The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

STAR-TLING VIEWS "Hollywood," says James Cagney, "is a hick town with Broadway running through it." And Diana Wynyard adds, "Its marital changes are pathetic. By CHARLES DARNTON WHEN even we in this land of the free-for-all matrimonial stakes lift an occasional eyebrow at Hollywood's never-ending entries in such sportive events as airplane elopements, midnight marriages, noonday divorces, and weddings on the rebound, it is not surprising that the English attitude should be one of wide-eyed amazement. "Its rapid marital changes are pathetic, hysterical, beyond belief," declared Diana Wynyard. It was clear the British film star did not use the word "pathetic" in a slighting sense, that it came from her sympathetic understanding, her broad intelligence. "I should greatly regret to be misunderstood," added Miss Wynyard. "But to me the whole matter is pathetic because of the injustice it works. It is hysterical for the reason it grows out of a highly nervous state of affairs. It is beyond belief in the seeming composure with which it is accepted." Our talk took place at a time when newspapers were ringing with Hollywood excitements in which divorce was the hammer that clanged the bell. "It isn't that I disapprove of divorce," explained Miss Wynyard, "though I should be glad to see less of it. Nor is there anything shocking about marrying again. It's only that I don't believe in marrying casually. What {Please turn to page 56) By BARBARA ROBBINS WE were talking about Hollywood — who isn't? — when James Cagney hit it off with: "Hollywood is a hick town with Broadway running through it." Ever perplexing, it was over there on the other side of the mountain as we stood in front of a smothering First National stage out of which the violently active Jimmy had just popped. In the circumstances it seemed that nothing could be better, at any rate, for Cagney than a turn about the green, shady lot of the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. Of the same fresh-aired mind, he gave himself his walking papers. "And what else is Hollywood?" "It's an obsession," he snapped. "It 'gets' you if you don't get out of it every time you have the chance. That's what I do. But you can't really know it, understand it at all, unless you go far away and stay away for a month or two. Here you're too close to it to know what it's all about. But with the freedom of distance and the sanity of detachment you may be able to figure out its many bewildering angles." Through his eyes I began to see it as a thicket of cross-purposes, a tangle of ambitions, a web of rivalries, a snarl of jealousies. "Most of all," he hurried on, kicking a pebble out of his path, "it's the tension here that's felt. It never lets up. There's always the awful, sickening uncertainty of not knowing what tomorrow's going to bring, whether you'll be in or out. People who have made their mark in pictures get to feel they are definitely set, only to find themselves on the train going back home." "What one thing, more than any other, typifies Hollywood?" "Fear," he answered, with something more than a shrug and something less than a shudder. For, you may be sure, there's no lack of courage in the Jimmy Cagney who was yanked up by his bootstraps on New York's scrappy East Side. He had to fight for everything he got. "Get that education!" he now told me, was his importunate mother's way of getting him out of bed of a morning. And get it he did by working at one thing and another and paying his way through school and college. Among other things, he went in for high finance above the ground level of the Broad Street curb market. As he put it, bringing his lightning fingers into telegraphic play: {Please turn to page 56) 30 The New Movie Magazine, August, 1935