Movieland. (1945)

He, too, was far from the top of the ladder that was these days to find his secretaries sending out twenty-thousand fan photographs a week, that was to bring out seventyfive hundred jitterbug addicts at eight a. m. before the doors of New York’s Paramount Theater the day he opened there, that was to find him drawing down five thousand dollars per week on the radio and netting a cool half million in 1942 as the Dream Prince of the Rug Cutters. In fact, when Betty and Harry were first introduced, he was in somebody else’s band, just an ex¬ ceptionally good trumpet player who was beginning to get the idea that the swing addicts could be weaned to something less hectic in music. (How right he was is proved by the sale of his records — over a million copies each of the sentimen¬ tal “You Made Me Love You,” “I Don’t Want To Walk Without You, Baby,” and “I Had the Craziest Dream.”) But the serious, reserved, tall young man wasn’t making a dent wits his ideas then. Betty, still in her teens, was one of his “public.” She still is. That is what makes them so perfect to¬ gether. On her recent trip to New York to see him, sought after by dozens of important men, by night club proprietors, by Broadway pro¬ ducers, she spent her entire vacation on the Astor Roof, watching and listening to Harry like his widest eyed fan. Let it be said here that Betty hon¬ estly doesn’t realize her own impor¬ tance. She’s humble enough to re¬ gard herself as “luck.” She doesn’t see why people run after her or why there are such great demands on her time. She is, therefore, as im¬ pressed with James’ being in love with her as a small town girl might be. She hasn’t yet considered that Harry is undoubtedly more im¬ pressed with her being in love with him. Even back in those dark days in Chicago, Harry could set Betty’s educated toes to tapping and start her to humming under her breath. She thought Harry was wonderful the way more mature fans were thinking Clark Gable was wonder¬ ful. Harry regarded Betty as a cute kid and a nice youngster, but that’s as far as it went. Several years later he met and married Mary Louise Tobin, a pretty little singer with Benny Goodman’s band. Meanwhile, Betty clicked on Broadway and had come back to Hollywood, which had awakened to the fact that she was much more than a cute blonde. In three short years she zoomed to the top . . . and then there was George Raft in her life. Much has been written about the Raft-Grable romance and parting. It doesn’t need review here. Betty was grateful to George for his thoughtfulness and his considera¬ tion. She wanted to be in love with him. At one time she certainly would have married him if he had been free. Despite her dizzy ap¬ pearance, Betty is no flirt. She is as different from Lana Turner’s un¬ certain temperament, for instance, as love is from hate. During the three years Betty went with George Raft, she never looked at another man romantically — that is, not until the day when Harry James strolled casually back into her life, when he was imported with his band to fit into the new Grable picture, “Springtime in the Rockies.” By this time, jive was burning up the theaters and ballrooms of the country. Exhibitors were crying for hot name bands on the marquees. And young American jive hounds were wildly going James mad. During the making of “Spring¬ time in the Rockies,” the James marriage was beginning to hit the rocks. Harry and his singer wife separated, reconciled, separated again. The hopeless tangle of George Raft’s marital status was beginning to get Betty down. They were quarreling, making up, quar¬ reling again. Betty and Harry found themselves reminiscing like a couple of old friends. They talked records and music and careers. They made those wonderful discoveries about personal tastes in common that people always discover when they are falling in love. But I do not honestly believe they then knew they were falling in love. When the picture was over, they went their separate paths. But this time they didn’t, or couldn’t, forget one another. James started playing a sensa¬ tionally successful engagement at the Palladium in Hollywood. Betty was still being seen with George. But for the first time it was noted that Betty was having dancing dates with men other than Raft . . . and always, it seemed, at the Palladium. One night, for the fun of it, and also for the cash customer value, the management announced a jitterbug contest to be run off between swing band maestros, themselves, and their partners . . . and who should win it but Betty and Harry James? That was the first linking of their names together . . . but far from the last. When Betty finally broke with Raft, there were few Hollywood “insiders” who did not believe it was because she knew that she had fallen in love with Harry James. But once again Betty’s good sense kept her from going overboard. Harry left for a New York engage¬ ment. Then one morning Louise James talked to Los Angeles news¬ paper men and said that she was planning to file a divorce suit against Harry soon. The first thing Harry did when he got that news was to put in a long distance call to Betty in Hollywood. The first thing Betty did was to catch a train to the big town to see him. The weather was hotter than the proverbial hinges all the time she was there, but every night the most famous James fan of them all sat quietly at a little Astor Roof table, one as close to the bandstand as any table could be placed, and waited till Harry finished his work. During the day, while he had to sleep, eat, rehearse, catch up on the thousands of details of his band which is now “big business,” Betty sat in a hot hotel room playing his records over and over, singing with them and to them. Make no mistake about it — Betty is deeply in love and now the whole world knows with whom. She says, “I have never been in love like this before. I have thought I knew what love was . . . but it hasn’t been like this. When I met and married Jackie, we were both kids, too young to know our own minds or hearts. I never want to say anything that will hurt George Raft. I will always be deeply fond of him. But now I want to be mar¬ ried forever, to have my own home and children, at least two of them. If that means giving up my career, why okay. Maybe the way you know love is real is when you re¬ alize that nothing in life is impor¬ tant to you except preserving that love and making it more perfect and everlasting.” Thus on the morning of July Fifth in Las Vegas, Betty and Harry pledged their love. There being no escape, they posed for the waiting photographers, signed the auto¬ graph books, hastily sipped the champagne that had been iced. Outside, the car was waiting to take them back to Beverly Hills, via another slow train, back to the house that Harry has rented for Betty. Betty has turned her Bel-Air estate over to her mother. When the war is over, the James will see about building, will see what they can do to arrange their individual careers so that they will not have to be separated. They know now that they must part soon, when Harry goes into the army in Octo¬ ber. That is one reason why, right now, they are jealous of every mo¬ ment. They have so few of them in which to be together. The dawn was just breaking as their car disappeared down the lonely desert road. It looked like the beginning of a beautiful day. It looked like the dawn of a wonderful life for Harry and Betty. The End 22