Hollywood (1942)

In the few months that Diana Barry more came to know her fabulous father, John Barrymore, they were a great father-daughter team. Top left: The Great Profile with his third wife, Dolores Costcllo. Above: His fourth wife, tempestuous Elaine Barrie. Left: Diana and her author-mother Michael Strange, who was the second Mrs. Barrymore There'll %l v* «i^ h Be a Barrymore | Like the dozen good men who were his friends to the end, Diana Barrymore deplores the flood of cheap sentimentality that attended John Barrymore's death. "I regret now that I let myself be persuaded to identify myself with my father," she confesses, a bit ruefully. "A suspicion will always linger now in some minds that I, like so many others, tried to tag along on his coattails and exploit my relationship. In years to come it will be difficult to evaluate any success I may have as an actress. The question will always be in the back of my mind. 'How far could I have gone without the name?' " Her private grief at the passing of her scarcely-discovered parent, Diana kept to herself in quiet dignity. There was none of the time-worn hokum about. "The show must go on." She was granted a leave of absence from her first starring role in Between Us Girls. She retired to the home recently purchased from Estelle Taylor and remained there in solitude for a decent period, returning to her job completely self-possessed and without any show of the theatrical tragicalness so common among Hollywood's bereaved. The genuinely tragic circumstance about Diana's bereavement is that until January, 1942, she had seen her father on only two occasions, once when she was twelve and once when she was eighteen. The second meeting occurred three years ago when they were playing adjoining theaters in Chicago, Diana in a revival of Outward Bound and John in My Dear Children. 42 By DUNCAN I MM llllll I At a night club during that engagement, John was sitting with Elaine Barrie and some members of his company, when he was struck by the dark beauty of a young girl sitting alone across the room. He asked the head waiter who she was and got the startling reply, "That, sir, is your daughter." The next evening, as he was preparing to leave his dressing room after the performance, Diana, still in make-up and scarcely resembling the girl in the night club, tapped fearfully on The Great Man's door. She was bidden to enter. "Ho-ho!" Barrymore exclaimed gallantly. "To whom am I indebted for a visit by this vision of loveliness?" Timidly Diana introduced herself. They spent most of the remainder of the night getting acquainted. The next reunion was at eight o'clock on a gray January day in the Los Angeles Union Station. Diana was arriving on the Limited to begin her film career under the tutelage of Walter Wanger. As the train slid to a stop, she saw an agitated knot of reporters, photographers, press agents and studio representatives preparing to initiate her into the Hollywood hubbub. But before the strangers could get to her, her drawing room door was opened and there stood John Barrymore at his scintillating best, fastidiously turned out in Bond Street clothing, complete from Homburg hat to spats and stick, a costume he was never known to affect offscreen. The importance of the occasion could not have been pointed up more tellingly than by the dual facts that The Great Profile had not only arisen at six to meet the train, but furthermore had decked himself out like a grand duke incognito. But the atmosphere of solemnity was dispelled at once when he said to the trembling Diana: "Stop trying to look like Ophelia." Then in quick, succinct sentences he told her how to comport herself with the members of the press who were scrambling up the corridor. "Don't prove to them you're a genius," he warned. "Or, if you must, don't underline it. Let them discover it themselves." It was at that exact moment, Miss Barrymore confesses, "that the ham in me began to come out. I went out and met that mob and acted, probably for the first time in my life. I acted the way I thought a non-genius would act. It was probably my worst performance to date, and there have been some bad ones." A lesson in humility came a few days after her arrival in Hollywood when her father took Diana out to the ranch of her Uncle Lionel, whom she had never met. "For about five minutes the two Barrymore men made a great fuss over the goggle-eyed Barrymore girl," Diana relates. "Then they switched over to other things. I didn't get into the conversation again for three hours. "On the way home, father said to me.