Not the E lest Matter to Question Celebrities Cases of Mis taken Identity Some movie people, like Ga Cooper and Wallace Beery, won't submit' at all—others try to sneak out the back way, plead nervous headaches, previous engagements, anything, writes B, R. Crisler to the New York "Times" Nearly all, we suspect, heave sighs of boredom when the press department, hat in hand, Or armed with a contractual clause, politely requests them to ce-operate by receiving, at least, the gentleman of that great organ of metropoli opinion, the "Daily Ephemera." When the arrangement is finally có summated, all parties to it generally would rather be in another place, doing something else, yet in spite of all these moral and physical obstacles, the movie interview to-day is probably the commonest thing in print, commoner than all the examples' of cheap fiction, commoner than recipes on the woman's page.
Taking the Press for Granted All cinema people, at the height of their personal success, are apt to take the press for granted; it is always there, on tap, like water in the pipes or dance music on the radio. They think it is pretty tough to stay at home and be interviewed when other people are going to the races, and they are perfectly right; it is tough. But it isn't exactly a picnic for the interviewer, either. Take us, for example. Looking back, on a sudden Proustian impulse, we made'tbe horrifying discovery that in the past fiscal year or two we have interviewed upward of 200 celebrities, most of them of the very first rank, a good number of the second or treaty class: and a few of the space-filler category.
Nearly all were charming people, but charming or not, we had to come back every time and write nice things about them to fill a space not lessened by the fact that they had been non-communicative or dull or in a hurry to join some other brilliant personage for dinner.
That is why, looking backward down the long perspective of old news columns, we have begun to feel sorry for ourself, and to wonder if the passive end of the interview is always necessarily the short end. What would all those glittering personalities have thought if we had written some of the things we noticed about them but were too polite to mention, or had ever recorded some such mutually embarrassing circumstance as the fact that we didn't even know Robert Taylor when we walked into his suite &t the Waldorf a year or so ago, and it was only after clumsily stalling through the entire interview that we learned who he was and discovered that Robert Young was the handsome juvenile we had come expecting to see.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.