INTERVIEW : Glitter Is Now a Warm Glow : Buddy Rogers starred in the first film to win best picture. With Mary Pickford he reigned over Hollywood’s golden era. It seems like only yesterday.

‘Looks a little like a hotel up there these days,” Charles (Buddy) Rogers said the other afternoon, gazing from a sunny sitting room uphill toward the looming beige bulk of Pickfair, the legendary estate that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. began to build at the start of their marriage in 1920, and that was Buddy’s home for the 42 years of his marriage to Mary.

“When Mary was about to leave on her journey to heaven,” Rogers recalls, “she said, ‘Will you live on here?’

“I said, ‘Lord, no; it’s too big, too much for me to rattle around in without you.’ She said, ‘What you should do is take a piece of land down the hill from the house and build yourself a place of your own.’ And that’s what I did.”

Pickfair more than any other home symbolized Hollywood in its unchallenged heyday in the 1920s, Hollywood at its most opulent, glamorous, enviable and fascinating, its stars as rich and famous and potent as royalty, with Doug and Mary themselves as their king and queen. But Hollywood has changed, and so has Pickfair under its subsequent owners. After Mary died in 1979, Rogers sold Pickfair to Jerry Buss, and it is now owned by financier Meshulam Riklis.

“He’s alone since his wife [entertainer Pia Zadora] took their two kids and left,” Rogers says, “and I believe he’s trying to sell it.”

The house that Rogers built after Pickford died is a few dozen yards down Pickfair Lane from the mansion. It is gated and elegant but not intimidating. Within, it is light-filled and livable, and crowded and aglitter with treasures from Pickfair itself--gifts received and objets d’art purchased (a set of Napoleon’s china, watercolor sketches by Rodin), an entire Western bar, stools and all, with Remington paintings.

A kind of honors room off the entrance hall is filled with eight decades’ worth of memorabilia accumulated both by an actress who was, at her peak, very likely the most famous woman in the world, and by her husband, a star personality in his own right.

There are Pickford’s two Oscars (a best actress award for “Coquette” and a lifetime achievement award given in 1976) and the aviator’s leather hat and goggles Rogers wore in William Wellman’s 1927 silent classic, “Wings,” the first film to win a best picture Oscar. There are scrolls, plaques, posters, portraits and a shiny key to the city of Olathe [o-LAY-thuh], Kan., where Rogers was born and raised and to which he returned a few weeks ago to be honored.

For all its accouterments, Rogers’ home, where he now lives with his second wife, the former Beverly Ricono, is too bright and alive to suggest a museum, yet there is inevitably a sense of the past revisited, and a sense of lingering presences: Pickford herself, of course; Fairbanks, Chaplin, Swanson, Hearst, Griffith, Zukor, Mayer, Davies and Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen, pals from “Wings” who remained pals all their lives. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Pickford was his stepmother) is one of Rogers’ closest friends and an occasional house guest. (“What a charmer,” Rogers says.)

Going back to Olathe as a local lad made good was a thrill. “But,” says Rogers, “what differences! Three thousand population when I was a boy, 80,000 now. Kansas City has reached right out to it and made it a suburb. I managed to find our little house, but that’s about all. Couldn’t find my grandfather’s hotel. He charged $2 a night for a room and served a very good meal for 50 cents. This time I stayed at a motel for $75 a night.”

His father published a weekly newspaper, the Olathe Mirror. Buddy had a Kansas City Star paper route and also delivered the Mirror on Wednesdays. His father later became probate judge of the county. “Married thousands of couples,” Rogers says. “He became known as the marryin’ judge.”

Rogers was a member of Demolay, a Masonic order for young men, and at meetings in Kansas City got to know another young Kansan named Walt Disney. Disney later sought out Rogers in Hollywood, and Rogers tried unsuccessfully to get friends to invest in Disney’s vision for a grand Hollywood studio.

How destiny lifted Rogers out of Kansas and into history seems as emblematic of the Hollywood ‘20s as “Merton of the Movies.”

“The local theater man told my father that Paramount Pictures was making a national search for 10 men and 10 women to study acting at their studio in Astoria, Queens,” Rogers recalls. He was then in his third year at the University of Kansas, ambitious only to be a musician and bandleader, which he became.

“I didn’t want any part of it, but Dad said do it for him, so I did it for Dad. I sent off some photographs and thought that was the end of it. But darned if I didn’t hear I was one of the 10. The only other one of the 20 of us who went anyplace was Thelma Todd.

“Well, there in Astoria we studied how to fall down without hurting ourselves and how to hold a kiss for three minutes without laughing. That’s what I mostly remember.”

He got word that he’d been cast as Ronald Colman’s brother in “Beau Geste,” the romantic adventure of the French Foreign Legion. He was fitted for his uniform in New York and entrained for Hollywood, pausing in Olathe, where he paraded up and down the main street in his Foreign Legion duds for two days. But on the coast he learned the role had gone to someone else, as did his next promised role, in “Old Ironsides.”

“I just wanted to say the heck with it and go back to Kansas,” he says. “Then I had lunch with Billy Wellman and he put me in ‘Wings,’ and there went Kansas.”

It was a heady time for a young man out of Olathe. There were black-tie dances at the Biltmore every month, Rogers remembers. “You could see every star in the business, from all the studios, and cutting-in on the dance floor was allowed.” He believes he was actually introduced to Fairbanks and Pickford on one of those nights, although in the crush of people it apparently did not strike any of them as fateful.

For “Wings,” Rogers actually had to learn to fly and was taught at Kelly Field in San Antonio by a young Army pilot named Hoyt Vandenberg, later to be a four-star general in World War II. (During World War II, Rogers tested and delivered planes as a pilot in the Navy Ferry Command.)

Ultimately, Rogers appeared in nearly 60 films, none so memorable as “Wings.” Rogers also got to have a second career as a bandleader, with a radio show on NBC as early as 1931 and engagements all over the country. Gene Krupa was his first drummer and Johnny Green (composer of “Body and Soul” and other standards) his first pianist. Rogers himself was primarily a trumpet player, but in his stage act he also took choruses on piano, drums and all the reed instruments.

Once, playing in Chicago, with his mother visiting from Olathe, Rogers got a dinner invitation from Al Capone. A bit nervously, he accepted. Capone, surrounded by three dozen or so burly associates--”Henchmen, I suppose they were,” Rogers says--greeted Buddy and his mother with courtly charm and introduced them to his own young son. For years afterward, Capone sent Rogers telegrams commenting on and usually praising his broadcasts. The last was from a prison in Florida.

R ogers and Pickford first met more significantly after she saw him in “Wings” and asked him to be screen-tested for her next film, “My Best Girl,” in 1927.

“Three of us tested,” he says, “but I got the part. She was a salesgirl in a department store, which my father owned. I was a trainee and I was assigned to her, so she was my boss. I didn’t tell her who my father was, and there were all sorts of complications. I ran it again the other day and it still plays well.”

Pickford’s marriage to Fairbanks in 1920 seemed the stuff of fable and the lavish Pickfair mansion they built an appropriate castle. But like many less-starry marriages, theirs did not age well.

By 1935 there were reports in the press of a Rogers-Pickford romance. She divorced Fairbanks in 1936, and she and Rogers were married in June, 1937, sailing to Honolulu for a Hawaiian honeymoon, along with another honeymooning couple, Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond. Pickford was 11 years older than Rogers.

Before the marriage, Rogers leased a large house on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood (“Quite a busy street these days,” he says). It was a way of declaring his own independent status. But Pickford couldn’t abide the idea, and Rogers quickly moved into Pickfair.

Too, they hadn’t been married long when she put her foot down about his barnstorming with the band. She threatened to divorce him if he didn’t stay home.

“I couldn’t blame her,” Rogers says. “I was away so much. But she really took my band away from me,” he adds with a wry grin, as if remembering a distant scolding.

Naturally, there were plenty of consolations: lawn parties for 300 and 400 guests, most of them legendary in their own right, even starrier sit-down dinners for 20 or 30. Rogers recalls a dinner on the night of Pickford’s birthday--on April 8--although nothing had been said about it. When the word leaked out, one of the guests, Marion Davies, excused herself, drove home and returned with a diamond ring as a birthday present.

William Randolph Hearst himself was an occasional guest. But once, Rogers says, they drove to San Simeon and arrived at 9:05 p.m., which was five minutes after curfew. They were told that not so much as a cup of coffee was available. They turned around and drove back to Beverly Hills.

Hearst once asked Pickford to sell him a literary property that she had bought for her own company and that he wanted to produce. When she refused to sell, he said, “Your name will never appear in my papers again.” She still didn’t sell, but the threat went unfulfilled.

Pickford’s last public appearance was in 1976, when at Pickfair she taped for the Academy Award ceremonies her acceptance of the special Oscar. She looked sadly frail and hesitant, and Rogers said at the time that he wished she had been allowed to do a second take; he was sure it would have been stronger and better. But the crew was afraid of tiring her. After the taping, she sank back into seclusion and died in 1979.

Rogers and Beverly Ricono married in 1981. She had been a real estate agent whom Rogers and Pickford had known for years in Palm Springs, where they had a second home.

Tall, slim and erect, silver- haired, still actor-handsome, Rogers turned 91 last Sunday. He swims daily, aiming to get back to the golf course after a temporary disability suffered a few weeks ago. He was recently honored for his and Pickford’s contributions to the Motion Picture Fund, of which she was one of the founders in 1920.

Meanwhile, he lives with an unparalleled richness of memory, and he not only is one of the last ties to the growth of the movies as both an industry and an art form from the 1920s onward, but remains an active player among the giants who left their prints at Grauman’s Chinese.

His mother once said he’d have been healthier and happier if he’d stayed in Olathe. “What if I had gone back to Olathe?” Rogers says. “Oh, my, think of all I’d have missed.”