Hollywood (Jan - Mar 1943)

Richard Arlen is an old favorite who's still going strong. Right: Dick loves to cut up, so he's relegated to the doghouse by Wendy Rarrie. He's in the new Paramount picture, Wrecking Crew Perpetual By GLORIA BRENT H A tired-looking jaloppy with chipped paint and an asthmatic engine wheezed up to a drive-in on Sunset Boulevard. The car-hop looked at the grinning man behind the wheel, and as she left with his order she whispered to a co-worker, "Pssst — -do you know who's in that broken-down buggy? Richard Arlen. Poor guy. He's certainly come down, hasn't he?" Dick Arlen heard her and his grin became even broader. His own car was being looked over by a mechanic at the moment and Dick had borrowed a car on the garage lot. Richard Arlen may not be Hollywood's ace heart-thump and glamour boy as he was a decade ago, but he's doing very nicely, thank you. Besides the car, Dick has a penthouse, money in the bank and a smooth running film career which 56 nets him a tidy yearly sum in the neighborhood of $60,000. Comedown? Hardly. Dick is 41 years old but in appearance he hasn't changed at all from the handsome, rakish youth who was the shining light of so many of Paramount's football and adventure films. Same waistline, same hair, same shoulders, same grin. Even the same sense of humor. Today Dick is star of a series of modern action films on the same Paramount lot and neither time nor changing circumstances have dampened the irrepressible Arlen. The sets of his pictures resemble a circus on a Saturday matinee. Dick doesn't take anything seriously. In the middle of a love scene, he'll tell the leading lady, "Aw nuts, let's skip that." He disappears between scenes, then skims back on the set riding a red scooter. The set is continually enlivened with the Arlen brand of practical jokes. He once turned around in the middle of a scene, drew a gun out of his pocket, shot into the air and a stuffed duck hurtled down from the rafters. Dignity is unknown during the filming of his pictures and although Dick is the star, it's not uncommon for* a lowly grip to call out during a piece of emoting, "No good, Dick. You're hamming it up." The crew members presented Dick with a doghouse to which he retires when he's been particularly obstreperous. No wonder set hands beg to be assigned to his pictures. Today Dick's pictures occupy the lower half of double feature bills, but they clean up. They don't compare in importance with his early films, which were strictly big-time, but Dick has a special reason for remaining in them — a reason based on a rare type of loyalty and friendship. It was less than ten years ago that Dick Arlen was in such demand by producers that he turned out thirteen pictures in one year, and once worked in four films at the same time! He was the swashbuckling star of such epics as Wings, The Virginian and Four Feathers. Then suddenly, little was heard about him. What happened? In 1935 the Paramount studios, to whom Dick was under contract ever since he started in 1921, went through a change of personnel and Dick was reorganized out of the studio. That wasn't particularly upsetting to Dick because he was in his heyday and every other studio wanted him. Instead of signing with one of them he decided to free-lance and pick his own stories. "Like most actors, when left on my own I made wrong decisions," he explains. "I was offered Lives of a Bengal Lancer but turned it down. Franchot Tone got the role and it made him a star. The pictures I chose to do turned out to be turkeys which didn't do my career much good. But the final gamble really did me in. I had a chance to star in an English picture and it sounded like a fine opportunity. It was to be tremendous. It was a sort of British Union Pacific and the American people weren't interested in a story about the building of a railroad in England. Working in that picture kept me out of Hollywood a year, and when I returned a new crop of leading men had taken hold. I had stayed away too long, and I had to re-establish myself all over again." At this time, two bright young men, Bill Pine and Bill Thomas, were about to embark on the production of their own pictures. They had been press agents at Paramount when Dick was the fair-haired boy there and they knew only too well how popular he had been. They asked him if he would star in their productions and Dick said yes. It was a new and untried enterprise, and as such, involved an element of risk for Dick. The films were to be made on small budgets, and if they flopped Dick would be washed out for good. Before this he had turned down many offers to appear in "B" pictures, but this offer came from two pals and that made all the difference to him. They never signed a contract — just a handshake — and after two years the arrangement continues. Since then he has received offers from other studios, increasingly heavy now since the war-time shortage of leading men, but Dick is not accepting them. There is nothing to pre