The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 113

S3 Juanita Hansen, Who Escaped From Many Daring Exploits for the Screen, Almost Meets Death From an Outburst of Scalding Steam in the Shelter of a Hotel Bathroom If WSa VX Xv v.0' A i if i v1' X- P1' sa le, cltl ka Having Finished Her Hot llalh, Miss Hansen Stood Up in the Tub and Reached for the Lever Which Turned on the Shower. She Turned the Handle to "CoW," She Insists, When Suddenly an Outburst of Scalding Steam Enveloped Her and She Fell in a Faint, Receiving Distressing Injuries Which After Months in a Hospital Finally Left Her Scarred and Maimed for Life, One of Juanila's Movie "Sninls" as She Hangs by a Rope in the Jungle. match ft water out and stood up to take a cold shower. Turning the lever Kerenl Photograph of Juanita Hansen, Showing How She Is Compelled to Wear a Scarf to Hide the Sears of Her Injuries. Photograph of Miss Juanita Hansen, Showing Some of the Area Where the Livid Sears Still Remain.

One Half of Her Entire Body Was Scalded. an apartment, she was confined for several months to her bed and had to be treated several times daily. Now that she has fully recovered, from the pain and shock of the original scalds, she is still under treatment or removal of the scars that prevent her working on the stage or screen. Fortunately her face was turned away from the shower and the searing Bteam did not touch her features. But her months of pain and suffering took their toll on her beauty.

Once full faced and rather plump, Miss Hansen's face is now thin and drawn. But In time, the plastic surgeons say, her countenance will fill out again. Miss Hansen's screen career began at the age of 16, just as she left the Los Angeles high school. Juanita Hansen was the original Mack Sennett bathing girl and her Instantaneous appeal was the cause of the endless squads that followed her. Thus bathing made and, 15 years later, at the age of 31, almost ruined her.

In 1919 her salary jumped from $200 a week to $65,000. a year. This may not seem very large compared with the alleged million-dollar ones of today, but she really got hers. This prosperity came with taking Pearl White's place and for several years she made serials until her face, figure and daring became familiar to picture fans in every part of the earth. In 1918, while risking her neck for one company by day and for another by night, she found the double work exhausting until someone told her that dope would pep her up.

It did, but she paid the inevitable penalty. In a few years it took morphine to put her to sleep at night, cocaine to wake her up in the morning and heroin to carry her through the day, until the collapse came in 1920. It was now cure or ruin, and she went the rounds of the various sanitaria. The last one cost her $2,600 and its effects lasted just three days after she was discharged "cured." This was the point where anyone with a "yellow streak" gives up to the drugs and slowly sinks toward the gutter and a suicide's grave. Miss Hansen took things into her own hands and gave herself the "cold turkey," which means shutting off the narcotics all at once.

This is the quickest and most permanent of cures, but is likely to be fatal. What she suffered can be guessed by the fact that she endured weeks of torture rather than risk the chance that a bit of morphine would send her back again. Cured, strong and well once more, she went to New York in search of work on the stage. As she had been listed as an addict, Federal narcotic agents watched the actress and finally raided her apartment. They found nothing, but to punish the woman for talking back to them, she was arrested and taken to the station "house any way.

After 14 hours in a cell. Magistrate Francis X. McQuade dismissed her with a scathing arraignment of the irresponsible government agents. After several seasons in vaudeville sketches, she was to rehearse for a legitimate play, this Fall, called "Ego," when the bathtub accident almost killed her. While the beauty doctors are removing the unsightly scar tissue and the power to use her left arm is returning, she is cheered by the news that the screen now demands a good voice, something she fortunately THE life, health and accident insurance companies agreed with Miss Juanita Hansen that she was a good actress, a nice girl and all that but, just the same, she was a "bad risk," and they refused to insure so much as a single hair of her blond They admitted she was as perfect internally as anyone could see she was externally, but they (lid not care to hike a chance on a girl who earned her Jiving by leaping from locomotive to lo.

omotive, plunging over high water-fulls in a canoe, diving from precipices, climbing a rope ladder from a speeding automobile to an aeroplane, etc. The companies have statistics to show that even men who do such things usually come to an untimely end. The daring "stunt" actress who had token Pearl White's place in the films gi Lhem an argument. She knew something about herself that cannot be down in cold figures. Miss Hansen omes of Viking ancestors who gave her more than blond hair that 1st ns on the screen.

Her tow-headed forebears had a precious faculty th it made it possible for a small company of them to raid the more civilized coasts of Europe, knock the heads off such men as opposed them and carry away to sea the gold, silver, jewe'ls, pretty women and any other portable property they fancied. These ancients were tall, rangy but no means "beefy'' men. They were ble to whip many times their weight in ordinary soldiers because they had perfect co-ordination of eye, mind and muscle, making possible the same sort of careful recklessness that makes Lindbergh of that same race seem "lucky." Miss Hansen, explained that when she does one of her "death-defying" acts, she knows exactly what she can do and has no nerves to make Vr falter or miss. What might be risking death for the average woman or even man she claimed was not really taking much risk for her. The Viking mothers could only hand this ability down to their boys, but the movies have now given the woman who possesses it, plus the necessary face and form, a chance to cash in on it herself.

Still, you never can tell. 'She might be hurt in a taxi smash so she would like to carry a few hundred thousand insurance. But the insurance experts said no. It would be bad enough for her to break her well-moulded neck, without their having to pay for it. Curiously enough, the companies and Miss Hansen were both right and also both wrong.

With businesslike efficiency the actress produced one film-thrill after another, without a slip, a bruise or a scratch. She knew her own powers, kept within them and they never failed her. Almost nothing was left to chance. For instance, that locomotive leap was rehearsed until, to use her words, "it was safer than a wedding." Perched on one engine, the other passed it at such slow rate that any active, nervy young person might have done it. But even with a "slow-cranked" camera, the scene would not have looked like much.

The incident was repeated over and over, each time at higher speed. The engines passed but nothing happened except that the girl's keen Viking eyes watched the other mass of roaring metal to which she was to spring. Each time she would give the signal to do it again, a little faster. Finally Miss Hansen was satisfied that she had about reached the limits of her ability and ordered the engineers to repeat the last performance exactly and that she would do her stuff. For tfje final time the locomotives came together, their engineers' eyes glued to the tachometers to make sure that their driving wheels were revolving at exactly the same rate as in the previous passing.

The cameras ground, the villain and the hero did their comparatively safe villainy and heroism and the director bit his lips in silence. At these crucial moments the actress is her own director. If she was not frightened the others were at the sight of the determined face, with blond hair whipping the wind. The critical instant arrived. There was a flash of flying arms and legs and flapping clothes.

She was across but had she caught hold? Then followed a moment of apprehensive dread as they saw one hand and both feet lose their grip, a slip that seemed almost to send her to certain death under the wheels. They had forgotten that she was to enact this heart-stopping detail, but she didn't forget it. She passed unscathed through all the perils that heartless scenario writers could devise for her and finally graduated from the dangerous end of the business. The joke appeared to be on the insurance companies, who had missed some fat, substantial premiums. But there seems to be a queer fatality about persons who live dangerously.

It was often remarked during and after the late war that the men who bore the most charmed lives while bullets were flying proved to be just the ones later, in the midst of peace and security, to fall victim to some trivial accident. Such was Miss Hansen's fate, but she astonished the doctors by not dying, though according to the laws of medicine she should have done so. One quiet afternoon, last summer, Miss Hansen, in her suite at the Lincoln Hotel, New York City, might have supposed that she was never safer from harm in her life. She decided to take a bath and did so. Insurance experts have learned to their cost that the bath is about the most dangerous place in any home or apartment.

People manage to injure themselves in all sorts of ways whi taking a bath. With feet in the water they reach a wet hand to the light socket and electrocute themselves. They slip getting in and out, fracturing skulls and sometimes drowning themselves -while still unconscious. The actress did none of these things. After the bath she let the 19, by Annrican Weeklj, Inc.

this hot steam and water will force its way down the cold water pipe for several floors. According to one engineer, the hot water would force its way down through the entire cold water system, thereby affecting the entire apartment house and any one on any of the lower floors turning on the cold water faucet would, instead of cold water, get scalding hot water. This question will probably be cleared up during Miss Hansen's suit for $250,000 damages against the hotel, for she surprised the doctors and lived. P'or six weeks she hovered between life and death in the sanitarium. Every possible aid known to medical science was given her.

But it is doubtful if medication alone could have saved her. Juanita's fighting Viking ancestry came to her rescue. Her perfect constitution and her unflagging determination to recover eventually carried her across the border line to safety. Miss Hansen is a fighter, as was proved once before in her life, when she succeeded, after a three-year battle, in curing herself of narcotic drug addiction. Not even the excruciating pain caused by the steam blast nor the long days and longer nights of constant suffering could induce Miss Hansen to turn to the relief that would be readily afforded by the hypodermic needle.

When the best physicians urged her to "take a shot" to escape temporarily at least from the agony of her wounds, the little actress compressed her lips tightly and shook her head. Having once escaped the horrors of addiction, she would not, although suffering about the severest pain the human body is capable of enduring, take any chances of being in its clutches again. It was six weeks before she was pronounced out of danger. Even after she was removed from the hospital to of the indicator to the word "cold," she says, Miss Hal-sen awaited the cold rain that should descend upon her back. Instead, a blast of steam and boiling water shot down, scalding and hurting so that for the first time in her life the fearless young woman fainted.

She who could extricate herself from the pounding torrent of a waterfall lay helpless in that harmless-looking tub. Caught off her guard, the athlete had been knocked out and the cruel flood continued to burn her back where it struck and to sear her left side as it flowed around her body. After she had been through about an hour of this Miss Hansen's secretary, Miss Beatrice Bates, began to wonder and looked into the bath room, white with the fog of steam. Still unconscious, the stricken actress was rushed to the Murray Hill Sanitarium, where the doctors measured the area of skin that had been destroyed. Medical students are taught that if more than one-third has been burned the patient is doomed.

In Miss Hansen's case it was not a third, but one-half so they said there was no hope. The Occident is somewhat mysterious and it has been claimed that it is mechanically impossible to get hot water from that sort of mixing valve when the indicator points to "cold." However, the thing has happened in other places. For instance, in an apartment house where the washer in the mixing valve on the top floor becomes in some way stuck, a person wishing to use the hot water turns on the faucet and the hot water, instead of coming out of the faucet, will force its way over into the cold water pipe and, being of a higher pressure than the cold water, will bring hot water out of all the cold water faucets along that line of plumbing. Unless turned off Great Briuin HIliU litoi-iud 1 i.