The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-07-19
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS

Just a kid. That is what he was, yet he wore tho uniform of his country. but
 it's sober color could not shut out the sunlight in his boyish soul.
 Personality is wonderful thing. It's everything in an actor, singer, or speaker. Without it no one can ever ex- pect to sway an audience, but with 1t, even the worst critics fall for It.
 I remember awhile back sitting at the Lyric and hearing handsome young woman, with wonderfully we'll trained voice, sing some beautiful songs, and leave the stage without getting even what theatrical folk call "a hand.' She had the voice, the presence, the training, the songs, but she never got l, in sympathetic touch with those in front of the footlights l asked the leader of the orchestra, whom I met the next day on the car. if he had noted her, and what in his opinion was the matter with her. He sized her up in three words: "She ! lacks personality"
 I am thinking now of poor, suffering Anna Held. l was in New York a quar- ter of a century ago when she burst on | Gotham and made the jaded public sit uD | and take notice by her sheer beauty. She | was truly radiantly beautiful young woman, the ravishing French. type, pt- quant and sensuous. It is hard to think | of her now in any other way than as the saucy provocative young French woman | who radiateG life and made mems blood 1 jingle She had with beauty that other gift of the gods, personality.
 ] Then came Madame Langtry, haughtl- | ly cold and statuesque the high-tyIed English beauty, cold as a statue placed l on pedestal in a public museum It was pleasant to look at her, for she was wondrously beautiful, but you gazed a, ] her in a kind of an impersonal way. Your blood rever ran any faster through your veins. She might we'll have been | done in marble or put on canvas. I saw I her act and she was devoid of person. | l the primrose path of dalliance it was done not because youth ran riot in her
 veins, but out of cool calculation for place in society.
 l And then came Yvette Guilbert, true daughter of Paris, with all the diablerie of the streets in her veins, and without o,v of Aroa ItaId's beoutx,. ana vat by an auuring personality ten times more l of provocatriee than her more beauti- ful countrywoman, She had the 1.-the, 1 quick movements of the panther, the pent-up cruelty of the tiger, the teasing ways of cat with bird, until she
 audience and unehain dormant passions.
 
 I am the limit, I admit. I began to l tell of a handsome lad who came out of | a coach filled with soldiers into the one in which I Was sitting along with tired men, weary women, restless children and crying babes, and just by his sheer good humor created an entirely differ | ent atmosphere. The men began te smile, the women looked rested, the chill I dren amused, and the babies stared ir lopen-eyed wonder and forgot to fret I
 How did he do it? Not by being fresh but by just being natural He came into the ear with smiling face, eyes dancing with merriment. shoulders thrown back l His entrance won us all. He stood in the doorway W ith the trustfulness of pupS, who bounds into room wagging his talt as much as to say: T won't bite, I just want to play; come on and give me . pat and let's have romp." am sorr, for a man mean enough to kick a puy who with his only way of show, n. friendship is wig-wagging friendlines with his tail.
 ,l He gave US "the all over." as much a!
 to say, II am out for good time; car IT come ill and play with you over her, for a bit before go lover there to d.
 my bit ?y And We all gave him the hisl