Hollywood (1942)

manoffs to snarl at citizens married to beautiful girls felt a little more numb than usual. If the contretemps hit Hollywood hard, it hit John Payne harder. Hard enough to jar him out of a complacency that might have stifled a promising career. Fun went out of his world and ferocity came in. Ferocity of purpose, singleness of goal. Today John has his eyes fixed steadfastly on the apex of the Hollywood dramatic heap with no time out for horseplay. "Miss Shirley," he says, dismissing the divorce crisply, "is a grand girl and I'm a sap. When you say that, you've said it all." However, John is not amused by the publicity that attended his domestic troubles. He believes he's being played for a chump. The claim that his divorce was a special kind of shock because his marriage was idyllic leaves him cold. All Hollywood marriages are idyllic, in the public prints, he says, until the divorce lawyer mounts the front stoop with the papers. "I'm sore about all this slush," he says. "Maybe it's a good thing, too. It makes me think. I've done a lot more constructive thinking since I've been sore than when everything was beer and skittles." Before his marital break he was a Cafe Society regular. His good ^H^a> For ■oliii Frivolity went out and ferocity came in when John Payne was divorced from Anne Shirley. Evidences of the new Payne are apparent in his new Fox film. Iceland By JOHN FULLER ■ The thunderclap of the John PayneAnne Shirley divorce reverberated through Hollywood from Holmby Hills to Huntington Heath. The town is inured to screwy things, but this was too much. Even the wolf pack that gathers at Ro 22 natured features grinned out of night life pictures everywhere. He was content to let tomorrow take care of itself. Once his youthful spontaniety was his trademark. Today he is preparing himself for serious drama, convinced that life is a problem to be met with serious reflection. It is no secret that Twentieth CenturyFox is leading him toward the White Tower once occupied by Tyrone Power, now lost to Uncle Sam. He got into the Fox yard when Power and the studio disagreed over Stardust and it is only natural that he should catch the mantle from the great Tyrone's wiry shoulders. The significance of this opportunity has combined with his domestic clout to make John the almost saturnine young man he is today. He is determined to be not merely a successful actor, but a great one. It seems to him to be the vindication he seems to think he needs. As a step along the monastic path to this goal, he has taken up semantics. Semantics is a study of meanings as they apply to human behavior, to races and gods and kings and caterpillars; of why flowers bloom in June and the bloodstream runs clockwise in some beings, counterclockwise in others. "It has helped me to understand what happened to me and to appreciate human values," he says, "and if you hope to be a good actor, you have to appreciate human values." No one is better aware than John Payne that his success, to date, has been built on the good luck of a handsome face and sturdy body, plus the difficulties of a studio with a star. "How should I have known I wasn't an actor?" he asks. "I got good parts, good notices. I was a success and I painted the town red before I got my come-uppance." It isn't often that a punch in the nose is lucky, but John once got one that was. He was working as a bouncer in a snooker pool hall in a rugged section of New York as a means of paying his way through a Columbia University short story course and a Julliard Music School voice class. One day a tough customer took exception to John's face and threw him out of the snooker atelier, causing John to resign from a prone position on the sidewalk. He landed a job singing bits in a radio station and there a Shubert scout found him and led his faltering feet along the path to musical comedy, eventually exposing him to Samuel Goldwyn. Goldwyn invited him to Hollywood. He spent a year waiting for Goldwyn to use him and another in Warner B's. Then Darryl Zanuck rescued him. He found quick prosperity at Fox and since he had married Anne Shirley, it seemed he was on top of the world. When baby Julie Anne arrived two years ago, the world was indeed his oyster. "It took a kick in the teeth to bring me down to earth," he says. "This laughing boy stuff is fine until your world collapses around you. The movies had their laugh period, too. Now they're striving to be seriously useful and I'm ready to ride the bandwagon." He believes that his future lies in the quick, hard-hitting, realistic type of picture. His mood is no longer escapist. He wants to make people think. Only by thinking, he says, can a bewildered world solve its problems and insure future security for peoples and individuals^ Right now he's making Springtime in the Rockies with Betty Grable, which is about as serious as the capers of Moon Mullins. When it's finished, he's scheduled to try his wings in serious stuff. He calls it his Farewell to Frivolity. ■ HOLLYWOOD