The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

•* * • *• MY first impression, meeting Ann Harding for the first time, was that she was a living Statue of Liberty. And, curiously, it persisted throughout our revealing talk. Not that Miss Harding loomed like a torchbearing graven image with her head in the sky. Far from it! She was definitely and humanly down to earth. Yet there was something, perhaps her classic ashen hair or the white sweep of her fine brow, that recalled the reigning goddess of New York Harbor. Somehow, the same free spirit seemed to shine through her clear eyes with the light that lasts. Her flashing smile soon put me at ease. Frankly, I had felt a bit uncomfortable, having heard she had not given a magazine interview in three years and suspecting, reasonably enough, that she might loathe all interviewers. "Not at all," she protested. "It was simply that I felt I wasn't any good at that sort of thing. I'd try desperately to say things that meant something, then read that I was a good wife and loving mother. Gratifying as it was to learn I possessed those highly commendable domestic virtues, I doubted any possible absorbing public interest in the revelation, so finally decided I couldn't be sure of myself in print." Of one thing you may be sure: Ann Harding is exactly what you'd expect her to be from seeing her on the screen — direct, sincere, understanding. Realizing as much, I wondered whether she felt that in her film characterizations she could always be true to herself. "I'm afraid there are times when that isn't quite possible," reflected Miss Harding, "but I always try to be true to myself. And now that you speak of it, the same question came up when I was offered my first important Broadway part in 'The Trial of Mary Dugan.' I told the producer, Al Woods, 'I'm not 6 JUST LET ME ACT! For the first time Ann Harding explains her three-year silence. Rudeness and silliness hurt this woman whose motto is, "To thine own self be true " Left: Ann's eyes, this author says, shine with the light that lasts. Below: As you saw her in character in "The Biography of a Bachelor Girl." Clarence Sinclair Bill. By CHARLES DARNTON a tart.' 'I know you're not, sweetheart,' he agreed, 'and that's why I want you for Mary. You'll keep the audience guessing and that'll keep up the suspense.' I suppose that was good showmanship, but it wasn't me." "Do you think that makes any difference with an audience?" I asked. "No, not when you're on the stage, but it certainly does when you're on the screen," she declared with all the emphasis that is in her. "In this medium your audience identifies you completely and unreservedly with the character you play, does it with child-like conviction. People who go to pictures go with their minds all made up about you, and if you fail them in their idea of you, in what you represent to them, they'll never trust you, never believe in you again. It's like having a friend who suddenly turns out to be a thief. That's not a very good illustration, but it may serve to show my point. If you do anything in pictures to shake the faith of your audience in you, do anything before its eyes that changes you from the person it has imagined you to be into an entirely different person, it will have nothing more to do with you." Shut in though we were, away from everybody in the portable dressing-room Miss Harding was using in the making of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture, "Biography of a Bachelor Girl," that great, unseen, unknown, uncertain audience seemed very near, likewise so exacting as to leave her little if any choice of her own. "I don't mind that," she was quick to say. "After all, an audience has a right, indeed the supreme right, to its likes and dislikes. This has been, is, and always will be true. But there is one thing I do mind, and that's loss of privacy. That is too great a price to pay for my work, even though I love it, making life a nightmare for me outside my own four walls. When I came out here I thought it would be marvelous, getting away from audiences, escaping crowds, avoiding noise, and just working in a studio, living in a house, and enjoying country quiet. I was very naive." Her most becoming wide-brimmed hat blew off in a breeze of laughter, then she went on, earnestly: "Something ought to be done about these autograph hunters, for instance. It's by no means confined to Hollywood," she sighed. "I found that out when I went on an airplane trip to Cuba. I'd been working hard and felt the need of a rest. But did I get one? I did not. Jumping out of the fryingpan into the fire would have been light exercise compared with that gruelling experience. It began right here, when four of us boarded the plane, and it went from bad to worse. From one airport to another where we stopped for fueling the waiting crowd grew bigger and bigger, until we seemed to be in the horrendous glare of a monstrous spotlight drawing millions of moths. At last I (Please turn to page 59) The New Movie Magazine, March, 1935