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Todd Emanuel. I had probably been feeling a little sorry for them, feeling that my own kids, David and Erika, who are just about the same age as Debbie's, were more fortunate because at that moment they were being diapered and dressed by their own mom. I guess, to be perfectly honest, I was congratulating myself that, though Debbie was rich and famous and talented, somehow our house was better than their house. And the more I kept thinking of this the harder my head kept itching away, obviously trying to tell me something.
"Okay, Head," I said finally, "what's bothering you — I mean me?"
To which my Head calmly replied, "That thought we just had about being better off than someone else is just what causes so much tragedy for so many people in Hollywood. If I may quote from the Bible, Pride goeth before a fall. Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased. Now you see those old magazines, well, they're not exactly Bibles but they make the same point. They're filled with pictures of the most beautiful, rich, exalted, proud people in the world, and what happens to these people? Pull over an orange-crate, make yourself comfortable, and take a look. . . ."
For more than an hour I sat there in the chilly cellar turning through hundreds of dusty pages of Life in Hollywood in the decade that is almost over now — the decade of the Fifties. I heard again Ingrid Bergman's anguished cry, "I'm not a saint, I'm human!" as she carried the baby of Roberto Rossellini safe in her womb against the outrage of a shocked world. I looked again at the joyous faces of "perfect couples" like Liz Taylor and Nicky Hilton uniting in "ideal marriages" doomed to wither and die overnight. I read again all the sad sordid details in the lives of Rita, Lana, and Ava, the triple goddesses of the post-war years, the most envied women in the world, setting their feet on paths leading to heartbreak, murder, and lonely exile. I shuddered again as Judy Garland in her twenty-seventh year, the girl I had fallen in love with when she was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, put a knife to her throat and slashed herself in an agony of unknown despair. And again and again I paused at pictures of a girl who really had everything, not only fame, fortune, beauty and a distinguished husband but the rarer advantage of having been born into a home of taste, culture and refinement, a girl named Gene Tierney who in 1950 was acknowledged by Modern Screen as the best-dressed star in Hollywood and who this past October was discovered (at the age of 37) working as a sales clerk in a clothing shop in Topeka, Kansas. I looked and nodded, beginning to understand, when suddenly my head began to itch again.
"Here we go, with that same old bad thought," said my Head, "congratulating ourselves that, though we've had our little problems, we've never