Modern Screen (Feb-Dec 1959)

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"Next day I went straight home from school and said, 'Now, Mom, I'm going to cook dinner and you're going to do thisand-that.' My mother got very angry. When my father came home, she told him. Then my father slapped me and he said, 'Don't you ever tell your mother what to do. Don't you ever try to pretend that you own this house or you're even part of this house!' " Runaway One night she ran off into the snow. Next day her grandfather found her, wet and shivering, and brought her back. At seventeen, she did leave home. The leaving was somehow symbolic. She burned or gave away all her possessions. She cut her hair very short. "And from that day I never again wore make-up." Diane had bizarre experiences. She lived with five old ladies in a rest home, and kept to herself and read Yoga. She married a boy and left him, got an annulment and found out later she was pregnant with his child. Arriving in Los Angeles with a girl friend ("It's so big it builds a fear in you"), she decided to stay for a while. She wrote her grandfather she wanted to take acting lessons. "So send me some money for them please. Also send me some more. Because I'm starving." She decided she'd put her baby up for adoption once it was born, but whenever she really faced the idea, "I would start screaming and yelling. I'd go for walks and pick up little pieces of paper — " Jim Dickson, the man she later married, helped her face her most pressing problems. She had her baby, kept him, married Dickson and became a movie star all in a very short time. There was Peyton Place, and then the break-up of the second marriage, followed by a reconciliation and another split, and then the part in Ten North Frederick and Diane's collapse on the set. "I just had a nervous breakdown, I guess. It wasn't a quiet little thing. I sort of blacked out for five days." Always mixed up Being oddly honest, and having a sense of humor, Diane denied that Hollywood had caused her sickness. "I didn't have to get in the movies to be mixed up. I was mixed up before I got here." She was the strangest movie star anybody'd ever seen. Nominated for an Academy Award, she took no pleasure in her triumph. "My greatest disappointment is myself," she said, and she walked along lonely beaches, weeping silently, and she read heavy books about Eastern philosophies, and she went to pick up scripts in blue jeans and her bare feet, and she said she loved spiders and bugs. As a housekeeper she left a lot to be desired too. In a nearly empty shack, furnished with the barest necessities ("I dislike owning anything") she tried to entertain, but couldn't make it. Once, when a friend said he'd like his tea iced, instead of hot, she looked stricken. Dangling two tea bags, she stood in the doorway, hopeless— "What do I do now?"— and the sight of her — all bulky sweater and long legs and little fawn's face — melted the guest into a puree of adoration and pity. She was drunk with austerity (the money she made meant nothing to her, convinced as she was that salvation depended on self-denial), and starved for culture. She wanted to learn all the poetry and music in the world. "I'll never be really happy," she said. "But there are moments — " Most of those moments came when she was with Shawn. Her son is two and a half years old now, and she's devoted to him in an almost too-concentrated way. Because of him, she worries about herself. "I'm emotionally unstable at times, and I'm afraid of that—" She's proud of his sense of rhythm, his brightness, she broods that "he doesn't behave like a child. He doesn't care at all for toys." A normal place with normal people Undoubtedly, the move to Bennington was partly on Shawn's account. Diane wanted to find a normal place with normal people where a little boy could grow up whole. And she wanted to get away from acting, which "exhausts me. I'm sometimes so tired from it that I literally cannot move a muscle." Strangely, the last acting Diane did (on TV, for Playhouse 90) dealt with a shy young mother who skyrocketed to Hollywood stardom, and who was thereby made miserable, and who ultimately ditched her career. Diane identified very strongly with the girl in the script, so strongly that the director was afraid she might not even appear on the night of the show. She appeared, and she got through the thing, but she hasn't acted since, and she says she never will again. Producer Jerry Wald thinks he understands the reasons. "Her sensitivity was such that she couldn't put up with the traveling companions to success: maliciousness, deceit, slander and jealousy. She had no father, mother or husband. I think it was just too much to ask a young girl to assume such a responsibility with no one to lean on. Then there were the business problems: 10% here and 10% there, and her salary wasn't that great. You can get tired of people and the hitch-hikers who take bites of you. She has more strength of character than you'd think. It takes more courage to do what she's doing than to hang on." In Bennington, Vermont, a tired girl, tired from twenty-two years of running, has come to a place where she wants to stop. She wants to make a home for her child, the home she herself never had. She wants to read, and play her guitar, and sing little songs, and stare across a hundred hills, and find the self she lost somewhere, way back in the beginning. Again the words of the Tennessee Williams' character seem to fit here: "I can sit quietly looking for a long, long time in absolute silence, and possibly, still possibly — the old pure music will come to me again. Of course on the other hand I may hear only the little noise of insects in the grass. ..." To Diane, the little noise of insects in the grass might sound as sweet as the pure music of her heart. We hope, whatever she's looking for, she finds it, in a brand-new world where fairies live to eat cheese, and love is possible. . . . END