THE STORY-TELLER.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 August 1922, Page 10

THE STORY-TELLER.

GIRL WHO WAS TOO BEAUTIFUL, LIFE STORY OF BARBARA LA MARR. (By Adela Rogers St. Johns, in Photoplay Magazine.) A kindly old judge with a fringe of white hair around his bald spot leaned down from his bench. “You’re too beautiful to be alone in a big city while you’re young,’* he said. “Go back to the country, back to your folks. You're too beautiful, my child. You don’t understand where it might lead you.” The tall, slim young thing before him turned away her wonderful eyes, bowed her head in its cheap, gay straw hat, touched her lips once with a little hand in a ragged, glove—and , left the courtroom.

That girl was Barbara La Marr. And that was the day—eight, nine, seven years ago—that we christened her the “Too Beautiful Girl.”

1 was there, a reporter on an afternoon newspaper.

Then, she was a sixteen-year-old country girl with a face that might have launched a thousand ships. A face that was to lead her, as one like it led Trojan Helen, into the very thick of the elemental things of life. To-day, she is the alluring young dramatic actress whom you will remember as Milady in Douglas Fairbanks’ “Three Musketeers,” and who is soon to be seen in the superb leading role of Rex Ingram’s newest production, “Black Orchids.” Between the two lies a page from the Book of Life that is written in scarlet and green and black and gold. It isn’t often that the Great Playwright shows us naked, human drama.

When he does it is like gazing from the top of the Bright Angel trail into the stupendous miracle of the Grand Canyon. The story of Barbara La Marr is just the real-life yarn of a girl who was too beautiful —and didn’t know what life was all about.

But it is the sort of thing we progressive women of to-day ought to read and consider. It is elemental.

I have always wondered how Helen felt during the Trojan war. The thoughts of her heart, while death made her face an unwitting instrument to slaughter thousands and lay her lover’s country in ashes at her feet, make an epic poem worth dreaming over. Barbara La Marr’s face at fifteen, when I first knew her, was the kind that could no more go peacefully through a world of men than a cobblestone could pass through a window without bursting things up. At sixteen, the girl who is now Barbara La Marr and is now no prettier than numbers of other women, was so beautiful that a woman couldn’t even be jealous of her. As well be jealous of the crescent moon in June—or an American Beauty rosebud —or a Keats sonnet. The face that launched a thousand ships—the face that lost Mark Anthony the world —the face a million poets have sung—that was her face at sixteen. I am trying to avoid exaggeration. I have seen a good many, beautiful women in my time. Of them all, Barbara La Marr was the most exquisite girl I have ever seen. And at sixteen her beauty threw her suddenly into the whirlpool of life, quite without warning, quite without preparation, knowledge, or protection. You have read about things like that. This time I saw it happen. Then began the series of adventures that go to make up her story—a story from which David Graham Phillips might have written a tremendous novel, full of tumult and tragedy of youth and beauty. I think she was only fifteen when she was kidnapped from her peaceful little home in a small village a few miles out of Los Angeles. Leading there a quiet sort of life with her father and mother, simple, hardworking, ordinary people, she quite suddenly disappeared. For day<3 the police of Los Angeles sought her. urged to frantic efforts/by the pleas of her father.

At last they found her. miles away, carried there by a fast automobile, with her stepsister’s friend. The police took her home, a shaken, bewildered, beautiful child. The matter came up in court. But the girl was safe and the family only wanted to forget it all. She had come to no harm. A few months later, still suffering from the shock of her experience, she went to visit friends in Arizona.

She was not particularly interested in men, but already she had learned that men were always interested in her. One young man, a nearby rancher, lost his head completely over the girl. He followed her about all day and spent the nights watching the house where she slept. One day as she and a girl friend rode across the open country in a car. he stopped them dragged her from her seat, put her up behind him on his horse, and rode away with her, a veritable young Lochinvar.

Perhaps the dash of his wooing appealed to the girlish heart. Perhaps in her simplicity she couldn’t control the situation. Anyway, she rode to the altar for the first time —behind him on his fierv broncho.

Tf her husband had lived, the girl’s beauty might have faded in the glare of an Arizona sun. and the grind of a desert existence. But in a few months he died of pneumonia, and the sixteen-vear-old widow went home to her famBlossoming daily, daily more lovelv to look at, she fell in love with and married a man who shall be nameless here. He was a lawyer, good-looking, cultured. romantic, of good family—everything that the child’s heart was beginning to envision: everything that the men she met normally in her own sphere were not. The wedding was; performed by one of the best known ministers in the city, after a courtship that lasted three days. There was a wedding supper at the bride’s home —a bride so marvellously lovely in her simple white dress that the guests were speechless before her.

And a bride, who. when the rural gaieties were over, clung an instant to her father, kissed her mother, and followed. glad in a strange, newly-awaken-ed way of the beauty she might bring him as a wedding gift. But the nemesis that hwng above her beauty trailed her light footsteps even I here. * Three days later it was discovered 'that the man had a legal

waiting anxiously at home with her three children for his return, had seen the license in the paper. Utterly crushed and broken-hearted,, the child bride, who was not a bride, hid herself and her shame and grief from the world. She could not be found.

The man went home to his wife. He declared he remembered nothing of the marriage, that the girl’s beauty had cast a spell over him under which he suffered complete amnesia. For two days then I helped a frantic father search for his girl. He wa<* an old man. He felt that he should have protected the child more carefully. He blamed himself. And when at last we found her, hidden like some stricken thing in the home of a married woman friend, her dark hair down to her knees, her face white as sea-foam, he took her into his arms as though she had been six and someone had broken her doll. A week later, the man she had married was declared by doctors to be suffering from a permanent mental disorder’, as the result of a blood clot. His obsession was the face of the Too Beautiful Girl. He seemed bewitched by her loveliness. They operated, hoping to remove the clot that caused the pressure. He died on the operating table. It was that experience, for she had loved him and she had seen the wife and three babies whom she had so unknowingly wronged, which first stirred the mind behind that beautiful face. The depth of an emotional nature, of a hunger for life and experience that today is a tremendous artistic force, drove her to seek for the things she hardly knew existed—for love, beauty, color/ study, people, culture, enjotion.

Her family had moved to El Centro, a little town on the desert in Imperial Valley. A raw town then, without a single advantage, without beauty, without anything to offer a nature yearning for new food, a nature beginning to unfold as a rose blooms.

So the girl left home and went to Los Angeles to find work. But her father was a man and he knew something of the effect of a face like hers upon other men. He was afraid of her, in his timid, ineffectual way. He followed her. begged her to come home. She loved him, too, but she thought of the desert, the loneliness, and she refused to go back.

She had forgotten that she still wasn’t of age. Her father went to the juvenile authorities. He asked them to send her home and to force her to stay home. And the kindly, wise old judge looked into that face, with its great seagreen. mist-gray, pansy-purple eyes, its carved scarlet iips, the rich., black hair against the pearl skin—and sent her home.

As soon as she was eighteen she started again to find work. Like Helen of Troy, her face had launched tragedy —had spelled disaster. No matter how innocent she had been, the fact remained. She couldn’t find work. Nobody wanted her. They were afraid. Even the movies were superstitious affbut her. It was all very well to be beautiful — but not too beautiful. Cabarets were not so fussy. She learned to dance. Later came vaudeville.

She is now living very quietly in Hollywood with her sister, almost a recluse. She does not attend parties and her friends are literary people. I wonder what you and 1 would do with our lives if we should suddenly be given the gift of perfect beauty. I wonder if. we. with great beauty and little else, would have moulded our lives any better than some of the other beautiful women who have made shipwreck ?

And I wonder if we would have come back as Barbara La Marr has. The abnormal quality of her beauty began to fade. She became wise, with the wisdom of women who have grappled with life barehanded. She began to write, first very lovely and successful little verse. Then scenarios. Under her new name of Barbara La Marr—for that was not her name when she was the Too Beautiful Girl—she wrote a number of excellent scre?n stories. At last she went into the seenaria department at Fox. Always in the back of her mind, had been the intense desire to act. Much as she liked her writing, and she was very clever at it, it was not the thing she wanted most to do. She made a break. Her first part was with Fox. Her next with Anita Stewart in “Harriet and the Piper.” She has made seven pictures altogether including the “Musketeers” and the “Prisoner of Zenda,” in which she plays Antoinette. She is now making “Black Orchids a play and a role which should establish her as one of the great young dramatic actresses of the screen. I believe Rex Ingram thinks it will make her the greatest. Her beauty is indisputably tempered, though even now most women would love to look as she looks.

WISDOM FOR PARENTS Some amusing remarks are contained in an article by the famous author, Mr. Arnold Bennett. The following bits of wisdom for parents are worth noting. Parents, like other human beings, habitually mistake their own preferences and desire for the voice of omniscient wisdom. Let no one set you permanently on a path to which your temperament objects. ’ Those wondrous persons who invariably act according to the dictates of reason are usually enormous bores, priggish. and without imagination. Parents are apt to hold the singular belief that they have conferred a benefit on their children by bringing them into the world, and that, therefore, their children owe them all sorts of heavy debts, including blind obedience.

Too often a parent who himself has not been successfully ambitious will try, for egoistic reasons, to realise an ambition vicariously through his son, regardless of his son’s temperament. The business of youth is to conquer difficulties; the business of age is to avoid them.

To shirk responsibilities ift youth is to create difficulties for age. It is a form of cowardice.

It is. a good thing to try, but I do not agree that it is a. good thing to try for that which you lack the machinery to attain.

Failure should never be carelessly risked, any more then typhoid fever. Nobody is the same after it.

The engagement is announced of Miss Dorothy Page, eldest daughter ot Mrs. and the late Captain W. C. Page. N.Z. E.F., Birkenhead, to Mr. Kenneth Ward, youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Ward,