The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

WARREN WILLIAM PREFERS NATURAL LIPS UNUSUAL TEST SHOWS *■$?'. HERE'S WHAT WARREN WILLIAM SAW UNTOUCHED PAINTED And then he found out he had picked the Girl with Tangee Lips • Even Warren • Warren William playing William, debonair jj "Th?,Cas*of !hf; c»"ous. Bride", a First National actor who usually picture, makes lipstick test. plays wise, witty roles, prefers girls with naturally rosy lips. He decidedly does not like that "painted look". We found him at Warner Brothers Studios. With us were three girls. One used no lipstick; one had her usual lipstick on, and the third used Tangee. "Which lips, Mr. William, appeal to you most?" we asked him. He pointed out one girl . . . said, "Her lips are most appealing. They're so natural-looking." Warren William picked the girl with Tangee lips. Tangee's magic color change principle gives your lips natural color. Makes them soft and kissable. Tangee brings out the natural rose in your lips. It never makes you look painted. For the simple reason that it isn't paint. For those who require more color, especially for evening use, there is Tangee Theatrical. Try Tangee. It comes in two sizes, 39c and $1.10. Or, for a quick trial, send 10c for the special 4-piece Miracle Make-Up Set offered below. World's Most famous Lipstick ENDS THAT PAINTED LOOK USE TANGEE CREME ROUGE WATERPROOF! ITS NATURAL BLUSH-ROSE COLOR NEVER FADES OR STREAKS EVEN IN SWIMMING * 4-PIECE MIRACLE MAKE-UP SET THE GEORGE W. LUFT COMPANY TG85 417 Fifth Avenue, New York City Rush Miracle Make-Up Set of miniature Tangee Lipstick, RougeCompact.CremeRouge.FacePowder. I enclose 10* (stamps or coin). 15* in Canada. Shade □ Flesh □ Rachel □ Light Rachel Name AddressCity State. Two Star-tling People was tall and dark and he persuaded Henry King, who was going to direct "One More Spring," to give him a test for the part Sheehan was even then steeple-chasing abroad about. It took a lot of persuasion, too. "Do you play the violin?" the director wanted to know. Of course, all violinists in pictures play violins — such a thing as dubbing has never been heard of. "Well, not exactly," Walter admitted, "but I know how to bow one." And he did — by the next morning when the test was made. Walter left off his whiskers and the director liked him in the characterization sufficiently well to give him a crack at it in the picture. When the picture was finished and run off in the projection room the director turned to Walter. "They're going to change your name, you know," he said, "and I'd like you to take my name instead of your own. Walter King should make a good name for an actor. It didn't matter to the studio moguls that Walter Woolf was a name already pretty well known on the New York musical stage where the debutantes thought his voice divine in such productions as "The Passing Show," "The Last Waltz," "Lady in Ermine," "Countess Maritza," Victor Herbert's "Dream Girl," "The Red Rogue" and a revival of "Floradora." The name with which he had already won this success was discarded as easily as the title of a hit play or a best-selling novel when it's made into a film. Walter didn't mind — much. He knew that Henry King was paying him a tremendously flattering Hollywood compliment by offering him his own name. "There were quite a few mix-ups at first, though," he said. "You see, it's a bit hard to get used to a new name when you've had the old one so long. For instance, at the house we'd always pick the wrong one. People would call up and want Mr. King, and we'd tell them they had the wrong number; then, when some of our friends would call for the Woolfs, the cook would say that Mr. King lived there, and so on. Pretty soon we got to calling it Woolf King or King Woolf, and that just didn't make sense." At a preview of "One More Spring" a sweet young thing with an autograph book rushed up to Walter and wanted him to sign it. He wrote "Walter Woolf." She looked at him with acute disappointment and disgust. "But it was Mr. King's autograph I wanted," she pouted, giving the book a vicious little rip. Walter took the book and signed the other name, and the girl looked at him stonily. "She'll always believe it was a fake," he said, "and I guess I don't blame her." AT his bank it was much the same. He sent out checks signed Walter King and the bank wouldn't cash them. Then he changed the name of the account to King and lapsed into signing his checks Walter Woolf. The bank still wouldn't cash them. "I guess people began to think I was a bum check artist," he grinned, "until I hit upon the plan of signing both names." At the time he stepped into "One More Spring" Walter was just about to pull out of Hollywood. Not shake its dust off his feet exactly, but go back and revive himself in New York for a (Walter King) {Continued from page 31) while. He had been in Hollywood for over a year without getting anywhere in particular; he got plenty of work, it is true, but hardly in parts befitting the reputation he had made on the Eastern stage. He came to pictures originally when a film scout heard him singing in "The Red Rogue," but after he got in front of the camera they didn't want him to sing. Irene Dunne and countless others had the same experience. Hollywood signed them because they did something well, and then wouldn't let them do it. Walter still doesn't sing in "One More Spring," but he's going to in "ManEating Tiger," the film he's making now. That isn't a Frank Buck jungle picture, by the way, but a more or less melodramatic comedy of errors in which he plays a Spanish troubadour with a guitar — and it's supposed to have a dash of "It Happened One Night," too. That wavy, shiny, coal-black hair of Walter's, with that lighter bit of a mustache and those soulful brown eyes looking out from a screen over that guitar should be something, girls. To paraphrase the advertisements a bit, they're the eyes you love to look into. Previous to coming to Hollywood Walter King's career was a curious parallel to John Boles's, except that Walter got a bit further up the ladder than John did. But they both knocked around New York and found the avenues to fame mostly blocked with detours leading to hall bedrooms and cheap restaurants — if any. Walter remembers well this period of John's career, and how John eventually came out to Los Angeles with a musical show, afterwards getting his big chance in "The Desert Song"; Walter himself first came to the Coast in a stage production of "Music in the Air," and chose that trip in preference to an offer to play the same show for Oscar Hammerstein III in London because he deliberately had his eye upon pictures. "I think every actor these days has his eye on pictures," he said frankly, "and it isn't only the money, either. For where, even in a big New York hit, you play to possibly 100,000 people in a month, you play in pictures to millions of people every night." Nevertheless, Walter had actually given up his house, had his notices in to turn off the gas, lights, and water and so on when he got his "break." He did that once before after playing in "Golden Dawn" for Warners — but this time Hollywood didn't let him go. His present long-term contract at Fox isn't his first in pictures, either. Universal had him under a seven-year lease after he had made a picture there, but the deal blew up. This Woolf has been at Hollywood's door a lot. "I was at New York's door a lot, too," he said, "before anything happened. Then, one night, while I was Reginald Denny's understudy at the Winter Garden show, he was taken ill and I did his stuff. Jake Shubert chanced to be out in front that night, but I never knew it until six months later when he sent for me and gave me the lead in 'Floradora.' Things sort of went on from there, I guess." Strangely enough Walter was with Reginald Denny in "Lottery Lover" on the Fox lot when he got his chance at "One More Spring." He wasn't Denny's understudy this time, but when the picture began the director had switched the two parts, King playing Denny's and Denny, King's. Walter thinks that was quite a coincidence, but then he believes that life is pretty much of a coincidence anyway. "I had a good part in 'One More Spring,' " he tells you modestly whenever his performance is mentioned, "and naturally it stood out a bit." But he must have stood out a bit even as a boy because he sang in the famous Mormon Tabernacle choir. His folks had moved to Salt Lake City from San Francisco, where he was born, when he was five years old. There are no stage traditions in Walter's family because his father was a real estate dealer and cigar merchant, and Walter's first stage experience was in a vaudeville sketch which closed after one performance. That one performance, however, was enough to put him as a kid in smalltime ten-twent'-thirt' houses and eventually take him via Chicago to New York, where he studied voice seriously for eight years. The upshot of that was an engagement with Walter Dunbar's revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, where he learned about singing from them. Incidentally, although he sings perfectly in six languages, he can't speak a word of anything except English. If OR the rest Walter Woolf— King is ■*■ pretty much of a regular guy who sees Hollywood without the customary rosecolored glasses. Although obviously destined to make pretty ladies' hearts go pit-a-pat he is very much of a man's man, too; he may have to strum a guitar on the screen but he likes better guns, dogs, and boats. In contrast to his romantic appearance his speech is very colloquial and matter-of-fact; he may sing poems and so forth, but he talks straight from the shoulder and in unmistakable Anglo-Saxon now and then. His New York environment shows markedly in his clothes, with vivid shirts of solid colors and coat and pants that don't match. He walks rather stoop-shouldered — he's six feet and onehalf inch. It's the extra half inch, he says, that breaks him down. He says he'd rather work with Janet Gaynor than with Warner Baxter because Janet quits the set promptly at five o'clock while Baxter works till six. "But they saved my scenes until both the others had finished," he wailed, "so it was midnight by the time I got home to my wife and two kids." All of which merely goes to show you how domesticated this particular Woolf really is. ANSWERS TO BABY ALBUM ON PAGES 14-15 1. Helen Hayes. 2. Joan (Rosebud) Blonde 3. Una Merlcel. 4. Helen Mack. 5. Norma Shearer. 6. Donald Woods. 7. Edmund Lowe. 8. Sally Rand, of course. 9. Jack Oakie. 10. Richard Arlen. 11. Janet Gaynor. 12. Margaret Lindsay. 13. Hobart Cavonaugh. 14. Lee Tracy. 50 The New Movie Magazine, August, 1935