Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

HOLLYWOOD Sob -Stories Hidden Away, Edwina Booth Still Is Haunted By The Horrors She Saw By DOROTHY CALHOUN HERE is a girl who is haunted. She looks out of the window of the small commonplace bungalow in Culver City and sees, instead of oil-derricks and sub-division signs, strange tortured trees writhing against a sky of brazen blue. And suddenly she shudders. "I can't explain — " she says, " — but nothing was sane looking. Even the trees looked different — crazy. Tall naked trunks with a flat tuft of leaves on top — trees shouldn't look like that." It is five months since Edwina Booth left Africa. Five months in which she has been struggling to get back to every-day life, five months in which she has been trying to forget glossy jungle leaves, a grey sun that strikes one down like a sharp blow, dark skins and painted animals and nightmare trees. . . In these five months, all sorts of fantastic rumors have floated around Hollywood about this slim golden-haired girl, chosen to play the White Goddess in "Trader Horn " on five days' notice. Unknown before she set out on the African safari, she is still to be seen on the screen. In the slow weeks while her youth battled with the fever brought back from the jungle, M-G-M has held up the picture, waiting for her recovery. In a Haunted House BUT while Edwina was hidden away in a beach cottage from friends who talked too much, and reporters who made her talk too much, with a nurse and doctor to care for her, whispers went around. One tabloid printed the report that the "goddess girl" of "Trader Horn" was suffering from some malignant tropic germ thai would be fatal in a few months. Another rumor {Continued on page 84) C. S. Bull Then and now: above, healthy and robust Edwina Booth before she saw Africa; at left, the thin, wasted girl, bareheaded under the tropic sun, who played the White Goddess — with one of her cannibal companions 29