TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1955)

produced and directed by herself. Because of her success, she was engaged as a writer by a major Hollywood studio. But she only remained two months. Something even more wonderful had happened the year before, when she had taken five girls from the playground to see Walter Hampden act on the stage. . . . Walter Hampden is still a fine figure of a man, playing kindly old-gentleman parts in the movies and TV. But, in those days, he was Cyrano de Bergerac. He was Hamlet. To the young girl in the balcony, he was a god! For there, in a man, was the physical embodiment of the Good. "Oh, my head was so in the stars!" Katherine sighs. This was a severe case of hero worship! Though, at the moment, Walter Hampden was still as unattainable as any of the many daydreams Katherine constantly conjured up, there was always the wild hope that she could actually meet him. Oh, just to go backstage . . . talk to him . . . maybe even shake his hand. This all might be ... if it weren't for the stage manager who kept saying: "Absolutely no!" o omehow, Katherine managed to hide backstage. "I wouldn't have had the nerve to do it if I had been alone," she recalls. "But with five girls waiting outside — well, you can accomplish a lot, if you're put up to it." At midnight, her hero came out from his dressing room. All Katherine can remember of that fateful meeting is that Mr. Hampden asked if she were Irish. She said yes, she was — forgetting for the moment the half of her that's Scotch. It must have been the right answer. He agreed to let her read for him next day. Next day she read. It didn't stop Mr. Hampden from continuing on tour with his company. But it didn't stop Katherine, either. Her letters followed him. "You should have seen them," Katherine blushes. "All transport and hero-worship!" But they worked. After a year, Walter Hampden wrote to her, inviting her to join his company. It didn't matter that she had a career mapped out for her in a Hollywood studio. At a word from her hero, she dropped everything. Hamlet needed her. Cyrano had sent for her. "Actually," she says, "he probably just wanted to stop those letters." She moved to New York, but her first season with Walter Hampden was mostly spent on tour. During the summer, she was engaged as leading lady for the Barter Theater in Virginia. Then, returning to New York, she continued in the theater and broke into radio. But she had outgrown hero-worship as naturally as she had outgrown her teens. And, like all people on the stage, she had come to prize reality as the one luxury. She still desired the Good, but she was no longer afraid of love. She was ready to have it attainable. . . . Katherine describes Paul Y. Anderson as "a great and good man." When they met, he was Washington correspondent for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch — a Pulitzer Prize winner. They married, and all at once Katherine found the love she had been looking for. But, after a year and a half, her husband met a tragic death. "It took me seven years to get over it," Katherine says. Returning to New York, desperate to forget herself in work, she set a gargantuan task for herself. It took her entire capital of five hundred dollars to do it, but she dramatized, illustrated, and worked out in verse-choir Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." It was produced in Madison Square Garden for The Greater New York Fund, and then on radio's famed Columbia Workshop. Then, faced with the necessity of making a living, she returned to the theater, where she played Queen Guinevere in the revival of "A Connecticut Yankee," Death in Somerset Maugham's "Sheppy," Mrs. Taylor in George Kelly's "The Deep Mrs. Sykes," the Mayor's wife in Ferenc Molnar's "A Miracle in the Mountains," and the bigot in "The GreyEyed People." In addition to all this, she became well known in radio, playing in such shows as Against The Storm,:, Right To Happiness, The Kate Smith Show, and Ellery Queen. Then she broke into TV, where she has been seen on Krajt TV Theater, Armstrong Circle Theater, Comedy Hour and Studio One. A high point in Katherine's professional career came last summer, when Columbia Pictures needed an actress for a part in the new movie, "Tight Spot." It was the role of a policewoman who befriends Ginger Rogers and finally gives her life for her. It was not unusual that they sent for Katherine. What was unusual is that they had remembered her from a screen test seen more than three years before. But, in those years following her husband's death, her career held little meaning for her. Katherine's drive had never been for success, it had been for love. But now, even the impersonal variety seemed unattainable. Loving humanity meant helping humanity. And, ever since her days at the Alhambra Playground, she had dreamed of being a teacher with a school of her own. She would teach dramatics, because that was what she knew best. But, remembering some of her own teachers, who had been too "theoretical and silly" to really be of help, she had determined to get actual experience first — in life, as well as the theater. Well, she had gotten the experience, but now. . . . "I don't think someone who hasn't satisfied his own ambitions is ready to teach," Katherine says. She had become, from her own point of view, the sort of person for whom it would be impossible to run a school of her own. For it is Katherine's philosophy of life that each of us is "two different people." No, not good and evil (since "all men desire the Good"), but optimsitic and pessimistic. Our optimistic self, of course, is our "better self." And, when our better self is in control, the Good is possible. We have the strength to put it into practice. IVatherine knows now that "the whole business of life is to learn to be happy." An unhappy person — such as Margot Finchley, for instance — is no good to herself or to anyone. And what is happiness? "Dear old Polonius," she says, remembering her "Hamlet," "I think he put it best — 'This above all: To thine own self be true.' " That takes courage. "But every unhappy thing that you rise above," she reminds you, "makes you that much stronger." And then, we are not alone. No one is. "Belief in God — that's the whole secret of having the will to live." But it had taken Katherine a long time to learn that secret. She had kept searching through the years — searching for the Good. And then one day, she suddenly understood. The Good all men desire is God. And God is Love. . . . Then she remembered something her husband had said, when she had asked him, once, if he believed in God. 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