A Pot of Gold for Billie Dove (1927) 🇺🇸

The “rainbow girl” they call Billie Dove, because of her pastel tints, which reproduce so exquisitely in color photography.

by Myrtle Gebhart

“A panchromatic subject,” a camera man put it, meaning, in plain English, that she is color sensitive.

I prefer the first sobriquet, however, for two reasons — Billy is invariably happy-spirited and smiling and, secondly, she has followed a rainbow of dreams that has led to the promised pot of gold.

Since the very commencement of her career — in the “Follies” — she has harbored large yet sensible ambitions: she would marry happily and she would also be a success as an actress, and life would then be very serene, with naught to wish for and naught of friction to mar its contentment.

Even in certain times of discouragement, when the mists almost obscured her high arch of dreams, she clung to them with a quiet obstinacy. She was willing to wait for their consummation.

And now she has found the pot of gold, gloriously full.

For a long while one disappointment in particular rankled, though she did not bewail it. That was that no one seemed to share her belief that she could act, not until she met and married Irvin Willat, whose faith in her gave her more confidence.

Lois Weber’s The Marriage Clause was Billie’s answer to her critics, followed by the same director’s The Sensation Seekers, in which her ability was still further manifested. Owing to a happy combination of circumstances, these two pictures proved to be the turning point in her career. She played interesting, womanly characters in both films, and the sympathetic understanding of the woman director, Lois Weber, made her feel more at home, at ease, in her work than ever before.

Of a sudden, after having been rather ignored for a couple of years and regarded only as a pretty lead, companies started bartering for her services. Three contracts were offered her. First National’s she accepted. Her first film for them, in which she appears with Lloyd Hughes and Lewis Stone, is entitled An Affair of the Follies. It hasn’t much novelty in its plot, being the fluffy tale of a dancer who is loved by two men.

“But it has such true little home touches.” Billie defended it, when I scoffed. “The cooking, in the early scenes, when we’re just married.” And she elaborated the details that had engendered her enthusiasm.

Five years has the rainbow girl spent on her quest for the pot of gold.

“Remember our first chat?” Over the luncheon table in her green-tinted dressing room we reminisced together. “Four and a half years ago — I had just come West to star for Metro.”

Of course I had not forgotten. Beforehand, I had envisioned her, the first “Follies” girl I was to meet, as a resplendent creature, somewhat startling. But I found that the “Follies” earmarks were missing. She was merely pretty, and she didn’t pose or scintillate, and I wasn’t thrilled at all. I liked her, though, immediately, and the years have not changed that first impression.

“And remember Wanderer of the Wasteland,” she went on, “when you came with us on location. Irvin and I were honeymooning.”

“You certainly were! One morning at breakfast you emptied a whole sugar bowl, one spoonful after another, into his coffee, while you were gazing at each other. We all held our breath and waited for his grimace when he tasted it. But he drank it all without taking his eyes from you.”

“Why, I — he — we did not!” she gasped.

“Did so. The rest of us got cheated out of sugar. And we all decided that love must be great!”

“It is.” she said. Her blue eyes — that blue of a peaceful sea — stared past me, out onto the rain-whipped lawn, and I knew it wasn’t the dreary day that was softening them with dreaminess. “We like each other better every day. We live quietly and never go out when we’re working. Besides, Irvin studies and reads a great deal. Companionship— -that explains our happiness.”

Her success as a wife is due, I believe, to the fact that she is so essentially feminine. But her very womanliness is also the reason why, after her series of fluffy Metro pictures, you did not see her often in films. For when the flapper flung her way onto the screen, she edged out the Billie Doves. The boyish figure, with its flat chest and swaggering strides, became the vogue; the pert kid with a mania for the Charleston, cocktails and cigarettes, held the center of the stage.

The womanliness of Billie, her delicately rounded curves, her quiet charm, which is so much more receptive than eruptive, the innate sweetness of her. found no screen market save in Westerns, in which she acted under her husband’s direction.

The word “sweet,” which is so characteristic of Billie, has been applied to her in irritation, even in mockery. Can Hollywood. I wonder, ever be pleased? One player is denounced as temperamental, another as conceited. A girl so sweet can’t be genuine, Hollywood argues, and accuses her of being insincere.

I have seen this sweetness of Billie Dove’s tested under conditions that would have sorely tried a less serene disposition. But never have I seen in her the slightest sign of ill feeling or resentment. She is always the same — charming, considerate, calm, and sweet. When with girls, her chatter of clothes and furniture and pictures is voluble; she sparkles. With men she is the receptive listener. By some this attitude is practiced as a subtle flattery. But it is not a pose with Billie. On location, in a Pullman-car compartment piled high with magazines, fluffy lace pillows and candy, in a small-town stuffy hotel room, in a sand-floored tent on the desert, or in her charmingly furnished Italian villa in Hollywood, Billie is ever the same. Talkative when the subject is shows or modes or films or the new novels, silent when the conversation takes a deeper turn.

“Beautiful but dumb!” has been said of her.

Just what do they mean by dumb? One unversed in the classics? To be well read is not necessary to intelligence nor to entertaining companionship. Why should it be held against her that she quotes neither Aristotle nor Shakespeare? She has taken care of her mother and put a young brother through school; she has made a happy home for her husband, and now she has proven herself a capable actress. For a “dumb” girl I think she has done pretty well, don’t you?

Her brain is practical. When an interior decorator had a commission from her to purchase house furnishings, and displayed his selections for her final choice, she astonished him by quoting from a notebook in which she had listed the price at which each particular article could be bought from other firms. Furthermore, she knows furniture and periods and antiques, and you’d be surprised if I told you the names of some who don’t. She got what she wanted at the cheapest possible price, and her home is done in excellent taste. Now, is she dumb?

After our lunch, while she changed from a chic black-and-white street frock to an evening gown of sheer chiffon, the fluffy-ruffle type in which she looks best, our chatter covered a large range of subjects, from friends to Italian linens. Then, with a raincoat over her costume, galoshes hiding her silver slippers, and an old hat of Mr. Willat’s drawn down almost to her nose, she splashed along beside me to the stage, talking of how at home she felt at First National.

But Billie would be at home even on a Pullman car sidetracked on a desert wasteland — she would convert her surroundings into a home. Some women have that home-making gift, shown in little touches.

As I dived into the shelter of a car and left her with the water dripping from her umbrella, she said softly, musingly, “Five years — and I’ve found the pot of gold.”

Her cheery smile lingered with me and seemed to lessen the scowl of the gloomy day.

Billie Dove was edged off the screen by the influx of flappers. Her womanly type was no longer wanted.

But feminine charm is coming back in, so Billie now has a contract with First National. She and Lloyd Hughes are happy newlyweds in An Affair of the Follies.

Billie shows her studio card to the First National gateman to prove to him that she belongs there.

That very womanliness that has been her hoodoo on the screen has made Miss Dove an ideal wife and homemaker. She and Irvin Willat, the director, have been married for three years.

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1927