[3] He worked as a printer, a stenographer, an advertising writer, and as a clerk in the wholesale and retail drug business.

Collison was an $18-a-week clerk in a Columbus, Ohio drugstore when he turned out this first success, in collaboration with Otto Harbach, about the pursuit of an incriminating undergarment which a shy bridegroom in a single bold moment had presented to a young woman whom he had temporarily fancied.

The hit movie had been a flop on stage: "Red Dust, a turgid play," was "a repetitious melodrama ... Another of those plays of the tropics, or anyway the near tropics, where passions are primitive and men wear their shirts open in the front," wrote The New York Times.

Directed by Christy Cabanne, it was the first feature-length film to include Shirley Temple in the credits.

MGM cast Ann Sothern as Maisie Ravier, a brash American working woman.