Modern Screen (Dec 1952 - Nov 1953)

a bachelor finds himself (Continued from page 47) has talked often and freely about his visit to the clinic, his only reservation being a rehictance to give specific examples for fear that .others may try to apply his own personal experiences to themselves. "Everybody is as different from the next guy as are his fingerprints," he said, "and things like this are strictly individual cases." With this in mind he asked that some of our conversation be kept off the record, arid so this story will not go into detail about his" stay at the clinic, except for those things that started the pendulum swinging back for Dan. He used this expression himself. "I've thought about writing a story and calling it 'The Swing of the Pendulum.' It's hard to explain, but I believe that each individual has his own goal in life and his own natural interests. Many times you go off on tangents— I know I have in the last two years— but sooner or later you come back to the basic things you really like. Until you do, you're only floating, because you're entirely off your course and have no direction. That's what the clinic did for me — they gave me a direction. And so I swung back." As an example he said that in his boyhood he had loved horses, that he was never happier than in those hours he spent on a horse's back or in a stable. Yet with his zooming career and its attendant pressures, he did less and less riding, he saw less of the people he had been happy with, and he took on new interests that were foreign to his nature. Now he is once more back with horses, and with the same people, and he is content. Something like this is such a simple remedy, yet few people can see their own lives in an objective manner. The clinic helped here, for they led Dan into a variety of interests, some of which he rejected and some of which he found to his liking. Few of them allowed him time to thuik about himself. While there he took up basketball, he lectured on the theater, he took a course in political philosophy and one in writing. They steered him into woodworking and although at first Dan had no stomach for it he soon found that wood cannot only become beautiful, but that the work accomplished a deeper purpose. "When you are chiseling a block of walnut down to a thin line and are still working on it to create something beautiful, you can't possibly worry about yourself. I found that I liked to work with my hands. I tried painting and sketching, but except for a pencil sketch of two horses' heads that I've framed and hung in my apartment, I didn't really care for it. I liked clay better. I liked the feel of it in my hands. There's a three-dimensional thing about it." "What else?" I asked. "What else are you doing?" He gave me that affable grin and said, "Well, there's the hunt club, and the horse shows, and both skiing in snow and water skiing. And I've written a few songs. And of course I'm active in the local Menninger chapter. I play around at writing stories, too." "Poetry?" I said. He grinned again. "Sure, I wrote a lot of it when I was a kid." He said it with a happy lack of self -consciousness. * "Dan, do you do all these things — there are a great many of them — out of a sense of urgency? Or do you really want to do them?" I asked. He shook his head. "I've watched other people fight to 'keep busy', and it's a futile fight. The only time hobbies do you any good is when you really want to spend time at them Not kill time." We talked for a while about these varied interests of his. Since his return to Hollywood he has made a great many things of wood: bowls, candy dishes, even tables, and says he would do more if he didn't have to go over to George Montgomery's to borrow a lathe. His connection with the local Menninger chapter consists mostly in promoting interests and funds so that a new center may be possible in Los Angeles. The clinic itself, which trains its own doctors, needs more money and a greater scope of operation. Skiing is one of his newer interests. He had water skiied since boyhood, but snow was a new experience. Otto Lang was preparing a film about skiing and wanted Dan to learn "just enough to look at home on them." Dan not only learned to ski in snow, but retaliated by teaching Lang to water-ski. He has recently become interested in baseball, too, for strangely enough, although Dan lived practically in the shadow of a big league ball park, he never cared for baseball as a boy. Then his role as Dizzy Dean in The Pride Of St. Louis turned him into an avid fan of the national sport. The freedom to go barreling off to a ball game or Sun Valley, or a horse show or a hunt, means a great deal to Dan, and One pal, "Have you ever read Stephen Crane's 'Red Badge Of Courage'?" Other pal, "No— I HATED him for what he did to Lana Turner." The Hollywood Reporter although he feels that marriage is a natural and happy way of living for a man, his recent solitude has been good for him. For some time he employed a manservant to keep his five-room apartment in order, but soon even Jess' presence bothered him. He let Jess go, not because the man wasn't capable, but because of the very fact that he was always there. Two other factors were involved: Dan was slated for several months without picture work and had every intention of utilizing his time away from home, and also he wanted to buy Early Autumn — and horses these days cost a small fortune to buy and board. "Having to keep house myself is worth it to me," Dan said. "I swing a mean dust mop anyway, and it's wonderful to be completely alone when I feel like it." He has lived in the apartment since his divorce and described it as, "early Dailey. It's an orderly cluttered sort of place, filled with things that have a particular meaning for me." Books take up a lot of the space, and only recently Dan has found time to resume his reading. Years ago he had vowed to read the One Hundred Great Books of the World, as listed by literary authorities, and went through about 35 of them before he came to the period in his life when he harnessed himself with filings he did not really want. Now once again there is a fat tome on the table by his favorite chair— Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." "Now I'm back to living just about the way I did before the war," Dan said. "All these things were part of my life and I let them go, but now that I'm alone they've come back, and I feel once more that I'm really home." It wasn't easy for him to come back. When he first returned to Hollywood he startled everyone by boarding a dating merry-go-round and keeping it up night after night until friends felt he must surely give way. It was a frantic sort of existence and one completely unnatural to Dan. It was the period in which he was searching j for the road home. "I did things I didn't like to do. I went to Hollywood parties. I even wore a tuxedo. I suppose I thought I should try this kind of life. I'd never had time for it before — I'd always had more to ! do than stand around for four hours and i make small talk. Well, I tried it and I didn't like it. Soon, out of it all, I came ; back to my old triends, my old hobbies and haunts. I feel I'm pretty lucky that I've been able to keep myself from bouncing into marriage." "What about another marriage?" I said. He spoke without hesitation. "When I marry again, it will be a girl with whom I can live my own life. I'm interested in too many things, really, and I need some J body who can keep up with me and not i take it as an affront that I should find happiness in things and places that aren't j necessarily in our home. Somebody once j referred to it as 'the sea of marriage', and that's the way I think of it. Sort of being one within ourselves, yet able to seek opposite shores." "TJan toyed with his fork for a moment. "You know, if and when I marry again, I'll feel that I'm really married for the first time. It's because I've grown up. I'm through wearing pretty girls on my arm like a bracelet. I used to criticize myself and criticize others, but by now I've evolved an honest appraisal of myself. For the first time in my life I know what I can do and what I can't do, and I know, too, what I can expect from other people. I've grown up, and I feel I'm ready for marriage now — if I find a girl who is also grown up enough to understand that we must lead our own lives. I've always wanted a big family and I still want it. There's still time." I asked him about travel. "I'd like to go to Europe mainly because I love old things," he said. "I like the feel of a piece of old oak, of old stones, of leather. There's r a solidity in old things that gives me peace I guess that's why I love horses so much. There's a security and honesty in themJli "I like the way people five their lives in Europe. They take time to live." He picked up the breadbasket on our table and flung it down again. "The waitress | here — she threw that down just like that.^ It meant nothing to her. Yet I have some,,) Rumanian friends and some Hungarian^ friends, and when I go to their homes for^ dinner and they pick up a piece of bread so, and hand it to me, they do it as though j they loved it. And they can have a bottle j. of wine that cost no more than a dollar ^ but to them when they serve it to a guest ^ it's a great and beautiful part of life, h can't get that feeling from the generation today, particularly in California. Every-, j, thing here seems as though it's ready tcjL blow away." ^ He smiled at me. "I'm talking in circlesi ot but I hope you know what I mean. Vzr^ living now with ease and freedom ancp. it's so much better than it was. I can feejjj it in my work — a lot of the strain hafj,f disappeared. I can honestly say I've neve} ^ been happier in my life." ^ I did know what he had meant. Con-jn. tentment, plus a sort of happy surprise" that he had found it, was written over his r face and sprinkled through his speech ^ Modern psychology might say that Dan J in his worship of things steeped in the^ solid past, was like many of us still yearn-. L ing for security. But I had a strong feelins j,( that he was glimpsing the peace of minG;E for which he'd been striving, that he' : -1 found what he wanted. I told myself as j g, left him that if Dan Dailey could be givei fc time to settle himself in his new-foun; JY way of living, he would truly be a hapjn man. . . . Now read how Dan almost tms his happiness — on the opposite page.