Gaston Glass — With the Vision Bernhardt Gave (1924) 🇺🇸
During dinner at the Montmartre, with lovely damosels smiling prettily at Gaston Glass, filmdom’s most sought-after bachelor, we had chatted of this and that. Subdued lights, waiters slipping about like shadows, the sound of laughter — all the flowers of fashion stopping to chat. He takes their flattery with an easy, accustomed air, always polite, debonair, the Gaston that lives across the street from me and plays golf and gives enjoyable parties and never worries. A Gaston of spirit, of lightness and charm.
by Helen Odgen
But later when we sat on my porch our talk grew a bit ruminative. At my mention of the sad passing of Sarah Bernhardt, he became aroused, his voice rang with sincerity.
“A dynamic, magnetic, marvelous woman! Something about her that — that sort of goes beyond me when I try to put it into words.” For a moment it was a boy who sat there, the red glow of his cigarette tip a dot in the night blackness.
“She was my godmother, you know. A woman of indomitable courage. Temperamental, a genius, domineering or impulsive or tender by moods. Sometimes,” somberly, “I feel I’m not living up to her confidence in me — success, money, they breed stagnation.”
For some time he talked of Bernhardt, speaking with his slight accent, an occasional fumbling for the right English word to express his chameleon thought indefinite form. After a while a thin sliver of a moon peeped out of the sky and the lights went out in all the houses on our street, and still his low tones paid homage to the greatest actress of all time. I forgot all about him, about me. Time was not, nor place. Only Bernhardt, the unforgettable.
“She was a — how can I say it so you won’t ridicule me? — a soul. The thing we all want to be. something in us… we don’t talk of things we feel, do we? Too much sham and pretense in all of us… but Madame rose above all that. She was a — a symbol.” He paced restlessly up and down the porch. “She typified to my mind: truth. Cynical, bitter at times, but always truth.
“When I was six, she took me, began my training. Until I am twenty — with some periods in school and art study — I remain in her company. Everything that I am, that I’ll ever be, I owe to Madame. One thing she impressed: sincerity. This flattery I hate, how your friends say to you. ‘Oh, Gaston, your performance was marvelous!’ when I know, here in my heart, it was rotten.” He laid his hand on his heart in a gesture that didn’t seem at all theatric. “Afraid to hurt your feelings. But I like truth — and to say what is in my mind also. I make people angry, my best friends. Last night I was at a preview, very bad picture. I hurry out, because I know they will ask me how I like it and if I tell what I think they get sore. Madame used to say, ‘Gaston, tell the truth. Le diable! what you care what they think?’”
Sunburned, of undistinguished appearance, features slightly irregular, Gaston would seem but an ordinary young man were it not for an intangible something. Perhaps personality, maybe just the “difference” of the foreigner. But I like to think it’s the imprint of the hand of genius laid upon him during his childhood by the greatest of them all: Bernhardt. Some of it has been erased in his contact with American commercialism. It has at times, in some of the very ordinary films in which he has appeared, almost receded from view.
But there is enough of it there yet. in the intenseness with which he feels things when once aroused from his equanimity, to suggest that he may yet do great things.
If ever that spark dormant within the sleek, well-groomed contentment of him be touched by an overwhelming desire for something unattainable, something that he wants and can’t have — he is likely to reach the heights for which Madame trained him.
“There is something wrong with my acting,” he confessed in his sudden, dejected, introspective mood. “But what? I can’t tell,” shrugging helplessly, “why I like or don’t like a thing. My heart is in my work. When I start a picture, I study the script for a week. I know my scenes, as one does on the stage. Next I dress the character. There is much psychology in dress. When I put on evening clothes, I feel important. I am somebody. I am dignified. But when I wear flannels, old sport-clothes, I slouch. Dressing the character is half the business of making him real, individual. I work hard, yes. But always it lacks something. “What?
“Madame would say, ‘Gaston, act with the mind, not too much with the heart.’ She had that real actor’s gift of — of standing aside and watching herself act. While seemingly broken-hearted in the scene, she would scold me in a whisper for something wrong that I do. Norma Talmadge and a few others — they snap into a scene and snap out of it. Some actresses, they make me sick, the way they ‘wait for the mood,’ demand music. Foolishness. An actor needs none of those things. Madame scorned them.”
Gaston likes sports — in moderation. A round or two of boxing, golfing or tennis when so inclined. He likes to camp and fish and hunt. Five kindred souls — Gaston, Tom Forman, Kenneth Harlan and a couple of other fellows — go on fishing trips.
“When I want to know a man, say what kind of fellow is he, I take him out to the country. If he fuss. ‘I want hot water. I want so-and-so,’ then I know he’s not a man at all and I like him no more. We sign a pledge, we five, not to shave or change our clothes for a week.” I could fancy Gaston so garbed, for I see him often lounging about the yard none too fastidiously gotten up; but imagine the immaculate Kenneth in old clothes, his chin boasting a stubble of beard!
I asked Gaston if he should like some day to return to France.
“To visit, yes. Not to act. There I am nothing. Here I am not so much, but a little bit. America give me my chance, my prosperity. It makes me sick when foreign actors think they are better than Americans.”
I mentioned one of his countrymen, a man of exceeding vanity. I had heard Gaston arguing one evening, most forcibly, with this fellow, berating him for his high-handed attitude, advising him to change his air and to try to make Americans like him.
But he paid tribute to the charm of Andrée Lafayette. Though she has been here some time it was only recently that they met. They have a little French club here — Gaston, director Louis Gasnier [Louis J. Gasnier], Maurice Canonge, Charles de Roche, Robert Florey, who handles the foreign publicity for the Pickford-Fairbanks productions and who shares Gaston’s bungalow. One evening to their meeting came Andrée.
“I hesitate about meeting her,” Gaston said frankly. “These ‘too beautiful’ women are unreal. But Andrée! Like a child, unself-conscious, the spirit of fun. They parade her here as a beauty, she is bewildered, retires into her shell. They call her cold and unfeeling — it is just that the poor child is wondering what it is all about. With us, only her countrymen, she can be herself. So out to Venice by the beach we go, seven or eight of us, riding the shoot-the-chutes, throwing the balls for the funny little dolls, eating hotdogs and popcorn. And, leading us into all sorts of foolish mischief, always Andrée, laughing, crying, so happy to be herself for a minute.
“It is hard for a foreigner here,” Gaston reminisced of his own humble beginnings in this country. “I came here when I was twenty, with Madame’s company. When she return to France, I stay here. I want to play in a stage comedy, and then maybe pictures. She upbraided me. ‘I’ve trained you to be an actor,’ she stormed, throwing at me whatever happened to be handy. ‘With the grace of le bon Dieu, you might yet be one. Instead, you would play comedy!’ Pictures, she thought, had a great artistic future, but comedy was nothing.
“I knew my own mind, so I stayed. It was very hard. I had only a little money and was unknown, nothing. I could speak no English. A friend took me to the Lambs Club and there I would sit for hours, listening to the fellows talk. I would smile and say yes, yes, when I should say no.
“Funny, isn’t it, how self-conscious we are?” He fell silent, searching again for the answers to those inexplicable questions which trouble him on those rare occasions when he stops to think about them. “Why is it? Others, they would help. But we are ashamed to admit our ignorance. I would sit in my room, in an agony of unhappiness, moody, until I would force myself to go out and mingle with people, even though I blunder. Gradually I began to learn. And then John Emerson ask me one day to translate a French word. He give me a little role in ‘Oh, You Women.’ Then I have no more difficulty.”
And therein lies the answer to the question: why doesn’t Gaston Glass, who proved once that he had it in him, around us again?
B. P. Schulberg, who has him under contract, will feature him next in a quadruple role — great-grandfather, grandfather, father and son — in “Maytime.”
To many girls Gaston personifies romance. But living close by a person does shatter illusion. One finds realities, to like or dislike. I see in Gaston a gifted boy too inclined to take things easily, who could do big things if some impulse should arouse him from his devitalizing’ contentment.
He knows his classics, the mental food that Bernhardt gave him during his childhood. By the hour he muses of Balzac, of Dumas; in a lazy, analytical way he likes to take life, people, impulses, everything, apart to see what makes them go. Dissatisfied because he can’t understand the vague things his chameleon mind wants to peer into, he brushes the cobwebs of thought aside and, in an instant, is dancing divinely to the victrola’s jazz.
Perhaps the trouble with Gaston is that he doesn’t understand himself.
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He has slightly irregular features and would be undistinguished in appearance were it not for an intangible something — personality perhaps.
Photo by: Albert Witzel (1879–1929)
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1924