Phillips Holmes — Bachelor of Hearts (1931) 🇺🇸
Phillips Holmes said: "A male screen star has the same chance of finding happiness in married life that an extra girl has of picking up the Hope diamond under one of the tables at the Brown Derby Restaurant!"
by Rosa Reilly
None of your dreaming youths, yearning after the great 'what-is-it,' is this Holmes. Instead, under a perfectly arched cranium topped with hair that is the exact color of old-time molasses taffy, Phillips packs fifty ounces of gray matter which he has trained in twenty-four years to gauge the world clearly and expertly. That's why, after less than twenty-four months in the bewildering talkie trade, he is one of the most popular juveniles and certainly the best dramatic actor among the screen's masculine younger set.
"Why kid yourself about it?" this handsome youth continued. "In this generation, thank God, we don't fool ourselves. I know a male screen star can't be happily married — no matter if be tied up with the finest girl in the world. In fact, the finer the woman, the less she would be apt to understand him."
I thought of Maurice Chevalier, Conrad Nagel, Richard Arlen, Harold Lloyd, and several other celebrated movie men who seemed to have found a reasonable amount of that illusive quantity better known as marital happiness — but nobody likes to contradict a screen star, so I didn't put up an argument — just listened while Holmes' deep, intense voice went on.
"Take a star's life and examine it carefully," he said. "He has to be made tip and on the set by nine o'clock in the morning. That means getting up before his wife is thinking about turning over. Then the chances are he will never leave the studio until seven o'clock in the evening. Perhaps for two or three days a week he'll have to be on the lot until eight or eight-thirty; sometimes even all night. And by the time he gets home and takes off his make-up, all he wants to do is roll into bed.
"Sometimes a screen player, because of sound recording conditions, may have to start work at nine o'clock at night and work until four in the morning — never seeing daylight for two weeks at a time. He has little energy left for reading or listening to music, for visiting or sports or the theater.
"It's no use talking — no man or woman can keep regular hours in pictures. That's why I never was awfully keen for a screen career. Although my father has been a well-known actor for years, and my mother, Edna Phillips, was leading lady at Daly's Theater — which was the Theater Guild of its day — my leanings were all away from anything dramatic. I wanted to be a stock broker, and had had quite a good offer which I planned to accept after I finished at Princeton. But I had only been there one year when Frank Tuttle, the movie director, came to college to make 'Varsity' with Buddy Rogers. They decided to get a college man to play Buddy's roommate — just to give the right atmosphere. I was the lucky one selected, and in case people should say after the picture was released 'Such things never happen in a university,' I was to be the living refutation.
"After the picture was over a couple of fellows in my group said: 'Why don't you go out to Hollywood during vacation and look 'em over?'
"I thought that was an excellent idea and did go. Only when my vacation was over I couldn't leave. I was badly bitten by the Hollywood bug. But for a year I could get nothing to do — just playing bits here and there — until suddenly Devil’s Holiday came along. And what with Nancy Carroll, Edmund Goulding, and a good story, to say nothing of the fields of waving corn — I woke up one morning and found my name on the dotted line of a contract.
"From that moment on, every producer seemed to want me to work in a picture after a year of nobly concealing their eagerness. I finished Devil's Holiday one Saturday afternoon at five o'clock. Started another picture that same night at nine. Finished one for Fox at two o'clock one day, started at Warner's the next morning. Worked there twenty days and began the next noon at Columbia on 'The Criminal Code.' Remained until the picture was completed — eight-thirty one Tuesday night — and then dashed off the lot with a police escort to catch the eight-forty train for New York. Missed it. Didn't reach New York until Saturday morning. Began work that afternoon and have been on the go ever since. So you can see how much good I'd be to a wife.
"The trouble is you get so wrapped up in your work you forget everything. It is the most selfish profession in the world for if you want to be any good you've got to give all of yourself to your films and if you do that — where does a wife or a family come in?
"I got so excited when I played the sailor in Her Man I could think of nothing else. It was my first tough part and I was crazy about it. Nobody believed I could do it. Everyone said: 'Gee, Phil, you won't be any good as a sailor.' But it comes natural for even the most conservative person to have his tough moments! The chief difficulty I had was to get my voice right. I had to have a certain tough tone which can only be gotten by adopting a peculiarly nasal quality. After I had that down, I enjoyed the picture more than anything I've ever experienced in my life. Particularly the scrap which put twelve people in the hospital. That film was realistic, all right. But any good melodrama is, for it goes back to primitive living.
"It was sheer luck that got me into pictures, and looking back over my life I've been lucky all along except for one mishap which occurred the day I was born. My mother was on her way from the West back to New York where I was to have made my first personal appearance. But being a premature infant even then, I decided to come into the world in Grand Rapids, Michigan, instead. And you can imagine the blow that was to my Broadway Thespian parents! However, it was a great bit of luck being born into a stage family for, no matter what people say about talent not being inherited, after all there's a certain sensitiveness which a son of artistic parents is bound to have handed down to him. He's bound to be the same type of emotional being. But a son of an already famous actor has to work like the devil before people are willing to admit he can stand on his own.
"Although I had absorbed a certain amount of stage technique from watching my father all these years, when I went to Hollywood I had to learn that most important part of all screen acting — how to project myself. How much to give out — how much to hold in. When you're before the mike you can't tell if you're any good. You have to see your scenes 'played back' first. When you're actually before the cameras you get so tied up in your part that you're apt to overdo it. It's only by keeping a tight rein on your emotions that you can give a good performance. Which seems strange to outsiders since most of them think it's by cutting loose and letting your emotions carry you along that you earn the great big villa in Beverly Hills and that large red roadster!"
Of all the women in screenland, Holmes likes Swanson best. "Gloria has a magnificent mind and she exudes a certain romantic flavor which is absolutely fascinating to me," he explains.
Gary Cooper and Dick Arlen are his pick among the men. For sport he likes flying but doesn't know one gadget from another. He's not one bit mechanical. He has no hobbies. Doesn't care to read. Doesn't play the piano — or the zither. Can't work himself into a froth of excitement over golf, tennis or polo. But he does like athletic girls with nice sun-tanned skin who don't insist upon his being athletic! Nice, good-natured girls whose idea of a swell afternoon is to sit by his side on the Pacific sand and listen to the rollers breaking on the more or less stern cinema coast.
Phillips Holmes in Devil’s Holiday, Her Man, and "The Criminal Code" scored every sort of screen success — popular, financial, and artistic! He is slated for certain stardom.
How much does a comedienne weigh? Daphne Pollard has the weight of many Educational comedies on her shoulders but she supports them nobly.
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Collection: Screenland Magazine, April 1931