Silver Screen (May-Oct 1939)

72 Silver Screen for October 1939 Romance in Reverse [Continued from page 39] were funny but I didn't know just how funny. It was after I'd gotten out in the world that I realized all people didn't drip Groucho's brand of humor or play the piano like Chico or clown like Harpo. I just thought the world was made up of delightful zanies and I've never quite gotten over the shock of finding out that it isn't. It was Zeppo who brought Jack over. Jack was playing at the Orpheum and Zeppo told him there were a couple of girls he wanted him to meet, and Jack came all expectant and hopeful, dolled up in a new tie and his best suit, only to discover the girls were my sister, Babe, who had reached the provocative age of fifteen and myself a skinny, gangling kid. of thirteen. For once Jack didn't appreciate Zeppo's humor. "Fine thing to do, bringing me here to meet a couple of kids," he said. I was furious. After all there's no time in her life a girl takes herself quite as seriously as when she's just entered the teens. Me a Kid! I glared at him, hating him with all my soul. Why I'd even escaped my mother's watchful eye long enough to put lipstick on. She had to keep her shoes under lock and key in those days. Babe and I were always sneaking her highest heeled pairs and risking our necks in trying to look as grown up as we possibly could. Jack saw he had hurt me and was sorry. It isn't in him to hurt anyone consciously and certainly not a child, even if she were a brat like me. "Do you like dolls?" he asked, trying to make conversation and I was more furious than ever. I just stalked out of the room without answering him. The next afternoon I had my revenge. I gathered my gang around me, and a formidable gang it was, too, and announced I was taking them to the Orpheum with the money I'd been saving for Christmas. There was a string to that offer though, a long one full of knots. They had to heckle a guy called Jack Benny. We got there early and held the first two rows in the orchestra for an' hour before the show began. We applauded every act enthusiastically. We laughed in all the right places and kept a respectful silence in the others until the cards appeared on either side of the stage announcing Jack Benny. Then we sat there with faces as stony as our hearts, deadpanning his best gags. Jack told me, years later, he had never wanted to do anything as much in his life as he wanted to reach down into the orchestra that day and yank me up on the stage and turn me over his knees. The next time I met Jack Benny was after my sister had married and moved to Chicago. She had married an actor who was a friend of Jack's and the three of them became pals. Babe adored him but Melt she had turned traitor to those two kids of a few years ago. Imagine her liking that upstage so and so. Jack Benny. I was engaged to a boy nobody but I seemed to like very much. I was always getting engaged to boys like that. My views of life were alternately rose color and drab gray in those days. If ever there was a romantic little ninny it was me. Every time I met a new boy and he had a line that pleased me the world turned rosy. Then, a few days later, they hardly ever lasted longer than that, I began to get fed up with romance and the world would look as if it never could stop raining again until I met a new lad I could rhapsodize about. Much to my surprise I liked Jack when he came to see us. We had moved to Los Angeles and he was playing the Orpheum there. It's always the Orpheum on Keith time you know. But I had a date right after dinner and I kept it without a twinge. And the next day when Jack appeared at the store where I was working as a buyer, and asked me to lunch, I didn't turn a hair when I refused. He came to the store every day for a week after that and I went out with him twice, but it didn't mean a thing. A week afterwards our telephone rang at three o'clock in the morning. The family was in a frenzy before my father got to it. What awful thing had happened? Could it be Babe? Could it be Grandma? None of us could think of anything but a major calamity that could make any telephone ring at three in the morning. But the world hadn't turned upside down after all. It was only Jack Benny calling from San Francisco as casually as could be to say, "Hello Doll, I was just wondering how you are and what you're doing?" At that moment I was shivering in my nightie motioning appealingly to the family not to stand there glaring at me. For now that they were no longer scared they were furious. But I wasn't mad. I was thrilled. It was my first long distance call and that meant something to a kid still in her teens. What if it wasn't a romantic conversation, full of pleas and endearments, it was still a long distance call. I think even then I knew that call didn't mean much to Jack. It was just an impulse that stage people get all the time to call long distance as casually as anyone else would call from a few blocks away. And three o'clock in the morning didn't mean anything more to Jack than it did 'to any other young vaudevillian having a bite to eat after the show. It was just the middle of the afternoon to him. But to me it was an event and I did my darndest to turn it into a throbbing moment. But it didn't quite come off. How could I get romantic over a man kidding me in that casual, easy way Jack has of doing things. Anyway I must have known that another BIG MOMENT was due. I told you I was a crazy kid, didn't I? Well it did, a week or two afterwards. I had gone north to visit my grandmother and I met a boy I thought I was mad about and we became engaged. Only it was different this time. The wedding day was set for January and this was November. Lucille Ball, RKO star, plays an extremely fast game of badminton. And not just for the exercise. She's crazy about the game. I was wearing his engagement ring too. That made it seem pretty formidable this time. I was scared to death when my head wasn't in the clouds, where it was most of the time. I couldn't wait to call my sister in Chicago and I was pretty crestfallen at the way she took the news. "But you don't know what it's all about," she wailed. "You're such a goofy kid. Don't do anything in a hurry. Come out here to visit me and I'll try to pound some sense into that head of yours." The first person I saw when I got off the train at Chicago was Jack. There he was standing beside my sister and brotherin-law grinning and he was the first of them to reach me. He took my hand and there wasn't any wild thrill. Only that nice, warm glow. Suddenly I knew how frightened I had been. I knew it because the way I was feeling now was just sort of happy and secure and peaceful. We went around a lot together in the next week or so. I'd never had so much fun in my life. Funny, the way Jack and I clicked. We laughed at the same things without even realizing we were doing it. We were serious about the same things too. We'd sit together on the shore of Lake Michigan and sometimes we'd talk and sometimes we wouldn't. When two people speak the same language they think the same language too. And though it was November and those Lake breezes blow pretty hard we didn't even know it was cold. We did the goofiest things together. We always just fell in with each other's ideas. We never had to explain things. So when we got on a bus once and I saw