While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was
building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid for
her with a card of introduction to Miss Havender.
In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very
limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally in the
spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her measure.
The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express emotions,
but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night, sometimes for a
thousand performances or more. The movie actor is expected to respond
to a situation once or twice for rehearsal, and once or twice for the
camera. There is no audience to struggle against and listen for--and to.
The director is always there at the side calling, reminding, pleading,
encouraging, threatening, suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the
expression, doing all the work except the pantomime.
That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the heroine
of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional crisis.
Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.
Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless vice
of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after it was once
cold. As an actress she would have been one of those frequent flashers
who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink back into a
torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night performance.
Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second week would have
found the audiences disgusted and the third would have found her
breaking her contract and running away with somebody. A horse that has
run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie had run away twice.
But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play always
the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not required even
to follow the logic of the story. For a while she would play a bit in
a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would
play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene in that
scene. It might be a year further along in the story. It was exciting.
Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up as
a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third picture
was as nearly the same as possible.
Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold
newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was a
rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted canvas
walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it.
There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, pouting with
starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.
She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back. The
scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes to and
from.
An officer of the “Cruelty” came and took her from the garret. That was
the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage with a
multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of the story was
taken.
She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She came
in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter. Her
father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing.
Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went in the motor to a
dismal street where she was shown coming out of the tenement, and going
back to it gin-laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was
photographed going in with her young millionaire.
The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted
in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and
she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers on a
corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but the change
incessant.
The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played on
the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in a closed
automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the home of some
wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies on the bribe of a
gift to his favorite benevolence.
There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching
herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or
gorgeous, sad or gay.
One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it is
always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to one and
curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe and feel is
magic unbelievable.
In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect
was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that
hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from
hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other
actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.
There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's expectations
and made her pantomime singularly legible. The modulations of her
thought from one extreme mood to another were always traceable. This
was true of the least feelings. Ferriday would say: “Now you decide to
telephone your lover. You hesitate, you telephone, a girl answers, you
wait, he speaks, you smile.”
Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each gradation
of thought. “I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd better not. Yes.
No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central! Hurry up! Gramercy
816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816? Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't
she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No, there he is! Oh, joy! I must
be very severe. Hello, Harry.”
All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were,
under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly
alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or
intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all
she told it, and adored her.
Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her on
the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character. It was
delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or girlish
malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She was so pretty
that she could afford to act ugly.
It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio to the negative,
then to the positive. There was editing to do, and it seemed to her that
her most delicious bits had to be cut out, because Ferriday always took
three or four thousand feet of film for every thousand he used. They
had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and subtitles, and it
angered her to see how much space was given to other members of the
cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not the center of, and she
developed an acerbity of protest against any “trespass” on her “rights”
that proved her a genuine business woman.
She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent speed. She was
never so meek and helpless of expression as when she slipped in front
of another actor or actress and filled as much of the foreground as her
slenderness permitted. When she was crowded into the background she knew
how to divert attention to herself during the best moments of the other
people in the scene. And she could most innocently spoil any bit that
she did not like to do herself or have done by another.
In the studio she was speedily recognized as an ambitious young woman
zealous for self-advancement. In fact, they called her a “reel hog” and
a “glutton for footage.” A number of minor feuds were turned into deep
friendships through a common resentment at Kedzie's impartial robberies.
Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. They exist in all
trades, and success is never won in large measure without them. Almost
all businesses are little trusts, monopolies more or less tiny, more or
less ruthless.
Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other members
of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved her better
on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother in the picture
was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting to scratch the
little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her the way to heaven
grew more ardently devout for having to grip the floor with his feet to
keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him off his own pulpit.
This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, and Kedzie was
saved from any danger of falling in love with the unspeakably beautiful
leading man by the ferocity of her jealousy of him. She had once, as
a little girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at the glory of this
Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little letter of adoration,
one of some nineteen he received that day from lovelorn girls about the
globe.
When she met him first in the studio he was painted as delicately as a
barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a scene under the full blast of a
battery of sick green Cooper-Hewitt lights. He looked about three days
dead and loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening dress, and
Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his linen.
Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow shirt, collar, tie,
and waistcoat in order that the photographic result should be the purest
white. The yellow linen was the completing horror under the spoiled
mustard color of his face with its mouth the color of an overripe plum.
His expression did not redeem his appalling features that day, nor did
his language help. While the cameraman leaned on his idle machine and
looked weary Lorraine Melnotte was having a sweet little row with the
actress playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have her fired
if she didn't keep her place.
That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate professional
jealousy. She never could. Her own was merely a defense of her dignity
and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who infested the
studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not lived with a poet
long before she began to experiment with large words. She practised
before a mirror any phrases she particularly liked. She had probably
heard Ferriday use the expression and she got herself up on it till she
was glib. Anybody who can be glib with “peculiarly impossible” is in a
fair way to be articulate. All Kedzie needed was a little more certainty
on her grammar; and her ear was giving her that.
Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a dark suspicion that
that was not his real born name. If Anita Adair was Kedzie Thropp what
would Lorraine Melnotte have been? It was a pretty problem in algebra.
But Kedzie despised a man that would take another name. And such a
name--as unworthy of a man as a box of chocolate fudge.
So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche in her heart and went
over into the gallery of her hates. She fought him with every weapon
and every foul thrust known to shy little women in dealing with big,
blustering men. She loved to call him “Melnit” or “naughty Mel.”
He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be released from his
contract. The backers were too sure of his vogue, however, to let him
go, and it was none of their affair how fiercely Adair and Melnotte
indulged in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love was so
wholesomely sweet.
With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. He had invented
her and was patenting her. She dreaded his wisdom and accepted his least
theory as gospel--at first. He combined a remote and godlike intellect
with a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like the other gods
of all the mythologies, he came down to earth in an amorous mood.
Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the value of tantalism.
She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and
she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her
duty was plain.
She played him well and drove him frantic. It would have been hard to
say whether he hated her or loved her more when he found her always just
a little beyond. He had begun with the greatest gift in his power. He
had promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift could count till he
had made that good. And it would take a long, long while of incessant
labor to build.
Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his groans of baffled
egotism. She could read his plots on his countenance, and thwart him in
advance. But this was not always easy for her, and again and again he
had only himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart. With
Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph--if
anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was
phenomenal always.