Modern Screen (Jan-Nov 1951)

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Controlled stroke, cracks shells easily. . . specially designed "off end" pressure gets out whole kernels. Available in a variety of colors and finishes. At department, home furnishings, and hardware stores. Makers of the world's first and finest wall type can opener. it's reigning cats and dogs {Continued from page 59) two-to-one over such peculiar choices as hamsters and possums, although the cats might not have been doing so well if it weren't for James Mason's much-publicized crew jogging the ratio. In fact, Hollywood's taste in pets is all-embracing, covering chimpanzees, ponies, camels, one alligator and an armadillo. The late John Barrymore was deeply fond of an aged and incredibly ugly vulture but when he found it sitting on the foot of his bed eying him speculatively during one of his serious illnesses, Barrymore expelled it in a fit of rage. But dogs are king, and nowhere are they more widely and dotingly maintained than here in Hollywood. In other parts of the country it is possible to keep pets without being suspected of anything more than normal himianitarianism, but not here. Indeed, a Los Angeles psychologist solemnly explained not long ago that with stars, keeping pets Ls a compulsion, for their egos must feed on the mute devotion of animals. One famous actress took the trouble to refute this psychologist pretty thoroughly. "If you want to go into it on a clinical basis," she said, "it may be principally that we're lonely. I don't really want to make it clinical. I've never tried to analyze it. If I'd been asked offhand, I just would have said that we like pets, the way other people do. But now that you've brought it up, it definitely isn't ego. Our egos are saturated as it is. You can get terribly lonely in the midst of friends — if they're friends — whose motives you're never quite sure of. You know, it's the same as a wealthy person living behind a protective armor of distrust. But a pet j\ist loves you because you're you. He doesn't want anything except to eat and play and stay alive. He doesn't know you're a star and he doesn't care, and he wouldn't know a house in Beverly HUls from a shanty. If you were washed up tomorrow, your friends wouldn't know your name, but your pets — they'd still be there." ALTHOUGH, nationally, cocker spaniels seem to have taken over the No. 1 spot in public dog fancy, they do not rate better than fifth in Hollywood. According to a loose survey conducted recently, the stars prefer in order, boxers, French poodles, collies, police dogs, cockers, and dachshunds. Among the more ardent boxer devotees are the Alan Ladds, who keep two in their West Los Angeles home and seven (at last count) at their ranch. They are enamored in particular of an aging, heroic female named Jezebel. Jezebel, Ladd sadly calculates, may not be long for this earth due to her zeal for biting automobile tires while the tire is doing 50 miles an hour. But so long as Jezebel is around, she gets the triple -A treatment with horsemeat on the side. It was Jezebel, who saw a delivery truck backing in the Ladds' drive while the Ladds' little daughter Alana stood gravely in its path looking the wrong way. Jezebel did aU that she could. She bounded into the child, knocked her clear and took the blow herself. By the time Ladd got her to the vet's she was as close to dead as a live dog can be, and she will never be in fighting trim again. But that has not stopped her where tires are involved. She can bite tires standing still but she prefers them on the wing, and if one of these days she tackles the enemy headon instead of from the flank, Jezebel's chances of a clean-cut decision will be very bad. Jezebel's masters served interne duty at the arrival of Macdonald Carey's water spaniel. Neither mother nor pup needed medical assistance, but Carey did. Word of the pup's arrival reached Carey at the Ladd ranch. And inasmuch as he'd been anticipating the event for some time and was duly joyous, he leaped into the air and continued straight on up until he met a rafter, at which point he naturally started down. He came down for a long time as imconscious as anyone ever gets, and had to be given scalp first-aid by his hosts before being rushed to a hospitial for minor surgery. The spaniel shortly was named Stitch. Stitch, according to his bemused master, has put a most fearful dent in the theory that Dogs Always Kjiow. Stitch likes burglars and does not care a hoot for many kindly, upright, and dog-loving visitors who come to the Careys' bearing him bones. (He doesn't like bones. He likes Royal Crown Cola and chocolate eclairs.) Stitch adores the furtive type of gentlemen interested in selling Carey salted gold mines, but he has an antipathy toward powerful executives interested in furthering Carey's career. Stitch doesn't bite but there is still a vague suspicion chez Carey that the hand that feeds him had better be quick. "The only time Stitch ever got real enthusiastic about me," says Carey, "was when I was playing heavy parts and came home beaurded and skulking like the dog of a rustler I was. He loved me then. If a prowler ever does get into the house, Stitch is going to give him coffee and sandwiches, show him the key to the silverware Eve Arden, who wears a short cropped haircut . . . goes to the same hairdresser who does Joan Crawford's French poodle, Ciiquot. Sidney Skolsky in The New York Post and slip him the name of a good fence. Whose best friend, I ask you?" Carey's problems are not unlike those of Doris Day, the proud but puzzled possessor of two black poodles named Beanie and Smudgy. Beanie, who hasn't the faintest idea he's a dog, eats oranges whenever he can get into striking position at his owners' modest grove, whereas Smudgy has developed a violent anti-social bent. Smudgy Ukes nothing quite so much as snubbing Marty Melcher, Miss Day's husband who adores him; jumping happily on the laps of guests who break out into nervous scrofula at any proximity to a dog, and wrecking the silklined antiques the Melchers lately have acquired. He is likewise devoted to soaking his feet in motor oU against the day when someone will turn up in a white flaimel suit. Vet some feel that the mantle of dog's -■■ most tireless martyr belongs rightfully to Victor Mature, who is stubbornly infatuated with an obese German shepherd named Nicky. Nicky has never yet been booked for forgery, embezzlement or assault with a blunt weapon, but she has been jugged so often that the local pound officials are thinking of giving her a monthly rate. The charge generally is running around without a muzzle, but not long ago she faced the stiffest rap yet: she was said to have bitten the postman. The postman so said. There were added mutterings that Nicky had long taken a dim view toward imif orms and their wearers, notably police, postmen and commissioned officers. Mature was outraged. He invited all and sundry to behold the riot of Nicky being systematically pulled apart by the neighborhood children, an ordeal to which she does indeed submit with boundless tolerance. And for a while the day was saved.