Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

Reported a newspaper columnist of their trip: The start of the Susan Peters-Richard Quine honeymoon was like something out of a movie farce. Three quarters of the way to Santa Barbara they ran out of gas and had to walk two miles to a service station. Then, back in the car, they were stopped on the road by crews fighting a fire. They talked their way through this, but didn't reach their hotel until 5:00 a.m. Some way to begin a honeymoon, I must say. Actually, despite its beginnings, it was a beautiful honeymoon. It lasted for ten days. And when it was over Dick reported back to his ship, while Susan returned to MGM to begin work on The Song of Russia, in which she co-starred with Robert Taylor. During the making of the picture people on the set noted her extra-radiance, her undeniable happiness. "Marvelous," they'd say to her, "the way you can be so happy with your husband so far away." To which Susan would answer, "I'm happy just thinking about the future, about a few years from now when the war will be over and he'll be back with me . . for good." No one — not she, nor any of the others — had any way of knowing then that Dick would be back much sooner than expected. That tragedy, sudden and violent, would see to that. . . . Young Kim starts a hope chest Marilyn Novak's aunt — the secretaryphoned her this Christmas day of 1944. "I'm glad you like it," she said, referring to the chiffon scarf she'd sent to her niece. "Of course you're only eleven-going-ontwelve, and lavender's a pretty grown-up color, but — " she added, laughing, " — maybe for now you can tuck it away in your hope chest and save it for the big event." Her niece asked her what a hope chest was. "A wooden box, usually, sweetheart," said the aunt, "where a girl keeps lots of stuff, clothes and bedding and things like that, for when she gets married." "Oh, I see," said Marilyn, somewhat disinterestedly. "I know, sure," said the aunt, laughing again, "it must seem like a faraway day right now, mustn't it? But a nice girl like you, sweetheart, a girl who gets prettierlooking every time I see her, come seven or eight years from now and you'll be surprised how fast some fellow, some wonderful fellow with a good job and a good heart, is gonna come find you and nab you and carry you off to the church so you can say 'I do' to him . . . You'll be reaZ surprised at how soon it's all gonna come. . . ." A little while later, alone in the room she shared with Arlene, Marilyn Novak, eleven years old, going on twelve, finished emptying the wooden toy box which had sat all these years against the wall, between the two windows. And, carefully, she placed the lavender scarf inside it. Then, hesitantly, she began to wonder about what her aunt had said. . . . Tragedy, sudden and violent It was exactly a week later, New Year's Day, 1945. Dick Quine was home on holiday leave. He, Susan — his wife of slightly more than a year by now, his brother and his brother's wife were hunting duck in the Cuyamaca Mountains, down near San Diego. Of the four, Susan, practically a novice at all this, was having the best day of all — she'd bagged a half-dozen birds within the first hour of shooting; Dick's brother the worst — he'd misplaced his gun at one point, thought it lost, goodnaturedly but disappointedly joined the 82 others as they continued with their hunt. It was about 5:00 p.m., some seven hours after they'd started, when the four decided they'd had enough and began to head back to their car. As they walked, Susan teased her brother-in-law about losing his gun. "Talk about butter-fingers — " she said. "Big boy like you losing a gun like that — " "You're so smart," somebody said, laughingly, "why don't you find it?" "Okay," said Susan, "I will." She did, too, about ten minutes later. It lay under a bush, at a spot where they'd stopped earlier in the day for a few minutes' break and a cigarette — where she'd had a hunch all along it might be. "Hey," she called out to the others now, spotting it, "here she is!" She could hear the others call something back, then heard one of them — Dick, probably— as he began to make his way through the foliage, towards her. Susan began to whistle. She bent to pick up the gun. Somehow, as she lifted it, she jarred the trigger. The gun went off. A bullet ripped through her side. She dropped to her knees. She was still conscious, still holding the gun, when, moments later, Dick came rushing over to her. His first reaction was one of relief. He smiled. "Susie," he said, "I thought I heard the damn thing go off. I thought — " But then he stopped. And he looked from her face, down to her side. And he saw the blood beginning to rush through the brown leather of her jacket. He caught her in his arms just as she began to fall back. . . . The bullet had lodged in Susan's spine. Three delicate operations in the course of the next few months proved futile. "Your wife will live," a doctor told Dick, "but there's nothing that can be done about the paralysis. She'll be paralyzed from the waist down, for the rest of her life. . . ." "No weeping around here . . ." It's hard to know who, in the three years that followed, was the more gallant, brave, of the two — Susan, in her wheelchair, or Dick, since transferred to a Coast Guard film unit in Hollywood, practically constantly at her side. Certainly, at the beginning at least, both seemed brave. In August, her first week home from the hospital, Susan told an interviewer: "We're going to pick up exactly where we left off. There'll be no weeping around here, no tears, no sir. In fact, we're making plans about my doing picture work again — MGM's been great to me, I want everybody to know that, just great. And Dick will be out of the service soon what with the war practically over now, and he'll be coming back to make pictures, too. And Dick and I have talked about how we're going to adopt a little baby boy as soon as we can. And Dick's already planning a new house for us — or else we might overhaul this place; but he's got something in mind with ramps and things instead of all these steps, so I can get around more easily in this doggoned chair I'm stuck to. "Dick," she went on, "Dick's been wonderful. He does everything for me. He's better than any nurse I ever had. Why. when I left the hospital, they were going to give him a cap. You know, before I was hurt the thought or sight of blood made him ill. Yet he was in the room the first time the doctor opened my bed sore; the doctor went to work and Dick helped him . . . helped him." She smiled. "No," she said, "there's going to be nothing wrong with the Quines, not with us. In fact, life is going to be better than ever for us. You just watch, and wait, and see." That was Susan talking, in 1945, at the beginning. "A Susan," as someone has said, "who still believed, somewhere way in the back of her mind, that something miraculous would happen soon and that she would, despite what any doctors said, be able to walk again. A Susan who, despite her outward laughter, smiles, was miserable inside herself. A girl who dreaded two things — being confined forever to this wheelchair she joked about; and tying down her husband, the man she loved, to a life of boredom, of slavery, of unfulfillment, of nothingness. "Those of us who really knew Susan, know why she suddenly asked Dick for a divorce that day in 1948. After three years, she realized that there would never be any improvement in her condition. That she was a broken woman. Doomed. "That Dick was doomed, too. "She didn't want it to be this way, not for both of them. "She wanted Dick to be free. "She never told him why she asked for the divorce. She just made up her mind and one day, putting on the greatest performance of her life, she asked him to leave the house. "He begged her to reconsider. "She refused. " 'Please go,' she said. "And, finally, he did. "There was no sadder, more lonely, more heartbroken man than Dick Quine after that— for a long, long time after that. . . ." Kim heads west It was July in Chicago— July of 1952— and Marilyn Novak, nineteen now, knew that she must leave. The decision came upon her suddenly. She was out with her fiance, a young electrician named Bill. They'd been to the movies and they were walking home when Marilyn said: "It's no good, everything that's been happening — not really." "What?" Bill asked. "Us," she said, "planning to get married like this, when we hardly know each other . . . Even though we've been going together for two years now — hardly knowing each other . . . hardly knowing what love is." He turned to look at her. "Huh?" he asked. "And me," she went on, "enrolling in that secretarial school, when the last thing on earth I really want to be any more is to be a secretary." "What are you talking about?" he asked. "I'm going away," she said, " — that's what I'm talking about." He stared at her. "The heat got you or something?" he asked. "I don't know what's got me," she said. Bill cleared his throat. "You didn't," he said, "you didn't let that guy, what he said, go to your head, did you?" "Guy?" she asked. "The guy who told you he wants you for a model, for that refrigerator company." Marilyn Novak nodded. And smiled. " And travel,' he said. 'Leave Chicago for a while and come to California, the great Far West, to San Francisco, Los Angeles. Hollywood — ' he said." "Is that what it is," Bill asked, "that you really want to do that?" "Partly." she said. "And what's the rest of the partly?" he asked. "I don't know. Not for sure," she said. She stopped walking. She faced him. "I'm sorry, Billy," she said. "I feel like that girl in the second feature tonight, that bad girl, when she told that fellow off and left him . . . But I know now, it's the way it's got to be."