Hughie Mack — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
“Dancing around we were dancing around. —”
by Mabel Condon
And others who had intended to, decided, with the bidden appearance of Hughie Mack on the floor, that they would wait for the next one and thus avoid the crush.
“— then he’d dip with his knees,” syncopated the orchestra of four. But not Hughie. He grape-vined, he lame-ducked, he whirled, (judiciously), but he did not dip with his knees. He had regard for his three-hundred and forty-some pounds, also for the three or four other couples the floor managed to accommodate. For nobody but a Flora Finch would have survived had Hughie followed the dictates of the music and dipped with his knees.
“He’d trot her to a corner —” prompted the musical four.
The corners, also the side-lines of the Screen Club’s impromptu ball-room were filled with valiant Screeners. They took up just as little space as possible, in tribute to Hughie and the limitations of the floor, and Hughie in return averted numberless panics by keeping nicely within the border-lines thus formed.
“Ah there, Hughie!” It was William Russell in salutation from the side-lines.
“All I get from here is a rear view came a voice back of Mr. Russell. “If he has a partner, she’s successfully hidden.”
Mr. Russell moved aside a mere two inches and allowed Billy Quirk a better view. “I see — he’s not dancing alone then.” Billy decided and returned to his glass of lemonade with the cherry in it.
“And the people would stay till the break of the day —
“While they were dancing around. —”
The music stopped. Hughie brought two knuckle-padded hands violently together several times and then allowed the valiant Screeners to continue the applause while he gently patted his forehead with an out-size linen handkerchief. But the musicians, as though the task of providing dance music for a fat man were a greater effort than that of observing tempo and rhythm for those who kept within the two-hundred pound limit, unhearingly deserted their wearied instruments and departed refreshment-wards.
“Water, water everywhere, but lemonade to drink,” invited Hughie, seeing no water at all but plenty of other things. “Wait here and I’ll bring some.
Me made an opening through the crowds that a taxi could easily have followed, as far as space was concerned and, returning triumphant and lemonade-laden, took possession of the other chair the corner offered. I moved mine forward to be on a speaking level with Mr. Mack, for his occupancy of a chair also bespoke that of several feet of whatever space happened to be in front of it. At that, he looked as though he were sitting on the chair’s very edge.
“Aren’t you afraid lemonade will make you thin?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t and that it wouldn’t, anyway.
“Been training all my life, and the more I trained the fatter I got; I say ‘trained’ and ‘got’ because I stopped training.”
“But you didn’t stop getting fat.”
“No, and I’m getting fatter. I always was fat, though. When I was sixteen, I weighed two-hundred and twenty pounds and went in for all the athletics going. And I went right along with them, a pound a day almost. I continued training, though, thinking that each new week or month would mark the beginning of my thinness. Instead of that — look at me!”
“Yes, but look at your Vitagraph comedies! You couldn’t afford to get thin,” I reminded him as the cherry in my glass eluded the two pursuing straws, for the third time. “The last time we talked about weight, you weighed three-hundred and eighteen.” “That was last summer, wasn’t it?” “Yes, in the Vitagraph studio yard. You were dressed as a messenger boy. It was a hot day.”
“If I was dressed as a messenger boy, it must have been a hot day,” decided Hughie. “The hotter and tighter the clothes I have to wear the hotter the day is sure to be.”
“Well, the day was hot and your suit certainly looked tight,” I remembered.
“John Bunny and Lillian Walker were taking you for a swim and there was nothing I wanted more on that hot day, than a swim,” Hughie recalled. “But I had to stay and be a messenger boy.”
“Yes, and you told me that you were twenty-eight years old and that before you came into pictures, you were an undertaker.”
“I was, and the offer to work in pictures was purely accidental. It came from the Vitagraph company and was so much more profitable than undertaking that I gave the business to my brother and stayed here. That was almost two years ago. I came the day Bunny sailed for England. The only other theatrical experience I had was vaudeville; but I like pictures better,” he concluded, resting his empty glass on the palm of one fat hand.
“I’m comfortable, even if I am fat, and I’m peaceable; I don’t like arguments,” he added.
“So I never have any,” he further added. Hughie’s brown eyes closed to the tiniest of slits as he smiled his acknowledgment of a greeting from Marguerite Snow. It was the variety of smile that never fails to delight film goers and that added much to the enjoyment of the last personal-appearance sketch at the Vitagraph’s Broadway theater, where Mr. Mack was among those who scored highest in the way of laughs and popularity.
“I have to have everything I wear made to order — but I’m comfortable,” he repeated. “And I’m glad that this is the last night of the exposition,” he digressed. “Heat and crowds may melt some people, but not me, and I’m three-hundred and forty-something right now.”
“Mercy!” I consoled, letting him have my empty glass as the musicians reseated themselves.
And Hughie Mack cleared a path for everybody as he returned the glasses to the brass railed counter and the man with the white apron.
—
Players Leave for Canada
The entire cast of the Life Photo Film Corporation, now engaged in the making of the six-part western psychological drama, “Northern Lights,” left for Montreal, Canada, last week in a special car to complete the pictures that form a part of this production. As an instance of the extravagant scale upon which the Life Photo Film Corporation is putting on this production, a contract was made with the Army & Navy Stores Co. to ship to Canada, uniforms, accoutrements and complete outfit to supply an army of 700 soldiers and 400 Indians, which take part in the production in addition to the regular cast. The contract for this equipment called for the payments on a rental basis, in excess of three thousand dollars. The company, it is expected, will be gone for from two to three weeks. Mr. Edgar Lewis, the director, stated that this production is being staged with details never before attempted in motion pictures.
Immediately following the completion of “Northern Lights” the players will start work on “Capt. Swift,” the drama which enjoyed such a long run on Broadway.
The company also purchased the world’s motion picture rights to Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, written by C. Haddon Chambers. The novelized form of the story is one of the most popular novels written within the past decade.
A cable was forwarded to Edward M. Roskam, president of the company, who is now in London, advising him of the fact, and requesting him to call at Haddon Hall, in the north of England where the story was originally laid, to the end that proper arrangements may be made to take the pictures at that spot.
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Harry Spingler, juvenile lead of Life Photo Company.
Elita Proctor Otis, William H. Tooker and George de Carlton in “The Greyhound.”
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The Photoplaywright of the Future
Emmett Campbell Hall, whose name, had the present practice of screen-credit to authors been in general use for the past three years, would be as familiar to every exhibitor and motion picture patron in the country as it is in the scenario departments and studios, and who at the present time, as a staff writer, is supplying many of the noteworthy Lubin dramas is most optimistic with regard to the future of the capable photoplaywright.
“The time will come,” he says, “when the photoplaywright of real ability will have a personal following vastly exceeding, numerically, that of any author of books or short stories, for the reason that the photoplaywright’s public is from three to five million for each release, while that of the most popular writer of printed fiction will not average 200,000 for a short story, and a slightly larger number for a very successful book.
“The exhibitors and the public will come to count on good plays from certain authors, and will ask for them, in advance, just as the works of popular fiction writers are ordered by book stores and individuals long before they go to press. The film manufacturers will of course avail themselves of this ready-to-wear popularity, and will advertise “A John Doe Drama every Wednesday” — if someone has been wise enough to tie John with a contract — or “A Special Richard Roe Feature.” The fact that it is a release of the Nevermiss Company will be accented mildly, not shouted, for it will be appreciated that the important point is whether or not this particular release is good, and the Nevermiss Company will be too wise to perpetuate the mistake of proclaiming loudly that all Nevermiss releases are the acme of attainment — the Nevermiss trademark will mean to the trade just what the imprint of a good publishing house does — and we buy our books not, for instance, because they are published by Harper, but because they were written by Mark Twain. The manufacturer’s name will guarantee photography and general standard of production — the names of the author and actors will hold out the promise of entertainment, for, as most persons are coming to admit, it is, when all is said and done, the story and the acting that count most. The greatest director who does, or ever will, live cannot make a good release from a poor story, though he may make a wonderful picture — a photodrama with the drama left out.”
Collection: Motography Magazine, July 1914