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tal responsibility, wrote Diana a very circumspect, fatherly letter urging her to be a good girl in school. Diana snapped back, "I've made a close study of your career and look where you got by hardly knowing your ABC's. I'm going to follow in your footsteps, even if I break my neck doing it."
Finally her mother bowed to Diana's lusty attack of stage fever by withdrawing her from school and entering her in the American Academy of Dramatic Art where she plunged into the work gleefully, doing everything from sweeping the stage to playing Eliza crossing the ice.
But in spite of this, she still didn't get a complete go-ahead. Mama, member of the Social Register (Diana is ditto, but doesn't talk about it) insisted upon a formal debut. So Diana, very bored with the whole thing, was presented to Manhattan society with a' lot of ta-rah-ta-rah, and when the launching was over she turned her back on deb committees and tea parties to spend the summer in dirty overalls playing in stock.
She started out like any beginner, not like a Barrymore at all; her famous dad was far away and too engrossed in his own hectic marriages and front page scrimmages to find much time to sponsor the career of his stage-struck offspring.
Father and daughter finally became acquainted in Chicago two years ago when Diana arrived in a revival of Outward Bound and John was ensconsed there in My Dear Children. For the first time, John made a noise like a papa. He got up early to meet the train. He hadn't seen Diana in almost eight years, and then only briefly, so when a long-legged, exotic young lady stepped down he didn't recognize her as his own daughter. When she introduced herself, he gasped, "I didn't know I was father to a Hedy Lamarr!"
Diana was ever the ambitious young actress. "I asked Dad to see me in the play and to be brutally frank in telling me what was wrong with me," she recalls. "The evening he was in the audience I was so nervous I almost muffed my lines. It was the strangest thing. I didn't feel as though it were my father in the audience at all. I kept thinking, 'That's John Barrymore watching me. He's probably tearing my performance apart.' Later, he came backstage with a big red apple, the family tradition as reward for a good performance. That was the nicest thing he could have done. I began to feel like a Barrymore myself!"
After this charming get-together, father and daughter separated again, and Diana plugged her way ahead, doing so well on her own that she could afford to turn up her nose at cashing in on the" Barrymore name. One Broadway producer, for instance, about to put on a play in which he was going to exploit the talents of several daughters of famous fathers, approached Diana with a part, but she sniffed at the idea. "I've gotten along this far without being known as John Barrymore's daughter. Guess I'll coast along on my own steam the rest of the way."
Which is just what she did. She tried
out for a role in The Land Is Bright, an
Edna FerberGeorge Kaufman play, and
landed it cold. She played a neurotic,
[Continued on page 74]
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