Modern Screen (Dec 1949 - Nov 1950)

jerry gi I den rapid wrap around of crease resistant fine rayon gabardine Beige, Mink, Evergreen, Rust, Mica Grey, Purple, Gaucho Red, Navy 12.95 SIZES 10-20 Available at . . . RUSSEKS, New York FAMOUS BARR, St. Louis, Mo. HECHT CO., Washington, D.C. Please send me the Jerry Gilden "rapid wrap around" 12.95 STYLE #711 Size _lst color choice 2nd color choiceName Address. City Charge □ Zone Check □ -State Money Order □ a girl can't be too careful! (Continued from page 47) Lila Leeds who sought success in Hollywood but found marijuana and jail instead, or the Peg Entwhistles diving to their deaths off 50foot Hollywocdland signs who find the going too tough to take. It isn't only the hundreds of sordid items which crowd the news columns with a Hollywood dateline that I'm telling about. They don't tell the whole story. There are trip-ups just as tragic in proportion, and maybe more so, when you consider the living hearts they bruise and the happiness they frustrate. Sometimes it's nobody's fault but a girl's own. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes the fog she gets lost in is just a poisonous by-product of the frantic factory of Hollywood fame, and practically impossible to escape. Several years ago, a beautiful girl from Oklahoma drove out to Hollywood with her young husband hunting work. She had no money or fame, but she had something far more precious — love. When she got a job in westerns, he sat outside her sound stage, adoringly, all day while she worked. "I didn't ever go inside — that might disturb Phil," he once told me. "I just wanted her to know I was ther? always with her." Next time they came out, they had a family — two darling boys — also, success on Broadway back of them. Both hit the Hollywood big time, but the girl won an Academy Award in her first picture. She changed — from Phyllis Walker to Jennifer Jones. She changed in other ways, too. She sacrificed the rare adoration she possessed and her perfect family picture. Now she's married to the man who renamed her, her producer. That's a top set-up in Hollywood, to be Mrs. David O. Selznick. But, considering the trail of woe that followed — Robert Walker's breakup, her puzzled children growing up with split parents — is it success? When Jane Wyman was pouring every I shred of herself into making her determined bid for an Academy Award, she sacrificed — to Hollywood's amazement — one of its happiest homes, an ideal husband. At that time when I called Ronnie Reagan, he told me bitterly, "If there is a divorce, I'll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent." Jane got her Oscar for Johnny Belinda — but lost something a thousand times more dear, which she'll probably never find again. A girl can't be too careful. Even if she walks the chalk and minds her P's and Q's, she's in constant danger in this lions' cage called Hollywood. First off, there's the showcase life she'll live as long as she's a star. It takes lots of girls a long, long time to realize that, and some of them never do. Only the other day, Joan Crawford, who certainly should know better after 20-odd years, motored through the Northwest, supposedly with her poodle. But also along was her director, Vincent Sherman, a married man. Although everything was, I'm sure, very proper and all, newspaper accounts had her eloping with her next husband, and it was embarrassing when those reports came back home to Hollywood. Nor did it do Joan's reputation any good. From the minute she is worth noticing, a girl will be noticed. Everything will be magnified mercilessly. Her daily routine, her boy friends, her home life, her deportment— everything. If she slips to the right or to the left or sags in the middle she'll be mauled — often with good cause, but often unfairly, too. In any normal town, Elizabeth Taylor's teen-age heart strivings with their con sequent rifts would have been smiled on sympathetically and recognized as pure "puppy love." But Elizabeth drew indignant blasts and the ridiculous tag, "The Jilt," before she married Nicky Hilton. You should have seen some of the withering mail she received, calling her every fickle, cruel-hearted name in the book — and as I did — the tears it drew from Elizabeth's violet eyes. Elizabeth's good name didn't deserve such a lacing. Ava Gardner's did. Little Jane Nigh currently is getting just as much criticism for having a different date each night and collecting a string of sighing swains, which is perfectly normal (and nice work if you can get it) as is Ava for carrying on a flagrant affair with a married man. The vicious, unfounded gossip that was whispered about Shirley Temple and John Agar's boy friends was enough to twist your hair into a permanent wave. There's no rhyme nor reason half the time, to the shellackings a girl's reputation can take, but unless she's loveless, like Ann Blyth, sweet as sugar candy, above reproach, no girl is safe. And even saints slip — look at Ingrid Bergman! "But some silly little fools come to Hollywood actually seeking sensational publicity in the belief that it will make them stars. So off the track is their misguided thinking about what a movie career takes, that one headline-hunting girl actually pulled a strip-tease in front of Paramount studios a while back, "protesting" some snipped-out scenes of a picture she'd lucked into for a bit. The cops stopped her, and I suppose that's just what she wanted. But nobody's heard of her Everything But Aspirin Schwabs' is not the biggest drugstore in existence. It is not even the biggest in Hollywood, but it comes very close to being the most unusual drugstore in the world. Schwabs' is owned and operated by four brothers — Jack. Leon, Bernard and Martin Schwab — who regard their success with a kind of harassed delight. "The place is jumping with customers every evening, especially after ten-thirty, but we don't know what causes it," says Jack Schwab. The telephone booths in the Schwabadero (Schwabs' drugstore) are always full of characters calling up Central Casting, or an agent, or a friend who might know about a job in pictures for them if they hurry. The traffic lanes in and out of the booths are so congested that ' the Schwabs persuaded the phone company to set up three extra booths in the vacant lot next door. Around ten-thirty at Schwabs' the "floor show" begins. There are no entertainers and no music, and the "show" consists merely of a lot of people standing around talking to each other. T en-thirty is apparently the hour when the faithfid feel a compulsion to drop whatever they're doing and visit Schwabs' to mingle with the gang. By eleven, standees are three and four deep in front of the counter and are spilling out into every nook and cranny of the place. Pete Martix — "Hollywood Without Makeup"