Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1943)

72 (Continued from page 23) Martha and Mitzi and I played theaters. Sometimes we played "Nissen huts," tin-roofed barracks about eighty feet long in which a small platform served as the stage. Saturdays, supposedly, were our days off. Every week end we returned to the very grand Hotel Savoy and by noon on Saturday our rooms were something to shock the august management. The handkerchiefs we laundered were pasted against mirrors and windowpanes so they would dry smooth and look ironed. Lingerie and stockings hung from shower bars, bedposts and chandeliers. But after Tommy came into my life, those precious week ends were spent with him every time he could get away. Then one night when Tommy and 1 were planning to be married I woke up screaming. It was appendicitis. They did a grand job for me at the hospital. I was there only eleven days, just long enough to miss the tour in Scotland. You can't call quits even for a day over there without missing something. I must say, however, that my days in the hospital served me well. I telephoned everyone with whom I had even a bowing acquaintance and begged for coupons. I needed nine coupons for the wedding dress I had ordered at Hartnell's and seven for my shoes. I got them finally. A boy in Tommy's squadron, about to leave for North Africa, gave me fifteen he had left. We wanted a double ring ceremony and it wasn't for lack of trying that I didn't get a ring for Tommy. There just wasn't a man's wedding ring to be found anywhere. Tommy was able to get a gold band for me. But it is his signet ring, wound round and round with dental floss My Wartime Honeymoon so it won't slip off, that I wear as an engagement ring. We were married at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption on Warrick Street. I had my lingerie for the something old, my dress and veil and shoes for something new, Mitzi's pearls for something borrowed and Kay tucked a blue ribbon down the front of my dress for something blue. Our wedding cake was divinely beautiful. But it was a fraud, fashioned of fluted, crimped paper. I had to pull off the paper to cut the plain cake which reposed inside. Life in England is like that these days— and very good, too. A DAY or two before Tommy and I were to be married I learned we girls were scheduled to leave for North Africa at five o'clock on my wedding afternoon. But, to prove every cloud does have a silver lining, weather conditions postponed our flight. Tommy and I had two days in London together. Later, learning it was ceiling zero everywhere around, Tommy rushed down to our embarkation base. Two hours after he arrived we took off. It was then, without saying a word to anyone, that I promised myself I would get back to England before I returned to the U. S. A. some way, somehow. Everyone who hears how Kay and Martha and Mitzi and I spent weeks together on tour, sharing uncomfortable accommodations, sometimes under the strain of danger, suspects we aren't the friends we were when we started out. They're wrong. Strangely enough, we're even better friends. We r.ve this to a system we worked out Once every week we held an open meeting. At this time we agreed to register any complaint or grievance while we could still do it in a friendly way, before rancor or bitterness had raised its destructive head. "What do I do that gets on your nerves?" I asked, opening the first meeting. Kay, bless her, told me right off — and started all of us being equally truthful. "If you sing once more as we walk into a place . . ." she threatened. I hadn't known I was singing under my breath much of the time. But after that I watched myself —plenty! COR sweaters and Patricia Morison's ad' vice I'll be forever grateful. It was Pat who suggested sweaters comprise the major part of the fifty-three pounds of luggage, including the weight of the luggage itself, which I was allowed. Patricia, just back from England as we were leaving, said. "The boys are fed up with uniforms, you know. And you can't take anything which needs cleaning or laundry. So, you take — in a word — sweaters!" I wouldn't have made Africa if it hadn't been for the sweaters I took because after our tour of the British Isles my one evening dress was beaten. The boys were so nuts about evening gowns and silk stockings and perfume — and we had such a limited supply of them —that we saved what we had for our shows Africa wasn't any bed of roses, but we hadn't expected it would be. We had no hot water to shampoo our hair, for one thing. I could manage my pompadour well enough, sans shampoo; but my back hair T hicVed into a snood. Above Mi mm