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IS MY PAL
By FREDRIC MARCH
Some time ago we printed a story
about Fredric March, by Ralph Bellamy.
Here's where Freddie gets even
IF I were going to be isolated for six months in some spot at the end of the world and I was given the privilege of having only one male friend on this retreat, I'd choose Ralph Bellamy as the perfect companion ... for the rich conversations, the mastery of emergencies, the sense of humor and the merciful silences he would bring to such an experiment.
On the other hand if some lofty-browed scientist could successfully throw me back to my college days and years and send me on a jaunt to .Paris with a pocketful of money and a bucket of red paint I'd still pick Ralph as the ultra-streamlined ideal companion in whoopee!
For four years we have been the best of friends (our wives are friends from stage days) and we are as inseparable as studio callboards will permit. In that time I've seen Ralph the center of various and varied settings . . . discussing Russian literature with the literati . . . smashing out a victory on a tennis court . . . losing a rubber at bridge with as much sportsmanship as he won the previous one . . . delving into international politics with some visiting dignitary . ... rolling a mean pair of dice on a Caliente gambling table . . . spending hours
alone on the sand at Laguna Beach ... or rallying the craziest members to play the craziest game at a
At the left, in the small insert, there's a portrait of Freddie, and at the right is one of Ralph. Below you see Ralph answering his fan mail. As Freddie tells you in this story, he answers all of it personally.
party. . . but I have never seen him out of sympathy with the event of the moment.
His adaptability is a gift that makes it possible for him to get the greatest benefit, either intellectual or just plain pleasure, out of everything he does.
I am constantly amazed at the wide circle of friends he has. On every hand I bump into people who know Ralph and the group ranges from music reviewers to the kids at the corner gasoline stations. All children including my own are wild about him. ... If his even disposition permits him any particular aversion it is for the man or woman who is easily bored . . . or pretends to be. Life is interesting and vivid to Ralph and his own sense of adventure and thirst for knowledge makes him impatient with people who do not get the utmost out of every available experience.
Though we have known each other only since our Hollywood days I have picked up enough of his background to realize this unquenchable zest for life must have begun in his youth. He is seven years younger than I, a mere stripling of twenty-eight, yet I find myself envying his background, the store of experience he has piled up.
He has done everything I should have liked to do. When he was a kid he ran away from home. . . . He's played in stock companies and tent shows acting one week and painting scenery the next. He's been broke and affluent . . . hungry . . . struggling in bit parts, recognized on Broadway and a success in Hollywood, but it has all been just so much adventure to him, the lean with the fat, the good with the bad. (Please turn to page 46)
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