Epic-Maker

"The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling," said Cecil B. DeMille in a speech a few months before he died. Few men had changed that art as drastically as he. Story and song, play and pageant have always demanded that the audience's imagination fill out the scene; DeMille and his Hollywood disciples left nothing to the imagination. His life was dedicated to manufactured magnificence; the "epic" was his trademark in a world that would never match its image on his movie screens.

But when vigorous old (77) Cecil Blount DeMille died of a heart attack in Hollywood last week, the town that he had taught to operate on the grand scale buried him with uncommon dignity. Only a handful of mourners were at his grave. It was a modest exit for a showman whose 70 pictures have made more money* than any other movies ever filmed.

Goldfish & Warriors. Other men often made better movies, but no one else ever catered with such monumental efficiency to the fickle, well-fed goddess that Hollywood describes as public taste. For years, DeMille was Hollywood: he founded one of its first studios in a barn. When he went west from New York in 1913, head of a syndicate that included a struggling vaudeville producer named Jesse Lasky and a glove salesman named Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn), it was enough that he had the drive and energy to put together The Squaw Man, Hollywood's first full-length flicker, with He-Man Dustin Farnum. By the time DeMille produced his fifth movie, The Man from Home, in 1914, he was a slick showman. He was experimenting with artificial lighting, using shading to create the illusion of depth. When a wire from Goldwyn complained that exhibitors would pay only half price for a half-lit film, C.B. wired back: IF YOU DON'T KNOW REMBRANDT LIGHTING WHEN YOU SEE IT, DON'T BLAME ME. Goldwyn promptly answered: FOR THAT THE EXHIBITORS WILL PAY DOUBLE.

For a few years, C.B. made soap operas with such homely morals as "Don't change your spouse." Then, said his younger brother William: "Having attended to the underclothes, bathrooms and matrimonial irregularities of his fellow citizens, he began to consider their salvation." C.B. rediscovered the Bible.

DeMille's father, a playwright, was an Episcopal lay reader. Every evening he read two chapters from the Bible aloud to his two boys. "The people in the Bible weren't characters in a book," said C.B. later. "They were real individual entities to me. Mighty warriors like Joshua were my heroes."

Benevolent Tyrant. By 1932, when DeMille began to make talkies, he had already produced a series of Biblical epics (King of Kings, The Ten Commandments). He strolled his sets, a demanding and benevolent tyrant, a chair boy always behind him with a chair so that the master could sit down without looking, a mike boy always beside him so that the master could issue orders. A secretary trailed him, pencil at the ready. At home, a handy pad awaited his jotted-down inspirations in every room -even the bathroom.

C.B. had been an actor himself, and he always knew exactly what he wanted done. Once, when Britain's Henry Wilcoxon was playing Antony to Claudette Colbert's Cleopatra, DeMille became disgusted with the limp acting of extras in a battle scene. He grabbed a spear and charged Wilcoxon to show the extras how to do it. In the melee, Wilcoxon was wounded and went to the hospital for seven weeks.

Peacocks in Dogpatch. To support his well-publicized passion for authentic detail in his movies, DeMille liked to dabble at historical research, would sit for hours in the basement of his Laughlin Park home (where he lived with his wife Constance for more than 40 years), poring over reference books, surrounded by a small museum of medieval armor and -three glass-enclosed shrunken heads whose hair was regularly washed and coiffed.

DeMille had an Olympian hideaway in the Tujunga foothills, east of Los Angeles, a rough, scraggly domain akin to Li'l Abner's Dogpatch. The parties he used to give at Paradise Ranch are still part of Hollywood legend. Guests got Russian Cossack blouses to wear, and DeMille's own entrance was always in the tradition of high drama. Gifts for guests were borne in on silver trays, while an organ blared Wagnerian music and tame peacocks and deer blinked in at the windows.

The Hollywood of those days disappeared, but in his on-screen showmanship, DeMille refused to change. He was shooting The Ten Commandments in Egypt three years ago, when he insisted on climbing to the top of an 111-ft. gate to direct the action himself. He barely got down. The cause of his sudden fatigue was a coronary thrombosis. But he was back on location next day, defying his doctors.

By last week the erect, white-fringed bald eagle of Hollywood had finished another epic (The Buccaneer) and was starting to work on a filmed history of the Boy Scouts and its founder, Lord Baden-Powell, when his overworked heart finally failed. The DeMillennium was over; Hollywood would never be quite its old colossal self again.

* An estimated $750,000,000. DeMille's second version of The Ten Commandments, released in 1956, has already caught Gone With the Wind as the alltime box-office leader, is still in its first run. All DeMille's personal profits from this picture go to the DeMille Trust Fund for "Religious, Charitable and Educational Work."

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