Motion Picture (Feb-Jul 1941)

Prom the Private Diary of Gloria N «** 3\n for tonight. Broke a date «**"» '{ to. t feel ?he «ay ny heat^yr Guess I need llte seeing snybod £ g one. a laxative, tut * are _ /^r" ifl\ •^•mlly all night. Ex"L!^ Slept wonderfully «"■ No up8ets forked fine thl< ' "^f J. gone or anything, "^e me tonlght. too. Sure hope Jin can The action of Ex-Lax is thorough, yet gentle! No shock. No strain. No weakening after-effects. Just an easy, comfortable bowel movement that brings blessed relief. Try Ex-Lax next time you need a laxative. It's good for every member of the family. W and 251 Old Enough To Know What She Wants {Continued from page 35] for example, my contract specified certain types of roles for me — and I didn't even dream of having it revised. It seemed like a pretty good contract to me. But one day the Front Office called me in and said they were tearing it up and giving me a new one, hecause they had 'a little older' roles in mind for me, beginning with Little Nellie Kelly. 'You're eighteen now,' they said. So suddenly, my roles started being different — even though / didn't feel any different from how 1 had felt at seventeen or even sixteen. "And Mother is letting me take over more and more business details. Like keeping my appointments straight, myself, and talking to agents and people myself. I used to depend on her to do everything. Now I feel as if I'm taking a little of the responsibility. Which is a good thing. "She still takes care of the financial things," Judy continued, "but she's teaching me how, by degrees. Only sometimes I think she must get pretty discouraged. As a business manager, I'm as bad as she is good. I'm not extravagant. I don't throw money away. But I have an awful habit of not writing the amount on the check-stub when I write a check. I can't be trusted to knowhow much I have in the bank." She smiled a self-chiding smile. "Though I can be trusted to drive a car by myself now," she added in self-defense. Perhaps you have visions of Judy blithely tearing around the countryside in a sporty red roadster with the top down. Kindly disillusion yourself. She drives a sedan, if you please. And not because she can transport more of "the gang" at one time in a sedan, but because she feels safer, driving a heavy car. Which is good proof of Judy's sanity. SHE denied having any ideas about taking up flying — which has become the great Hollywood urge. (It has supplanted ranching.) "I don't like flying," she said. "The thought of flying frightens me. Any form of transportation frightens me. The thought of trusting your life to machinery. It's almost a phobia. Maybe it is a phobia. I can't bear to go in an engine room. All that pounding machinery seems like a bunch of ominous monsters. "When I'm on a train, I get to thinking about that one man up front, making everything go. What if he went crazy, all of a sudden, and decided to wreck the train — because things were so monotonous? And I've always been afraid of boats. I keep having a recurring dream about a boat. "Did you ever have the same dream, time after time? This one is awful. I'm on the deck of a boat that's being launched, and everybody's standing at attention, and people are cheering and waving flags. A woman breaks a bottle of champagne on the bow of the boat, christening it, and it starts sliding down the ways. Only when it hits the water, it keeps on sliding down. I look around to see what everybody else is doing — and everybody else is still standing at attention, as if nothing is happening. I want to scream and I can't. The water comes over our ankles, then it's up to our waists — finally it's up to our necks. That's when I wake up. At least, so far, I have." She shuddered. "Let's change the subject." She was willing to confess that she had become clothes-conscious, and that that was another proof that she was beginning to grow up. "Adrian has come into my life," she quipped. (He designed her wardrobe for Ziegfeld Girl.) "But I was clothesconscious before that happened," she said, more seriously. "Though not long before. A year or so ago, I didn't give much thought to what I wore. One thing seemed as good as another, so long as it was decent. I'd wear a sweater and skirt with a fur coat. Then one day I went shopping and I saw a couple of smart things and — I just became conscious of the right ensemble. I guess that happens to every girl, when she reaches a certain age. Usually about the time she finishes school." JUDY finished school last June. "Thai's a big change in my life," she said, " — not having to combine school work and screen work. Though after about a year's rest from text-books, I'd like to start taking some college courses in the arts. There are some things I want to know that I can't learn any other way." Singing lessons, however, still aren't anywhere on the schedule. "I've never had any, and now I'm afraid to take any. They might change my luck. And speaking of being afraid, maybe you think I wasn't scared this last year when I had to have my tonsils out. I was never so frightened in my life. The doctors couldn't guarantee that my voice would be the same afterward. It was more or less a gamble. But I had to have those tonsils out — they were poisoning my whole system. And the operation did change my voice. Only it helped. I can hit lower notes now, and higher notes." But that hasn't changed her vocal ambitions. She's still swearing allegiance to songs with a hot beat — because they've done all right by her so far. Not because life is simpler, singing hot songs. If anything, it's more complicated. Judy told us about that "Minnie From Trinidad" number in Ziegfeld Girl, by way of illustration. "Busby Berkeley shot two choruses of that number in one long take. I started singing at the top of some steps, and had to walk down them, singing— without looking at the steps — and then, at the bottom, count thirteen, take two steps forward, then turn and weave in and out of lines of people, and reach a certain spot on a certain note, without being able to look down and see if I had hit the mark, then count eight, turn, take a certain number of steps and count five more. And singing all the time. You get galloping hysterics after about eight hours of that." On days like that, or on any other days, did she ever think she'd like to give it all up? "No, it's in my blood," she said. "I don't want to quit for a long time yet. I mean, I hope it's going to be a long time before I start slipping — because I want to quit just before that happens. And even then I'll probably keep on working on the radio and the stage." But not night-clubs. It may be news to you, if you've been following the gossip columns, but Judy doesn't like night-clubs. "It's a funny thing," she said. "When I wasn't old enough to go to them, I thought that when I was old enough, I'd go every other night. But now that I am old enough, I go about once every three or four weeks. People think I go oftener because, every time I do go to one, it's printed about twenty different times. In most night-clubs, there's nothing to do but sit and talk and drink— and I don't drink and it's hard to talk, because of the noise. Even in the places where there's room to dance, there isn't enough room. "So going to night-clubs seems like an awful waste of time. Unless it's to see some special entertainer or hear some special orchestra. I don't have to leave home to talk 56