Patsy Ruth Miller — Patsy Ruth Flares Up (1927) 🇺🇸
Little Vesuvius has blown up! When I went out to Patsy Ruth Miller’s house I found her in high mettle, flinging her wind-blown bob about like a spirited pom ‘s mane.
by Myrtle Gebhart
“Behold me,” she exclaimed, “at a crisis in my life! You would bust right into The Big Scene. I’ve had a fight, grand and glorious. The first since I’ve been in pictures.”
It developed that she had obtained a release from Warner Brothers.
When I had extracted the details, the grand fracas simmered down to a polite interchange of words. Pat had awakened to the fact that the routine films in which she was playing were not advancing her, and the Warners agreed it would be foolish to attempt to hold her if she were going to be discontented.
Pat would surcharge the air with the drama of it and, hair brush held high — whether it was meant to be a torch or a sword couldn’t be figured out — announce, “Ce n’est que le, premier pas qui coute ! It’s the second step, getting a role I want, that may be difficult. C’est une autre chose !”
Every incident is transformed under the flash of her personality into an importance that it scarcely deserves. Pat’s buoyancy and her instinctive dramatic sense give color and thrill to most prosaic happenings.
Only recently have I realized that few outside Hollywood really know Pat. The screen never has reproduced her youthful flare; she seems wooden and saccharine, whereas her personality is one of sparkle and pungence. She is a most amusing person, with a sense of humor often directed toward herself, and is sophisticated without being worldly or experienced.
“That makes it twice as hard for me,” she admitted ruefully the truth of my comment. “Not only do I have to create a likable impression when meeting people, but I must undo the one already formed of me. How can I impress my personality in dumb, stupid parts? I want to do farce or comedy, the Constance Talmadge sort of thing. When I’m forty, and should be trailing around in long negligees doing Pauline Frederick roles, they’ll have me flapping — and I’ll have to put a mud pack on my face every night in order to greet the camera next morning.
“I’ve been in pictures five years and I’ve concluded it’s time to do a Custer act!” She sharpens everything she says into dramatic relief, talks in italics. “Except for one Lubitsch picture [Ernst Lubitsch’s movie So This is Paris], I’ve been stuck into poor stories. I’ve learned all ‘just movies’ can teach me. Now it’s time to plunge. I may starve, but I’ll have a grand time doing it.”
The phone rang. A friend, in from New York, told her she was acquiring a following in the East.
“I thought,” said Pat, slightly subdued, “I already had one! Good for my pride.” She was very humble for five minutes, but rallied. To take from Pat her superb self-assurance would be to remove the very essence of her individuality. She has an avid curiosity and a greed to learn, so she reads up to date, and a few leaps ahead.
And she speaks French, another accomplishment of the past two years.
“And how I write it! Had a French swain in New York. Alas, that romance was snuffed out by my long-distance French. I don’t know yet what I wrote him, with a dictionary in one hand, and filching phrases from his letters to write back to him.”
For all her flippancy, Pat has her serious moments. We were speaking of a girl whom disillusionment had embittered, and Pat said, in a reverie, “It isn’t the big tragedy that’s hard to bear. You get hit slap in the face; you’re dizzy for a bit, then you shake it off. It’s the little, pecky, irritations and small disappointments in people that grate on you. Bubbles are always pricked; life has its ugly corners. Experience and knowledge either make you cranky and melancholy, or else tolerant, with a power growing in you that you are unaware of — or you develop a sense of humor that fights your battles for you.”
In spite of her sophistication, her French frocks, her beaux, Pat is still very much a little girl. The other day she imperturbably cut up a gown, simply because she needed some lace to cover a boudoir pillow and hadn’t any other at hand. And alibied herself with such skill that Mrs. Miller saw the uselessness of reprimanding her.
She will tell you, to a cent, the cost of something. “New car? You flatter me. Last year’s painted over — I’m getting economical. Bought a sixty-cent cheese-cloth design for a cushion cover, decided I didn’t like it, erased it, and drew a new one.”
Her fad of the moment is making hook rugs. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her tan-and-green bedroom, the frame on her knees, yarn everywhere. Her work was slightly erratic.
“Do you know what hook rugs cost?” she bridled. “You wouldn’t. I suppose you’re really not to blame for being an ignoramus. At least one hundred and fifty dollars. Besides, you should be pleased to see me so domestic. I’ve decided definitely —”
My burst of raucous laughter sent her scornful eyebrows up in interrogation.
“Last week you decided definitely to tour Europe this summer, the week before you were going to marry and have three children. Now, I suppose, you’ve decided definitely to go on making hook rugs for the rest of your life.”
She sighed, elaborately. “I get no credit for economy. It’s sad, the way my talents are unappreciated. And I do wish you would try to acquire the art of politeness. I’ve decided to be a director.”
Sitting back on her heels, eyes squinted at what might possibly develop into a hook rug, she shut her lips very firmly. I gasped. Had she said running an engine, turning pagan, eloping with the postman, or any such folly, I should not have been surprised. It seems, however, there is no limit to that girl’s imagination. It often strikes me dumb in amazed admiration.
At that, she may, if she doesn’t change her mind. Nothing Pat would do would seem unusual, for she never does the customary thing; it would be exceptional for her to be trite.
“First, I’m going to travel. Europe, the Orient, everywhere — people, life!” Widely flung arms embraced, figuratively, the world. With a keen brain she grasps knowledge greedily, assimilates it, and now is learning to shuffle it about. “I read and read, and have absorbed others’ thoughts; in the past two years I have realized that I have a brain, and I’m getting a kick out of using it, analyzing, and thinking for myself. I want to make my life constructive and to have fun while doing so. I want to know everything, and to be broad and tolerant. I hate narrow people —”
“Hating is the perfection of tolerance!”
“Give me time, can’t you? I’ve not graduated yet. Seriously, though, I believe these contacts with writers have taught me a lot. At first, that was my reason for cultivating authors. I knew vaguely that they had something I wanted, that would be of value to me. I wanted to get out of the picture rut, away from the little circle whose only conversation is pictures; and these men had achievements to their credit. They are thinkers.
“Selfish, my first motive. My second was of such a self-sacrificing and altruistic nature that it surprised even me. I found so many of them unappreciated by the studios that had brought them out, with a flourish, to write stories, and then had ignored them except to use their names, that I determined to devote the rest of my life to cheering poor, misunderstood writer men.”
Poor, misunderstood writer men like Ben Hecht, Robert Benchley, Edwin Justus Mayer, Patrick Kearney, Donald Ogden Stewart!
I’ve seen the tallest brows furrowed over her frowns — men whose caustic wit and critical satire have caused them to be held as little tin gods in the writers’ world, swarming about her while an older, more intellectual woman was ignored. It is not only her vibrant, exultant youth which spins into popularity; it is more her penetrating wit, the humor that she tosses off in pertinent sallies, and the way she says things.
Ben Hecht, his villainous pipe clenched between his teeth, sat on a cushion at her feet all one evening, roaring at her quips. Pat doesn’t wise-crack — she is too clever. She doesn’t repeat mots of the moment; she coins them.
“How,” I asked her, “do you manage to grab off all the celebrities? A famous author arrives from the East and the next evening you are at the theater with him. Do you meet the trains?”
That she refused disdainfully to answer, but admitted slyly, “It’s my maternal quality.”
Incidentally, the presence of so many writers at dinners at the Miller home has bred in the Filipino cook startling literary ambitions, which he gives vent to by spelling out sentiments on the pastry.
“We never know what to expect,” Pat said. “You may get a cake with a candied greeting, ‘You are the love of my soul,’ or an articulate pie saying, ‘Art is the quintessence of imagination.’ That cook’s talent will come in handy when we’ve duty guests; next time I’m going to slip him the word and have him put, ‘So sorry you can’t come again!’ on everything from steak — well, he can spell it in onions, can’t he? — to dessert!”
My cookies were adorned with a cordial “Adieu!” but I failed to take the hint, laying it at Pat’s door.
“A mere contretemps, chère amie. My accent might be improved, mightn’t it?”
It may interest Pat’s fans to know that she isn’t going to fall in love any more, she says. So often was her name linked with one after another, that George Jessel got off his famous line last year that “a ticket West includes a stop-over at the Grand Canyon and an engagement to Patsy Ruth Miller.”
In The First Auto, her last picture for the Warners, she supports a parade of antiquated horseless carriages. It is really a romance of the gas filly, with Pat in bouffant skirts and leg-o’-mutton sleeves adding the so-called feminine interest.
“I’ve played it for comedy,” she winked. “I’m in the mood. Besides, one look at me in the antediluvian costumes would turn the best intentions. I reveled in the chance to show the world what a small waist I have, holding my arms akimbo in every scene.”
There isn’t any more to say about Pat just now, except that when I phoned later I learned that the hook rug had had a relapse.
Photo by: Roman Freulich (1898–1974)
Patsy Ruth Miller’s heart is set on sophisticated roles, and her costume, in “Hot Heels,” proves it.
Patsy Ruth Miller’s verve and wit are a tradition in Hollywood, even though her screen roles have done their best to obscure her real self from the fans. In the story on the opposite page will be found a great deal of the flash and sparkle that make her so distinctive.
Photo by: Rayhuff-Richter
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1927