The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

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Also in Handy Sizes at the 10c Stores SEND THIS COUPON .tefeWwirh FREE Wheitt°ptle 7 '""^S or ( ) Transparent fffi^" ^"^ } Creme for C) Day or ( ) Even in .Tw ," SU,lted t0 mY type C ) Ash Blonde O L°f bYT "" ( ^ B'ond^ ; Brunette; C ) Dark Brunetf -V Vr"e;»CP Chesrnu CoSg*° b00k]« "HPW to Enhance Your Natural | I / trade at Name. ''" «' *• >■< D'P'' $«"' Address • ■ ■ ■ , ^ ^ City ■ State Two Star-tling Views (James Cagney) "I was one of those birds up in a window making signals." "You said something about fear," I reminded him. "It's in the air," he waved. "You feel it all around you. You may try to laugh it off, bluff it out, but it's there just the same. If one word describing Hollywood could be written across the sky that word would be FEAR." He flung it into capitals with a twofisted gesture. "But fear is only one of the many elements here, and to be able to stand Hollywood at all you have to accept them all. Even then life in this place is so hectic you feel the need of escaping from it." "Yours, for example?" "I can't play the social game and do my job," he confessed. "But others can and do. Hollywood's social life is so continuous and exacting that it's enough to wear out anyone. Not that its wildness isn't ridiculously exaggerated. Newark, any small town, can top it." Skidding around the corner of a building, he nearly collided with a beauteous ocher-tinted actress who hailed him with a flashing, "Hello, Jimmy!" "Hello," he quietly responded, not at {Continued from page 30) all unpleasantly, but with so much the self-denial of a confirmed anchorite that I was prompted to inquire: "What do you think of Hollywood women?" "Women," he exploded, "are the same here as anywhere!" For a reeling instant the air seemed filled with shattered blondes and splintered brunettes. "But," I marveled, "doesn't Hollywood set a high price on beauty?" "It offers more opportunity to the pretty young woman," Cagney drily conceded, "than it does to one who isn't much to look at." He streaked past a flower-bed as though it were poison-ivy. "The good-looker has a better chance to make the grade. But no matter how much beauty she may have she must have something to go with it. If she has ability she will go far. But she can't get by with just her physical equipment. If girls are serious — that's the point — they can make their way in Hollywood." "How did you feel about yours when you came to Hollywood?" "I didn't think I had a chance," was his frank reply. "At that time, four years ago, all the juvenile men in pic tures were tall and good-looking, the sheikish type. Naturally, I realized that my looks were against me. The only reason Hollywood wanted me was that I could play a tough killer." Grim as he sounded, he looked like a rapt choir boy. "How did you like it when you got here?" "I didn't like it," he savagely emphasized. "I hated it." "Is there anything about it now that you particularly dislike?" "Yes," he snorted. "What brings me up short" — and I was desperately hoping something would — "is Hollywood's lack of appreciation of good acting. There are any number of fine actors who never are given anything but small parts." There is nothing so selfish as youth. Yet it's safe to say there isn't a selfish hair in young Cagney's red head. "But what about Hollywood's glamour?" I asked, as we headed into the home stretch. "The eyes of the entire world may be focussed on Hollywood because of its so-called glamour, but I can't see it," he flung back. Jimmy Cagney had beaten me by a length — and Hollywood to a pulp. Two Star-tling Views (Diana Wynyard) surprises me most of all is that in Hollywood the same names often figure in both divorce and marriage, one following directly upon the heels of the other. The people concerned don't seem to give these vital steps the time and thought they demand. Apparently those who suffer from their own mistakes don't try to deal with marriage patiently and sensibly. No one, we may well imagine, has ever gone through it without at one time or another approaching, if not entering, the danger zone." There was nothing censorious in her attitude. Indeed, Miss Wynyard was as kindly and considerate as the wife and mother she played so beautifully in "Cavalcade," a picture eloquent in itself of the permanence of the English family. "That permanence is generally true," she said. "Of course, divorce is by no means unknown in England, but it is not so easy there as it is here in America. Until recently, I believe, infidelity on the part of a husband was not in itself sufficient grounds to gain a decree for a woman. He had to give his wife a beating, or at least a black eye, and that was unpleasant, not to say painful. As the law looked at it, a man could go out without disturbing the home, but his wife couldn't." I wondered how Miss Wynyard felt about the Hollywood man who sometimes gets it both coming and going, paying love balm before and alimony after marriage. "The poor fellow hasn't a chance," she sympathetically observed. "He is particularly in danger of suffering financially from what we in England used to call the breach-of-promise suit. Such a suit, in my opinion, should never be brought into court, but settled outside, if settled at all. Any public dealing with emotion is, to me, essentia1'-" hate (Continued from page 30) ful. But, most of all, the breach-ofpromise suit strikes me as being an awful give-away on the woman who brings it, implying as it does that she got herself engaged with the deliberate idea of getting money out of it. She ought to have more pride." "Then you feel the law gives woman the advantage?" "Especially in America. We must also bear in mind that women are more exacting than men. This being the case, the law should be justified in showing up an adventuress. Women of that type deal with emotion wholly from a mercenary motive, and emotion should never be considered in terms of money. For that matter, I don't see how it is possible for a woman to put a price on it, estimate exactly what it is worth in dollars and cents. Nothing could be more absurd. The whole business — for the acquisitive woman makes it a business— is manifestly unfair. Even worse, it is rampantly indecent." NATURALLY, Hollywood emotion, which can be costly beyond the dreams of avarice, came in for attention. "In Hollywood emotions are highly keyed," pointed out Miss Wynyard. "This is only to be expected of a community whose stock-in-trade is emotion. Because of the strain, family life may be disrupted, even destroyed, by the very work which is Hollywood's sole reason for existence." Sensing more than a hint of the difficulty of marriage and career going hand-in-hand, I was curious to know whether Miss Wynyard believed emotional incompatibility to be Hollywood's chief trouble. "Its greatest trouble," she declared, "is too much money. That's all you hear wherever you go — money. The higher the salary, the greater the nervousness over it. It's not surprising then that something should snap. Yet, Hollywood is essentially domestic." That was the last thing I expected. "First of all," explained Miss Wynyard, "people here seem to marry. In fact, they marry a lot. In planning a dinner party you find to your dismay that all the people you want to ask are couples. You don't know which way to turn for a stray man or a single woman. Why, when I tell anyone I've never been married even once I'm looked at as though I'd committed a crime! In Hollywood marriage is nothing if not progressive. There was just a flicker of her Mona Lisa smile before she got back to money with: "There's so much of it in Hollywood that it makes us slack, and that's one thing we can't afford to be, if only for the reason we're in the public eye. Reminded that English newspapers take a lively interest in Hollywood's intimate affairs, she granted: "That is true. But London has always shown a keen interest in screen celebrities. Joan Crawford, for one, was fairly mobbed there. And that, mind you, was before her divorce, so it couldn't possibly be put down to sensationalism. "I prefer divorce to separation, which seems a messy sort of life. I hate any untidy way of living." With this tidy way of putting it, she added: "Oddly enough, the big scene in my last American picture, 'One More River,' was an English divorce trial, significant for its underlying idea of keeping the family intact." "How can that be done in Hollywood?" She threw up her hands. 56 The New Movie Magazine, August, 1935