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7. "Marrying the harlot' apra regarded the picture he made in NewYork, which was released as For the Love of Mike, as the worst of his career (it is now a lost film). A comedy about three New York ethnics (a Jewish tailor, a Dutch delicatessen owner, and an Irish street cleaner) who adopt a baby and raise him together, putting him through Yale, it starred Ben Lyon as Mike, with George Sidney, Ford Sterling, and Hugh Cameron as his godfathers. Other elements in the commercial formula were action (the Yale regatta, filmed on location) and romantic comedy (in the person of Claudette Colbert, a stage actress making her film debut as an Italian girl working in Sterling's delicatessen). Producer Robert Kane was hard up for cash and hoping to bluff his way through the shooting of For the Love of Mike, keeping the company one jump ahead of creditors. Kane went to Europe before the shooting started, leaving production manager Leland Hayward in charge. The actors insisted on being paid every morning, and Capra cut corners all through the production . "It was just so jumbled up that nobody ever paid attention to the picture. I remember every day, waiting, waiting, until the poor guy [Hayward ] would come in with a sack full of money, sweating like a son of a bitch. By then the day was gone." Unlike the cast, Capra had so little bargaining power that he agreed to defer his entire salary until after the completion of shooting. But he was not in it for the money. He was in it to prove to Hollywood he could direct a picture—any picture—apart from Harry Langdon and to dispel his own anxiety on that score. Claudette Colbert was appearing on Broadway in the hit play The Barker concurrently with the filming, and her first film made her determined never to make another: "For the Love of Mike I hated. It was not the kind of pantomime I knew anything about or was interested in. I was used e 1 8 2 F R A N K C A P R A to acting with my voice. I remember sitting on a stool and Capra telling me to cry and I couldn't do a thing. The way it was made was terrible—they rushed me from the theater, got me in a car, and raced me to the studio." "The French girl never did understand me," said Capra, who later directed her again in It Happened One Night. "She was a new star on Broadway, and I was nothing. She didn't know what a director was. She had no idea of what to do. But I can't blame anything on her on that picture. We were both neophytes. She was very pretty, but she didn't get anything to do. It was horrible." When he finished the editing in July, Capra discovered that there was no money left to pay his salary. Not only that, there was no money to buy him a return train ticket. So the director hitchhiked back to Hollywood. **Flat on my ass" again, in the late summer of 1927, Capra considered quitting the movie business. "I was at a crossroads," he said, "and it was a hell of a decision to make. The first good job that came along would have finished it for me." There was talk of a job as a chemist with a rubber company on an expedition to South America. But more appealing was the idea of going back to Caltech (as Throop was now called) to study for his master's and doctorate in astronomy, so he could work with his then-idol, Dr. Edwin P. Hubble, at Pasadena's Mount Wilson Observatory. But Capra first had to take care of an embarrassing problem: he still owed $750 on his college loan. His mother advanced him the money, and he went out to Pasadena to return it to the controller, Edward Barrett, who had made him the loan ten years earlier. Capra recalled that while visiting the campus, he also went to see Dr. Robert A. Millikan, the president of Caltech. The celebrated physicist had taught at Throop during Capra's junior year, while on leave from the University of Chicago. Capra had never forgotten the thrill of watching Millikan demonstrate his famous oil drop experiment, by which he had been able to determine the charge of an electron. Millikan became president of Caltech...

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