Ethel Clayton — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1913) 🇺🇸
Ethel Clayton is trying to keep from thinking about small-pox. For whatever awful thing she thinks about long enough, she gets.
by Mabel Condon
That’s how she accounts for the losing of her diamond bar-pin, not once, but many times. She always knew she was going to lose that pin; she always did. She always knew that, somehow, it would be returned to her; somehow, it always was.
But she got tired having nervous prostration over it, so took it back to the jeweler’s and exchanged it for a friendship circle, which gives the satisfaction of staying just where it is put.
“It’s how much I like a thing that makes me sorry to lose it,” said Miss Clayton from an electric-lighted corner of her dressing room in the Lubin studio. “About a month ago the laundry failed to return two embroidered collars I sent it and their loss still bothers me; I can’t forget how much I liked them.”
There was a rap at the door. “Who is it?” asked Miss Clayton.
“Laundry!” came the answer. “Just a minute,” Miss Clayton called back; then, to me, “Observe how business-like I am with the ‘laundry’.”
She crossed to the door and admitted a man with a long box. The man presented a bill. “I’ll look at the laundry first,” Miss Clayton announced, untying the box. From its tissue-paper nest she took forth a simple white frock, held it at arm’s length and examined it, front and back.
“Very nice — now I’ll have the bill,” she decided, and read, “One fancy dress, $1.25.”
“Fancy?” she inquired, looking down at the plain white gown.
“The ruffle,” the man explained, pointing out a three-inch drape at one side of the skirt. “Oh, yes, I’d forgotten the drape.” The man departed with his dollar and a quarter and when Miss Clayton had placed the dress on a hanger on the back of the door she returned to the chair in front of her dressing-table and explained that one time she didn’t look at her laundry while the man was there and when he had left she discovered a scorched-to-death sleeve in her very best crepe de chine gown, the should-you-get-sick-and-company-comes-to-see-you one.
“They gave me one-third the value of the gown, but I have a suspicion they’ve been making it up on me ever since,” she laughed, and confessed, “I’d never make a business woman because I tire of things too quickly. I’ve never been able to stay in one place — except school, just once, — for longer than five months at a time. I was born in Champaign, Ill., and grew up in the backwoods of Missouri. My father was a road builder and my mother and I accompanied him on all his trips. We had no permanent home, but just lived wherever my father’s work took him; and that was all through Missouri and Kentucky. One year, I remember, I changed schools eight times.
“My language was awful; it was that backwoods kind with a twang to it and was a positive disfigurement. We went to Chicago when I was about eleven, and I started to the public schools there. Then for four years I attended St. Xavier’s Academy and was leading lady or leading man in all the school plays. My ambition was to be an actress and when the nuns introduced E. H. Sothern to us my ambition became a determination.
“I played several short engagements in Chicago after leaving school and when with the Daniel Frawley Stock Company in Minneapolis, where I played leads for nine months —”
“At the age of seventeen,” I interrupted from the tapestry chair, which hid a mysterious looking box. “Heard it from somebody in Chicago — our editor; he used to do newspaper work in Minneapolis and wrote you up ever so many times.” I answered the how-did-you-know? query in each Ethel-blue eye.
“Yes, I was just seventeen and after Minneapolis, went to Milwaukee and played twenty-two weeks of big summer stock. Then I was offered the part of the model in The Devil and next was leading woman for Emmett Corrigan, from whom I learned more than from anybody else. Vaudeville, twenty-two weeks of it, followed, then the role of the chorus girl in The Country Boy. Then pictures.”
“Why did they attract you?” I asked, when she stopped with a nothing more to tell stop.
“They attracted me because of the out-of-door life, not because of the money they would mean,” she replied. “Air is food and drink to me. Really” — and it was said as though it were meant — “I wouldn’t care for a lot of money and I have no desire to own a big house, where I’d feel that I’d have to stay most of the time.
“This is what I’d like — to have a shack at the ocean for the summer, even though the sea air makes me pale and washy looking, and in winter to live just wherever I felt like it, in a house, an apartment or just a small suite. I have an accumulation of things I take with me wherever I go; usually I unpack them and set them up wherever I stay, if it’s only for a month. But I don’t have much time to look at them anyhow, so I left them packed — they’re in those packing cases, back there.
“That box behind you,” pointing out the mysterious looking one, “contains a Satsuma made in Japan. It’s my most precious possession and I carry it around with me done up in cotton.” The box was fat and squat and looked as though it might contain a bomb.
“I like roving too well to settle down in any one place even though it were a very beautiful one. So, you see, I really wouldn’t care for much money. I’m glad, though, I had enough to buy an automobile last summer; I drive it and never had as much pleasure out of anything. I’m proud of having paid for it myself and enjoy it so much more on that account. It furnishes lots of excitement for me and that’s what I like — to have my life full up of things. Otherwise, I should get violently ill.”
“Ready, Miss Clayton?” came the director’s voice from somewhere in the studio, and Miss Clayton replied through the door that she was.
“This is to be a chase run-away scene,” she said, on a search through her dresser for a veil to tie over her red-gold hair that fluffed becomingly about her pretty face.
And as she started off in a wiggly buggy I guessed the chance of her becoming violently ill from inaction in picture work was mighty slim.
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Why Not a Doll Souvenir?
Many an exhibitor will give “Alkali” Ike dolls as souvenirs during the Christmas holidays. In the past three weeks the Essanay Company has shipped out over three hundred dolls to theaters throughout the Middle West. Here’s how the exhibitor is making money on their souvenirs. He will order two dozen dolls and will give away on an appointed evening four of them. The rest he will sell. This pays for his advertising and also secures for him a full house. The “Alkali” Ike dolls are without a question one of the biggest novelties in the film business of months, when all the motion picture publications highly praised the unique and novel advertising specialty. They enable every exhibitor to show his patrons that he is a live wire.
A small theater in Brooklyn, New York, ordered a dozen of the “Alkali” Ike dolls and a week later reordered two and a half dozen. This was two months ago — and since that time they have been ordering a dozen a week. The manager writes, “If it wasn’t for the ‘Alkali’ Ike dolls I don’t know what I’d do. The kids go crazy over them and make their parents come to the show to get a doll. I give two away every Saturday night to the two lucky ones holding a certain number, and all the rest I sell before the second show is over.”
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“Bill” to Be a Picture Star
Readers of the New York World and the papers throughout the country to which it syndicates its Sunday magazine section will soon have the pleasure of seeing Paul West’s little philosopher, “Bill,” the office boy, in action. Mr. West has signed a contract with the Mutual Film Corporation to supply the scenarios for a series of reels, which will make of the irrepressible “Bill” a motion picture star, and wherever “Mutual Movies” make time fly, there “Bill” will assist in that commendable work. It is not generally known that “Bill” is drawn from life and not altogether from the vivid imagination of Mr. West. He is, however, a living, breathing boy, and the real “Bill” has been secured to be the “reel” Bill and pose for the pictures.
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Prominent Exhibitors
T’was a magic wand that S. L. Rothapfel waved o’er the Regent theater at One hundred sixteenth street and Seventh avenue and lo! — the photoplay house that was just “The Regent” became “The Regent de luxe” with the “de luxe” meaning much more than it usually does. Mr. Rothapfel’s explanation of the change in the house is rather more practical; it begins with “I’ve been working on it for weeks” and ends with “— and I’m not through with it yet.” It is difficult to imagine what else in the way of an improvement can possibly be added but, as there is no limit to the fertility of the ideas which evolve from Mr. Rothapfel’s brain, the Regent’s patrons may be prepared for other additions and changes which will go toward sustaining the description “de luxe.”
“And I’m just beginning,” concluded Mr. Rothapfel the second night after the theater as he stood in the back of the house looking garden-ward to where the orchestra was playing real music, to where a colored fountain was playing real water and to where a splendid cast was playing a real story on the best screen procurable. Potted plants and shrubs added to the garden illusion and above and to either side of the screen, balconies in the semblance of summer houses trailed roses and vines and, between pictures, framed singers, in evening dress, with the soft reds and greens of vari-colored lights. A pipe-organ swelled the volume and sweetness of the stringed orchestra, blue-uniformed and white-gloved attendants found satisfying seats for the intermittant arrivals; these same attendants helped the men off and on with their overcoats and a dusky maid in gray dress and fluffy white cap and apron stood ready to offer her services to the ladies.
Men and women alike noted the long mirrors which had been placed in the back of every door in the carpeted promenade at the rear of the seats and men and women both made use of them.
There is a coziness and warmth of welcome about the house that everybody seems to feel; this is not the result of just the beauty of the house, the merit of the orchestra, the fineness of the pictures shown or the worth of the songs and singers, but all these qualifications plus Mr. Rothapfel’s earnest and honest endeavor to please and to make his theater a home for his patrons, is the answer to the homey feel of the “Regent de luxe.”
From the courtesy qf the ushers to the selection of the musical numbers, from the choice and placing of flowers to the ways and means of ventilation, the hand and mind of Mr. Rothapfel are seen. It was no idle fancy that conceived and bestowed upon him the title “Belasco of motion pictures.” In the art of planning and making for a theater beautiful, he has no peer; he is the master in his chosen line, as the seventeen other theaters of which he has made successes, prove.
The Regent, however, is his first picture house in New York and there is no disputing the fact that it is also New York’s first picture house. The quality of entertainment offered vouches for its continued popularity and the increase of prestige to the name of Rothapfel.
If you are of New York and haven’t as yet dropped into the Regent, take the first opportunity and the subway’s Lenox local and do so. And by all means, wait around a few minutes and get a glimpse of the man who has made the theater more than worthy of the title “de luxe.” He may be directing the orchestra, he often does that by way of variety, though he confesses to knowing not so much as one note of music; when you see the dress-suited man with the blonde hair with a kink in it and the alert eyes with the twinkle in them, and the quick manner with friendliness to everybody in it — you’ll know him for Samuel L. Rothapfel.
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The Eclectic Film Company announces that it will shortly increase the number of its releases from two to three a month. It is quite within the range of probability that in a short while after that, it may make a release every week.
Collection: Motography Magazine, November 1913