Modern Screen (Jul-Dec 1945)

THAT OLD FEELING (Continued from page 33) hey first met under a summer moon as een-age kids and fell head over heels in ove. In fact, ever since Tom Drake's bright srown eyes* silky voice and attractive male ;creen talents in general popped him out of he bottom of nowhere to the Hollywood :rush circle of feminine fans, he's been pretty much written off by the gossips as i mystery man and a four-F in the real ife romance department. lue bachelor . . . Whenever anyone would corner him md demand, "Now, give, Toni — who's your jest girl?" he'd return a blank stare and ay innocently, "Why, nobody." And the unny part was — he himself thought he was [uoting gospel — until a certaih lonesome •Tew Year's Eve in Hollywood when a leartache out of the past caught up with iim. Tom Drake was seventeen when he first aw Chris and she was just fifteen, a pert nd pretty young Irish-Dutch butterball rom the Poconos, with peaches-and-cream kin and yellow-gold hair, just like she is oday. Only then she had braces on her eeth. Tom had those same darting hazel yes, those same long lashes and»brown urls that flopped down over his eyes if he idn't watch out. Tom was Alfred Alderice, a New Rochelle boy just out of Merersburg Academy, and Christopher was une Dunne, who wanted to be an actress nd had talked her mother into letting her tart young. To show you how close they 11 became from then on — June took the ame Christopher for her professional ame after Tom's sister, Claire, named her rst baby Christopher. And later, Chris Tom's new wife) named her little girl Christopher, too. Which makes three Chrises in the family now. But away ack then (around 1936) it was June and Bud," because that's always what Tom's lose friends have called him. Bud and is sister Claire both were at the Reginald -oode summer drama school near Pougheepsie, N. Y., because they had the same lea Chris had then. They wanted to act. 0 it wasn't exactly fate that put Bud and ttle June Dunne in the cast of their very rst play. Practically the whole school :ted in the plays. Only maybe it was fate lat played the little trick that Tom and hris remember as their very first rolantic moment. That was when Tom slashed his hand ght before opening night curtain trying to "ack a can of milk and the doctor umped an anti-tetanus shot into him. Well, that was okay, and he didn't even ;el woozy until the second act, when all jc a sudden he broke out in a mess of itchy ives that made him feel like an army of its had invaded every item of his costume, robably what Tom Drake would do now ould be yell, "Cut!" scram off to his ressing room and just scratch luxuriously, ut in those days he was Sir Galahad in -easepaint and he'd heard the show must 3 on. So he wriggled himself through le show miserably, but when it was over 2 rushed up to his sister's room, peeled 1 his shorts and yelled "Do something!" Chris was there and together the amaur nurses took over poor Tom, who at iat point resembled a walking boiled toato.' And it was at that very unromantic juncire, both Chris and Tom swear, that love opped in for tea. Chris will admit she id a desperate crush on Bud anyway' the mute she saw the 17-year-old dream boy, ie thought he was about the cutest thing 'er invented. But seeing him looking so darned, helpless — well, the first thing she "knew she was leaning over and giving him a very sweet (but lingering) good night kiss. All this happened right before sister Claire's eyes and that's the way it was from then on. One for all and all for one, Claire and Chris and Tom and the little group of Reginald Gooders who cut their acting eye teeth up in darkest Poughkeepsie. They all lived — about fifty of them — in a vast boarding house, took a bus to the theater together and had their off-hour fun around the hot spots of Poughkeepsie, like coke and hamburger stands, movie houses and juke joints. They had picnics in the woods and they took moonlight rides in somebody's jaloppy and trudged around Poughkeepsie selling tickets to the reluctant merchants for their colossal productions. They sat together in the audience when they were not acting and formed an applause claque and they talked at night in somebody's room until all hours about art and the theater and what great stars they'd all be some day. They were all thicker than thieves, but Chris and Bud were something special. manhattan reunion . . . But it was in New York City that Tom and Chris really got serious. When their mother died suddenly to leave Tom and Claire orphans (his father had passed on earlier), they moved into Manhattan, taking an old remodeled apartment house on Riverside Drive. Their first visitor, of course, was Chris Dunne and the Poughkeepsie gang of summer stockers, all of whom had moved on to the big. city to pursue their art. Chris was Claire's best friend by then, they corresponded constantly and she'd always say in her letters, "give my love to Bud." So when Tom and his sister moved into town the gang, Chris included, rallied around to fix up the place. They painted the poor old Gay Nineties house a modern white and blue and moved in their heavy Victorian furniture from New Rochelle and, while the artistic effect was pretty awful, it was their very own nest and they loved it. And somehow Chris Dunne was over there more than the others. And Tom found himself telling her about everything that happened to him and calling her on the phone every night to report every rosy prospect he could glean out of his long, dull day haunting agents' offices and tramping up and down Broadway looking for a job. He'll probably never forget the first job he landed, either — because it was Chris he called first to brag expansively about it. It was Chris who'd be most thrilled at the news — Tom knew that. He rushed to a phone booth and dialed Chris. Tom was so impressed with himself at that point he could barely button his coat. But he pulled a world weary, nonchalant tone out of his diaphragm. "Hello, Chris," greeted Tom, "just thought I'd call to say hello." "Oh, hello, darling," came back Chris, "anything new?" "No," yawned Tom, "not much. Oh, by the way, I'm starting a new show." "What! Oh, darling, how wonderful!" "Yes," sighed Tom in his best bored tones. "I'm working, just joined Actor's Equity. Director said they'd been looking all over. Start rehearsals tomorrow." Chris said she'd never been so thrilled. She said she was sooo happy for Tom. Sure he'd be a terrific hit. She was impressed to pieces and the guy glowed like neon. And so the next day he strutted down "IT HAPPENED IN SPRINGFIELD" Mary was only a little girl. Maybe seven or eight years old at most. So when the teacher brought all those visitors to her school in Springfield to see how this "experiment in democracy" was working out, no one expected a very good answer to their question, "Do you know what democracy is?" Until she piped up, flushed and sure, "Democracy is, my daddy is a Democrat, and my grand-daddy is a Republican, and I love 'em both!" "It Happened In Springfield" is a short movie, maybe twenty minutes long. And yet in those twenty minutes is covered the whole fight America is putting up against the men with the fascist by-lines, the clever men with the hunger to split up America. They tried some of that talk on John Knudson. He was a simple man who loved the wooden Indian outside his general store, and the little children with their precious two pennies for jelly beans, a good man who couldn't wait until his son, Bill, came home on furlough. But John never did get to meet him. Because a bunch of kids ganged up on "the dirty foreigner" and tore his store down. And ■ beat him unconscious. And when Bill heard about it he cried, "My father was a friend to everybody, why ■pick on him?" Somebody sputtered, "They're only a gang of hoodlums, only kids, they don't know any better." And Bill retorted, "But where did they get the idea? They didn't cook it up themselves. This race hatred was passed on to them, deliberately and viciously, by men who knew what they were doing!" Ann Carter used to buy all her school supplies from John Knudson. She liked him, just as she liked all the Johns and Isaacs and Pasquales and Patricks in the world. And liking them, she became a teacher in one of the many elementary schools operating on "The Springfield System." To explain in Ann's words, "Young children know nothing about racial hatreds. They get that sort of thing from older people. Under this method, we teach them not only the true meaning of democracy, but they learn to live it from the very beginning of their days at school." And to prove America's wisdom to Bill, she took him on a tour of her school. She let him meet little Mary, she showed him the classes where aliens were studying for their citizenship exams and where Mrs. Perelli was using the new word "pray," in this sentence, "I pray God He make me a good Americano!" Yes, Ann Carter showed Bill the Springfield System. She was also showing him a glimpse of America as she could be. And as she will be, with your help. And yours. And yours. * * *'-' ■■ You MODERN SCREEN readers have never needed your bitter medicine sugar-coated, you've never worn rose-colored glasses to those newsreels of Tarawa and Iwo Jima and the bloody butcher camps of Germany. That's why we'd like you to see "It Happened In Springfield" when it reaches your neighborhood theater. You cannot afford to miss it. 69