Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

:i9ht % °ns °t« Then three and a half, too young for dreams — as yet * I on a stretcher, but get me back to New York." So they did, and Alice considered it nothing when she showed up the next night, black and blue, still sick and shaken with shock, to sing with the band as usual. But Alice never, then or afterwards, considered anything she did remarkable. You did your part and gave it all you had and if you were never satisfied, always reaching up and beyond toward some shining ideal that kept dancing in your head, that was life. When she became a movie star, she was still like that — still reaching up and up to something beyond, never satisfied, always scared to death, but always going on in spite of it. Those who have never been afraid and gone on in the teeth of that fear do not know what courage is. It was that courage, later, that made her the most beloved person on the big, busy studio lot, so that guys like Tyrone Power and Don Ameche, and big directors like Henry King and Irving Cummings, and that most brilliant of producers, Darryl Zanuck, literally sat up nights planning how to help her, how to protect her from that fear, how to make the steep road easier. For upon the little chorus girl's climb to the moment when in 1939 all Hollywood said, "Alice Faye's the coming greatest star in pictures," she had one enemy. She made the grade the hard way and always had to fight herself and her memories and her past, as you will see. One thing, she thought, as she drove alone to Hollywood that first day, one thing I won't have to stay in Hollywood long. Just a few weeks, a few broadcasts with the band and then I can go home. Why her idol, the great Rudy Vallee, wanted to make a motion picture was a little beyond young Alice Faye. When you were head man in radio, when you could pick and choose among the famed night spots of New York, when you were a big shot in the sacred theaters of the Roaring Forties, it seemed pretty silly to travel three thousand miles away to make a movie. But Rudy Vallee could do no wrong. The tale of that strange, romantic friendship, the true tale of the kid who first danced on the sidewalks of New York and the IrishCanuck lad from Maine, can and must be told now, must be revealed in all its danger and tragedy and beauty. Certainly Rudy Vallee was the most important influence in Alice Faye's life. It made her and almost broke her, it is blended of many feelings and thoughts and happenings, it has been so little understood — which is natural enough because there have been few love stories like it and in a way it isn't a love story at all. IF Rudy wanted to make movies, if he needed her in those tragic days, why, Alice would come along, as she would have gone to the snow fastnesses of Tibet or the sands of the Gobi desert after long-haired tigers. You had to do that for the guy who was your best friend and had given you your great chance. But movies? No. I don't have to make any movies, she thought. I'd be scared silly. I'm just the singer with the band. "I just came along for the ride," Alice said, in that slightly husky voice of hers that still held traces of Tenth Avenue and the West Side of Little Old New York. She said it to anyone who was interested, though not much of anybody was. "Me in pictures? I'm a singer and a dancer, see? Besides, I got to get back to New York. You know how it is, if you stay away too long they forget all about you, and you lose what little you've done for yourself. I was born in New York and that's where I belong — you ever been to New York? H-mm it's a big town, huh?" But Hollywood, even the refined, respectable Hollywood of 1933, turned out to be a contrary jade. Woo her, and often enough she shrugs and turns an indifferent shoulder. Look at her with big, wistful, blue eyes that regard her honestly !8