Modern Screen (Dec 1937 - Nov 1938)

MODERN SCREEN AFTER DIVORCE-WHAT? (Continued from page 41) EYEBROW CONTROL charm and beauty, it's most important to keep your eyebrows trim and shapely. And it s easy, too. Just "tweeze"away those stray hairs and heavy outlines with Wigder Tweezers — especially constructed with raised shoulders and carefully set jaws for positive grip. Don't neglect this essential beauty care! Get *'igder Tweezers today at any drug orlO-cent store lOe • At home — quickly and safely you can tint those streaks of gray to lustrous shades of blonde, brown or black. A small brush and BROWNATONE does it. Guaranteed harmless. Active coloring agent is purely vegetable. Cannot affect waving of hair. Economical and lasting — will not wash out. Imparts rich, beautiful, natural appearing color with amazing speed. Easy to prove by tinting a lock of your own hair. BROWNATONE is only 50c — at all drug or toilet counters — always on a money-back guarantee. FACE MARRED BY UGLY SCHOOL-AGE PIMPLES? 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Eat 3 cakes daily — one cake '/a hour before meals. matriarchal system is a form of social organization as in certain primitive tribes in which the mother is head of the family, and in which descent is reckoned in the female line, the children belonging to the mother's clan.' "That's us," laughed Joan delightedly. "I am now a matriarch. My household is a matriarchy. There is but one exception, in my case, to the definition given in the dictionary : that is, the business about the children reckoning their descent from the female line. Melinda is Melinda Markey, of course. Ditty is Dianna Bennett Markey. When Gene and I were married he gave Ditty his name. It seemed absurd to us for sisters to bear different names, so we made them alike. Gene comes to see Melinda twice every day. He takes both of the children out with him frequently. Ditty is as crazy about him as Melinda is. We are all completely friendly. Gene and I have dates quite often. I think that the only way divorce can be ugly for children is when the parents make it so by being ugly about it themselves, by indulging in a mental tug of war, with the children between them. Nothing of the sort is the case with us. We have departed thus far from the primitive. IT was, and is, simply that a woman with a career has a dictator complex and you can't conceive of a dictator who would 'share and share alike' even so much as the morning paper, now can you?" "That's the way it is with me," said Joan. "Including the morning paper. I like to get it first. I don't like it when someone else gets it and musses it up and then passes it on to me. That's sort of symbolic of the whole. I like to have my meals when / like to have them. If I don't want luncheon at one and dinner at eight, I don't want to have to have them at those hours. When there is a man in the house there must also be a routine. "I want to be able to come and go as I please. Last year I did 'Stage Door' on tour. I was gone about six months. I took the children with me. Ditty went to school in Connecticut, Melinda traveled with me and thrived on it. And it is certainly beneficial to adults. I was getting into a rut before I did that play. I never intend to be in a rut again. I want to do a play every year. Now, when you have a husband to consider, you can't just pick up and go off for months at a time, even when it is good for your career. And I feel that to do that play was necessary to my career. It happened to go very well and that gave me a selfconfidence I very much needed. "When I come home from the studio now and feel tired and want to go to bed and read, I don't have the uneasy feeling that my husband is dining alone, listening to the radio alone, probably wondering who ever thought up this idea of the emancipation of women anyway ! It's an unnatural state of affairs, a career woman and marriage under the same roof. "I like to do everything I do well," said Joan seriously, "or not at all. I much prefer trying to make a success of my life as a mother and as an actress, than trying to make a semi-success of marriage, too. I detest half loaves." We were talking, Joan and I, in the living room of her new house in Holmby Hills. This house that Joan built is a house so femininely lovely, so comfortably, unniovie-starishly lovely. And yet, as we talked, I began going over in my mind some of the things I know about Joan. Contradictory things, at first thought, but working together to make a composite picture of this Lady Alone. Joan, the youngest of the Bennetts. Yes, but whenever the girl's mother has a problem to solve, it is to Joan she turns. Whenever Richard Bennett is ill or in doubt about something, it is to Joan he wires or cables. Joan was once shy, self-conscious, timid. This came about because she is the youngest sister of Connie, strong-willed and definite, of Barbara who is vital and vigorous. She's the youngest in a family who were, all of them, famous and colorful, so that the young Joan found it all too easy to take the well known "back seat." Then, Joan is near-sighted. Time was when this made her self-conscious, when she tried to conceal the fact by various pitiful little subterfuges. She has to wear glasses for reading. She can't recognize people when they are seated across a room from her. Only a short time ago Joan would hastily wtiip of? her glasses before she entered a public place. She would have run rather than be photographed wearing them. Joan has worked out of all this. And when, recently, a smart magazine asked her to sit for her portrait, wearing her glasses, she sat for it without a quaver, the picture turning out to be as distingue as the subject. THERE is not a lazy bone in Joan's slender body. Even when she is not working, she is up every morning at nine. She then goes through a routine of posture exercises because she feels that she tends to be roundshouldered. Three times a week she goes to the public ice-skating rink and skates, because she feels that nothing gives you the poise and grace that skating does. She makes out the menus at home. A splendid housekeeper, she is also a thrifty one. If she has a very expensive dinner one night, she will plan an inexpensive one the next night. Lamb stew. Meat loaf. She makes out the children's menus. When they were traveling East last year she spent her time on the train planning the children's menus for three weeks in advance. As there is a difference of five years in their ages, she had to make out two complete sets of menus, one for each little girl. When she entertains at dinner — she never has large parties, usually dinner for six — she knows exactly what each guest had to eat when he or she dined with her six weeks or six months previously. And she sees to it that that guest does not have the same menu again. Joan always has her evenings planned far in advance when she entertains. Because she herself plays neither Bridge nor any other parlor games, she usually has tickets for the theater, takes her guests to a night club or provides entertainers for them at home. Whatever is decided on, is planned, right down to the last detail. And so, as my thoughts of her took shape, I began to see Joan as the matriarch she says she is, in spite of her delectable femininity ; a new kind of matriarch, young and beautiful, not full of years and stern, as one formerly imagined a matriarch to be. Now I wondered whether the answer to "After Divorce — What ?" might not be Joan's answer — a matriarch, women without men, women alone ? It seems that Joan is making a happy — nay, brilliant — success of it. For ^