Rubye de Remer — The “Once-Upon-a-Time” Girl (1919) 🇺🇸
Once upon a time there lived a poet whose heart was a song and whose mind was a well of wisdom and whose soul had been tried thru the Lethean waters of many experiences. He sang a song, and the song began “Make me a child again, just for tonight.” He sang that song because of his wisdom he had come to know that all the happiness the world can give is never the happiness of little feet straying thru a daisy field in May, robbing the trees of the tart wild cherries, splashing about in the eternal brook. Or perhaps he knew his Bible and remembered the words of admonition, “Unless ye be as a little child.”
by Faith Service
It isn’t possible to be made a child again, even for the precious boon of the one little night. It isn’t possible to make the long returning. Almost, it is impossible for us to retain the heart of a child.
When a woman, a girl, has been acclaimed by the great ones of the earth as, for verbatim instance, “the most beautiful blonde since Venus,” when she has been posed by Harrison Fisher, when she has been starred in musical comedy and in pictures, when, every place she goes, there is a stir and always the stir in admiration, even amazement— ego in a large dose is not only to be fully expected, but even to be condoned.
There is an exception to this, alas! fairly consistent rule.
Rubye de Remer is the exception.
Once upon a time there was a beau-ti-ful princess, and her hair was pure gold and her eyes were like blue stars fringed with gentian flowers, and she swayed like an Easter lily when she walked, and this beau-ti-ful princess was gentle and sweet in all her ways. and obeyed the good King, her father, and the virtuous Queen, her mother, and was courteous and mild of manner to all with whom she met… All of us, at one time or another, have read a very similar fairy legend. All of us, or most of us, have long ago foregone the belief in the beau-ti-ful princess with the hair and the heart of gold.
There is such a one.
She is Rubye de Remer.
Like Lochinvar, she comes out of the West — Denver, to be geographically correct. And she has the real Western rolling of the r’s, this princess from out the pages of Christian Andersen. “People are always telling me,” she said, “that I should get over my Western twang, but I tell them that I am a Western girl, and proud of it, so why should I try to talk like some one I’m not! They tell me, too, that I should be more ‘up-stage,’ have more airs and graces. I just can’t. If I cant be myself sincerely enough to please, I certainly can’t hope to be anybody else. I think sincerity is the most beautiful characteristic in the whole world — just real people, no matter what they do or who they are. Of course, I am mad about people with ability and the power to prove it, but then, quite often, they are the real people.”
It is significant of this once-upon-a-time young person that when she talks of these real people and the people with ability she never, even in thought, includes herself. Her entire attitude, expressed and unexpressed, is “Who am I that I should hold myself in high esteem?”
She thinks her mother and dad are the dearest people in all the world, and when she has a “lot of money,” her main ambition is to buy back the old homestead where she was born and convert it into a home for destitute children.
She still tells of her first job, which was to pose for Harrison Fisher, with honest awe in her manner. “Whatever may come to me in life,” she said, “it will never have the thrill I felt when Mr. Fisher asked me to pose for him.”
She doesn’t want to go on the stage. Just doesn’t care about it. “Pictures are for me,” she said, “and I am going to stick to them. I don’t believe in divided and subdivided aims.”
She always, always wears black, or old blue, or a mixture of both.
She has a hobby for kimonos and has a remarkable collection of them, more in the way of quality than quantity.
She is emphatically not extravagant.
She loves rare perfumes.
Her idea of a home is concentrated upon one room which, she told me, with the wide eyes of a child, should be hung in black velvet and strewn with old blue velvet chairs and divans and have a marble fountain playing in the center. “There would be attendants,” she said, “to fan me and rub me. I think harems must be lovely — only I’d probably be doing the fanning instead of being fanned.”
Which is quite, quite probable… knowing Rubye de Remer.
She has a host of friends, and “Everybody just loves Ruby” is their slogan. It isn’t as the “most beautiful blonde since Venus” that those old Denver friends greeted her, nor yet as the girl whom World Films is starring and whose pictures are circumnavigating the globe, but just as “Rubye dear” who went to school with them.
She has a duck of a new Romer car. “I don’t consider it an extravagance,” she told me, seriously speculative. “You see I just have to have something to take me back and forth to the studio, or I would be fagged out and tired-looking, and there would be no profit in that. I feel like a child with a new toy.”
There is never a night, no matter at what hour she retires — this was confided to me by her chum, who lives with her at her hotel — that she doesn’t get down on her knees by the side of her bed and say her prayers. And she does not need to pray to be made a child again, just for tonight, for she has kept thru fame and fortune, fair and ill, the ready laughter, the dear unself-consciousness, the clear heart of the eternal child, than which no art is finer, no power stronger, no magic deeper.
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When a woman has been acclaimed “the most beautiful blonde since Venus,” when she has been posed by Harrison Fisher, when she has been starred in musical comedy and in pictures, ego m a large dose is to be fully expected. Rubye de Remer is the exception
Photo by: Campbell Studios
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Rubye de Remer has a hobby for kimonos, and she has a remarkable collection of them. She is emphatically not extravagant. She loves rare perfumes. And — as to homes — she thinks “harems must be lovely”
Photo by: Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885–1971)
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Collection: Motion Picture Classic Magazine, August 1919
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Beauty has been given many women. Fortunes and favors have ever been lavished upon lovely ladies. But Rubye de Remer is exceptional because she possesses, as well as pulchritude, a splendid sense of humor. That's why we like her
Photo by: Strauss-Peyton
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1922