Stuart Paton — Blind Man’s Bluff (1925) 🇺🇸

September 14, 2024

“Faith and belief in everything good has brought him the light.”

How Stuart Paton, sightless and helpless, bluffed misfortune and won.

by Marion Brooks Ritchie

“A wee bit o’ faith packs an awful wallop,” says Stuart Paton. And if only you readers of Screenland could step into the room where this man who wouldn’t quit lives and have him tell you his story! His story of two years blind.

It’s a small room; the room of an artist, with paintings hanging on all the walls, and one, of water and tiny ships sailing into a safe harbor, standing on an easel. It seems to be waiting for the last few strokes of the brush.

It comes to you — he’s been blind for two endless years; and for the first time you really sense the horror, the terror of such awful darkness.

But a wee bit o’ faith packs an awful wallop, and Stuart Paton believed — that’s the word, believed — and, so believing, won.

They told me he was tired and had been lying down, but would be right in. I don’t know what I expected him to look like or what I figured he’d say, but I didn’t think he’d be a big Scotchman, with a big, soft smile. I certainly didn’t expect him to ask why his story would interest anybody. He was “only a director, a director of ‘movies,’” he said. I assured him there were thousands of us waiting to hear it. And, little by little, with a few smiles and perhaps a few catching lumps in the throat, he told me.

It was 1922 — July sixth, to be exact. Stuart figured he’d spend three dollars, go to the Auditorium and take in the Friday night boxing bouts.

“And, mind ye, listen,’” he said, “by some peculiar trick o’ fate I took wi’ me that night Owens, my chauffeur. Owens, the clever lad, had won a gold medal during the World War as a first-aid artist, and to him goes a great debt of thankfulness for the first aid that evening which probably made the return of my sight possible.”

With one more bout to finish the evening’s entertainment, the manager of the Auditorium stepped into the ring. It seemed that the policeman on the beat, the cop who watched their cars and helped make their Friday evening at the bouts more comfortable each week, had been in an accident. Quite badly hurt, too. Didn’t have much, and, well — his kids and wife were kind of hard put, and couldn’t they play “turnabout” as fair and sort of help see the poor devil through? That was the manager’s plea, and, without a second’s hesitation, the pennies, nickels, dimes — even dollars — were coming from all around the arena into the ring.

Paton turned. Great scouts, these fellows, when a guy was in hard luck. Crash! And one of those gracious, relieving silver dollars struck him squarely in the right eye. Oh, Faith, come to him now, for the eyeglass is broken into hundreds of pieces and each piece seems to have entered that delicate eye!

That, I say, was the right eye. Stuart Paton was born blind in his left. Oh, wee bit o’ faith —

But the Great War had given us Owens, first-aid man, and with that first-aid skill he succeeded in extracting the two largest, most deadly pieces of glass.

“And to think,” laughs the canny Scot, “there was one more bout to do. Weel, I’m still figuring on a rebate for the last reel I paid for and couldn’t see!”

For two hours and ten minutes they worked on his eyes, giving him no anaesthetic of any kind. The doctor said he could work better without it, and the chances of recovering sight would be greater. Twenty-three pieces of glass were removed from the eyeball, the bandages put on, and then the long, long wait for morning.

It came — somehow it always does — and with it Doctor Bronson. Paton went on.

“‘Now for the fun,’ I laughingly told him, and he started removing those wearisome bandages. He seemed to stop, and, says I, ‘Weel, Doc, pull off that last one so I can see. It’s dark.’ I heard him step across the room and then, ‘Paton, that last bandage will never come off,’ said Dr. Bronson.”

And to Stuart Paton, actor, artist, director, came the realization that sight would never again be his. He would never see to finish painting that little harbor; he would never start the picture whose sets and script were completed, waiting. Never see the sky, the streets, the people. He was blind, blind — eternal darkness, lightless, groping — hopeless. It was beyond endurance.

Here was a pause. Paton looked over to the side wall and there hung the picture of a little girl of about six and a boy about eleven. He cleared his throat with a smiling effort and continued:

“It was pretty bad and I could feel myself slipping. But when they took me home, Tootsie and Jimmy (pointing to the picture on the wall) were waiting for me. My baby’s kiss trembled, as if such a wee bit o’ a lass could vaguely understand. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘won’t your eyes look out at all? Ever? ‘Course they will! They’re jus’ the same,’ and she gave that sort of child’s sob that breaks your heart after a spanking.

“Nobody knows what I’d have given to have told her ‘yes,’ but right there I said to myself: ‘They say I’m blind; they say I’ll always be blind; but I won’t; I say I won’t be blind.’”

So the fight began — for the kids.

Born with a weak constitution, Paton had fought off consumption since birth. Instead of becoming a lawyer, as his family insisted, he went on the stage in England, but soon his doctor informed him he must leave England — go to a different climate — or he could never last. He came to America, and in our glorious sunshine, with his unfailing faith and belief in the Supreme Power, regained his health and started out to make good.

Moving pictures were in their infancy. He knew he was the greatest actor on earth, and when a moving picture company called for an artist to play “Hamlet” — although the movies were much despised and you only took a job in order to eat — Paton was hired for the part. To his chagrin, in the middle of that marvelous “To be or not to be,” from all sides of the stage came over ripe tomatoes and overlaid eggs! Late he learned he was staging some work for the Gold Dust twins — they were to come in, clean up in a jiffy, and show all housewives that without Gold Dust life wasn’t worth living. That was his start in the “movies.”

Since then be has directed many pictures. There are very few famous players he hasn’t directed. He named them to me — Rex Ingram, Priscilla Dean, Betty Compson, Dorothy Phillips, Harry Carey, Wallace Beery, Marie Prevost, Kenneth Harlan — and a lot more. “Bavu,” for Universal, was his last before the accident. Strangely enough, he has written and directed many stories about blindness. Through Blind Eyes is a story he wrote years ago. He directed “Through the Eyes of the Blind” and “The Great White Darkness” — both stories of blindness. And now, God willing, he will start his first picture since the darkness left him. It’s called “My Lord of the Double-B.” and he’s going to make it “different.”

“My banker won’t be stout and well dressed. I’m going to make him puny and badly groomed. My villain won’t look like the villain — you’ll think he’s the hero. And my miser won’t be weak, or and bent — begad, I’m going to have him stout, young and good-looking,” says Paton.

So he’s won. It’s taken two years of pain and torture in mind and body, and his entire fortune of about one hundred thousand dollars. They were two long years that seemed centuries, but that faith, that belief in everything good, has brought him the light. He says it was faith and the kids. He had to see for the kids — they needed him so. But kids aren’t they Faith?

“A wee bit o’ faith — and the kids — pack an awful wallop,” says Stuart Paton.