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Glory. Actress Hayes' "cute" period fused with her more mature phase in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The Serpent of the Nile was her first regal impersonation. Notwithstanding Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams' crack that she was suffering from "fallen archness," Miss Hayes still maintains: "I felt that my tiny Cleopatra was just right. It seemed to me that Shaw meant her to be a gay young numbskull.'' It seemed that way to the theatre going public, too, for Caesar and Cleopatra had a long and prosperous run. The god Broadway was beginning to give her glory in good measure. Her What Every Woman Knows was a great personal and financial success, and the next year (1927), she took a chance on a play that had the unhappiest ending imaginable—the heroine, a Southern flibbertigibbet, shoots herself in the last act. This was Coquette, which had to be interrupted while Miss Hayes bore her new husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur, their famed daughter Mary.
First notice of this affair occurred when Producer Jed Harris abruptly terminated the run of Coquette, announced that his star was going to have a baby. Several weeks later through Actors' Equity the cast filed $3,050 in claims against Mr. Harris for two weeks' pay in lieu of notice that the show was closing. Mr. Harris took refuge behind the "Act of God" clause in his contracts and the matter was finally adjudicated by a board of arbitration which decided against the producer.
"Little Lady." With Coquette in 1929, Miss Hayes reached Los Angeles in her 88th week. Her agent took her out to see the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer casting director. The director took one look at the slight little woman with the tipped-up nose and unflattering yellow hair, turned to her agent to ask: "What does the little lady do? What sort of parts does she play? Mmmmm. Well, leave the little lady's name and address and if anything comes up that she might fit into I'll give her a ring." He never did.
Miss Hayes was not to be so easily sidetracked from the silver screen. "You know how dames are," says her rough-&-ready husband, who at that time was already a well-known Hollywood writer. "They go to see a picture, look up at the doll on the screen and say to themselves: 'What the hell, anything she can do I can do.' " What Helen Hayes subsequently did in Hollywood won her one of the little gold statuettes which are the topnotch mark of merit of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, for her performance in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, which Husband MacArthur wrote for her cinema début in 1931.