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one-night stands. President Taft used to say that after
he went to a play the first thing he asked himself was whether it was
as good as Disraeli. When Arliss hurt his hand and had to do all his
business with one arm, there arose a legend that Disraeli had
paralysis. Compared to Disraeli, The Green Goddess was a failure;
Arliss played it for only three years. Old English in which skinny
Arliss was a hard-drinking, robust old Tory, was his greatest
financial success on the stage. In Hollywood, George Arliss is an
extraordinary personage. He stops work every afternoon for a cup of tea,
goes home at 4:30 no matter what the cast is doing. His director always
addresses him as Mr. Arliss. He dresses in narrow trousers and a high
stiff collar, carries change in a purse. Because he and his wife once
saw some cattle starving in a drought, Arliss is a vegetarian. His
theory ("I eat nothing I can pat") puts fish on his menu. He
keeps an elaborate research library to help him with costume parts. He
rehearses privately for two weeks before every picture, takes his
wife's advice about makeup. She plays in his pictures only when, as in
Rothschild, she can appear as his devoted wife. George Arliss's
monocle, originally an affectation but now a necessity, has worn deep
grooves around his right eye. He has never been known to break one. He
gets exercise by walking, followed slowly by his car and chauffeur so
that when tired after four miles outbound he can ride home. The clock
on his dressing table is 250 years old. He used it in Alexander
Hamilton. Most of the characters whom Arliss has portrayed with the
greatest success have been infidels. He is a practicing Episcopalian,
head of the Episcopal Actors Guild. At 66, he is provoked by being
classed with superannuated mummers like Otis Skinner and De Wolfe
Hopper. As a loyal British subject he still entertains hopes of being
knighted.
¶Scandals (Fox) is a mass of trivia garnishing the backstage
romance of Jimmy Martin (Rudy Vallee) and Kitty Donnelly (Alice Faye),
a romance almost put asunder by a Park Avenue hussy (Adrienne Ames). As
he croons, Vallee regards the onetime cabaret girl whom Mrs. Vallee
recently named as corespondent in a suit for divorce with saucer
eyes, but otherwise comports himself with poise and wooden dignity.
Pelican-nosed Jimmy Durante fondles a wooden duck, raspingly sings
''My Dog Loves Your Dog."
