"My Love Life"

Love Is Not a Bauble to be Tossed Lightly from Hand to Hand—It Is a Little Silence of the Soul, Says This Famous Film Star

Dulcimer Dear

to Delight Morgan

EDITOR'S NOTE: The pages of the motion picture magazines have been glittering, lately, with a wealth of intimate revelations in which celebrated ladies of the screen have set forth their hearts' own burdens, and their secrets of love. But it has remained for Vanity Fair to achieve the distinction of persuading Miss Dulcimer Dear, the noted film star, to permit the public a brief glimpse into her own love-life; and we are confident that those who have seen Miss Dear upon the screen (as who has not?) in Passion—the Perjurer, The Brute Kiss and other super-productions, will recognize, respect—and keep secret— her very poignant chronicle of pathos and truth.

It is not easy for a girl of refinement like we stars of the silver screen to bare their hearts to the public. But I have thought and thought, and I have decided that, however repulsive it may be, my love-life must be revealed to posterity. For of what avail the toil and moil of one who has played the woman's role in life, if it serve not to warn other girls, standing at the cross-roads, of the toll that must be paid by she who unwittingly arouses the tiger in men?

The child makes the woman. So bear with me while I go back just a wee bit into childhood's happy hour, when I lived with my father in our modest cottage in that veritable "Nature's beauty spot", the California foothills.

Father was a photographer and re-toucher of repute, and often used to pose me as a model for what he called "boudoir pictures" —such as Cupid, Asleep and Cupid Awake, Her First Ball, and In the Surf at Ostend. How I would preen myself when he placed the cardboard wave about my neck, or decked me out in all the frippery and gew-gaw that go to make a woman of the world! But sometimes, beholding myself in a mirror I would fall back, shuddering, my hands over my eyes.

"It is too much beauty!" I would moan. For well I knew that a girl as opulent and alluring as I could only go the carnal way.

It was when Father was making a series of photographs entitled Youth's First Urge that Passion claimed me for its own; for he had procured, to pose with me in the picture, a well-known young man about town—a handsome fellow, big-boned and curving and with a bit of the Old Harry lurking in his eye. His name was Raymond, and he was the kind that would tousle your hair... yet protect you.

We had to pretend to kiss each other in the pictures, but it was a very long series, and hardly had Father put his plates away after the last photograph when everything seemed to grow dark somehow and, as in a dream, I released myself from Raymond's embrace. He was subdued and shaking.

"Can this be love?" he murmured, in his man's way; "or is it merely love's counterfeit, Passion?"

Well, I had heard the word before, but little knew its meaning. So I took Raymond's hand, and went with him into the starry night.

I was the child-woman, questing, questing ... I knew not what nor whither.

My temperament, alas, clashed with Raymond's after a few days, and on the borderline between Las Vegas, Nev., and California's sunny clime, we parted—he to go his way, I to go mine. Little did I think then that, in the months and years to come, I was to be the tinder that sets men's souls aflame!

A bit of driftwood, I wandered on life's highway, while my form (well-rounded for a girl of my years) grew wasted with worry and heart-hunger, and in my dark, flashing eyes a new, brooding depth lurked. How shall I write of the Fate that directed my faltering footsteps? Suffice it to say that one day, as I paused to toss a wanton curl from my weary brow, I raised my eyes and beheld, before me, a glittering pile of buildings and a large gate upon which was embossed, in letters of fire; COLOSSAL PICTURES, INC.

It was enough. I had glimpsed a tinsel world that beckoned. 1 stood upon the threshold of Life and Love. I think, perhaps, that I swooned a little.

Say that I was swept, willy nilly, off my feet; say that I was drawn into the maelstrom then and there; but do not say (as the newspapers would have it) that I became love's plaything and nothing more. For I have always thought that Love should be a very seldom word, and not tossed like a will-o'-thewisp from lip to lip in devil-may-care fashion. For a girl may love where she listeth but, list she never so lightly, she will find her true love some day; and when that happens, she is but clay in the hands of the potter.

I do not deny that I have found love. Alas! am I to blame that I have found it too often?

But to go back to the day when I, womanchild that I was, stood timidly at the gate of the first moving-picture studio that I had ever seen. ... I ventured inside after a while, and was wandering happily along in the dappled sunlight, attracted by the song of a bird in the distance (for I have ever been a naturelover) , when, to my surprise, the bushes parted and out stepped a—shall I say "man"?

He was more than that. And as I watched his rippling hair and clean-cut limbs flash in the sun, I knew a little swooning of the heart.

"Ho!" he cried, baring his teeth in a winning smile, "and where are you going, Tinker Bell?"

(My name was not Tinker Bell, of course, but that is the name of a character in a play by a gentleman named Sir James Barrie Bart O.M.M.A.L.L.D. Edin, which sounds like a very long and silly name to me, but that is how the dictionary speaks of him. Well, it seems that this Edin called a fairy a Tinker Bell once in jest, and the name has stuck, so now it means a person in frolicsome mood. So my new friend called me Tinker Bell.)

I stepped back a pace. "I am but following the oriole that carols so sweetly over yonder hill," I murmured in low tones, the ready blush mantling my cheeks.

"I am that oriole!" he said proudly, and doffed his hat with a courtly gesture. And it turned out that he was a whistler by profession, and was now voice-doubling in birdcalls for the forest sequence in a picture called "The Stark Nest".

Instinctively I liked and trusted him. So we strolled on a little way, and every once in a while Norbert—for that was his name— would imitate a Bob White or a fan-tailed warbler, and our feathered friends would fly out of the trees and bushes and circle around us, nestling affectionately on arm and shoulder. I had the strangest feeling that Norbert and Nature and I were all just one happy family.

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Alas! I little knew then that what is mere friendliness in Nature oft arouses the primitive passion in Nature's masterpiece, man!

I was afraid, for a time, that I, too, might lose my poise. But no. For Norbert acted the part of a gentleman after a while and, seated on a mossy bank, told entertainingly of the olfactory system in our good friend, Robin Redbreast while I listened with adoration.

Other men have been in my life— yes. But it was Norbert who first whispered to me the Sweetest Story Ever Told (I do not mean the one about Robin Redbreast) and even when I at length succumbed to the producers' pleas and went into pictures, becoming famous overnight as the Little Witch of the Silver Screen, I never forgot him—until that night, in an exclusive cabaret, when I first met Lionel Leonard.

That night! It teas to be a milestone in my life!

I was curled up, little-girl-wise, atop the piano, lightly strumming a guitar while Norbert gave the birdcalls of the tanager and the bobtailed thrush respectively. But, though I feigned a care-free air, my eyes were empty; for I felt that holy love could never come to the woman who plays the guitar thus in wanton fashion. Thus I was brooding, when a waiter touched me on the arm, and slipped a folded bit of paper into my hand.

Wondering, I opened it and read:

One gentleman's socks

One pillow-case

One doz. hanks

Two sheets

but the waiter pointed out that I was looking at the wrong side of the paper, so I turned it over, and it said:

I LOVE YOU.

And with that, Lionel Leonard strode forth and took me in his arms in his man's way. He was a very masterpiece of muscle, in whom thew and sinew met in perfect accord.

"My brute man!" I sobbed, for I am a lover of the Body Beautiful.

Lionel held me closer. "But I am a gentleman, too," he reproved me, tenderly, "and wear nothing but silk next to my skin."

Then he told me that he had loved me ever since the moment when he had glimpsed my perfect muscle coordination while strumming upon the guitar; for he was the proprietor of a muscle-conservatory on the Santa Monica Pier, and therefore very interested in all such things.

Like some pagan thing, I followed him. And many were the joyous hours that Lionel and I passed in the conservatory with our Little Wonder Muscle-Builders, while Passion, that Fool's Paradise, began to assume less and less importance in my mind. For ours was a clean love.

"My Wonder-Girl!" Lionel would often whisper to me, "you will never have sagging muscles, tired skin and pouches, creases or other blemishes that flesh is heir to!" (Of course, he spoke only in jest, for I had no hide nor hair of a blemish upon this miracle of Nature that I call my Form.) And when he had showed me how to do a Swedish Twist, he would sling his gun over his shoulder, and with a "View-halloa!" he would be off. For he was a great lover of the chase.

Dio mio! It was through one of these very hunting excursions of Lionel's that Passion once more claimed me for its oivn.

It seems that while I had been leading a pure life with Lionel, Norbert, my first love, had been lurking about the Pier in sinister fashion and practicing the old, familiar bird-calls in the hope of luring me to his embrace. Was Lionel, then, to blame, when, happy-go-lucky in the underbrush, he heard the bird-call on that fatal afternoon and, mistaking it for the cry of a grouse, took aim and fired? I think not.

Fortunately, he only winged Norbert in a trifling way on the ear. And when they were graciously escorted back to the muscle-conservatory by a passer-by who happened to be passing, my concern was not for Norbert, nor even for Lionel, but for myself; for when I had looked but once into the eyes of the stranger, I felt weak and giddy, and I knew that I was once more the prey of Love, the prankster.

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"I—I'm sorry to be such a silly," I faltered, staggering weakly against a chair.

The stranger caught me roughly in his arms. "May I fetch you a stimulant?" he pleaded in low tones, the love-light shining in his eyes.

Well, I felt that it was wrong, somehow, to leave Norbert and Lionel thus aghast. But Love had caught me in its web of steel, and I was drawn as is the magnet to the pole; for I am built that way.

Harry—for such was the stranger's name—was a baritone singer, making a concert tour of the West. And often, in the twilight, he would sing to me, aping the pantaloon in the opera who hid his serious mien beneath a cloak of gaiety. I wept as I listened, for I sometimes think that I myself am like that pantaloon.

Harry gave me what no other man had ever given me—peace, and restful quiet. But it was not to last; for I soon discovered—ah, God!—that he was travelling with a male quartet.. It was then that the iron entered my soul.

How shall I write of Alfred, the tenor—that gentle, dreamy lad who worshipped at my shrine as though I had been a goddess? Or of Bert, the bass singer—Bert, the funmaker, whose elfin demeanor oft changed to wistfulness at my approach? Or of Jason, the fourth member of the quartet, whose wild Irish strain caused many and many a stormy scene between us?

How shall I write of the hours I have spent, turning over and over in my tortured mind the same old question . . . which? Which of these good men was it to be? Or must it—Mon Dieu! must it be all of them?

It is a question which often faces we women whom men call beloved. And perhaps I shall never know the answer. But I will be brave—for I know that somewhere my true love awaits, that some day he will take me by the hand, and our love will be sealed and sanctified in a chaste caress.

But, until that day comes, alas! am I fated always to be that vessel of passion, that siren who unwittingly entices men into that whirlpool that lies between the fatal rocks of Scylla and Ciribiribin?