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RALPH BELLAMY tells on
FREDRIC MARCH
Sometimes your best friend does tell, and Ralph says Fredric March is an incurable clown
By RALPH BELLAMY
Editor's Note: Few persons could be so well qualified to present an intimate picture of Fredric March as Ralph Bellamy. The two families are Hollywood's most popular social foursomes, and their close association enables Ralph Bellamy to reveal the unknown Freddie March whom we should all like to know.
SERIOUS as he appears on the screen, the Freddie March I know is a born comedian. Sometimes I suspect he is possessed of an imp, for the way he gets into mischief is little short of diabolical.
But try to put your finger on his humor, and it eludes you. He makes fun on the spur of the moment, and will seize upon an opportunity to pun, with the most excruciating results. At certain times he will go on a veritable punning spree that is positively fiendish if not devastating.
The practical joke is not for Freddie. That style of humor is premeditated, and Freddie March never bothers to arrange a laugh. His penchant for funmaking crops out as soon as he gets off the set. When the director sees a wicked gleam coming into Freddie's snapping eyes, he may as well sit back and wait until March gets the mirth out of his system, for his is the kind of puckish, whimsical humor that will bubble over when you least expect it.
One night the four of us — my wife Catherine, Florence Eldridge, Freddie and myself — decided to attend a Shakespeare play. Freddie and I had both trod the boards in the Bard's dramas, and we hankered to hear the sonorous lines again.
Unfortunately the performance was so poor as to send us all into utter boredom. And that is one thing that Freddie can't endure. He and I began to fidget and squirm, and finally began a low but heated argument over nothing at all.
Two very fat female devotees of the theater kept turning around and glaring balefully at us, but Freddie was in no mood for behaving himself when Shakespeare was being done to death behind the footlights.
This went on for some time, with the ladies in front shushing and glaring back alternately. Finally, during an important hush on the stage, the fat lady in front of Freddie sneezed.
Freddie leaned forward, outraged and dignified, and tapped her on the shoulder.
"Quiet, please!" he said in a tone of great annoyance.
The irrepressible Freddie used to be a
Kenneth Alexander
Left: Fredric March in his costume for "We Live Again," in which, as the young Russian nobleman, he lets himself be exiled to Siberia for love of Anna Sten, who reformed him.
Right: Fredric with his wife, who is known on the stage as Florence Eldridge.
Cosmo Sileo
22
The New Movie Magazine, February, 1935