Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

A Blonde Old Fashioned? (panette as her great-grandma in ante helium days B y GLAD Y S HALL |j TEANETTE LOFF is an old-fash I I ioned girl. Ill don't care what you sav — she is an old^ fashioned girl. She hrings to mind lavender and old lace, the scenr >f mignonette, the sense of a fair young thing playing the spinet, the harp or the melodeon at twilight in a dim room opening to a faint rising moon, the picture of a young mother handling talcum powder and rose-leaf skin and woolly shirts. There is something grave and quiet ahout her. A bit of Nordic sternness in the profile and the definite modeling of cheek and chin, in the sweep of the pale gold hair. Jeanette thinks about souls and things. When she was a very little girl, up in Saskatchewan, she wanted to play the violin, [because, she says, she knew that the violin had a soul. Her father, Danish, and a violinist, refused her permission to play his instrument. She is left-handed, and it offended him to watch her handling of the how. What She Played Then SHE thought of the piano, but the piano hasn't a soul. And then, the organ — the organ has a vasty, tumultuous, deep and velvet soul. She decided on the organ. Everyone knows that she played the mstrument at leading movie houses in Portland, Oregon. She improvised for everyone from Mary Pickford to Clara Bow. And she used to stay in the theater long after the fan-hungry crowds had streamed out. She would sit alone for long, dark and solitary hours, because she hated to leave the organ and the music she brought from it. Alone with her music and, probably, with her soul. Her "crush" was Pola Negri, in those days. They say, wisely, no doubt, that opposites attract. I believe it must stop at attraction. 1 cannot picture Jeanette and Pola Jeanette as her grandaunt of covered wagon days If You Don't Think It's Possible, Look At Jeanette Loff remaining long on any common ground. She never dreamed of being a movie actress herself. She thought there were so many beautiful girls in Hollywood. She didn't see why she should have any particular chance. It took the concerted efforts of other people to give her the idea and the impetus to do something about it. Fashioning Her Life JEANETTE is an old-fashioned girl. The circumstances of her life notwithstanding. I know that she has been married and is married no longer. I know that she is a movie actress and, odsbodkins, a blonde one, to boot. I know that she lives in an apartment, alone, and doesn't take her mother to the studio with her. People say that "she sacrificed her husband to her career." It may be that her husband sacrificed a wife to a career. Perhaps if he hadn't been eager for her to come to Hollywood to try her luck, perhaps if he had refused his "consent" to her trying for the screen — well, perhaps we should never have seen Jeanette in the exquisite Bridal Veil sequence of Paul Whiteman's " King of Jazz." All things work for the common good, say the professorial Pollyannas. But I believe we should have seen Jeanette, or heard from her, in something, in some way. She was always used to women doing things. Her mother was a professional designer. Her sister studied something or other. Their household hummed with music and sketches and the creative impulse. Marriage, a small apartment, tea at the leading hotel, bridge and tennis and country clubs would never completely satisfy the girl who hadn't found the proper food for her capabilities, the proper setting for her beauty or (who knows ?) the resting place for her heart . {Continued on page gg) 41