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New team rising in the West: "What are we waiting tor?" said Cary Grant when he saw Martha Scott's picture
Best-dressed young girl in pictures: Rita Hayworth, a five-foot-fiver who can make castanets — and films — click
A blue-eyed girl from Illinois who gave a rosy tinge to the famous Goldwyn face: Hoax Girl Doris Davenport
The old — and new — faithfuls of Hollywood. You're sure to know their faces; you may know their names; but ten to one you don't know this news about them
BY SARA HAMILTON
Great Scott!
MARTHA SCOTT, the young actress who has scored such a tremendous hit in the picture, "Our Town," is the girl Hollywood wouldn't have at any price. "You simply are not photogenic," they once told her flatly.
So Martha, who had scored in the stage play, "Our Town," for two years, went back to Broadway to radio work and a new stage play. Two weeks later Mr. Sol Lesser telephoned her to come back. Mr. Lesser, it seems, had seen Martha's test for Melanie in "Gone With the Wind."
It just happened when Mr. Lesser phoned that Martha's play was a flop, so she was free to come, and did, and saw, and conquered. But better still, down in Williamsburg, Virginia, "The Howards of Virginia" troupe (formerly "Tree of Liberty") were awaiting a leading lady, a post left vacant by the illness of Joan Fontaine.
"I have the test here of a youngster unknown to Hollywood," Producer-Director Frank Lloyd said to star Cary Grant. "We might look at it."
"Well," said Cary, when the test had been run off, "what are we waiting for?"
To think that Cary aproved her, sight unseen, is the biggest thrill of Martha Scott's life.
There could have been no better choice for a heroine of a small-town play than Martha. In the tiny village of Jamesport, Missouri, Martha
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grew up among people whose troubles and joys were her troubles and joys. After eight years in the village one-room schoolhouse, Martha went away to Kansas City to attend high school.
"The girls weren't very kind," she says, "for with my long curls and country clothes, I guess I did look odd."
But Igja Lilly, one of the instructors, recognized the qualities behind Martha's small-town appearance and advanced her the magnificent sum of $1500 to study at the University of Michigan for the teaching profession.
Six months of teaching taught Martha herself a lesson. She wanted not to teach but to act, so she traveled to Chicago in search of stage work. She found jobs in a department store and a candy shop, but no stage work. And then she heard that a winter's stock company was being organized in Detroit. Boarding a bus, Martha headed there. They gave her walk-on and bit parts and paid her ten dollars a week, but she learned and worked and studied.
Thomas Wood Stevens, head of the company at Ann Arbor, liked Martha's work. When he and Iden Payne organized a Sheakespeare Memorial Theater in Chicago, Miss Scott was given a job. She toured two years with the company, reciting Shakespeare by the yard. Then one day in San Diego, when Martha had saved $150, she left the troupe and headed for Broadway for big things. Instead, she found a bit on a radio show with another young strug
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A failure in his first test on the hair score, Richard Denning now knows how to wield his comb like an actor