It is a far cry from the greatest emotional actress of the films to one of the world’s most infectious comedians. Yet I have set aside chronological considerations in order to save for last my recollections of a man whose comedy touches brightened the Goldwyn lot almost as much as they did the Goldwyn screen.

It was Rex Beach and I who brought Will Rogers into pictures. After our approach he confided to us that he had been somewhat mystified by the delayed recognition of his talents on the part of the picture world.

“I used to think it was funny,” said he in his own inimitable way. “Here motion-pictures were booming along. They were getting in trained dogs and trained cats and grand-opera singers and everybody in the world but me. I couldn’t make it out, and now after all these years you fellows have come to.”

Rogers still loves to dwell on these fictitious pangs of a slighted talent, and he always adds, “Well, there was a movement on foot for making fewer and worse pictures and so they hired me.”

Certainly if his coming into picture activities was the result of any such urge, we were woefully misled. For his “Jubilo” was one of the best pictures ever produced by the Goldwyn Company.

Around his selection for the chief character of this story Will weaves one of his choicest monologues. “Sam had bought a tramp story,” he relates, “and he was looking around the lot one day for somebody who could play the tramp. Well, he happened to see me in my street clothes and he said, ‘There is the very fellow to play the tramp!’ Of course,” he adds, “I love to play a tramp—you can act so natural and never have to dress for it.”

Whether this story is historically correct or not it does bring out one of Will’s claims to distinction in the Hollywood community. An old slouch hat pulled down over his eyes and some kind of nondescript trousers uncreased as a child’s brow—this is his inveterate costume. Clad in this wise, he used to stand around the Goldwyn lawn and, surrounded by a crowd of cowboys and extras, would amuse himself by throwing the lariat at our “Keep off the Grass” signs.

The reader may imagine what a personality like this did for a studio somewhat overcharged with the artistic temperament. Temperament itself seemed to find relief in those droll remarks with which Rogers meets almost every issue of the day. Numerous times I saw Miss Farrar and Miss Frederick talking with the comedian, and both gave every sign of an unshadowed enjoyment in his conversation. It was one of the two, I think, who asked Will one day whether he liked pictures as well as he did the stage.

“Oh, sure,” drawled he with the unsmiling face which always makes his verbal twist the more irresistible. “Why, up to the time I went into pictures I had never annoyed more than one audience at a time. This is the only business in the world where you can sit out front and applaud yourself. Now I was getting to that place on the stage where that feature appealed to me.”

Incidentally, one of Rogers’ most amusing memories of the stage implicates Miss Farrar. I shall let him sketch this with his own pungency of style. “I made one picture Doubling for Romeo,” he relates. “The reason we made it was that we could use the same costumes that Miss Geraldine Farrar and a friend of hers (at that time) had worn in some costume pictures—all these Shakespearian tights and everything. I don’t say this egotistically, but I wore Geraldine’s.”

There may be those in the screen world who are overridden by emotions, who are played upon by gusts of alternate personal attraction and repulsion. Not so Rogers. He is essentially a home man, and the first thing he did when he came to Hollywood was to invest the savings of years in a house for his family. This residence of Bill’s is on Beverly Hills, and its location imposed upon its owner a heavy social responsibility.

“You know,” I heard him telling somebody the other day, “my principal occupation in California is not making pictures—it is official guide. I live on the same hill as Uncle Doug and Aunt Mary—only I live much lower down the hill than they do—in fact, I live at the foot of the hill in a swamp. It’s right at the forks of two streets, and all I do all day long is to tell tourists where Mary Pickford lives. I will be out in the yard going through my daily work—maybe licking my second kid—when some Iowa car will drive up and say, ‘Can you tell us where Mary Pickford lives?’ So I stand and point it out—just point and say, ‘Mary Pickford lives right up there.’

“You want to know why I came back to the stage for a while—why, just to get a rest. I was so tired pointing. Now, I have played for every charity affair that was ever held in Los Angeles, and their people are very appreciative, so when I die they are going to give me a benefit and take the money and erect a statue of me with the arm pointing toward Mary’s and a sign on it, ‘Mary Pickford lives right up there.’”

There is nothing waspish about Rogers’s fun-making. Such a quality of humour as his implies, in fact, a true sense of life’s values, a very wise and mellow spirit. Nothing shows this more clearly than a communication I received from him not very long ago.

“Dear Sam,” it read, “when you first announced that you were going to write this book of memoirs I must say it didn’t create much of a stir in movie circles till they learned what memoirs were. Then when they found it meant truths, everybody, including myself, commenced to get leery and wondered if you were going to remember everything. Now, I don’t know what you are going to put into this catalogue of yours, but I do hope for the salvation of the Infant Industry you don’t tell all—especially not what some of my pictures grossed.

“But if you’ve got to say something about me, say this—they were the two happiest years of my life that I spent on the old Goldwyn lot. We had some great troops there in those days—all of them good fellows. There was Miss Frederick, whom everybody that ever met her liked; Miss Madge Kennedy, than whom we have no sweeter character of stage or screen; Mabel Normand, the ‘kidder’ and good fellow, friend of every soul on earth, whose quiet and not-seen charity has helped many a poor soul in need; Tom Moore, as good an Irishman as ever lived, and not stuck on his looks either.

“Also say this: I made in the two years I was on the lot twelve consecutive pictures—all with one director, Clarence Badger. That, I think, is a record—to be with the same director. And if there is anything worth while in any of them, it was certainly due to his efforts, as I am no actor. But he is patient, capable, and the finest man I ever met.”

I have saved this communication because nothing else could reveal more forcibly the tolerance, the modesty, and the quick appreciation of anything good in us frail mortals which form the source of Will Rogers’s ever-welling humour.