Page:Screenland October 1923.djvu/24

24 the luckiest girl in the world. Would you consider yourself the luckiest girl in the world if you married a man who owed $80,000? Would you think you were in for a life of bliss if your husband had no position and stood small chance of getting a position for several years? Would you think you stood on the top of the world if your husband were dragged from the honeymoon to answer a charge of bigamy?

No, you wouldn't. Very likely you would go home to father and the certainty of three meals a day.

Mrs. Valentino, naturally enough, won't admit that she wasn't the luckiest girl in the world. But she will admit that the first months of their married life weren't all moonlight and roses. For moonlight please substitute the unbecoming glare of publicity and for roses please substi-

tute legal papers. But it's all over now. In her apartment at the Hotel des Artistes, Mrs. Valentino prepared for a trip to France and Italy. Another honeymoon? No, just a vacation. It will be a rest from the long, dreary and lonesome months spent on the dancing tour.

are all sorts of movie wives. There are the frivolous ones who step out, there are the home-loving ones who do the mending, there are the wives with careers of their own and there are the wives with influence. Mrs. Valentino is one of the few wives with influence. She reminds you of Mary Pickford. She talks business in a sane, cool-headed way. She is engrossed in her husband's success and his ambitions. Like Mary Pickford, she is the Disraeli, the Colonel House and the Charles Evans Hughes of the household. And, naturally, her husband thinks she is the Whole Works.

is much too sophisticated to talk about love and marriage. She won't give you any rule about How to Hold a Husband. She knows that if there were an infallible method the secret would be worth a million dollars.

Too much publicity about her marriage has made her sensitive and shy about talking about her romance. She believes that an over-emphasis of the Valentino personality has blinded the public to the fact that Valentino can act. And so her whole fight—and his