Divorced

"I wish I were with you, baby, because I love you. God bless you. Dolores." "Darling, you must get well because of my love for you. Dolores." "I love you. Dolores."

Published almost instantly in the papers of two continents, these and other messages from Dolores Del Rio, screen star, in Hollywood, to her divorced husband, Jaime, ill in Berlin, did not particularly impress a U. S. public accustomed to accept the quasi-private quarrels and love-making of picture people with the same scepticism usually roused by their screen depictions of the same kind of thing.

Few, therefore, took seriously the press accounts of the final, frantic cablegram to the German sanitorium which was not read by Jaime Del Rio since just before it came he had died of bloodpoisoning; or the story about the way Mrs. Del Rio's mother told her the news.

"It's all over."

"You mean--the crisis is over?"

"He's dead."

"Mrs. Del Rio sought comfort by burying her dark head in her mother's bosom. Her entire body was racked with sobs," said a despatch which made cinema fans chuckle.

Friends of the Del Rios were less amused. The emotion, they knew, was real. They recalled how Del Rio, owner of 20 ranches in Mexico, learned to write scenarios so as to have a professional reason for being with his wife in Hollywood, how he was known there as "Mr. Dolores Del Rio," and how, after a period of faithfulness regarded as unconventional by their colleagues, the Del Rios began to live apart, each denying estrangement. "Our careers have forced us apart."

They were divorced in Mexico last June.

Three months ago in Paris Miss Del Rio asked her husband if she could come and see him; after that they wrote to each other, the actress finally--"Keep up your courage, darling. I don't forget you in my heart. You must get well. I love you, I love you."--a message (it was the one the sick man did not live to read) suggesting once more the odd fact that all emotions of a certain sort, whether real or assumed, can be expressed only in the language of subtitles.