Modern Screen (Dec 1948 - Oct 1949)

alone... because she doesn't know LOVE can be lost . . . romance ruined if you offend with perspiration odor. So stop it before it starts ! DRYAD — Jergens new kind of deodorant actually stops the decaying action of bacteria . . . the chief cause of embarrassing perspiration odor...6efore it starts! Its complete deodorizing action keeps you sweet to love and adore. APPROVED by leading skin specialists. Harmless to clothes. SMOOTH as face cream as long as it lasts. 104, 294, 594. Dryad stops it before it starts when the other wasn't, and instead of pictures taking up four or five months of our time during the year it would run up to eight or ten months. Since you have to leave the house before the children are even up when you're working, and you come home plenty tired in the evening, there Would have been precious little home life together for us. We still worked together on our Sunday radio show with Gabby Hayes, and of course, Dale went along on my ten-weeks rodeo tour^ and on the other personal appearance trips 1 made. (So did the children, on our last trip, which was to Kansas City. When we told them they could go, Cheryl and Linda had their bags packed two weeks before it was time to leave and kept asking every five minutes whether it wasn't time to start yet. — Dale) But as far as her picture career was concerned — well, as Dale put it, "I guess if the master of ceremonies on a quiz show asks me what I do my reply will just be, 'Housewife'." (But once I acted! That was when 1 brought Dusty to the studio barber for his first haircut and I had to whoop and dance and emote in front of him to keep him from howling. — Dale) We had a chance to pitch in together at fixing up the house. Even the children got in on it, too. That was when we all took part in what they called a "treasure hunt," but what was really a fireplace hunt. You see, our playroom had no fireplace, but it's right under the living room which did have one — -and I wondered if the flue didn't extend downward in the wall to the playroom. I talked about it for weeks and Cheryl Arlene and Linda were all for investigating and finding out. One day I gave in, took a heavy hammer, and we all went down to the playroom. There was a plaster wall where the fireplace should be. I cracked at it a couple of times, the plaster fell away, and there, under it, was the brick of a swell fireplace! Cheryl and Linda cheered. Dale, who'd been set against ruining what she called a perfectly good wall, just said, "Hmmm!" (What would you say if you saw your husband take a sledge hammer and start knocking your home off its foundation? Especially if you lived on top of a hill and could just imagine everything' coming tumbling down to land in a heap in the middle of Vine street? — Dale) i know what i'm doing . . . It was nice having Dale home, because whenever I was between pictures she was right there ready to come along if I wanted to go hunting or make some other trip. I introduced her to coon and bobcat hunting down at Lake Henshaw where we went with ten coon dogs. (All in the same car with us! — Dale) And Dale got a bobcat, too. (Was that what that was? — Dale) And I took Dale on a visit to the place where I was born and raised — Duck Run, Ohio — and showed her the two-story house that my dad and I built. There was a purpose to this — I plan to do a lot more fixing around our new home and I wanted her to feel that I know what I'm doing when I get a chisel and a saw in my hand. (I'm not worried about the chisel and saw. It's the sledge hammer that bothers me. — Dale) We could have gone on nicely like that, with just one of us working in pictures, but whenever we made personal appearances people kept asking Dale why she'd retired. On top of that — well, an unusual thing happened as far as her popularity was concerned. Usually when a player in Hollywood stops being active, her fan mail I starts dropping off and pretty soon she's well on the way to being forgotten by her former audience. But this didn't happen with Dale. The folks kept writing and asking about her. So many wrote and so often that her fan mail began to increase steadily and was soon more than double what it had ever been before! That fact, plus the letters that were coming by the thousands addressed to the studio, finally got the production heads thinking and they insisted that Dale come back. But that's where Dale had her say. "As long as I'm on the radio with Roy, and I'm making personal appearances with him, there should be no further objection to my being in the same picture with him," she told them. There was no argument— well, not much of an argument, as Hollywood arguments go — and Susanna Pass in which Dale is once more my heart interest, was the answer. super-chef roy . . . If the shooting schedule calls for a lot of dialogue shots, Dale and I can go over them and rehearse at home after the children are asleep. That means I, for one, sleep better, knowing that I'm up on my lines. And towards the end of the week, we don't have to start worrying about going over our Sunday radio program. We can look it over on a Thursday or Friday, in between picture shots. All our work dovetails nicely. And, of course, our home life. I can even do some of the shopping for home, and some of the cooking. (The only shopping Roy does is for scrap bones for his dogs arid for chickens for our table. He likes to buy chicken fryers wliole and cut them up himself instead of letting the butcher do it. He claims the butchers don't take the time and trouble to hunt for the joints and just cut or chov through "approximately." This makes for splintered joints, which Roy thinks are dangerous for the children. But the best fun he has is getting into his red pickup truck and going hunting for bones. Hell drive up an alley to the back of a restaurant and disappear into the kitchen where he has -probably made friends with the cook. Pretty soon he's back, lugging a carton full of greasy bones. As soon as the dogs at home catch sight of the truck and smell his cargo they start howling the hills down. As for the cooking, the only cooking he does is when he prepares a "late snack" if we're having a party. But this, the way he does it, becomes a project. His object seems to be to find something that won't mix in an omelette. So far he hasn't come across this, even though he's used everything he could find in the kitchen including chili, pickles, left-over hamburger, biscuits, any kind of cooked vegetable, cheeses, jams, and the children's cookies. But his own favorite dish is not an omelette. Ifs beans. They can be boiled, fried, roasted, cold or burnt — he loves 'em. That, all his friends agree, is the real cowboy in him. — Dale) Yes, sir, it's just like old times — and I'm sure thankful to the fans, to Modern Screen, and to everyone who brought my Dale back to me. Just think — in threeand-a-half years, up to the time of our marriage, we made 24 pictures together! I don't have to tell you that we got so we could sail through a scene, no matter how tough it was, because we were comfortable with each other, knew just how the other worked. And then, just because we moved even closer together in our personal lives, we had to split up professionally! But that's all over now. I'm a happy man again. Dale is right next to me — and all I have to do is look through the window to see old Trigger tied to a post. (I knew it! I knew he'd have to get his old Trigger into this somewhere! — Dale) The End