Hollywood (1942)

9 I'm Glad Site's »eacl!99 §ay§ Laraine Day H When Nurse Mary Lamont, Dr. Kildare's love-o-life, was killed off in Dr. Kildare's Wedding Day, loud wails of bereavement were heard among followers of the Kildare series. There were many who took very much to heart the sudden demise of Nurse Mary, and as a culmination of all complaints, 1,200 hard-boiled marines, mind you, penned a pained objection to the studio: "How could you kill our Mary? Haven't you a heart?" But there was one person who was quite happy about Mary's departing spirit. And that happened to be Mary herself. In other words, Laraine Day. Ever since Laraine became Mary Lamont in the perpetual Kildare series, she found herself joined to a Siamese twin so possessive she couldn't move without her. The day that Laraine did the scene in which, as Mary, she falls under the wheels of an onrushing truck and was pronounced cinematically fini, the bond was broken. She breathed a great sigh of relief. Freedom, at last! Behind M-G-M's decision to kill off Mary Lamont and Laraine Day's eagerness to separate herself from Mary, lies a strange behind the scenes Hollywood story. When Laraine first became a member of the Kildare pictures three years ago, it was the break of her life. She was a young, eager dramatic student, just signed by M-G-M, and being made a permanent fixture in a popular series was like receiving an annuity for life. She might have gone along like that contentedly, but in a breathing spell between Kildares, she was cast as Maeve in My Son, My Son, and instantly became a promising new star on the horizon. Her performance proved her a superb actress and she was even being talked of as a younger Bette Davis. It was assumed that Laraine wouldfollow upher greatsuccess in My Son, My Son with other roles, equally dramatic and powerful. But no — Laraine went back to her crisp nurse's uniforms and outside of a brief twirl in Foreign Correspondent was practically back where she started from, getting deeper and deeper into the love life of nice Dr. Kildare and farther and farther away from the fulfillment of all those brilliant predictions. Here's what was happening: Mary Lamont was holding down Laraine to save her own skin. Mary Lamont had become a living person to followers of the series, and Laraine had become so closely identified with the role that she couldn't step out of character. "I wanted to be a hell -raiser," says Laraine. "I wanted to be a girl whom audiences might disapprove of, but whom they would never forget. I wanted to stray from the straight and narrow — cinematically speaking, of course. But there was always the fear that if I did it would ruin the 'nice girl' I was in Kildare. I had to remain sweet and antiseptic." So the gusto parts usually fell to someone else. Laraine, for instance, was anxious to play the trollop in Adam Had Four Sons and when she lost it, because it would Laraine Day, rid at last of a screen shadow that haunted her for many years, smiles jubilantly over her role in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture, Kathleen have clashed with the personality of Nurse Mary, it almost broke her heart. Susan Hayward got it instead, and it zoomed her stock upward. Laraine cast envious eyes at the role of Ivy — pathetic, downtrodden little streetwalker in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But Ingrid Bergman wound up with it. She saw one solid role after another given to other actresses, while she remained where she was, plodding in the hospital corridors and looking coyly at Lew Ayres. Of course, there is the other side, too. The studio had a stake which they couldn't very well relinguish. The Kildare pictures were something so close and personal to the hearts of fans that they might have resented their Mary's turning up as a tramp in some other film. A certain apathy, a sense of defeat, began to come over Laraine. "It wasn't," she explains, "that I considered myself too good to be Mary Lamont or that I didn't like her. Mary has been good to me. She has brought me to a tremendous movie public steadily. But no ambitious actress feels that she can get ahead if she plays the same part again and again." Laraine's statement about her tremendous popularity is no idle boast, for she was the first choice of over 12,000 movie exhibitors in their recent box-office poll. "I was beginning to wonder where Mary Lamont had left off and Laraine Day began. We were becoming one." She was beginning to think, too, that she would remain efficient Mary Lamont until either death or the Latter Day Saints rescued her, when she learned one morning of the amazing decision which is to change her career: M-G-M had decided that the character, Mary Lamont, was to go the way of all flesh. In Dr. Kildare's Wedding Day she would meet her end. For good. Immediately, rumors mushroomed that Laraine had gone on an all-out strike and had refused to play in the Kildares any more. That was untrue, and it was unfair. Laraine keeps her minor rebellions to herself and isn't capable of such an ungrateful gesture. It goes deeper than that. When M-G-M made the first Dr. Kildare picture, they never thought it would catch on as it did and pyramid into a series. Otherwise, they might not have been caught short. For every series must have provisions for new faces 16