We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
■ How soon is too soon to get married? That of course depends on the man, the maid and the morals of the moment.
In India, for example, it's fine and dandy to marry the toothless baby of your family's choice. In points North, East and South, your relatives prefer you to wait until you can say "I do" without lisping.
In Hollywood practically anything can happen on the impatient marriage age front, and it sometimes does, sometimes disastrously.
Judy Garland was 17 when she sang her way into the Mrs. David Rose title. Shirley Temple was another sweet seventeen miss who wishes she had waited. Ditto Barbara Lawrence, now a young divorcee. Janet Leigh was 15 when she took the plunge that almost drowned her. Lana Turner was a head-strong 19 when Artie Shaw took her to dinner at 8 p.m. one night, wed her before dawn the same disenchanted evening. Deanna Durbin was 19 when she shouldn't have said "I do" to Vaughn Paul. And Rhonda Fleming, who didn't let many get ahead of her, says now, "I was a bride at 16, a mother at 18, a divorcee at 24. A girl is crazy if she marries anyone before she is twenty-something years old." Rhonda wants me to tell you her love story. "It may help some of your readers with theirs." That's what I hope anyway.
"I just about broke my mother's heart," said Rhonda, a sensible woman of 26, "when I ran off to Las Vegas to marry Tom Lane. She knew I was too young. But now
I'm glad it all happened. Because maybe now I can help others not to make the same mistake. At 16 you think you know everything. No girl under 20 can possibly know the seriousness of marriage.
"But," continued Rhonda, leaning back in the armchair in my Beverly Hills living room, "the more my mother said 'Don't do it,' the more I wanted to. A couple of my girl friends were married so I wanted to be too. How silly could I get! Apart from my age, we weren't in any financial position to be married. And that's another reason why young people are fools to marry — they don't usually have enough money."
Wanda Hendrix had money. But Audie Murphy made her wait until she was 18 and he was more established as an actor. That didn't work out either. After champing at the bit for two years, their nerves were so on edge, the first angry word after the ceremony and Audie was hollering, "I quit."
Maybe that is the soft spot in young Hollywood marriages. Things go wrong and right away they scram to the divorce courts. What's happened to the old fashioned concept of stay married forever? Here, and in other big cities of course, the marriage plan seems to be "I'll have one husband while I'm a teen-ager, another for my twenties, one more for the thirties, etc." Anyway that's exactly what Bette Davis has been doing all these years. Will she get a new marital deal for her fifties?
"Tom and I," said Rhonda. (Continued on page 98)
Doris Day's two hasty marriages suffered. Janet Leigh was a teen-age bride twice. Jane Wyman wed Myron Futterman at
ens, they all suffered in their twenties — and each one learned a lesson she'll never forget.