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Pandora's star delighted that Lulu's back di Chris Chase
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| (...) Over the phone, she sounds
every bit as forthright as she said to have been in her heyday, and she is
delighted by the renewed interst in her pictures. "I think it's amazing" she says". "I'll be 77 in November, but this emphysema, you don't know how long you'll last. Tynan died of it. It's a dreadful disease. It clouds your mind, your memory. I don't know what I'm talking about half the time". Might her life have gone another way if she'd had to take herself more seriously, if she hadn't been so beautiful that men fought to keep her in fur coats? She answears that her days were not without discipline. "I spent years learning to write" she says. "And I've read enormous amounts of books. I can't read much anymore - I can't remember anything. So mostly I listen to these silly talk shows on the radio, people calling up and asking if they're in love". What about herself in love? She has written that she never really loved any man. "Where did you read that?" she says. "In Lulu in Hollywood" "Oh" she says. "I couldn't think where I'd written it. This starry-eyed thing? No, I don't think I ever was in love with a man like that. I was married twice, but I didn't want to be married, and I got divorced and I didn't love either one of them. At all." What she did love was writing. "And dancing" she says. "I danced with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, but I never was good. I didn't have that lyric quality you need. And I don't think I was a particularly good actress, either. In front of the camera, I was just myself. As far as I was concerned, the camera didn't exist. I made pictures at the Astoria Studios, and we would have lots of stage actors come over, and they were so frightened of the camera. It is really kind of sad to see them trying to get over this terrible self-consciousness so they could play their parts". "In Hollywood, of course, people liked to play, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, am I the fairest of them all?'. The girls were very vain about their beauty, because they thought that was what got them in movies". "But essentially, what matters is personality. Take a girl like Clara Bow, who wasn't beautiful and really didn't act. She was just herself, and suited to the period. Norma Shearer, Gloria Swanson, I don't know whether they were good actresses, but they were great peronalities. You have to have a very powerful personality. That's what makes a a star". Chris Chase, Pandora's star delighted that Lulu's back, "New York Times", September 16, 1983 |