Radio: Profile Unimpaired

He is now a successful soap-opera actor —but that is a far cry from being a movie matinee idol. Gone is the famous 23-foot Marmon with his name in solid gold on the door. He can no longer afford to pass out $100 tips to waiters. His hair is white, and the lean, taut jaw line once beloved by millions of women has run to jowls. “At 64,” booms Francis Xavier Bushman, “my energies are somewhat—ah—shall we say, mellowed, but my profile is unimpaired.”

In his heyday (1911 to 1918), Bushman made $6,000,000 by showing that aquiline profile in more than 400 films.

He spent the money as fast as he earned it. He had a $200,000 estate in Maryland and a ten-room suite on Riverside Drive. He smoked eight-inch monogrammed cigarets and was always accompanied by two huge Great Danes ($10,000 each). He was one of the first romantic actors to get his fan mail by the bale, and it always included several hundred amorous propositions.

In 1918 he flabbergasted his fans by revealing that he had been married since 1902, and was the father of five children. He admitted his marriage only because he intended to divorce his wife and marry his leading lady, Beverly Bayne (seven years later they were divorced). When they learned that he was a husband and father, fifty million disillusioned lady moviegoers promptly threw him over. The screen’s Great Lover was soon a has-been.

Except for his 1926 appearance as Messala, Ramon Novarro’s competition in the Ben-Hur chariot race, and a brief bit in Wilson, Bushman never appeared on the screen again. But in the last 16 years he has played 2,500 bit parts in just about anything radio had to offer, from Red Ryder to One Man’s Family.

Last week things were looking up. Francis X. Bushman was a hit playing a gregarious ham actor called Major Carson (reminiscent of the comic strip’s Major Hoople) on The Rexall Summer (Theater. In a sudsy serial, Bob and Victoria, he oozed kindly wisdom persuasively enough to insure himself a berth on that show for some years to come. “My radio family,” he explained cheerfully, “is so longevious that at this rate I should be in soap opera for 30 years.”