack in a greater or lesser degree.

But Barrymore [John Barrymore] —!

There is the exception which proves the rule!

The electricians watch him. The carpenters’ saws are still when he is working. Extras are enthralled. Every idle player who has been able to obtain admission to the set watches his movements like a hawk, looking for the secret of his success. Genius is a difficult word to use precisely. Of Barrymore the least one can say exactly is that his is the Nth degree of perfected use of talent.

Of his work on the stage this article has nothing to do. But on the set time after time I have seen the greatest tribute paid him that can be paid in Hollywood — every eye on him, every tongue silent. There is the thrill which perfect work alone can give in watching him do anything, even the tiniest bit.

First in interest, I presume, to the readers of The Motion Picture Director is the effect Barrymore had on the work of other players. I can only answer for myself.

I stuttered at first. I felt as one would who had been pushed into a verbal duel with Wilde, or as a theater pianist would if asked to play while the audience waited for Paderewski. Barrymore knows all there is to know about acting. My work was to appear on the screen alongside of his. Figuratively, my knees trembled.

No, he didn’t help me; not knowingly. But from his assurance, I gained assurance. He ignored me, took me for granted, and I felt warmed with praise. For I knew his reputation for scathing criticism of that which does not meet his approval.

Barrymore has a reputation for rudeness, you know — the cultivated rudeness on which the British upper classes apparently pride themselves but which isn’t looked on with approval in this country. But he isn’t rude. Not at all. He just won’t be bored. He is charmingly self-sufficient. His ego doesn’t obtrude itself but he does demand some of the peace and quiet of which the rest of the world often tries to cheat him — and he takes it at any cost.

There was never a day when there were not at least fifty visitors to the set during all of the weeks I worked with him. And they all demanded to be introduced to Barrymore, to shake his hand and observe that it was a “beautiful day” or a “beautiful set.” They interrupted his work, his thoughts, his rest.

One day I heard him tell a middle-aged woman, with a high-pitched, cackling voice that would set most anyone’s nerves on edge, “that isn’t a very interesting subject.” Anyone else would have told her to go jump in the lake. Barrymore was really, under the circumstances, being polite, very polite, to her. But she probably is spreading the story of his rudeness.

Barrymore smokes incessantly while at work — cigarettes between scenes, a pipe, black with the accumulations of years, when there is time. Tales of his drinking are widespread. Everyone has heard someone say that he has to be dead drunk to do his best work, that often weeks go by without his drawing a sober breath. One hears the same tales of every man of genius, or even of great prominence. But Barrymore is too good a workman to give liquor, or anything, a chance to interfere with what he is doing. Not once in all of the weeks that I worked with him did I detect liquor on his breath nor see any evidence of his having used it. I am sure that he, like many another man, drinks what he wants when he wants to. He has told me as much. But he was as sober as I all during the picture.

So it isn’t liquor which lifts his acting from the 99 per cent perfect to absolute perfection. Nor is it his sincerity. It is his technique. The actor who relies on technique and is only 90 per cent, or 99 per cent, perfect in it betrays his insincerity. But Barrymore bridges that hairline difference. His every move is perfection, studied perfection.

Take his wink. A natural wink barely registers on the screen. He opens both eyes widely, with an almost glassy stare. Then he slowly closes one. On the screen it shows as perfection itself in naturalness. Or his gesture of dismissal.

One naturally throws the arm in one wide sweep, which blurs across the film. Barrymore abruptly stops the swing twice. On the screen it has a dynamic force that seems to sweep everything from his presence.

Knowing the objections of a dozen other leading men, opposite whom I have played, to my height, I asked him if he minded if I wore high heels under mv long trailing skirt.

My part was a queenly one and height would help me in my portrayal of it. “I don’t give a damn! You play your part and I’ll play mine,” he answered.

Other leading men have always pulled themselves to their full height when opposite me, and thrown their chests out, then slumped to their natural height when in the distance. It is a common trick. But Barrymore often played up to me with one knee bent. His work alone held attention to him. He didn’t need, he knew and I knew, the artificial aid of superior height.

Every other leading man with whom I have worked has clashed with the director many times during the making of a picture — generally over his relative position before the camera. Not once did Barrymore and Alan Crosland, our director, clash. Barrymore let the picture come first and depended on his own work to maintain his prominence in every scene in which he appeared.

Once established in Barrymore’s mind as a capable actress, I was exempt from anything approaching criticism. Only once did Barrymore even suggest that I was wrong in any detail. That was when I appeared with patent leather shoes, a thing unknown in Rome in “Lucretia’s” time.

Then he spoke to Mr. Crosland about them. “But I’ve been holding my skirt up to keep it from these wet pavements,” I replied. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have known it.” That excused me.

This occurred during the filming of the prison scene of “Don Juan” when Barrymore had to work for three days in succession in water which was never below his knees and often came over his shoulders. That Is the only time I heard him sing. He was humming all day long for those three days. Whether he is one of those men who are happiest when combatting discomfort or whether he was trying to set an example to the other members of the company, to hearten them, I don’t know.

Even to people who know him well, who work with him or play with him, there is a glamour about Barrymore such as exists about few, if any, public characters of today. It was days, possibly weeks, before I had the temerity to speak freely and lightly to him as I would have to any other man with whom I spent many hours every day. I broke the spell with a cookie. I had more than a dozen of them, and after passing them to most everybody else on the set that day, to get up courage,

I started to offer him one and then withdrew, thinking he hadn’t noticed. But he had. “Can’t I have one?” he begged. And he took the very biggest one of all and stood munching it with me.

It was his all-inclusive knowledge which awed the cast almost as much as his work. He passed on every costume; he helped the director select and rehearse every player of every small bit. He made suggestions to the cameraman and to the electricians.

He always had the picture in mind; never his own place in it. A fencing master was rehearsing with him for one of the big scenes of the picture and left him with his hand covering his face at a point where there would be a close-up. “You’d better change that position,” someone told him. But Barrymore said, “The duel is a damn sight more important to the picture than another close-up of me. Let’s do it right. Monsieur, the fencing master knows. We’ll do it his way.”

I find that despite all my weeks of close association with him Barrymore’s glamour has not left. There is a fascination in watching his work on the set, even his rehearsals, that is as great almost as that of a complete performance — a fascination that hangs over no other motion picture player of whom I know.

It would not be fair to Miss Taylor to pass this opportunity to tell our readers of the success she has made of her portrayal of “Lucretia.” Mr. Barrymore has told her and everyone with whom he has come in contact that if the whole world had been searched no one better fitted for the part could have been found. So has Alan Crosland, the director. From Jack Warner [Jack L. Warner], Bennie Ziedman [B. F. Zeidman], and other Warner executives, from Ernest Westmore [Ern Westmore], the wigmaker, Sophie Wachner, the costume designer, from the men who ran the rushes through the projection machines, the laboratory men who developed the film, and from scores of others on the Warner lot, have come rumors, spreading through Hollywood, of one of those sensational performances which cause audiences to sit up straight in their seats and producers to rush to the telephone.

“If they keep on talking about me right to my face, I’ll begin to believe them and think I’m too good to make more than one picture a year,” Miss Taylor said at the conclusion of her interview, just before she left for a trip to New York and Havana. “That is why I am going away.”

“But, seriously, if I have scored a success it is because of the aid of a sophisticated director, and a sophisticated actor opposite me. Every step up that I have made has been with the aid of sophisticated direction — Charles Brabin, who made see also A Fool There Was; Marshall Neilan, who made Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, and gave me ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ to play, and Cecil DeMille [Cecil B. DeMille], who made The Ten Commandments.”

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Collection: Motion Picture Director, March 1926