FACELIFT AND FACE SAVING

On the 7^th June 1909 Mary Pickford makes her screen debut at the age of 16.

On 19^th April 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. The role went to someone else but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford. She quickly grasped that movie acting was simpler than the stylized stage acting of the day.

Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day but, after Pickford's single day in the studio, Griffith agreed to pay her $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week. Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both bit parts and leading roles, playing mothers, ingenues, spurned women, spitfires, slaves, native Americans, and a prostitute. As Pickford said of her success at Biograph: "I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities... I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I'd become known, and there would be a demand for my work." Pickford appeared in 51 films in 1909 — almost one a week.

It is unfortunate about the face lifts, but what about Buddy Rogers?

On the 7^th June 1948 Edvard Beneš resigned as president of Czechoslovakia. After the Prague uprising at the end of World War II, Edvard Beneš returned home and reassumed his former position as President. He was unanimously confirmed as the president of the republic by the National Assembly on 28 October 1945. Under article 58.5 of the Constitution, "The former president shall stay in his or her function till the new president shall be elected." On 19 June 1946 Beneš was formally elected to his second term as President.

Beneš presided over a coalition government, from 1947 headed by Communist leader Klement Gottwald as prime minister. On 25 February 1948, under pressure from Gottwald, Beneš appointed a Communist-dominated government--in effect, giving legal sanction to a Communist coup d’état.

Shortly afterward, the Communist-dominated National Assembly drafted the Ninth-of May Constitution. Rather than sign it, Beneš resigned as President on 7^th June 1948 and Gottwald succeeded him.