Quotes

[on riding with race-car driver Harry Hartz] I have traveled 145 miles an hour in an airplane but I got nothing of the sense of speed that came from going 110 miles an hour in the racing car. In the air you are too remote from the world to realize how fast you are going, but on the track you seem to be surrounded by things that flit by at an unbelievable rate.

[in 1937] Twenty-four years is a long time to work for one man. But when the man is Cecil B. DeMille, it doesn't seem so long at that.

[on her collaborator, Cecil B. DeMille] It's been a privilege to work with a man of his integrity and acumen. I think he's a genius; I think any man would have to be a genius to have made so many hits and stayed at the top so long.

All I knew was that I wanted to act. Then someone told me about motion pictures, how drama was filmed. I was fascinated. I like mechanics anyway. I hunted all over New York for a studio - and couldn't find one. At last a super told me a man named Griffith [D.W. Griffith] was doing pictures for the Biograph company. I promptly went there. Mr. Griffith wasn't in. His assistant was. I told him my stage experience. He ignored it, scorned it. "We want to know what you can do before a camera," he said.

I told him that I wanted a job as an actress and director. Mr. DeMille did not exactly snap me up eagerly. In fact, he said he had enough actresses around there and one director, himself, which was all he could stand. He also told me I should do something that I could do at 90 as well as 19 - my age at the time, believe it or not. He said I should get into writing, as there was going to be a great need for writers who knew screen technique and could do genuine dramatic continuity, instead of the "on the cuff" claptrap we had been shooting. This was an insult to my integrity as artist, writer, actress and director, so I left in a huff. I was back the next day, however, asking him for "anything" at $25 a week, and I've been with him ever since, with substantial raises, thank God.

I look back on a golden pageant of pictures he let me write with him, Les dix commandements (1923), Le Roi des rois (1927), Le signe de la croix (1932), Cléopâtre (1934), Les croisades (1935), Une aventure de Buffalo Bill (1936), Les flibustiers (1938), and many that I'm omitting. And I thank him for an accomplishment I might not have known without a DeMille to work for.