Modern Screen (Jan-Nov 1952)

than being a young and beautiful star. As the former she is quickly and easily accepted, and everyone, including Janie, feels more comfortable at the absence of pretense. The other afternoon she was shopping in a cut-rate market which is rarely patronized by the well-to-do, let alone well-to-do stars. Coming around one of the food counters, she ran into a man she sees from time to time at the studio in the course of her work. "Well!" he said, "this is a surprise. I thought you would do your buying at one of our fancier stores." Janie had her opportunity to explain that she just happened to drop in and was not a regular patron. Probably nine out of 10 other stars would have done this. But she didn't. She told the truth. "I know these places better," she said. "I was raised on them." Janet has tried to take a common sense approach to her triumphant rise as an actress. But there is a certain amount of nervousness about her which she cannot hide. She tries to, under a flow of constant chatter, but this, in itself, is a sort of give-away. And at times, words have failed her altogether under the stress of personal appearances. One of the last of these occar sions was a hospital benefit performance at a theater. Janet was introduced and stepped to the front of the stage to make a response. But she just couldn't get started. After an embarrassing pause she uttered an apology and fell back. The audience took it good naturedly, but Janet still cannot understand what made her mind go blank. And she isn't too happy about recalling such instances. The thought that it might happen again is very unnerving. Even Gary Cooper, who has been a top movie name for 20 years, is hardly master of himself when he meets his public in person. When the going is particularly tough and he is struggling to express himself, he will reveal his mental agony just about the way he does it on the screenshifting about, twisting his hat in his hands, and contorting his face until it resembles a crumpled paper cup. So perhaps a younger man like Howard Duff is not to be blamed if he, too, is far from poised on such occasions. Howard doesn't writhe physically when he is ill at ease. He is more apt to withdraw into long, awkward silences. A man whose job it sometimes is to write feature stories about Howard has learned that one of the ways to shake him out of a brooding, monosyllabic mood, is to startle him with an unexpected and very personal question. "Is it true you were once jailed by police?" he will ask, for instance. As it happens, Howard was in the toils of the law once ... but it was the result of a youthful escapade no one, not even the police, held against him. The point is that something about Howards success gets between him and the out side world and prevents a natural, easy contact. That "something," as we have seen, is not easily licked. Tyrone Power hasn't got it licked. He used to avoid newspaper interviews for one thing. It's still hard to pin him down for a press or magazine story. Diana Lynn is intellectually and artistically a superior person, yet, strangely enough, falls very quiet in a gathering, meekly so. And there have been parties from which she has run off to burst into tears over a fancied hurt. Is Victor Mature bothered by people? You wouldn't think so; but everyone knows he used to get uncomfortable when he'd have to stop his car at a boulevard light and the occupants of the car next to him would gaze over and study him. Just to give himself something to do, Victor installed a phone in his car and when stalled in traffic would pick up the receiver and pretend to be engaged in a conversation. It was pretense because the phone was never actually hooked up. You can keep adding Hollywood names to this list and find only a few who actually enjoy meeting their audience in person. Bob Hope, who is an exception, once expressed the reason for it in his own inimitable way. "Up there on the screen you're a moving target," he said. But when you meet them in person and there is something about you that they don t like— brother, you're a sitting goose! The End they can't make me behave" (Continued from page 33) such truth is not going to happen here. A few weeks after the violent collision between Dore Schary and Mario Lanza, it became evident that something had to happen. You can't have the most exciting new star on a movie lot feuding with the bosses, and expect nothing to come of it. There is always somebody who brings straight thinking to the situation. In this case, the peace -making was begun by Mario's wife, Betty. As Mario says, Betty is a girl who is familiar only with the truth. And Betty has a great thing in common with her husband. She hates lies and liars. She knows that even a small lie gives birth like a guppy to seven dozen other lies, until there are a whole army of them. So Betty, one day, picked up the telephone and called the director, Joe Pasternak. They faced each other m the living room of the Lanza home, and here, condensed, is what Betty said: "This has got to stop. My husband is an honest man. He may not be like other movie stars in Hollywood. He may not have settled down to a behavior pattern so that he is acceptable to two dozen minor executives whose names you and I don't even know. But we have to do something about this, because you are beginning to believe all the lies that have grown up about him, and so has Mr. Schary. "Mario is hurt, because these lies have grown so big that nobody — even you — even bother to ask if any of them are true. We have to talk about this right ' now, before you and Mr. Schary think that Mario is no good, as you probably do. And if you do, I can assure you that Mario thinks you are no good, too — even double and triple no good. ' So, they talked, Mario joining them. They got right down to cases, such as the time Mario threw a studio employee bodily out of his dressing room. They examined the case in detail, and Joe Pas82 ternak, a sensitive, emotional man, agreed that he would have done the same thing himself. He might have gone even further, and given the fellow a pair of black eyes in the process, because there are some things you never say to or about a man, if you want to stay healthy. The matter of noise, and general hellraisin' " were also entered into. It was agreed that you can't take a man like Mario Lanza, with a heart and voice like an erupting volcano, and expect him to behave like an easy-going actor with 10 years of experience in studio relations. When it was all over, Joe Pasternak said, "I love you both. You have got to talk like this to Dore Schary. Why, he doesn't even know what makes you tick! Shortly thereafter, Dore Schary came to Mario's house. The production chief and the star faced each other across Mario s desk, and the favorite son of South Philadelphia said to Dore: "You are a big shot. You are a nogood stinker. And I will tell you why!" Mr. Schary retorted in kind, and they went on from there. At the home of Dore Schary, a dinner party waited for hours, then gave up and fell apart. Two men, who normally are busier than a pair of snipers on the battlefront, were learning to know each other. When Dore Schary left the Lanza home, late that night, he left as a lusty friend, for he'd discovered that in his high tower as the mastermind of some 60 pictures a year, involving as many stars, the reports that had filtered through to him about Mario Lanza were highly distorted. And Mario's rebellion had centered on this very fact: it had been impossible for him to take his problems directly to the top level. . . , . ii. Why7 Because there is jealousy at trie lower levels of Hollywood, as anywhere else. And, if Mr. Lanza has an argument with anyone, it sooner or later will blossom into print, largely distorted, to the great glee of the individual who "planted" it with a reporter on the prowl for a sensational bit of copy. That is what happened on the subject of Mario's excess weight. "Look at me," Lanza said. "I've got a big frame. Big bones. All my life I didn t weigh too much for my size. When I came to Hollywood, I was around 179 pounds, and I could eat everything in sight. Then came The Great Caruso. Imagine, all my life this man is my idol! All of a sudden I get the chance to play him on the screen. I have got to be Caruso! I don t want to be just an actor who doesn t look like the man, singing his songs. "No, I want to be this man, and this man, as he grows older, gets heavier. Everything about him grew bigger. His songs, his build, the little way he strutted. The people around him— he collected them as he went along, more and more of them. "So, I lived like Caruso, and I ate like him, and I behaved like him, in my private life, as nearly as I could. But, all those at the' studio could see, was that I was getting fatter and fatter. Well, I have not the conceit to say I gave the public Caruso, exactly, but I would like to see somebody else do better— and that's what almost ruined me, for a while. "I was 230 pounds when I finished the picture— not 240 pounds. Two hundred and thirty. We are telling the truth and we must be exact. > "And then what happened? I didnt know it, then, but my metabolism began to run away with me. My bones must have been hungry for years, and the corpuscles liked the drunken spree they were on — and didn't want to quit. The truth of the matter was that dropping 40 pounds wasn't too hard. The weight hadn't been there six months ago, and it could be tapered off. And this is where Mario Lanza makes a unique confession of his own: "I heard the story that while I was up in Oregon I returned the script of Because You're Mine, without even reading it. That is not true. The truth is that I hadn't been sent a script. I guess everybody should know that the first version of many great plays are just plain lousy. To get a good story, writers have to work and revise. To get a good suit to fit, you have to keep trying it on for size. "That's the way it was. The premise ot the story— about an opera singer who gets