Ina Claire — Not Just a Wife (1930) 🇺🇸
Ina Claire seemed to be an ideal person to quiz about marriage. In the first place, Ina has been married to a smart newspaperman, whom she divorced in due time. In the second place, Ina has been successfully allied to John Gilbert of the films for a year and a half. (The half is important. In Hollywood every four months is celebrated. Life is short and matrimony treacherous.) And in the third place, Miss Claire has sparkled on Broadway in so many brilliant comedies bristling with epigrams, insults and divorcees that she has unquestionably absorbed some of the Lonsdale ideas on love and marriage, men and morals, scotch and soda. "Who can say that being "Polly with a Past," Mrs. Cheyney and the heroine of "Grounds for Divorce" wouldn't be a liberal education?
by Rowley Trench
So I went to Ina Claire to find out about the inside story of this thing called marriage. Why was it considered an institution, and who, as the beloved Raymond Hitchcock was wont to inquire, wanted to live in an institution? It would all be answered by the blonde Miss Claire.
Although she was living at the Savoy Plaza messages brought no response. Telegrams, footmen, and carrier pigeons were disregarded, one and all alike. So it was necessary to charter a camel and cross the hot sands of Long Island to the Paramount studios, where Ina was alleged to be making "The Royal Family" for posterity and the talkies. A-hunting we must go!
Again she was elusive. She was in her dressing-room but she had just quitted it for Stage 4 ; she had stopped at Stage; 4 long enough to leave her script and might be found in the commissary. A tour to that center of provisions disclosing nothing better than Harry Richman, carrying his latest photograph, ebony walking-stick, and humming something that sounded like I'm Just Wild About Harry, but after all anyone is liable to err. He may have been cooing I'm Just a Vagabond Lover.
At any rate, Ina Claire was finally discovered on a balcony in The Royal Family set, a very pretentious affair duplicating three of the original stage sets and leaving room for a miniature golf-course.
It seemed that Miss Claire was an off-stage voice in the opening sequence. She had to remain on the balcony, out of camera range, but on the balcony nevertheless. Taking the director's chair when he wasn't looking I hurried back of the set with it, and placing a ladder on it I climbed to the balcony.
"Miss Claire," I said, "here we are, and you might as well bow to the inevitable."
Miss Claire stifled a yawn and bowed.
"If a supervisor should find you on this balcony your name is abracadabra," she said, pleasantly.
She is a smartly turned out woman with a distinctly intelligent face that is attractive without being beautiful. She is the epitome of style, it should be unnecessary to add, and moves in an aura of sophistication.
Regarding matrimony she was rather positive and had very definite ideas.
"Matrimony is overrated and overwritten," she said. "Matrimony is not a state; it is simply a state of mind. If two people decided to marry with the prefixed notion of long vacations out of one another's sight, more marriages would be successful.
"I have never been disillusioned by the ceremony. On both occasions I have enjoyed the companionship of interesting men. My first husband, you know, once reviewed my play with some such phrase as 'Miss Claire is the worst actress I have ever been married to,' and yet we got along well. A sense of humor is indispensable. But that is obvious.
"Gilbert has a sense of humor. He's a charming fellow. Temperamental, of course, but aren't we all?"
That was a Lonsdale play, too, I remembered. "Oscar, darling, I'll be down in a minute," said Miss Claire. It was startling until one realized that she was furnishing the offstage voice stipulated in her contract.
"This scene will lead to my entrance," she confided. "In three weeks I'll have arrived on the set, in person. We in pictures work like the mills of the gods. Slowly, and we grind exceedingly small."
This was Miss Claire's second talking picture. The first was a Pathé, The Awful Truth, that created no uproar.
The Claire-Gilbert marriage was one of those front-page sensations for nine days, and the subsequent tiffs and truces were likewise broadcast.
"And that," she advanced, "is one of the very things that makes marriage difficult for professional couples. Heaven only knows that matrimony is a fragile bark at best on what philosophers like to call the Sea of Life, but when it is tossed about on waves of publicity and subject to the storms of popular opinion it has a doubly hard voyage.
"When you read in paper after paper that you and your husband have separated, that he is jealous of you and you jealous of him, it all has a certain terrifying effect. It's all very well to say 'Laugh it off' but it does something psychologically. And whenever Jack and I feel restless we go our own ways. It is a sensible idea."
"Though unconventional," I amended.
"Conventions," said Ina briskly, "are for visiting firemen and people who never get anywhere without signposts to guide them. Intelligent people who are capable of thinking for themselves are guided by moral sense of right and wrong. Conventions are stupid laws that probably have their place. But common sense and a decent sense of ethics are enough to keep the average thinking person straight.
"Aren't we getting too serious?"
There may have been something in the thought.
"When you read in the papers that you and your husband have separated it has a terrifying effect," says Mrs. John Gilbert.
Ina Claire is making her second picture, "The Royal Family," in New York, and she may also do a stage play here — Jack is working in Hollywood.
John and Ina Claire Gilbert. Their marriage was one of those front-page sensations for nine days.
"If two people decide to marry with the prefixed notion of long separate vacations, more marriages would be successful," says Ina Claire Gilbert.
Miss Claire as she appeared in her first talker, "The Awful Truth," which created no uproar. But wait!
Collection: Screenland Magazine, December 1930