Olive Borden Repents Her Folly (1930) 🇺🇸

February 14, 2023

Hollywood, chameleon townlet, is built upon the sands of publicity that swirl back to mingle, in the minds of her egoistic children, the true and the make-believe.

by Myrtle Gebhart

They tried to train a nice, lilting, little tennis-and-parlor personality into a prima-donna beauty. Olive Borden erred in believing the sonnets sung by the publicity typewriters.

But the Irish can't kid themselves very long. You can fool anything but a sense of humor; swamp anything but Irish spirit.

Two years ago, when her split with Fox occurred over a disputed salary raise and other differences, she had half paid for a sixty-five-thousand-dollar Beverly Hills home. It was expensively furnished — on the installment plan. Affluence marked everything with the grand gesture. The upkeep of her magnificent home totaled seventeen hundred dollars a month. Four servants saved her the least exertion. The garages housed a fleet of motors. Her modistes' bills were enormous. Had the firefly Olive been shown a fur coat costing less than thirty-five hundred she would have been insulted.

When the weekly emolument stopped, Olive sat in the midst of her grandeur and laughed shakily, her humor a bit uncertain, having been smothered for three years. Besides, it quavered against a background of tears.

There was hurt in her laugh, and irony, perhaps hysteria. Fight, too.

With a snappy gesture, she sold the furniture that was paid for, returned the rest with her apologies, fired the servants, moved to the beach and later to a small apartment. Her equity in the house was traded for business property returning rentals. Bills were catalogued, with the determination to clear them. Though the facing of such obligations is a moral duty, many shrug them aside and attempt to maintain prestige with an assumed front. They sweep the dust under the carpet. There is not much in Hollywood's attitude to encourage one to scrub the floor.

For eight months she was idle. With the eight pictures made since her return, she has paid her debts.

"Not a penny in the bank," she announced gayly, one day recently. "Oh, don't look worried. We eat. Maybe we go to the football game!" The laughter left her face, and for a moment brown eyes stared soberly ahead. Her hand squeezed mine, and the whole of her rippled with a vibrant sense of freedom. "But I'm square with creditors, the world, and my own conscience. And what a highly satisfactory feeling it is, too." Alert and buoyant, she made the very air seem to step smartly along.

"We're expecting a new arrival in the family." Eh? Aware that her seriousness often mocks a tease. I wouldn't bite, and merely hoped it would be a blonde. "Caucasian, if I have anything to say about it — very bright — though mother prefers a dark cloud," she chortled. It developed that the anticipated addition went by the name of Ford. A new car, these days, is an event. Economy characterizes their comparatively simple apartment, tended by two servants. A tempting fur coat was shrugged aside, though not without struggle, and a serviceable cloth wrap, priced at three hundred dollars, bought in its stead. Her clothes indicate instantly the change in Olive. When she used to lend an opalescent glow to the screen, she was swamped in ensembles typical of her film self — laces and picture hats and glittering sequins. With renovation of both mind and manner, she has clipped the flounces and shaken off the silken impediments. Favoring well-tailored sport things, she wears them with dash.

Circumstance plays so large a part in initial achievement that it is far less a work of one's own will and effort. Second success, following a failure, is a tribute to one's ability and character. It takes stamina to obliterate those uncomplimentary remarks inscribed after one's name by one's own foolishness. Mistakes beget knowledge — but the school is rough. In reaction to adversity and willingness to see and profit by errors, you see grit, or lack of it.

"The jolt brought me to my senses. My scale of living, my entire viewpoint, was twisted out of all proportion. A glamorous portrait of me was painted on the screen's canvas. Except for the physical likeness, it was a stranger. I was told to study and copy it, ordered to live up to the impression being broadcast. A player's personal life used to be important in reflecting her screen self; now it is only 'What can she do?'"

The studio designed a bouffant personality. It was not cut to Olive's measurements. Instead, into its fluted folds she must slip. Her role was one of luscious languor; all the humor was pressed out of her limpid, dark beauty, with emphasis on her physical allurements. Gracile and willowy, she decorated film tableaux.

Maintaining this strained dignity, she posed through Hollywood in splendid raiment, accoutered with all the trappings of stellar splendor. She was haughty, bored, and beautiful. Occasionally she flashed a dentifrice smile, between studied gestures.

"I put on a grand campaign." Backward glances curl amusedly over the stilted figure as it poised arrogantly against a veloured life. "Who says I'm not a good actress? My technique then should silence my critics."

A premature sunset shadowed that brief parade of glory. She began to believe in her own sham. Life grew too plushy.

"Prosperity brought a false set of values. Assumed artificiality gets such a hold on one that in time it shoves away realities, and it is easy to think the theatrical is real."

No one knew of her financial tangle until her books were clear. Her creditors were courteous; they believed in her. There was no whining of a hard-luck story. A small coterie of friends, studio employees, the gang in the publicity department, stuck. "They were bricks. I had held aloof from the picture crowd, not entirely from pride. I really had been too busy to chase around, though hauteur was a part of my role. So I did not blame the professionals for ignoring me when misfortune walloped me into exile at Santa Monica.

"For a while I wallowed in despondency and bitter regrets, thinking I was finished. I saw only the dismal side, following that first hysterical spell of laughter at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. I waited in a nervous tension for the phone to ring. It didn't.

"Gradually spunk asserted itself, and the thought dawned that you're never licked until you admit it out loud. So I dived into several activities, in an effort to occupy my mind. I studied French and danced, whirling around in what I fondly imagined was a Ruth St. Denis impersonation. When the screen began to talk, I took up tapping, clogging, and eccentric steps.

"These interests relaxed me, and my manner became jaunty. I felt myself again. We in pictures let things get too much of a hold on us." Her stream of words, tumbling over each other in echo of rapid thought, still more accented her buoyancy. "Material things, and advancement in one particular field, become too important, ambition too concentrated. And when you let anything be too necessary, it is invariably taken from you. That is for your good; otherwise, you make an idol of it. Broadening your horizon, you find a world outside, busy at various fascinating' things, and what you had considered so great dwindles in comparison.

"Almost any girl taken from obscurity and spot-lighted, highly paid and catered to, would go haywire. Precious few have escaped that stage of distorted viewpoint, unless they had very wise management.

"And how is one to know? One accepts the suggestions of executives, of professionals. Soon one is in a whirlwind of do-this and don'tdo-that. With no previous training that would have developed judgment, only exceptional cleverness or intuition could select wisely from all this proffered advice.

"It is highly enjoyable, I'll admit. We love acting too much to stop it when we leave the studio; besides, everything fosters stellar vanity, urges the continuance of the 'act.' We pretend, until it becomes problematical which is real and which sham.

"I wanted money, a lot of it. Why? I don't know, except that earning it pleases ego, spending it whets vanity. It adds to that absurd importance. With the inflated estimation of self, the more money you get the more you want, to increase prestige. And it is handy to purchase palaces and such trinkets.

"I whined and pleaded for better roles for so long that when finally my temper flared, they were shocked and called me temperamental. I was justified in kicking, but my manner at first was too subservient, then too demanding. Perhaps I wasn't tactful. When I saw the decrease in my popularity and read the criticisms, I begged them to feature me in good parts, instead of starring me as a dressed dummy. They claimed that I was becoming ungovernable. Well, it was my career that was tilting lopsided.

"The deepest hurt, for which I was not to blame, was their calling me temperamental over minor incidents, like driving across the street to the other lot, instead of walking, when I was in negligée for a scene. I have been game, working when ill, enduring discomforts, as we all do. An actor crabs, but we take it as a matter of course.

"I am sorry for having fought over salary. That was unwise. It stamps you as a trouble maker. And none of us is worth, in comparison with other vocations we might follow, half of what we get. I regret going grandiloquent, and being sassy. And I am beaucoup glad that it is all over."

The days pass swiftly, encompassing many activities : the newly exacting work, piano, vocal and tapping lessons, golf and swimming, French verbs, considerable reading, moderns of the sophisticated mode.

The producers are too busy shining new gleams to repolish scuffed stars. They thought they knew her limitations, and the day of the manikin, depending on ocular appeal, had passed. An agent plugged. In interviews with producers, Olive impressed with her sincerity, her acknowledgment of error, her eagerness for another trial, but with earnest self-confidence. Columbia extended a second opportunity. Suddenly she was working again, so quietly that news of it did not get about for weeks. While the stipend she demanded of Fox, two thousand weekly, was achieved only with her last picture, for the others she had been paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars a week, which sum she had been drawing during the latter part of her contract.

In "The Wedding Ring" her role was that of a young sophisticate, laughing at love. "Half Marriage" and "Gang War" preceded "Dance Hall" for RKO, where she is signed for future engagements. In "Dance Hall" she was featured with Arthur Lake. Defining the crude flapper, one of those brash and smart kids of the fifty-cent dance hall, proved to be immense fun.

With the variety which her work now affords her, she feels on the road to her ultimate goal, the stage.

Olive has been in pictures for six years — counting the interlude when she wasn't in them. Familiar with the camera, she is acquiring knowledge of the chattering cinema. Though soft, her Southern accent is not a detriment, as she enunciates rapidly and clearly; indeed, she talks in staccato gusts, only occasionally slurring her syllables as they do in Virginia, whence she came.

As a prologue to her sixteenth birthday, after a brief service as telephone operator, her career began, with the usual extra mobbing. Her mother managed to keep them going through lean times by running a candy store. The profits were meager. When stardom elevated them to the manor-and-ermine status, care seemed folded into the past. With privation's memories, and a natural hunger for beauty, extravagance was inevitable.

But the stern spirit which had carried them through poverty's pinch enabled them to weather subsequent vicissitudes and rehabilitation. Each of the many incidents weaving thrills and disappointments into these varied experiences has left its indelible mark. At twenty-two, having taken her first uppercut on the chin and recovered from dizziness to plunge into the scrap again, she is equipped, it would seem, for a firmer and more lasting achievement.

"Not sitting on top of the world exactly," she admitted, "but climbing up again. I'll hook onto each rung more carefully this time!"