Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

Tenth Avenue Girl (Continued from page 19) was the baby girl's fairy godmother at birth, for surely the old women, smiling at each other and at Grandma Moffitt when she came with the good news, had no reason to dream that this baby would one day be a movie star. Not but what successful men had grown up on New York's West Side, but they were the exceptions. Alice, had they called the new one? Of course — after her Mama. Well, Charlie Leppert would be that pleased, it being a girl. He'd wanted a girl, being they already had the two boys, Billy and Charlie. Charlie Leppert was a good man and a square cop, too. But they saw the child's future like their own. Going to school, some, and then maybe a job for a while in a factory or an office, if she turned out to be a smart one, and then getting married to one of the boys and having children and living in the same small, crowded rooms. Doing the cooking and the washing and making a dollar go so far it was sometimes a miracle all of itself. They didn't know that baby Alice's good fairy, Broadway, had given her as her gift that birth night dancing feet and a sweet, heartbreaking voice to sing songs, and a warm, rich beauty and a funny instinct that could take in and store up all the emotions of the world. "Alice, to me," Don Ameche, who has made so many pictures with her, was to say of her twenty-four years later, "is like a rare Stradivarius. The lightest touch brings music. She responds to every emotion in some mysterious way that maybe she herself doesn't understand." nER mother and her mother's mother were Irish. Plain enough always, that touch of the Irish, who cry when they should laugh and laugh when they should cry, and are somehow born behind the eight ball with a guilty conscience. But her father's people came from that war-torn, heart-torn land of Alsace-Lorraine, where the French and German mingled in a sort of No Man's Land. There was much of both races in big, openhanded, openhearted Charlie Leppert, who walked a beat in uniform and brought his ridiculously inadequate salary home for his wife and three children, to the crowded three rooms, with the lace curtains and the dark hallway, and the golden oak furniture. Perhaps it was from Grandmother Moffitt, her adored Grandma, that Alice Faye inherited the dancing feet and the voice to sing songs and the Stradivarius chords in her heart. For the little old Irishwoman was a teller of tales and an actress, though she played her scenes in the drab living room and with only the goldenhaired grandchild as an audience. Tales of Ireland — tales of the old days and the old people, fairy tales and legend and history — flowed from that honeyed tongue. Only if you had an Irish grandmother, can you know the tears and the laughter and the suspense and the horror of those tales told in the kitchen in a stirring voice that has just lost its brogue, told over endless cups of blacker and blacker tea. From one to another she rambled and sometimes she talked of her husband, who lay buried in a soldier's grave in Tennessee, and of his father, and the twice-told tales of the Revolution and the early settlers, and the Civil War itself — stories which had been handed down in the family. And it was Grandma who lighted the spark, fanned the flame, of Alice's hidden ambitions, ambitions that she thought were only dreams, so fantastic, so impossible that she never even whispered them, and as a little girl could hardly have put name to them. Only that she wanted to dance, and to sing, and to go out into the big, beautiful world and find the lovely things — colors and lights and music and excitement. Sometimes when she came home from New York Public School No. 128, where she was just one of the hundreds of West Side children who had to be educated by harassed, overworked teachers, she would find Grandma alone in the kitchen and sometimes she'd tell her about the dreams. "Sure, and you can make them come true," Grandma Moffitt said. "Why not? You've the finest blood in you, and never let yourself be discouraged for anything. Poverty's a thing may come to any of us and it's better for you it's come early than late, and, if you want to dance and sing, it's dance and sing you shall, my lambkin." Then the old lady would peer down into the narrow street and see her Alice, the golden hair tumbling down her back, dancing on the sidewalks of New York, to the music of a hurdygurdy, to an audience of ragged kids who had stopped their play to watch her. There were cousins, too, in Woodlawn and the Bronx, and it was great fun to go out there and to have room to run, and to go out in the big garages — remade from old-fashioned barns — and put on plays, and act them out, and Alice was always the leading lady. When there were programs at school, Alice loved them, she worked hard for them, and once she even thought that the height of her ambition would be to become a schoolteacher. That was because the teacher that year was young and pretty and gave lots of entertainments and told little Alice Leppert that she "danced exactly like a fairy." "And so you do," said Grandma Moffitt stoutly. Young Mrs. Leppert knew how to make the most of everything for her children, and as Alice grew up there was a bicycle and a precious pair of skates, to sling over her shoulder and go off to the lake at Central Park. "Skating, Grandma," she said, "is next to dancing." And the year she won the kids' championship on her skates was a banner year. LlFE, for girls like Alice Faye, always starts young — it seems that Fate forces the issue, drives them on, as though afraid that the years won't be long enough for them, won't give them scope enough. Somehow, dancing lessons had been managed on a scholarship in Billy Newsome's tap dancing class. Then at thirteen, small Alice took herself downtown into the busy, wonderful heart of New York, and registered for chorus work. She wanted to be in the chorus. It seemed to her, then, a vast and almost incredible ambition. To be a chorus girl. To get paid for dancing. To be in the theater — the theater that was to her the temple of all art and beauty. Of all the stories of her youth, perhaps the best-known one is about those same theaters. Often on their way home from shopping, she and her mother would pass the dark stage doors — those magic portals into the world of beauty. Ji 'ay? — My 4~Purpose Face Cream keeps your Accent on Youth!' *i m il >ug% ^ % m^ , « v^^H ' at? 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