Marceline Day — Marceline Keeps Cool (1927) 🇺🇸
The courtyard is in a bustle. Officers with gleaming swords keep the ragged, surging peasants back. The king and his train move restlessly about, impatient, bored. Monarch and subjects alike wait, wait, wait. Hours drag by, and tired but faithful ladies in waiting sigh.
by Myrtle Gebhart
At last a tatterdemalion figure shambles in, kicks a stone out of his path, and stands under the glare of the studio lights while they are most minutely adjusted for the scene. There are shouts, a great scurrying about, and a rearrangement of groups.
Amid all this bustle and clamor, one figure has preserved a quiet calm — Princess Catherine, now standing serenely unperturbed by the side of her ragged poet-lover, François Villon.
It would take a great deal more than the excitement of a movie scene to ruffle the composure of Marceline Day, even though that scene was being made for John Barrymore’s The Beloved Rogue and Marceline was playing his leading lady.
Marceline was but fifteen when, three years ago, she followed her sister Alice [Alice Day] into the movies. From the trials and tribulations of an extra she progressed to leads with Harry Langdon, thence to “hoss operas” at Universal. Whether she played wistful or spirited heroines, there was from the beginning an assurance about her performances that caught the eye and held the attention. Finally, The Barrier definitely established her and won her a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract.
The past year has brought Marceline out as a very distinct personality. She had seemed for a while to be merely another edition of sweet little Alice, whose wide-open gaze appears to be forever searching for a looking-glass to jump through. In fact, the resemblance between the two sisters had often been the cause of their being mistaken for one another.
However, Marceline had not at that time attained her full growth. In a twinkling, it seems, she has shot up several inches. Her manner, too, has changed. Shyness has given place to a surprising frankness in speech, irrespective of persons. “That sap!” she remarked witheringly of a very important star of whom she just didn’t approve.
Sister Alice is like a baby that you want to pet, with her round, childish face, her drawling voice, her snuggly little figure, all bundled in furs, and her brown curls, escaping from under her woolly tam. But Marceline is tall and slim, and over her blue eyes a smoky grayness drifts. She clowns with spontaneous naturalness. Her conversations are italicized by the fleeting expressions that wash over her mobile face like quicksilver.
Alice’s words linger; Marceline’s are crisp, with a bluntness that matches her boyish swagger. You would think that their positions in the movies should be reversed — that Alice should be the sympathetic heroine, Marceline the comedienne. But no, the producers say — and they must be right for Alice is certainly adroit at comedy and Marceline’s work has recently revealed a growing emotional power.
Red, White, and Blue, a film of the training camps, will next engage Marceline’s attention, according to plans at this writing.
“Don’t know yet who will be the man,” she raised her face from a huge box of chocolates to inform me, in that cool, even voice of hers. “Oh, mother dear, must you take all the marshmallows? Darling, wouldn’t you prefer a nice, crisp chip?” Her hands already full of marshmallows, she dived into the box for more, and thence her words came, somewhat muffled.
“You know, this thing they call publicity is simply wonderful,” she said. “The things the press agents publish about you give you a thrill whether they’re true or not. Like when they said I’d had all my gowns for a certain picture designed in Paris. I said to my studio-wardrobe frocks, ‘Now, try to look like you have Paris labels tacked on you,’ and enjoyed parading them almost as much as if they had actually come from Paris.”
That’s Marceline. Her imagination is used to enliven the present, not wasted in idle dreaming of the future. Wary, unwilling to risk being disappointed, the enjoyment of the moment suffices. Self-confident, she is hampered by no fears. She has shrewdly summed up a film career as a thing for which you have to be reasonably pretty “and then plug.”
Her calmness toward all things pertaining to the movies remained unshaken even when she was engaged to play opposite Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue. While others thrilled, Marceline merely said, “He is a very wonderful actor — and the prestige will help me — but there won’t be much me in the picture, will there?”
Success, to this cool young lady — who becomes an impulsive girl of eighteen only when really exciting things, like parties, are mentioned — has no glamour. It simply means work more interesting than any other, financial independence, lovely clothes, furniture, cars, and other luxuries.
Marceline has climbed the stairs only to the first landing. Another flight is before her, and still others, winding, twisting, leading on and up. Pausing not to glance over her shoulder into the pinched but not unhappy days of her childhood, she climbs — and she will continue to climb, up and up, this springtime Day on whom the sunlight glows.
After only three years in pictures, Marceline Day, at eighteen, is John Barrymore’s heroine in The Beloved Rogue, but takes the honor calmly, as you will read in the story opposite.
Not even the lead opposite John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue was exciting enough to stir Marceline’s calm composure.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1927