Ronald Colman — Fame is a Thief (1935) 🇺🇸

April 06, 2023

Ronald Colman can call his soul his own — but very little else.

Loretta Young once said to me, "Ronald Colman is like a man out of a book. He seems so subtle and sort of mysterious. He is like a character in a book you can't quite make out. You feel that maybe the author means one thing and maybe another..."

Loretta is right. Ronnie is like a man out of one of the very best English novels. He talks like a man in a book. And he is more exactly like his screen self in real life, than any other actor I know. He has that same remote smile, that look of one who remembers something lost, and rather sad, a long while ago, and who regrets that loss but is resigned to it.

He is utterly without pose. He hasn't one single mannerism or affectation. He never dramatizes himself. He never makes sensational statements. When, several years ago, he was called a woman hater in print I asked him about it, in the interest of all women. And he showed me his "little red book" wherein are inscribed the names and telephone numbers of Hollywood's most famed and fair. Whether he uses the telephone numbers or not he didn't say.

When I asked him for this interview he said, "Can't we just meet and talk, socially, and never mind the interview?" He sounded very reticent and English.

I said that I really couldn't be so piggy. I felt in honor bound to share him with the public. He conceded the point, graciously. He had finished his Clive of India scenes for the day and he changed into British looking tweeds, a bit worn, and took me to tea. He was smoking a pipe, he was tanned and very charming.

And once again I was impressed with the feeling one gets about him — that when he steps out of his life to meet you, or you, or me, he closes the door behind him.

What he really does in the house of his life, with whom he shares it, what hopes and dreams are closeted there, what memories haunt it, we have never known and probably never shall know.

I said on an impulse, "You really hate the things of fame, don't famous?" He said, "I'm afraid that I do." "But why?" I asked. "What has fame done to you? What has fame taken away from you?"

And then Ronnie made the most sensational statement I have ever heard from him, made it with more passion, more of a show of emotion than I have ever heard him display in all the years I have known him.

"Fame has taken my life away, my life as I want to live it," he said. "Fame has taken away my privacy, which is infinitely precious to me, which happens to be more precious to me than money or any amount of publicity. "Fame has robbed me of my confidence in my fellowmen and women. It has robbed me of my old friends and prevented me from making new ones. It has robbed me of my right to harmless adventures, experiences, flirtations, if you will, and the general fun which should be a part of every man's earlier life.

"Fame has robbed me of my freedom and shut me up in prison and, because the prison walls are gilded, and the key that locks me in is gold, it isn't any less monotonous. I don't mean to be ungrateful, for I do send up praise that I've made more or less of a success in pictures, and do appreciate the plaudits of my admirers." "But surely," I said, "surely there are compensations?"

"Yes, there is one decided compensation," Ronnie said, "and that is my work; I love the work, itself. But it is not of my work that I am speaking, now. It is of the smoke-screen that surrounds my work.

"There are no returns for me because I happen to be the unfortunate and no doubt stupid sort of person who does not care for the returns fame brings. They are not valuable to me. I don't want them. If you give a man a rare and costly gift and he has no use for it, then no matter how rare and costly the gift may be, it is not precious to him. "There are only two gifts to be had from fame, publicity and money. I have little use for the latter. I detest the former. And there I am. And this is not in the nature of a complaint, please understand. No one forced me to be an actor. I am an actor because I happen to like the work itself and because I am no good for anything else. I was one man when I went into the war. When I came out I was an actor. Along with the majority of my fellows I left the man-I-might-have-been on the battlefields.

"If I had it to do over again I would wish that I might have skipped the war. I would buy a bit of land somewhere. I would marry the right woman for me, I hope. I would raise cattle and garden produce that I might feed my family from the earth itself. I would certainly have children. I would do some laboratory work — research — fool about with glands and things. I'd be a sort of dilettante Arrowsmith. I have lived with unrealities long enough to know that these are the only realities: home, land, children.

"Fame has, by this time, robbed me of these realities. I think I shall never marry again. Fame has conspired with events to take aw-ay, piecemeal, more than twelve years of my life which might have been lived otherwise, domestically, perhaps; at any rate more satisfyingly than I have been able to live them. I shall not try again.

"Fame has robbed me of my self-confidence. Not as an actor, as a man. How can I be sure that people really like me for myself alone? They may like me, instead, because I bear the trade-mark, 'Ronald Colman,' or because I am a 'public character' with whom it is amusing to be seen.

"I don't want to sound like a misanthrope. There are exceptions, of course. There are times when my instinct tells me that my friends are my friends, irrespective of conditions. But we have, all of us. had a good many unpleasant experiences and, after a time, one's self-esteem takes a body-blow and doesn't ask for more.

Fame has robbed me of my courage. I don't dare to talk as freely as I'd like to talk. I don't dare to do a good many of the things I would like to do if I were John Doe, unknown. Reticent? Of course I am. Why not? It isn't that I am afraid of what people will say about me, nor even what they may print about me. There are more serious possibilities to be considered. You must realize that all of us in public life are excellent targets for all kinds of shyster claims, alienation suits, blackmail of all sorts. I am afraid of those. On more than one occasion one of us has taken some young woman to dine one evening and been served with papers the next.

"So, you see, Fame has robbed me of the possibility of charming friendships with charming women, which is an abnormal situation and downright theft.

"Fame has deprived me of a good many friendships with men. It has robbed me of old friendships and has prevented the development of new ones. Some old friends who have not, perhaps, done so well with the world's goods as we of the screen, feel inhibited about accepting hospitality they are not in a position to return. Or their egos very naturally resent being seen with a man who is by way of being a household word. They feel a sense of inferiority. Unjustifiable, essentially, but a normal reaction.

"It is the same with potential new friends. I meet men I like quite often. I feel that they like me. Nothing comes of it. I know that it is because they say to themselves, 'Colman seems like a pretty good sort but he's a movie actor; I can't keep up with him.' I don't blame them.

"I have a few close and intimate friends, of course. Old friends in England. Dick Barthelmess and Bill Powell and Clive Brook and a few others over here. And they are the only people in the world with whom I can feel at ease, with whom I can relax, be myself. I am exceedingly grateful for them. But it is a definite limitation not to be at ease in the world at large. It is a definite torture to me to feel like a monkey on a stick expected to do his tricks when I — I have no tricks.

Swishing his Scotch and soda around in his glass, Ronnie continued. "I seem to have got going. You'll be sorry you asked me this question before I am through."

"You are breaking my heart, but go on, I like it," I replied.

"All right, then, if you can forgive me. Fame has robbed me of the things I like to do, or rather, it has robbed me of the possibility of doing them pleasantly. I might be enjoying this tea hour much more fully, for instance, if there were not a determined looking lady two tables away eying me speculatively. No, but seriously, travel, I mean. I would rather travel than do anything else there is to be done. I like to dig about in strange corners of the world. I like to walk the boulevards of foreign cities, to poke about in remote little villages, watching people. But my pictures have always been there before me. That fixes everything. I can never be the observer, I am always the observed. I can never be in the audience. I must always be on the stage.

Bill Powell and I once tried to see London together. I wanted to show him my London. We got into an open taxi, one of the deep ones into which you can sink with only your heads showing. We hadn't gone half a mile before, from the tops of buses, from windows of shops and houses, people actually mounted on crates and boxes, were staring at us. We gave it up.

"Talk about 'He Who Gets Slapped'! He Who Gets Watched is in a far more painful predicament. At least it is painful to me. Genuinely. It is not Fame that is at fault, it is I.

"Mind you, there is Fame and Fame. If, at any time, some person should approach me and speak to me about some picture of mine, whether critically or appreciatively, I should be pleased. But that is not the kind of public attention we get, we who are watched, not the kind of attention given to public characters in other walks of life. When we go out in public we are the targets for all of the drunks, for all of the wise-cracking, ready-to-fight individuals there are.

"I was dancing at a Club one night recently when a man dancing by poked me in the ribs and said, 'Say, I just heard you talking to your partner. You talked like that to Loretta Young in 'Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back.' Do you always talk to women the same way?'

"On another occasion a man came up to me in a hotel dining-room and demanded that I dance with his wife. When I explained that I was with a lady he sneered and said, loudly, 'Wassa matter, gettin' too good these days?' He was very noisy about it. They usually are.

"And so, I go out in public as seldom as possible, which is a definite loss. An actor should be objective as well as subjective. He should be able to meet and mingle freely with his fellow men.

"I may sound unpleasant. It must seem more than a bit ridiculous, in these difficult days for a man to be moaning over the gifts of Fame when so many thousands of people are moaning for them. But you happened to hit on a nerve which is, in me, very much exposed and very sensitive.

"I am grateful for the work itself. I do enjoy it when I am actually on the set and in production. I am enormously interested in making Clive of India. I enjoy the acting, the reading of the script, the preparation for a picture. But the rest of it, the notoriety, the recognition in public places, the violation of my privacy, all of that is positively abhorrent to me and I can't help it. Call it a complex, a neurosis, a psychosis, anything you want, but there it is.

"The money reward is pleasant, of course. But less important to me, perhaps, than the others. It enables me to meet my obligations. Beyond which it can do very little for me. I live in an average sized and very pleasant house, as you know. I don't want a larger one. Even if I did, I doubt that I would have one. For Fame gives you gifts with her right hand and threatens you with her left. For if you live in mansions and exhibit the full fruits of success you are under all kinds of threats, kidnapping among others.

"I am not in the slightest degree clothes-conscious. I seldom think of my appearance unless it is for a picture. I have no desire for yachts nor a fleet of expensive cars. I have no costly habits. I like books, but they are cheap. I enjoy tennis, but I play with Dick or Clive or Bill on their courts. And as for travel, I like to travel as simply as possible.

"My work, and a certain sense of satisfaction, in that I have not precisely failed in life, are my two rewards. Fame has robbed me of everything else."