“Now go through it that far and see if you remember everything I told you.  When we get down to the crying scene after the officer comes on, I’ll rehearse you in that too, only for God’s sake don’t cry in the rehearsal!  You’ll go dry.  Now then!  Coat—­button—­sewing.  Goon!”

Well, sir, I stood there trembling like a leaf while she went through what he’d told her like she’d been at it all her life—­or rather like it was her dear Clyde’s coat and her dear Clyde’s photo and her dear Clyde that come in the door.  Then he rehearsed her in the end of the scene where the cop comes on, and she got that, too, though alarming him because she couldn’t even rehearse it without crying.  I could see this director was nervous himself by this time, thinking she was too good to be true.  But he got her into the chair sewing again, all ready for the real work.

“Remember only three things,” he says:  “Don’t look at this machine, move slowly when you move at all, and don’t try to act.  Now then!  Camera!”

It was a historic occasion, all right.  The lad at the camera begun to turn a crank and Vida begun to act like she wasn’t acting at all.  The director just give her a low word when she had to move.  He didn’t bark now.  And say, that crying scene!  Darned if I didn’t near cry myself looking at her, and I heard this stonefaced director breathing mighty short when she had to stand there with her hands clenched and watch her boy go out the door with this cop.

Vida was too excited to sleep that night.  She said the director had advised her privately not to make a contract just yet, because she would get better terms when she’d showed ’em what she could really do.  For this picture she would get paid seventy-five dollars a week.  A week, mind you, to a girl that had been thinking herself lucky to get twelve in New York.

She was very let down and happy, and cried a little bit out of working hours for me because it was all so wonderful, and her drowned boy might be resting on some river bottom at that very moment.  I said it was a safe bet he was resting, wherever he was; but she didn’t get it and I didn’t say it twice.

And such was the beginning of Vida Sommers’ glittering sob career in the movies.  She’s never had but one failure and they turned that into a success.  It seems they tried her in one of these “Should a Wife Forgive?” pieces in which the wife did not forgive, for a wonder, and she made a horrible mess of it.  She was fine in the suffering part, of course, only when it come to not forgiving at the end—­well, she just didn’t know how to not forgive.  They worked with her one whole day, then had to change the ending.  She’s said to be very noble and womanly in it.