The Lady of the Orchids. Item: a bedroom at 3:30 a. m. Item: a bed with ermine covers and a plethora of pillows. Item: Peggy Hopkins Joyce in a "creation" better known as a nightgown. Total: a bad French bad bedroom farce.
Mima. David Belasco is the grand old man of the U.S. theatre. To prove this, he wears a turn-around collar and permits himself to be photographed frequently with a benign facial expression. Like Flo Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan and certain other producers, he is never publicly designated as ridiculous. For the last few weeks, articles have appeared in news-sheets telling how "the Dean of the American Stage is working day and night, transforming his theatre into a veritable Hades," how "Belasco's version of Ferenc Molnar's Mima costs $300,000 to present," and lastly how this "lavish production will be Belasco's swan song." So a typical Belasco audience, in limousines, came to see Lenore Ulric in a play which contained devils, scenes of passionate affection and a huge machine for producing evil on the earth.
The machine was the invention of one of the devils; it contained three cylinders, which, when opened, disclosed a marionette called Mima working her wiles on a simple forester. The diabolical mechanic who had designed this dynamo was displaying its efficiency to a Satanic investigation committee which sat in the orchestra pit to watch. Mima took the forester away from his wife with waggles of her physique; she made him commit the sins of the calendar and other more intimate ones, as blackmail and pandery. At last, it was the intention of the devil that the forester should show that he had lost even the virtue of mercy by killing Mima for her crimes. The forester refused to do this, restrained by the little grain of goodness that remains in mortals, however debased they may be grown. The devil's machine, a failure, tottered and crumpled all over the stage and Janos, the forester, escaped through it, back to his wife who was waiting dinner for him. Interesting and incredible, the play was chiefly remarkable for the stage devices it contained; stage devices, since the invention of the cinema, are less potent than they used to be to evoke illusions and it was in displaying his unique skill in their construction that Producer Belasco really sang his swan song.
His skill in making actors out of individuals like Jack Dempsey or even Lenore Ulric is a less rare but more valuable one. When he watched Lenore Ulric display her manikinetic tricks to Satan's jury, Producer Belasco must have smiled to himself, for it was he, not "Dr. Magister," who taught her how to do them. A little girl from Minnesota who had played in stock in Milwaukee, she came to Manhattan and played in The Mark of the Beast. After that, Belasco got her and has had her ever since. Tiger Rose, in 1917, made her very famous; in Kiki, one of the Dean's most profitable ventures, she was a little "midin-ette." Later, she was a part Negress in Lulu Belle. Never married, her engagement has been reported with discouraging frequency; she eats lemons between meals to discourage hoarseness but her voice, nonetheless, is the voice of a dulcet raven. Her father was an army hospital steward and Lenore Ulric was born in New Ulm, Minn., in 1894.