Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1943)

The New Romance in John Payne's Life JOHNNY PAYNE, who will probably be Johnny Doughboy by the time you read this, as he is due to enter the Army Air Corps as a private as soon as he finishes "Hello, Frisco, Hello," is spending his last civilian evenings with Jane Russell. They make the newest and most provocative of those combinations that always set Hollywood jittering, this tall, blackhaired, broad shouldered fellow and this smouldering, sexy girl whom the whole world knows but has never seen on the screen. Their dating would set the Hollywood tongues wagging in any event, but the town goes into double talk when it thinks of Anne Shirley. Anne and Johnny had one of those "perfect marriages" that ended suddenly and without explanation from either one of them last January. It honestly was a "perfect marriage," too. Anne and John had met in 1937 while they both were very young, Anne still in her teens, and John, despite a wealth of worldly experiences, still only twenty-six. They had married almost at once and had their child a little more than a year later. Throughout their marriage they were very popular with a whole mob of mutual friends. They each had their careers at which they were most successful. They had a charming house and apparently their tastes were exactly similar, since you could see them, laughing together as they danced, almost any evening at Ciro's or the Mocambo or whatever cafe was the cafe of the moment. Thus Hollywood was deeply disillusioned when one night over a dinner table at Romanoff's they separated. For once, the mood of the town was unanimous. "What JANUARY, 1943