Modern Screen (Jan-Jun 1945)

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Betty also goes for romantic books (Right now she's deep in "Forever Amber," wistfully sighing that she'd love to play Amber) and likes reading them in bed. She has no idea of cash money values. She took her mother out for dinner on her birthday last year and had to borrow twenty bucks from Mrs. Grable to pay the check when she found her own bag bare. And the next day she strolled into a Westwood Village book store and handed them a $100 bill for a $2 book! But at heart Betty's a man's girl. No doubt about it. She's happiest when she's with men and she adapts herself readily and happily to their tastes and wishes. Betty has stopped wearing make-up of any kind around home, for instance, because Harry doesn't like it. She used to adore pompadours, rats and fancy hairdo's, but she threw all the transformations in the wastebasket when Harry allowed he admired her locks best hanging free in the breeze. She found out quickly what Sir Harry's favorite perfume was, and now she uses nothing else but. Even when her head man's away Betty clings to the things he likes. She seldom drives her big Cadillac convertible when Harry's on tour. Instead she herds Harry's station wagon around, with the name, "Bay-Bee," emblazoned on the outside (that's what he calls her, with the accent on the Bee), with his favorite French poodle "Punkin," perched in the front seat. ego-booster . . . I don't mean that Grable is any clinging vine — not by a long shot. But she's got a blessed streak of one-man girl backer-up femininity in her (it's a mighty lucky thing for a girl to have, the best booster in the world to a gent's ego) which always pays off in romantic harmony. When Betty and Jackie Coogan were married, Betty did everything possible to help "the Kid" make a comeback on his career, which is what he wanted most then. Betty went with George Raft, too, for three years without one date with another man. George, of course, is a sports nut, so Betty tagged along to all the prize fights, horse races, baseball and football games — everything that George liked best. She still lugs around a sports interest hangover from those days, especially in big league baseball. Last fall, when Betty's two home town teams, the St. Louis Cards and the Browns, tangled in a World Series at Sportsman's Park, Betty cancelled all dates to sit glued to her radio every afternoon. It follows that Betty's not the nagging type to make over or reform a man. Whatever Harry does is okay with her, right down the line. They've never had even a spat in a couple of years of married life. Only time Betty even faintly suggested a change in one of her beaux, it ended up comically to be a joke on her — maybe because she picked a comic guy to pick on. Before she was married, Betty had a few dates with funny man Phil Silvers. The first time she went out with Phil, Betty told him, "Phil, I think you'd look a lot better without your glasses. Why don't you take them off?" She knew pronto that she should never have stuck her neck out. Because the next time Phil called, he came tapping along with a white cane behind a Seeing-Eye dog! That was his way of telling Betty he wore glasses because he needed 'em. So it's no accident, maybe, that Betty's staunchest army of fans are men. Of all the 90,000 letters that pour in on her every months, the greatest number by far comes from admiring males (most gal stars draw the majority of their mail from other girls) and, of course, Betty's still the GI's Hollywood super dream girl by miles. She'd be the last to deny that a lot of her fervent service loyalty stems right from her own divine stems. Betty's not bashful that way, either. When she made her barnstorming Carolina camp tour a couple of years ago, Betty fought with the USO powers to wear a short, sketchy dancing dress that exposed plenty of scenery for her opening show. But there was a rule and regulation about that, it seemed — all entertainers had to wear long dresses or get shot at sunrise or something. So Betty dolled up in the slinkiest formal she could dig out of her trunk, put on French heels and darned near killed herself trying to off-to-Buffalo on a routine in that wrap-up. But there's another side to Betty's appeal for the soldier boys — the good sport, simpatico side that every Yank seems to read in Betty's face, and which I've a hunch is just as important an item as "cheesecake" to a lonely GI who remembers the good sport girls back home. On that same camp tour, Betty picked up a paper one day and read an item like this, "GI's picket Betty Grable." She read on to discover that a little out-of-the-way camp was sore as a boiled owl because they'd been by-passed by Betty's glamour tour. So they'd paraded up and down the barracks with signs, "Betty Grable is Unfair to Camp So-and-So." That got Grable. She put in long distance calls to Washington and shot wires to Hollywood asking permission to straighten things out. The answer was that there weren't any facilities there for a show, and it was too remote and just too bad. But that didn't satisfy Bets. She kept plugging until the USO trip routers let her skip over to the camp and scatter those pickets personally. That's what Grable thinks of GI's, and here's an example of what they think of her. A year or so ago, a salty Guadalcanal Marine got in touch with her through the Hollywood Canteen where she and Harry James were still entertaining the guys. (Incidentally, that's where their romance really got started, you'll remember if you read our story about them in the October, 1943, issue of Modern Screen.) This leatherneck said he had something he wanted to give Betty. It turned out to be a picture of her — not a pin-up picture — just a modest portrait. It was creased and dirty, and through the center was a bullet hole rimmed with dark stains. "My Bud," explained the Marine. "He always carried this one right over his heart — and when they got him, that's where they got him." Betty hauled him right up home with her to dinner with her mother in their Bel-Air house where she lived then. And if you think Grable doesn't shed tears, you should have seen her dissolve that evening. Duty took that particular Marine through Hollywood four separate times, and each time he called Betty, and each time she had him up to the house. When he shipped out again, he wrote her once a month regularly, from wherever combat action took him, for over a year. She hasn't heard from him for several months now, and knowing what a pal he was, Betty is afraid to think why. Yep, there are plenty of sentimental tieups Betty has with the boys that aren't all hey-hey and pin-up glamour. In fact, most of her intimate contacts with soldiers have been much more on the heartbreak side. There's the boy in England, for instance, who wrote her just the other day. He'd lost his eyes in action, and what he wrote was this: "I guess I won't ever be seeing you again, Betty, and that's not so good. But the last picture I saw you in (Continued on page 84)