Modern Screen (Dec 1931 - Nov 1932 (assorted issues))

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Modern Screen Janet and Charlie (Continued from page 43) Exactly the same quality as the famous $1.00 Phantom Red Lipstick — except in size. Try Phantom Red Lipstick and discover the real beauty of natural color and all-day permanence. Vanity size sold at all chain stores. ^hxuxloiri cRed ^ LI P STIC K The Most Misunderstood Girl ft on tn( Unpleasant things have been said about Kate Smith, but you must know her true story to judge her fairly. Read it in the new issue of RADIO STARS. If you missed the first issue of RADIO STARS last month you simply can't afford to make the same mistake again! Here's just the kind of a magazine you've wanted for a long time — just full of choice morsels of information about the glamorous personalities you hear so often but know so little about. If you want to know what they're really like, you'll relish RADIO STARS 1 0c At Kresge Stores, Kress Stores end Newstands 120 things to be put over on her. Look back to her school days when she was possessed with a normal impish impulse to turn in a false fire alarm. This was in Chicago and Chicago is a big city and its police have little use for false fire alarms. But Janet didn't turn one in. She knew better. Perhaps she weighed the reward and the retribution and decided the momentary thrill of a realized illicit ambition wouldn't be worth the punishment which would follow. But one day a boy who lived on her block committed some misdeed at school and saw to it that Janet was blamed. He got promptly what my grandmother used to call his comeuppance. Walking home from school with a sweet, submissive, forgiving Janet, he was dared to ring that fire alarm; dared with those big eyes and that pointed darling face and that wistful mouth and voice. And he did. And Janet escaped; and the youngman who had caused an injustice to be worked upon her a little earlier suffered a belated — but not too belated — retribution, in humiliating, if oblique manner at the large hands of the policeman who caught him. I can see Janet smiling to herself. ALL through her motion picture career no one has tried to put anything over on her without meeting with abject failure. There have been arguments about salaries and stories. Janet has retired, sweetly, without sulking, from the scene of battle. But she has always won out. Just now she is avoiding interviewers and the like. It is not helping her popularity with the press, this Garbo-like attitude, but in the long run I daresay she will get what she wants, whatever that is, through it. There have always been boys in Janet's life. Not all were like the boy who rang the fire alarm. But boys in plenty, to whose young strength she appealed as something infinitely fragile. But she was stronger than they, in her quiet determination masked by the silken sweetness of her face. There were intervals of work after graduation from the high school in San Francisco, to which she later moved. A job in a cashier's cage in a store; and work in a lawyer's office; and then the trek to Hollywood, with her stepfather as her guiding force, and the climb upward. There were failures and disappointments. Those days belonged to Elinor Glyn and Clara Bow. A girl must have "It." Janet decided she didn't, decided she had no sex appeal. As a matter of fact she has more, in one sense, than any woman on _ the screen today. But it is different, it is not exotic, it is the home-grown kind. It is not the sex appeal of partial nakedness nor scenes of passion. It is the appeal of the rose and not of the orchid. But it is a stronger and more lastingappeal, for it is the sort of sex appeal which keeps the world revolving, the sort a man may hope to find in the girl he actually marries. Disappointment couldn't conquer Janet. She kept on. Then came Charles Farrell and her chance. His chance, too. Let's consider Farrell for a moment. Born in Massachusetts, he moved to Cape Cod when he was a few weeks old. He's a New Englander born and bred, with an ancestral history of sea captains and whaling ships. You can read this history in his physical appearance, I think. And he loves yachting; he sails a boat like a born skipper. For the blood remembers, always. His father, however, left the sea for the show business ; he had theatres in the old nickelodeon days. His mother was artistic, she painted, she directed plays. In her plays Charlie had his first chance at acting and generally failed, covered with the vast, humiliating embarrassment of boyhood. 1LJIGH school, summer jobs as a life■*■ saver — and what a heart-breaker he must of been, how many girls who couldn't swim must have ventured out beyond their depth for the pleasure of being rescued. And then Farrell had a couple of years at the University of Boston. Boxing. Study. Good times; and working with his father at the theatres in summer until Billy the Midget came along with a vaudeville act and wanted a sort of manager and bodyguard combined. Charles Farrell took the job; the job that finally landed him in Hollywood and teamed him, after the usual desperate extra experiences, with Janet Gaynor in this miraculous marriage of two shadows upon the screen. Now, from his father and mother Charles Farrell had a rich inheritance: love of beauty, courage, understanding, and self-confidence. His parents believed in him ; so he believed in himself. His father wasn't afraid to quit the sea for the show business. His mother, artistic to her fingertips, worked out her own system by which she could incorporate her love of art in her life. It is easy to see what such an example and inheritance would do for a boy who already had the blood of sailing adventurers, strong men, vital men, in his veins. Then, too, Charles Farrell had all the makings of a great lover. When he fell in love it was a long hard fall. When he was eleven he fell in love. She wouldn't, at first give him a tumble. He says : "She was a ritzy kid. Perhaps that's why I fell for her." This love affair lasted right up until the time he left home, after quitting college to adventure with Billy the Midget. I wonder what happened to that girl ? I think Charles Farrell owes a lot to her. It was after Farrell had won through his first hard time in Hollywood and was playing bits that he met Virginia Valli who permitted him, after a houseparty, to drive her home in his car. This car was a flivver; it had cost thirty dollars. Richard Arlen, recalling