Ruth Chatterton — As She Is (1930) 🇺🇸
Woman’s place, so legend runs, is in the home. Ruth Chatterton's is in the drawing-room. Miss Chatterton would object to that; she says she is a tramp at heart. But only a lady with the Chatterton elan would make such a claim.
by Margaret Reid
Were one asked to interpret Miss Chatterton in a word, that word would be "grace." There is not an awkward angle to her mental processes, to her manner, or to anything about her. Mentally, physically, and socially she is composed of fluid lines. Because all this abstract nonsense fails also to include her brightly polished modernity, one wires the editor asking that the assignment be transferred to Frederick Lonsdale, who must have dreamed about Miss Chatterton before he began writing plays.
Mr. Lonsdale being engaged on a new play, in which, doubtless, the heroine will resemble Miss Chatterton, as is customary, the reporter then tears the well-thumbed pages giving synonyms for "sweet" and "quaint" out of the thesaurus — and nervously approaches virgin ground.
For such is a Chatterton to one brought up on the sweet quaintness projected at least once during an interview by most Hollywood femmes. Chatterton is neither sweet nor quaint. Hers is the charm of absinthe rather than sherry. She is pungent rather than appealing, attractive rather than likable.
Hollywood calls her a snob. When told of this she laughs, protests that it is wrong, that she is a creature of low instincts. The foundation of the rumor probably is her liking the people she likes, her exclusion of those she doesn't. Another reason, perhaps, is in her exquisite use of the king's English, in her mode of living, which is closer to Vanity Fair than to the Exhibitor's Herald.
She is obviously a product of culture and breeding. Her taste, whether instinctive or studied, is good. She is both chic and conservative, a combination possible to ladies who were born that way. Her smartness is tempered with the inherent dignity which makes it smarter.
You know her as well at first meeting as at the fifty-first. Her casual, friendly manner is devoid of formality. People whom she likes can never be ill at ease in her company. People whom she doesn't like are given the sensation of having raucous voices and too many feet. She can do dreadful things to the composure of a stupid or vulgar person.
Getting back a few lines, at the fifty-first meeting you still won't know Chatterton. At a certain point in her warm friendliness and candor is hung a veil, concealing herself, and to which intimacy she admits no one. For all her ardent living in and of the world, she gives the impression of esoteric solitude. Not, understand, a dolorous impression; just a faint sense of privacy.
A brilliant woman, rich in experience and knowledge, she knows life, but is diverted rather than disconcerted by it. She likes it and has a talent for living it beautifully. Of a generally even disposition, her inevitable flights to the sky and descents to the depths are firmly controlled and seldom visible under her casual lightness. She loves the good things life has to offer — unobtrusive luxury of environment, sunny days, bright gardens, amusing friends, laughter, and conversation. Her home is a rest cure for weary souls surfeited with the noisy radios, competitive wise-cracking, and nervous shrillness of many Hollywood domiciles. Chatterton and the kindred spirits she draws about her are people who can depend on their own wits for entertainment, without panic-stricken recourse to radio and gin to cover their lack of thoughts.
In an argument, as in Russian Bank or bridge, Chatterton cannot be beaten. She thinks clearly and directly, and her mind is too quick for any but mental racers. She never argues wildly, but talks only when she thoroughly knows what she is talking about. Which still allows a vast field, since she can discuss patent medicines as authoritatively as she can perfumes, or the stock market as knowingly as religions.
For all her cerebral energy, she is physically lazy. She loathes restless and nervous activity, and it disturbs her to see others indulge in it. Indolent and at all times composed, the spectacle of vivacity wearies her. Although keenly enjoying her work, she dislikes the labor it entails. She wishes the world were so arranged that one got paid handsomely for doing nothing.
Despite this, the driving force of her artistic ambitions have urged her to many and considerable achievements. At fourteen, a pupil in Mrs. Hazen's school in Washington, D. C, she accepted a dare from a friend to go on the stage. The friend introduced her to a director, who cast her as a cockney chorus girl. Completely untutored and ignorant of the theater, she was even then adept to an uncanny degree.
Parental horror and commands made no inroad on her blithe decision to leave school and become an actress in earnest. When the Chatterton mind is made up, it stays that way. She continued with the musical-comedy company when it left Washington and went on the road. A year later she was in New York and began a systematic attack on managers for a chance in drama. Visiting every manager in town daily, she was finally given a job to get her out of the way. In a stock company with Lowell Sherman, Pauline Lord, and Lenore Ulric, she served her rudimentary apprenticeship at fifteen years of age. At eighteen her performance with Henry Miller, in Daddy Long Legs, gave her Broadway on a platter. In Come Out of the Kitchen she was established as one of the gleaming stars of the American theater.
Anomalous with her present sophistication is her mastery of Barrie characters. Her Mary Rose was that haunting, twilight ghost of a girl as Barrie wrote her. Chatterton's talent for delicate nuances was proven conclusively in this, her favorite play.
It is difficult to associate her obvious lassitude with her capacity for work, a capacity only explained by her passion for accuracy, for the aesthetic gratification of having done a thing as it should be done. Her instinctive, facile gift was not alone responsible for her success. Years of indefatigable study and training lay behind its eventual culmination in polished, assured finesse.
In Los Angeles with her husband, Ralph Forbes, who was in pictures, she appeared locally in The Devil's Plum Tree and, with Mr. Forbes, in The Green Hat. Offers for pictures did not interest her until an opportunity to appear with Emil Jannings, for whom her admiration is unbounded. Making her debut in "Sins of the Fathers," her further enthusiasm was aroused by the imminence of talkies. Signed by Paramount as a featured player, she was unofficially a star with the release of her first audible film, "The Doctor's Secret."
Married to Ralph Forbes since 1924, their brief separation ended a year ago and they are deeply devoted. Mutual understanding and tolerance make possible their happiness, despite a dissimilarity in tastes. Their home is a palatial one in Beverly Hills, its interior one of the loveliest in the film colony. Modified Georgian is the prevailing note. Miss Chatterton's flair for decoration is evidenced in the correct, withal purely individual, simplicity of the rooms. They also have a house at Malibu Beach, where, during the summer, she loafs luxuriously in the sun, acquiring a rich tan.
Among her friends are Richard and Jessica Barthelmess, Elsie Janis, Florence Vidor, and Jascha Heifetz, and lights of literature, music, and the theater. Her closest friend is Lois Wilson, for whose intelligence she has great respect, and who. she says, has one of the finest voices on the screen. Chatterton parties are always conversationally brilliant and disarmingly casual, in the key set by the hostess.
She is warmly understanding of youth, and loves to encourage embryonic talent. To those in whom she takes an interest she gives intelligent and sympathetic attention.
A phobia about sitting for photographs has been the despair of publicity departments since she first went on the stage.
She adores Henry James, of whose works she has a complete set of first editions, Norman Douglas, and James Stephens, all of whose verse she knows and quotes. She enjoys, almost equally as well, a good dime novel. Perhaps the predominant ardor of her life is music. Her knowledge of it is comprehensive to the point of technical. From no concert including Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, or Debussy are she and her husband absent. Bach, in particular, reduces her to silent ecstasy. She also likes prize fights and follows the blows with scientific interest.
Stupidity is, to her, the primary sin in life. She cannot endure it around her. Exclusive of this, she loves people and likes to know them. Much of her ability for characterization has come from her observation of the many and varied types she has known.
She is, according to her own admission, uncompromisingly selfish, liking to do as she wishes when she wishes it. Since her wishes are usually pleasant ones, this trait has not modified the rapt devotion of her friends.
Not even a Hemingway could penetrate the barrier lying behind her wit and grace and vivid charm. When she was a little girl, she was noted for her good behavior, tidy hair, and clean dresses. Not known was her custom of going out to the woods on the grounds of her home, taking off her clothes and running wild through the trees, into the river, out again, onto a startled cow's back, shouting in vain attempt to make it run, darting up into treetops like an elf of the woods.
As little now, as then, is known of the actual Chatterton. But the surface is delightful, many-hued, and abundant with indications.
Stupidity, to Ruth Chatterton, is the primary sin of life.
Photo by: Otto Dyar (1892–1988)
Gracious and fluently charming, Ruth Chatterton nevertheless sees to it that one knows her no better after the fifty-first meeting than the first, says Margaret Reid in the story opposite, which throws light on a truly fascinating personality.
Photo by: Otto Dyar (1892–1988)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1930