Modern Screen (Dec 1948 - Oct 1949)

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Easy to prove on a test lock of your hair. First application must satisfy you or money back. 75c and $1,75 — all druggists. Retain youthful charm. Get Brownatone now. "But I'm so uv believing it. "I "Stay away plied, "That' But to the v. was a challenge: Shelley smuggled herseit mio projection room after the others were seated. She thought she'd escape unnoticed before the lights went on again. But it was so-o-o-o interesting that she forgot. And in her excitement she began telling Producer Michael Kanin how he should cut his picture. She must have been very cute about it, because ordinarily that's a good way for an unknown actress to buy a ticket to oblivion. "I guess,"' Shelley muses now, "I shouldn't do things like that. But it seems to me that movies are so departmentalized. I mean, everybody attends to their own business and you're not supposed to make suggestions outside your own department." She was so tense and nervous in her first scenes (thinking of her "ugliness") that she almost lost the part. But Shelley soon relaxed enough to make a few suggestions about her dialogue. When Cukor liked one of these, she was elated and made more. One day Author Garson Kanin memo'd: "Shelley dear, I know you've written many distinguished plays, but do you mind saying my lines as I wrote them?" That cured her. "Since then," she avers, "I've never tried to improve my lines." But her zeal for "un-departmentalizing" the movies has found outlet in other directions. It reached dangerous proportions on Larceny, for instance. Here Mr. Lane (Shotgun) Britton, her makeup man, admirer and confidant, had to rush in to smooth out a "situation." Seems Shelley, eager to help, was telling the veteran cameraman how she preferred to be photographed! "You just don't do that, Shelley!" warned Shotgun, after tranquillity was restored. "Oh," said Shelley, contrite, "I didn't know." Fortunately for her future, the girl makes these voluntary contributions to cinema uplift with a friendliness, zest and enthusiasm that soon win forgiveness. Even in her theatrical beginnings, Shelley violated that prime rule of the stage trouper: "Never overstay your welcome." As a moppet named Shirley Schrift, she made her way to a theater's Shirley Temple contest in her native St. Louis. She shrieked "On the Good Ship Lollipop" and kept on shrieking it until they finally had to remove her from the stage. She won a consolation prize. Apparently she never recovered, because by her 'teens she was persuading her father, a designer of men's clothing, that his future really lay in New York. Her mother, the former Rose Winters of St. Louis' famed municipal opera, was sympathetic. They moved to Brooklyn. Highlight of Shelley's dramatic career at Thomas Jefferson High there was her performance as Katisha in The Mikado. The school had two orchestras, which joined forces for this production without prior rehearsal as a unit. The resulting cacophony had reached a nice frenzy by the time Katisha entered for her aria. As Shelley recalls it, the chorus was singing something the orchestra wasn't playing, and poor Katisha was stumped. This time she did the wrong thing — stepped out of character— and made a hit. "Excuse me a minute?" she asked the thousand faces in the audience. Then she turned to the orchestra: "Let's start over and get together!" The thousand faces roared and cheered. Her prolessional debut was as a model in a metropolitan garment center And it went of course al1 wrong. sational. Sheiic., t sang and danced in niu^to keep her in doughnuts aiu. family home to go it alone. Almost . enough, that is. There was one time when she ushered at the Belasco Theater for $8 a week during an "at liberty" period — and impulsively spent all her cash on a fancy bathing suit in which to audition for a part. She didn't get it, and went two days without food. The stage career was not, however, without distinction of a sort — the wrong sort. In the musicai Rosalinda oheuey naa a good singing role. Rather lost in the music's complications, Shelley connived with the orchestra's oboe player (who carried the melody in her important number) to cue her. He would throw his head back, they agreed, as a signal that she should sing. "It worked fine," she reports cheerfully, "except the second night — he tnrew his head back too far, lost his balance, and knocked down half the orchestra." Despite this Winters-connected catastrophe, Rosalinda sent Shelley to Hollywood, with results partially aforetoid. The wnole results, at this writing, are still unfolding. After completing A Liouole Life, she took time out to go to New York for a part in Oklahoma! She returned from New York and Oklahoma! still unaware what A Double Life would mean to her. In practical terms it has meant a contract for three times the money she might have had if they'd signed her before the film's release. Nearly a thousand a week, with more promised. Meanwhile, the Winters life has settled down to routine confusion. She used to share a small apartment with mother, father, and sister Blanche, a pediatric nurse. An aunt and uncle were close neighbors — "and all my relatives moved out from St. Louis, and — oh, yes, the baby . . ." The baby, it developed, was a "borrowed" one from a motherless home upstairs. It spent the day at Shelley's while its father worked. (Shelley's own marriage, an impulsive wartime union now dissolved, produced no offspring.) Recently Shelley moved into her own small apartment in Hollywood, but bedlam moved with her. Oversupplied with energy and vitality, she creates her own — "just by being in a room," as someone observed. She keeps on the go. She works. When not working, she dashes breathlessly through her days, usually half an hour late for appointments, always with fantastic but legitimate reasons for her tardiness. She telephones friends, endlessly, for advice which she usually, and impulsively, ignores. And equal to her talent for doing the "wrong thing" is her gift for saying, without thinking, what she thinks. Recently, for instance, at a Jack Warner party the big man was reproaching Shelley for signing with U-l rather than with WB. Shelley, ever outspoken, told him of her Warners test. "But why didn't 1 see it?" he protested. "You did see it," said Shelley blithely, "and it was you who turned me down." Reminded later that it is lese majeste in Hollywood to recall a big shot's oversights, Shelley was unmoved. "Well, he did turn me down, didn't he?" she demanded innocently, as if that made any difference. But when you can be a "wrong-way kid" in the Winters way — who'd ever want to be "right"' The End