[Gutenberg 42449] • My Wonderful Visit

A steak-and-kidney pie, influenza, and a cablegram. There is the triple alliance that is responsible for the whole thing. Though there might have been a bit of homesickness and a desire for applause mixed up in the cycle of circumstances that started me off to Europe for a vacation.

For seven years I had been basking in California's perpetual sunlight, a sunlight artificially enhanced by the studio Cooper-Hewitts. For seven years I had been working and thinking along in a single channel and I wanted to get away. Away from Hollywood, the cinema colony, away from scenarios, away from the celluloid smell of the studios, away from contracts, press notices, cutting rooms, crowds, bathing beauties, custard pies, big shoes, and little moustaches. I was in the atmosphere of achievement, but an achievement which, to me, was rapidly verging on stagnation.

I wanted an emotional holiday. Perhaps I am projecting at the start a difficult condition for conception, 10 but I assure you that even the clown has his rational moments and I needed a few.

The triple alliance listed above came about rather simultaneously. I had finished the picture of "The Kid" and "The Idle Class" and was about to embark on another. The company had been engaged. Script and settings were ready. We had worked on the picture one day.

I was feeling very tired, weak, and depressed. I had just recovered from an attack of influenza. I was in one of those "what's the use" moods. I wanted something and didn't know what it was.

And then Montague Glass invited me to dinner at his home in Pasadena. There were many other invitations, but this one carried with it the assurance that there would be a steak-and-kidney pie. A weakness of mine. I was on hand ahead of time. The pie was a symphony. So was the evening. Monty Glass, his charming wife, their little daughter, Lucius Hitchcock, the illustrator, and his wife—just a homey little family party devoid of red lights and jazz orchestras. It awoke within me a chord of something reminiscent. I couldn't quite tell what.

After the final onslaught on the pie, into the parlour before an open fire. Conversation, not studio patois nor idle chatter. An exchange of ideas—ideas founded on ideas. I discovered that Montague Glass was much more than the author of Potash and Perlmutter. He thought. He was an accomplished musician.