Screenland (Nov 1950-Oct 1951)

Nancy, Charles Coburn and Bing Crosby in a scene in the Paramount film, "Mr. Music." "There is nothing horrible, heroic or even slightly hysterical about my story." 4» Chatting with Bing on set. "Even the town I was born in is sort of, well, conventional." LUNCHING with Nancy Olson at Sardi's in New York one day not long ago, we remarked that we'd just come from an interview with Ruth Roman whose mother had been a snakecharmer. Nancy looked rueful. Nancy said, wistfully, "I wish I ha<J had a snake-charmer mother or a tattooed-man father or something interesting like that. Something that would make colorful copy when I give out a story. A skeleton in the closet, maybe, or even a neurosis which would make me behave the way Bette Davis does in some of her pictures, sort of borderline. But in me you find, alas, a very, very typical, normal middle-class girl as like as possible to fifty million other girls in these United States. "I've never been the least bit hungry, lonely, frustrated, discouraged, unhappy, confused or anything," Nancy sighed, adding with an anxious expression in her bright blue eyes, "I doubt that you can even write a story about me, I'm so normal." "To be normal nowadays is to be practically abnormal," we encouraged. "If you can give us the case history of a perfectly normal girl, complete with details, well have a story, never fear." Nancy brightened. "No one is better qualified than I," she said, "to analyze a normal girl since I, without the slightest detour, am one. "At college they called me," Nancy made a funny face, " 'Wholesome Olson.' How d'you like that? Why, even on the screen I'm normal. In fact, it's because I look normal, act normal, am normal that I'm on the screen at all! "In Gloria Swanson's great comeback picture, 'Sunset Boulevard,' I play the part of Betty Schaefer who is the only normal person in the picture. Everyone else in the cast, including Miss Swanson, is macabre, is over the borderline — I alone am all sort of genuine and simple and believable. It was because Billy Wilder, who directed the picture, wanted someone completely opposite to Miss Swanson that he chose me to play Betty. What's more he wanted me to wear my own clothes and I did. I picked out the plainest stuff I owned, sweaters and skirts and one simple dinner dress. By way of makeup I wore only a base and wouldn't have worn that except that my skin is so fair I'd wash out otherwise. But no fake eyelashes for me, nor any of the goo that makes glamour. Billy Wilder told me, "I want you to look just exactly the way you look." "So I looked just exactly the way I look, which is so normal that it couldn't," sighed fair-of-face Miss Olson, "be normaller. I'm five feet five in height. I weigh 117 pounds. I have blue eyes. I have tan hair. In my studio biography my hair is described as 'caramel blonde' but that's just someone getting fancy about my light brown, American-color hair. "Even the town I was born in — Milwaukee, Wisconsin — is sort of, well, conventional. I love Milwaukee, especially the suburb in which I grew up. But wasn't there a star born on the Isle of Jersey and wasn't Greer Garson born in County Down, in Ireland? Quite a number of great people, stars and otherwise, were born, I know, in New York's Hell's Kitchen or down on the lower East Side — from which they arose with tales of horror — and of heroism — to tell. "There is nothing horrible, heroic or even slightly hysterical about my story. My Dad, Dr. Henry John Olson, is an obstetrician and gynecologist — a leader, in fact, in the field of obstetrics. My mother taught a business course before she married, but after her marriage was 'just a housewife,' as normal as you please, and the wise and witty mother of me and of my one wonderful brother who is now sixteen. "My parents' marriage is completely happy — so none of the tension or bickering of warring parents, no least suggestion of the {Please turn to "page 61) Being prettied up for the camera. College ■<hums nicknamed her "Wholesome Olson."