Modern Screen (Jul-Dec 1945)

JOHNNY COME LATELY (Continued from page 56) When applying and removing cleansing cream, always use upward and outward motion. To remove, wrap absorbent Sitroux Tissue around hand, like a mitt. (Tissues go further*, cleanse better, this way.) Then, pat with cotton soaked in skin freshener. Next, apply neb lubricating cream. Start from upper chest; work with both hands. Circle gently upward along throat. Make an upward half-circle around back of neck. For firming exercise, bend head forward, relaxed; roll to right, back; left, back to front. Repeat, circling left to right. Leave cream on half-an-hour (overnight, for dry skin). Remove with Sitroux Tissue, using upward strokes. Absorbent Sitroux removes cream thoroughly; fine for hankies, too. difficulties . • • DU1 uh os many ,eve, best to -PP'^ossibU And, Wto Sitroux Tissues as P«»"e best ,o all others, we are domg ou SITROUX TISSUES on moustaches. A world of glowing, if imaginary, press notices and thunderous — oh thunderous— applause. The plays that they gave were made up out of their heads and involved dozens of characters, each with a different kind of accent. No children's plays for them, but war stuff and drama of the heaviest kind. When John was ten, his father's work took the whole family to Panama, and — away from Parker's encouragement and interest — he temporarily ditched the theater. If he had been older, he would have felt lost, but when you are ten, the world is so full of a number of things ... He played baseball and learned to speak fluent Spanish. He grew to be six feet one and made up his mind to become a writer. He was gone for four years, and it was an enchanted era studded with jaunts to places Like Haiti and Cuba and the Bahamas, a heavenly period of erratic schooling and a great deal of fun. His was a congenial family, in spite of the fact that John's brother Worthington (whom, as a child, he used to call One-toTen) was nine years older than John, and in spite of the usual family run-ins. There was, for instance, the time on the trip to Panama when the ship ran into a terrible storm. The waves were Alpine, and the ship bobbed like a cork. The whole -family, with the exception of John, was felled with seasickness. "Get out of the cabin, dear," John's mother murmured from her bed, unable to bear the sight of his rosy, smiling face another minute. "Where'll I go?" he whined. "There's no one to play with." "Just go," she said. "Anywhere." John trekked down to the dining room, returning presently with a bowl of fruit and a rich looking cake. "Here, mom," he said, munching an apple in her ear, exuding health. No member of the family spoke to him for days afterwards. There was the period when he was about eleven when he made the family's life wretched hounding them for a monkey. He gave them no peace night or day. "They're a lot of work, dear," his mother would say to him. "A lot of work." "I don't care," he'd insist doggedly. "I'll do everything for it. You'll never know it's in the house." That was prophetic. monkeyshines . . . In the end his mom was beaten down, and they went off to a pet shop to buy the animal. It cost $5, and John bore it triumphantly off. However, in the car, it first spat at him, then clawed him, and it was just getting ready to tear him limb from limb when he got it back to the pet man. They didn't wait to retrieve their money. It was worth ten to get rid of him. "You would have a monkey, dear," his mother told him gently, expecting him to be crestfallen, prepared to hug and comfort him if he should cry or anything. "Yeah," said John, undaunted. "But what I really want is a dog." He was really a most annoying child. Incidentally, they did get a dog when they returned to the United States. They were living in Maryland at the time, and they bought a beautiful collie called "Buster." When the family took a trip out West at one point, they shipped Buster to some friends in Westchester for a visit. However, he ran away from them and reappeared at the house in Maryland three months later, ragged of paw and mangy of fur. The poor pup died soon after, and that was John's last encounter with animal ownership. He now contents himself with patting other people's dogs and looking wistfully in pet shop windows. He went to high school at Horace Mann in New York, during which time his interest in acting revived, and he worked with little theater groups after hours. He was a funny, shy kid, torn between this violent desire to act and a kind of horror of being stared at. He was devoid of the exhibitionism that is characteristic of most actors. Not only that, but he loathed girls, and love scenes were unadulterated hell. "Girls," he would say, "are dopes." "What about Parker?!' his mother would ask him. 'You're devoted to Parker." "Parker — " he murmured, and he realized then that he had never consciously thought of her as a girl before. She'd always been, well, just Parker. "Yeah that's right," he said. But it didn't change his feeling toward women in general. It remained for a session at the Theodora Irvine Dramatic School to accomplish the metamorphosis from gal-hater to gal-dater. one extreme to another . . . He graduated from Horace Mann, and Parker — who was studying at the Irvine school — persuaded Miss Irvine to take on John as a pupil. She agreed, but was something less than captivated with him. He was all arms and legs, and whenever he had to do a love scene, he'd freeze. "Look," Miss Irvine would say. "You like this girl, see. You're crazy about her." And after a while he got the hang of it, and she'd have to yell at him, "Now don't overact, John." Along about this time, he began to talk to his mother about acting as a career. "Do the Barrymores design bridges?" she used to ask him. Honesty compelled him to say "no," and then she had him. "Well?" she'd say triumphantly. Her meaning was clear. John's dad had been a successful engineer and so had his dad. Henry's family had invented the Worthington pump. By rights John should have been a terrific draftsman, a fast man with a slide rule. A crisp, terse, efficient individual. Instead, he sauntered, he gangled, he walked with his head in the stars. Eventually, of course, his mother agreed to let him take a fling at acting. "Get it out of your system," was the way she put it, "then come back to the fold." John joined Clare Tree Major's famous Children's Theater, and toured the schools of the country doing "Little John" in "'Robin Hood." He liked it, but he always felt a little sad because he could never make friends with the kids. With his blacked-out teeth and frowzy hairdo, he was nobody's dream boy; and when the play was over and the children came up ' on the stage, they always gave him plenty of elbow room and screamed if he smiled his toothless smile at them. Only once did a child come near him, and she had her mother in tow for protection. She was a small girl of about six, and evidently her sole contact with actors had been through the movies, where of course they are flat and two-dimensional. She walked around and around John, eyeing him from every angle, and finally she squealed, "why mama, he's round!" There followed six long years of stock, during which he starved with people like Lauren Bacall, and tided himself over from walk-on to walk-on with odd jobs like selling pajamas in Macy's and carrying trays in Schrafft's. The first break was a tiny role in "Janie," then Quizz West irj "Eve of St. Mark." Warners noticed him and put him under contract. There were (Continued on page 60)