Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

Bright Victory bargain. My neck for . . . No I didn't mean you. But I must do something soon." He felt the wind on his face. "I'm nineteen, but older than that. It's grownup I am, you know." "Ah. You've lived like something out of a penny dreadful for two years, and it's no wonder. Your sister's successful in the States. She's a writer. Try that." " 'Twould be damned dull." " 'It's grownup I am, you know!' " Captain Johnny quoted sarcastically. "Well, and still a black Irishman without a penn'orth of sense." He took out a tremendous green kerchief and made trumpeting noises into it. "Born for trouble." George, staring detachedly at the water, snapped his fingers suddenly. "The Abbey Theater!" he laughed. "I'd forgotten. I'm an actor, by heaven! I'll woo the stage," and he struck a silly pose. "You'll neither woo nor wed anything," said Captain Johnny. "They'll hang you first." But he was wrong. George had won the stage and married a girl before the year was out. The description of his work at the Abbey, enlarged upon and shamelessly colored by the bland young Mr. Nolan, brought him the first achievement. His flashing Irish grin and a line of blarney got him the second: a little actress, called Molly. That was not her name; but Nolan was no longer George's, for that matter. He was not sure about this business of extradition. He saw a name, sounding of no nationality, on a signboard the day before he met Molly so that the play's director, introducing them, said, "This is George Brent. Signed on yesterday." With the strange sound of it in his ears, George said to her, "You're why I signed. I was hoping they'd give me a part that would call for a bit of lovemaking between us, in the last act — cr any act." Her eyes did not waver. They were the young eyes of 1922, fearless, questing. "I'll see it's written into the script," she told him. He married her for various reasons. Because he was nineteen. Because she was beautiful and he wanted her. Because life, so nearly taken from him, was now inexpressibly precious and love a part of it. Because something important must be substituted for the excitement to which his spirit was attuned. Because the winter was past and the spring like no spring he had ever seen, or felt, or smelled. It lasted a month — the spring and his marriage — and both were a section of that period in his life when adjustment, not only to being alive but to being seriously adult, was a hectic thing. There was that first night on the stage, when he forgot his lines and the leading man, exiting, said to him for the benefit of the audience, "I leave you to your reveries!" And his subsequent change to another stock company, where he was relatively good but the play was not; so that once again the young man walked Broadway in a brand new suit that fitted too well because the pockets were flat. . . . Love had been sudden, overwhelming, the result of a certain oblique inclination. When it was over — and it was over when the first drunkenness of his freedom had passed — the young man and his wife discussed what they (Continued from page 67) had done coldly, detachedly. The answer was obvious. They stood in Central Park, for their farewell. George pointed at two swans haggling noisily over a piece of bread by the pond's edge. "See what we'll escape?" he said. She was strong, too, with a fine chinheld -high air. "Yes. It's been — great fun." "More than that." He meant to say more but a curious constriction in his throat refused the words. Awkwardly he took her hand in both of his, watching her eyes. They were brown and large, magnified by a film of tears. She turned suddenly and walked away down the path, her four-inch heels making sharp final sounds in the gravel. uLIMAX, such as first love, has its necessary anticlimax; George's began at once, and lasted almost three years, and consisted of passing months empty of emotion, of excitement. Broadway was indifferent to him, but his persistence lasted in each case as long as his funds did. Then there was always another stock company, another outskirts show. Until the afternoon came when his manager called him to say, "I've got something nice for you, George. It'll bring you in a nice mess of mazuma, too." George clutched the phone eagerly. "Yeah?" "It's a road show of 'Abie's Irish Rose'." After a moment's silence George said, "What am I supposed to be? The rose?" "Hell, no. You're Abie." George laughed patiently. "That's very funny. Now that we've settled that a black Irishman with the brogue of the Sod on his tongue would do very well for a Jewish gentleman. . . ." HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR HOLLYWOOD? Check your answers to the statements on page 83 with these correct ones: 1. Jeanefte MacDonald 2. Luise Rainer 3. Cesar Romero 4. Bobs Watson 5. William S. Hart 6. Myrna Loy 7. Walter Damrosch 8. George Raft, Walter Pidgeon, Lew Ayres 9. Anne Shirley 10. Barbara O'Neil I I. Thomas Mitchell 12. Shirley Ross I 3. Mary Boland 14. Sandra Lee Henville (Baby boy role in "East Side of Heaven") 15. Sally Eilers to Harry Joe Brown, Virginia Bruce to J. Walter Ruben 16. Charles Martin, writer 17. Mickey Rooney 18. Mary Pickford to Buddy Rogers 19. Constance Bennett to Marquis de la Falaise; Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to Lady Sylvia Ashley 20. Margaret Lindsay "I'm not kidding," the agent interrupted. And he was not, it appeared. "Don't be a dope," George told him, and hung up. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, he picked it up and said, "Hello. Yeah. I was just going to ring you back. I'll play Abie, as a test. Abie's supposed to be five, seven and sound like a Bronx tailor. I'm six, one and you know what I sound like. If I can get away with this I'm an actor. A real actor." He got away with it for over a year in hundreds of barns and opera houses and churches, in hundreds of big cities and minor villages in every state of the Middle West; and it was the beginning of things, as he had known it would be. He escaped by five minutes, with the rest of the company, a spring flood in the Mississippi Valley and went barnstorming back across New England and to New York, where he checked on his bank account and found it plump; and on the year, which was 1925, and found it buzzing with prosperity, with the fever of enterprise. Responsive, young George rented an expensive theater in Pawtucket, hired some actors and invited the population to come and be entertained. Pawtucket's grim textile-worker citizenry read his playbills, spat thoughtfully through its collective teeth and went quietly home to listen in at the new crystal set. Just as quietly, George went home to New York with the $1.47 he had left in the world. He was twenty-one. He saw the rest of the decade through at a dead run; another flier at owning a company — this time in Florida, where the rent was low and the townspeople's enthusiasm for drama encouragingly high, so that he made a few hundred dollars on the deal; a chance in a Broadway play, "The 'K' Guy," at long last, except it flopped; seventeen plays in a row at Elitch's Gardens in Denver; and, finally, Broadway once more. . . . The time in his memory is a confusion, as those years are now to so many people. There were occasional unimportant loves, a few good-bys without bitterness or regret. There was the infusion, as was inevitable, in his young mind of such sophistication as no man hath except he be an actor graduated from that period in time, and from that experience. NlNETEEN-THIRTY brought him, almost simultaneously, his greatest success and his greatest failure. The first was the lead opposite Alice Brady in a sprightly play called "Love, Honor and Betray," which made a great deal of money and in which he fed cues to a struggling unknown named Clark Gable and in which he gave (thought George complacently) the finest performance of his career. The second. . . . He could observe what happened to him then with detachment, with understanding, only after several years had gone miserably by and, on a particular evening, he found the impulse to explain it to the charming young lady who sat opposite him at a Cocoanut Grove table. "Can you imagine such a thing?" he asked her. He watched her slim lovely hands draw circles on the tablecloth with the end of a match. "A dirty break like that, I mean. You see, this agent had just come back from Hollywood and told me if I'd get right > INONSPI CREAM Because of an entirely new ingredient never before used in a deodorant! 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