Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/182

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN my life I have had the merriest of dispositions, but I was unequal to laughing eighty-three thousand dollars off.

I was not, as I recall it, met at the Los Angeles station by an admiring and grateful crowd of fellow film actors and actresses who pelted me with roses. The men and women of the California film colony who had been laboring at twenty-five to one hundred and fifty dollars a week viewed this descent in force of the one thousand dollars-a-week high hats of Broadway with a jaundiced eye. They had toiled and sweated long in the vineyards and now that the grapes were ripe we fair-haired boys and girls of the legitimate were to eat the fruit; eat it patronizingly with slightly curled lips.

They had their revenge shortly, but not many of them remained to enjoy it, for the mortality rate of the screen always has been appalling. Of the great names of the film world in 1915, actors, actresses, directors, those who survive undiminished may be counted upon the fingers of a careless sawmill hand. In the short interval others have shot up from the obscurity of extras and bits to blaze briefly and fade swiftly, gone with the cross-word puzzle, mah jongg and last year's favorite fox-trot tune. The lords