Marguerite Clayton — Friends Everywhere (1918) 🇺🇸

August 28, 2024

“When I was in California,” confided Marguerite Clayton, “do you know, I was almost afraid to leave for New York. Out there, they told me that Eastern people were heartless and cold to strangers and that the climate was awful and that anyway it was no place for a girl alone. Now here I am, perfectly safe and happy and in the very heart of New York and in an artist’s studio at that.”

by Dorothy Scott

Here she was, indeed. Nothing could be more typical of the heart of New York than the Beaux Arts apartments and the studio belongs to Haskell Coffin and looks exactly like an illustration from a Robert Chambers novel. Miss Clayton was perched on a high stool with a torn straw hat on her head and her hair over her shoulders posing for the cover of the October number of Photoplay. There was a gay little blaze in the huge fire-place, a bowl of field-flowers on the table and a canary singing somewhere in another room. In the midst of all this, sat Mr. Coffin, sketching sedately and trying not to look like Miss Clayton’s idea of an artist-villain. It would be impossible to imagine anything more correct and friendly and less like a scene from The Terrors of New York.

Miss Clayton looks as if she had just stepped off a magazine cover even when she is not posing for one. You almost expected to see “April Number 20 Cents” printed somewhere above her head. She is all pink and white and sky-blue and yellow — exactly the combination of colors to gladden a newsstand. And her expression radiates cheerfulness especially when she is talking about New York.

“My first idea of the City was all wrong,” she went on. “You know the sort of thing you read in novels and sometimes see on the screen. They always call the City ‘the vortex’ or ‘Babylon’, and picture people like me lost in its whirl. When I got off the Pullman at the Pennsylvania station for the first time, my teeth were chattering and I felt like the heroine in Reel One who is barely saved from an awful fate in Reel Five. Fortunately, a girl friend was there to meet me and when I told her I was frightened, she laughed. We took a bus up-town and the conductor found a seat for us and called me ‘sis’ and told me to watch my step. And the minute I saw Fifth Avenue, all smiling and friendly in the sunshine, I knew that I was going to love New York always.”

“As soon as you know a person well enough,” she said, “they will tell you about the time they were broke in New York. Someone has always helped them and then when they arrive they remember that time and help the next one. It’s like the line in the ‘Twelve Pound Look’ where you think “poor soul” of them and they think “poor soul” of you and that keeps you human. But you don’t stay a poor soul long,” Miss Clayton added gravely. “If you really want to, sooner or later you are bound to succeed. That is what I felt in the air from the top of that bus.”

Her own success has more than justified that feeling. Most of her training came from the West which accounts for her fresh viewpoint. She was born in Salt Lake City where she began her work on the stage almost before she can remember.

“I used to sing in the big Tabernacle there,” she told me, “when I was so little that I didn’t know enough to be scared. Then I went into musical comedy and one day I saw an ad in a Los Angeles paper asking for moving picture actresses. I didn’t tell anyone about it, but I went over to the studio (it was really a barn in those days) and applied for the job. Mr. Anderson accepted me in spite of my lack of experience and that began my work in the Broncho Billy pictures. It was entirely new work and lots of fun. For a while I thought I would never get tired of being rescued from Indians and things. But, while I am glad of the experience, I wouldn’t go back to Western stuff for the world.”

There is a picturesque contrast between the chaps and sombrero of the Broncho Billy days and the little manicure girl in the Artcraft production of Hit-the-Trail Holliday, with George M. Cohan. Miss Clayton adores such contrasts. She is determined not to be identified with one type of character that will prevent her from playing any other type that has ever been invented.

On the way back to the office I moralized to myself like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. It was a neat sermon to the effect that we get out of a specific place exactly what we take there and that the City is really a mirror which reflects the face you bring to it. The sincere worker who intends to do her very best and to help others besides will find — exactly what Miss Clayton found. As soon as you meet her you understand why she thinks New York such ace.