Silver Screen (Jun-Oct 1940)

"Men I Can't Forget" [Continued from page 39] that. A gun-totin' Texas gal, nothing like that fazes me. I was just scared of making a picture and may I be boiled in oil if I ever forget what I owe Randy, who took the worst curse off picture making for me. "I started to work in that hoss opera and I was so scared my lines didn't make sense. The director had to ask me whether I was speaking English or pig-Latin. My hands shook so I got my lipstick where my eyebrows were supposed to be and my eyebrows down where my lips belong. Randy got a laugh out of me by asking, politely, whether he'd made a mistake and this was a circus picture and I was the bearded lady! He took me in hand, Randy did. Very gentle hands they are, too, firm but gentle. He used the old every-day-in-every-way-I'm-getting-better-and-better method. He kept repeating 'what's the use of being nervous?' Five minutes later he'd say it again. The light broke and my answer was, 'yeah, what is the use?' He sort of took it all apart for me and put it together again. He was just like a parent who takes a neurotic child into a dark room and shows her that the bed is not a dragon, but just a bed, the shadows just shadows and not the ghosts of her ancestors. He'd tell me Success Stories, even going back to the days of Mary Pickford. He spent hours, while we sat around between takes, talking about my good points, the qualities he saw in me which would make for success. He saw right off that the most necessary thing in this world to me, is — laughter. And he made it his business to hand me a laugh a minute. "He sensed right off that any man to have, dare I say 'oomph' for Annie, has GOT to have a sense of humor. For my book, a man can look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or like Charles Boyer, he can be a mouse and not a man, but if he's got a lot of gags the glamour can go by and he'll still weigh in heavily on the Sheridan scales. "My philosophy of life is: what's the use of living if you can't have fun? Life's short enough, as it is. You gotta laugh now and then. To take life easy is my idea of life. Laughter and relaxing, what more do you want? Well, what I'm getting at is, Randy sensed these needs in me, has a share of them himself and so, we 'matched.' My memory of Randy is one big chunk of gratitude for making me realize that I can laugh as I work, relax as I work. He was the first to make me realize that, even in my work, I can be — myself. "My memory of Fred MacMurray is a memory of — my First Kiss! My first screen kiss, of course, don't be silly. And {memo to Fred) What a kiss! ! ! "Fred, I must tell you, helped me, too. He helped me by making it necessary for me to help him. It was like this: Fred had just made 'The Gilded Lily,' with Claudette Colbert, when they teamed us in that little number, 'Car 99.' I was destined to be bounced right out of the 'car,' and off the set and gone. But I Glamour may be emphasized in the exploitation of Ann Sheridan, Warner Brothers star, but underneath it all she is definitely the athletic type. She is an expert horsewoman, a better-than-average swimmer and no one is surpassing her on a dance floor especially when it comes to a rhumba. Her keen sense of humor is evident at all times. In fact, her philosophy of life is: what's the use of living if you can't have any fun? True enough. didn't know that, then. Fred, on the other hand, didn't know that the yet unreleased 'Gilded Lily' was about to start him to stardom. I was on my way Out. He was on his way Up. But we didn't know it and so were pretty even-Stephen. We were both at the Bottom, Be-ginning in Bs. . . . we thought. And both as nervous as ticks. "Well, come the love scenes and that guy was so shy he let me go like a hot rock. We had to take our love scenes over and over and over until Fred's paralysis sort of loosened up through sheer exhaustion. I was equally nervous, because I'd [Continued on page 58] 51