Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1943)

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Relieve your Baby's teething pains this summer by rubbing on Dr. Hand's Teething Lotion — the actual prescription of a famous Baby specialist. It is effective and economical, and has been used and recommended by millions of Mothers. Your druggist has it. DR. HAND'S TEETHING LOTION Just rub it on the gums (Continued jrom page 26) when I come home, when she's sleepy, and then I think of all the things I missed all day, I think how I missed giving her her bath, and hearing the first words she said and all that. I think about that when I'm on the set making pictures and it makes me very unhappy and what I'm doing doesn't seem very worthwhile, really." "Other women have to do that," I said, "other women have done it successfully." "But I don't have to," said Alice, quietly, "I don't have to at all. I don't care much about making more money. My husband makes enough for us. And the women who did it, as you say, successfully, didn't do it in wartime. You see, in wartime you stop being able to buy lots of things. "I want to explain just what I mean if I can. I've got a home — a real home. It's out here in the Valley and it's quiet and it's — good. Phil works hard and he wants a home. Now I can't get servants. When I'm working the whole place just falls apart. You can't buy somebody now to take care of your home, the way you used to do. I'm doing most of my own housework and cooking. And — if anything happened to my baby while I was away making a picture, I'd blame myself, I'd never get over it. "Both Phil and I were married before. We both knew what it is to make a failure of marriage. Now we have true happiness and it's my business — it's always a woman's business, isn't it? — to keep it, to protect it if she can. "It just seems to me that my duty is to my baby and my husband and my home. It seems to me I ought to be home taking care of my baby. I think myself that just as much as is humanly possible every woman with very young children, children that don't go to school yet, ought to be home with them. Sometimes I know it isn't possible, sometimes a woman has to earn her living, and that's different. But I don't. Or sometimes perhaps she can do something that's very important for the war. But what I do isn't very important. Lots of girls can do what I do — lots of girls can sing and dance. I've worked ever since I was a little girl. But you know that underneath most of all I've wanted a home and children and a good marriage. "In wartime," Alice said slowly, "keeping a home is difficult. It's a real job That's what I'm going to do." I THOUGHT then of the low frame house ' among the fruit trees out in San Fernando Valley, of Phil Harris, who is the husband Alice loves so much. "You're really happy with him, aren't you?" I said. "You really love him?" And with a little chuckle Alice said, "So far so good — and it's up to me how much farther it can go, isn't it?" So there it was and, as you can see, it's an honest and an unselfish viewpoint. Not easy to feel right about going away day after day and leaving the baby, not easy to drive forty miles a day to work and back, coming home to find the house in a mess, no dinner ready, never being sure what's happening to your baby while you're gone, doing a big day's work and then buckling down to get dinner and clean up and make beds and all that. Not easy at all. I know because I've done it — but then I had to. Listening to Alice, I knew only too well what road I had always wanted to take, what road I would take in Alice's spot — if that was all there was to it. But— is it? In wartime. That's what Alice had said herself. It's all different in wartime. Right there my imagination took a swift flight of a good many miles to the state of Georgia. Down there, near a lovely old Southern town called Columbus, is a great and almost unbelievable place called Fort Benning. Now there are quite a few movie theaters scattered over the vast area of Fort Benning for the thousands of men in training there. While I was doing my job, two pictures played in those small theaters which mean so much to the men who work hard all day at the grim business of learning war. One of the pictures that played was a violent tale of war based upon the assassination of one of Hitler's fiendish Gestapo chiefs. The men stayed away from that one in regiments — in battalions — in whole divisions. They were at war — they didn't need to be sold on it, though perhaps it is wise to keep it fresh in the minds of us civilians. The other picture was "Hello, Frisco, Hello." Starring Alice Faye. Well, I wish you could have seen them. They stood outside in long, expectant lines, they jammed into the theater until the walls bulged, they whooped and whistled and shrieked with approval when Alice appeared on the screen. "Other girls can sing and dance," Alice Faye had said, and I knew she believed it. But you see, Alice Faye, other girls can't sing and dance the way you can. Not for those guys nor so many, many more like them. There's only one Alice Faye, and the squawk the boys are making now is that they don't see enough of her as it is. That, you can see, is why all the time Alice was talking to me I kept thinkinglisten to me, Alice Faye. And then what I wanted to say was this: You're up against a mighty tough decision, my girl. You said it yourself — it's wartime. None of us is being allowed to do what we want to do. None of us can make any kind of a move however big or little without figuring out first whether it has any bearing on the war effort and what part that circumstance plays in it. Now there isn't any use kidding anybody "Hello, Frisco, Hello," was just an average run-of-the-mill picture. With all due respect for Twentieth Century-Fox, they have never at any time made the most of Alice Faye's genius. It's always made me unhappy, and I've screamed about it before in print and in person. Like the sergeants, I always want to see more, much more, of Alice Faye, and I want to see more facets and phases of that luminous and amazing personality, which combines so closely pathos and laughter, music and tears, sex appeal and tenderness. But even so, even though they don't give Alice Faye the stories and the parts and the songs she ought to have, the boys in the armed forces love her and they want to see her pictures. So the little girl from Tenth Avenue is up against a wartime decision, like a great many other American women. The pretty blonde who sang with Rudy Vallee's band and was kept behind in Hollywood after she went out there to make a picture is right smack up against it. On one side is what she wants to do herself — incredible as that may seem. You just have to take Alice's word for it, you always have to take her word for whatever she says. She wants to quit pictures, she wants the one she's working on now to be her last, she wants to give up the career she never has cared a great deal about, anyway, and do what seems to her her first duty. To give her life and her time to what used to be woman's only business — husband, home, children.