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ALAN lADD'S MARRIAGE
at last, a great woman writer draws a true — and keenly realistic — marital picture
But behind that romantic facade is a story of struggle, of two young people who had known despair and disaster, unhappiness and poverty, a broken marriage apiece, failure and hopelessness.
Now that he has become a real movie star a lot of emphasis is laid upon Alan Ladd's nice disposition. I don't believe it for a moment. Nobody with the defiance that burns like a flame in every movement Alan Ladd makes has a "nice" disposition. Don't misunderstand me. I'm sure he loved his mother devotedly, is kind to animals and small children and loyal to his friends. But you do not develop
the wary grace of a panther, the tragiclost smile, the hot and questioning eyes and the brittle bitter humor which belong to Alan Ladd upon smooth and easy paths, or with a smooth and easy disposition.
Alan Ladd talks little about his early life. (He's not much of a talker anyway.) But at eight he was sweeping out grocery stores.
He has that intense adoration of his dead mother which speaks of a childhood in which he saw her go through hard times, saw her work to support her son, saw her again and again do without those things a boy wants his mother to have.
"She never punished me," Alan Ladd says, "she never had to — all she had to do was look at me. She was so fine herself that when she looked at me and I saw I wasn't up to what she wanted, it was about the worst punishment I could get. She was a very strong woman. I think she had the most beautiful speaking voice 1 heard. It had bells in it — I've heard that phrase often, but I never heard them really except in my mother's voice."
I wonder if he knows that his has, too. An echo perhaps, one of those echoes which keep on and make a mother live (Continued on page 105)
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