Modern Screen (Dec 1949 - Nov 1950)

to susie from alan" continued Sue and Alan Ladd pose with daughter Alana, while son David "shoots" them with a toy camera. He can't get too close, because Alana's in bed with a cold. Alan loads up his new projection machine to run off Chicago Deadline in the family playroom. He's uncomfortable watching himself in a regular theater. In their home office, Alan goes right on reading his mail, and Sue answers the telephone. Alan hates to talk on the phone, will l.vt it ring when he's alone. trary, he can t rid himself of the feeling that he's in on a temporary pass. "Still feel you're working from week to week?" asked someone who hadn't seen him in a couple of years. "I always will." He explains it this way: "When you've lived most of your life with insecurity, o'ften not knowing where the rent and food's coming from, you can't suddenly crow. 'I've got X things and X dollars, therefore I'm secure. The other feeling's too deep in your bones. You're scared to death you'll make a mistake tomorrow, and it's going to be your fault and you won't be able to rectify it. Gets to be kind of an instinct with you. How can you reason with an instinct?" In their early days together, he told Sue a story. Long before This Gun for Hire. Dick Wallace gave him a small part in a play. The cast met at Wallace's house. There Alan saw a silver dresser-set. ' Why that hit me harder than anything else. I can't say." Alan told Sue. "But it did. I thought, to own such a thing, you must really be in solid.'' He smiled at his own naivete. In spite of the smile. Sue filed the story away in her mind for future reference. . She didn't go dashing right out for a dresser set. That would have been both extravagant and obvious. But from time to time she'd give him a single piece. Carol Lee. the Ladds' older daughter, who wanted to be in on it too, saved up enough to buy the shoehorn. When they moved into the new house. Sue added the piece that completed the set. Jr shines softly on Alan's dressing table and still makes him smile — in memory of I he awestruck kid of years ago, in appreciation of the love that gathered it piece by piece. The silver as such doesn't matter. The symbolism does . . . The ranch he and Sue bought is another symbol. "Some people buy pieces of paper called stock." says Alan. "That's not for me. I don't want to be left high and dry with a bunch of papers. I'd rather have something I can understand. Like the little wristwatch I used to own and hock all the t ime. It cost $25 to begin with, and they d give me five for it. After a while they wouldn't give me more than two. But I knew I could always get two bucks on the watch. The watch was my security for a meal. Well, so's the ranch. When they put me out to pasture, the ranch'll be there." And he'll know how to run it. He has a feeling for the land and for animals. What he doesn't already know, he sets out to learn from the ground up — through books, through people, through first-hand experience. Last year they spent Christmas at the ranch. Sue tied a tiny tractor to the tree, with a card that said, "Look out the window." Outside stood a real tractor, sporting a huge red bow. Alan rode it all over the place that day. Next day he had to go back to work. By the time he returned, the hired man had done everything about the place you could possibly do with a tractor. Alan stared gloomily over his well-ploughed fields — and then caught sight of a neighbor ploughing across the way. His face brightened. He approached the neighbor: "Say — could I go behind you with the tractor and help?" Next to the tractor, the truck is his pride and joy. All the Ladds share his enthusiasm for it. I Continued on page 79) '36