Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

Watched Charles Boyer Go Away to War (Continued from page 23) When the startling news of the Russo-German nonaggression pact, and Hitler's final demands on Poland, chilled France with a fear of imminent war, Boyer's first thought was for the safety of his wife, Pat Paterson. No one questioned then but that if war were declared, Italy would immediately line up with Germany. Nice, close to the Italian border, would be a tempting target for raids. So back to Figeac, the little town in southern France where he was born — quiet, sunny Figeac far from any impending battle lines — Boyer sped with his English actress-wife, to leave her in the care of his mother. And it was in Figeac that I met Charles Boyer and watched him prepare for the call to arms that was soon to come. I HAD been there a week, gathering material for a life story on this most modest of stars who, in his years in Hollywood, had been reluctant to parade the experiences of his youth. It had been a dramatic week. Telegraph and telephone lines had been requisitioned as France turned the myriad wheels of mobilization. We had been cut off from communication with the rest of the country and Madame Louise Boyer, elegant and gracious even at the most worried moment of her life, had been nervously awaiting word from her son. Each day I went to call on her and each afternoon, in the middle of our interview, as she told me some amusing anecdote of Charles' boyhood or found a new childhood picture to laugh over and explain, Madame Boyer would break off and, with an apology, ask me if I would accompany her down to the village square to learn the latest news. The wide trunks of the great trees that line the river Cele, which runs through the middle of Figeac, had become the bulletin boards of the town. Groups gathered around them to scan in silence each new Arts, or official notice. There was no overtone of bravado or patriotic hysteria among these sober-visaged villagers. Rather they were like a large family in the waiting room of a hospital, fearful of the latest bulletin from the bedside of a loved one. Madame Boyer's concern increased as one after another of the military classes were called up for service. One day's big splashing poster announced the requisition of all cars. The next day's proclamation gave warning against any hoarding. In Paris, air-raid shelters were being tested. The blackouts had begun. Americans were being evacuated to coastal ports and a million or more Parisians sent out to the safety of the country. France was not yet sure she would have to fight but she was clearing the decks for action. Men and machines were on the move all over the land. And Madame Boyer grew tight-lipped with terror. I remember the last afternoon I spent with her. Figeac dozed in the late summer sun. On the banks of the Cele. a few women were beating their clothes on the rocks. Along the stone wall by the river's edge walked two quiet-eyed nuns, their great white caps looking not unlike children's sailboats. Blue coated workmen rode by on bicycles with tinkling bells. There was an atmosphere of peace and serenity, quietness without stagnation, dignified endeavor without bustle and hurry. Nowhere have I ever seen such tranquil surroundings. It seemed impossible to believe that this village, the very symbol of peace and tranquillity, could be part of a land threatened by the horrors of war. Madame Boyer asked if I had been inside the lovely old Twelfth Century church of Saint Sauveur and when I replied I had not, she suggested we go together. Shadows fell across the arched entrance of the beautiful little building. We entered and paused a moment before the font where Charles had been baptized. A few whispered references to a particularly fine piece of wood carving on the pulpit, and then I saw that Madame Boyer had forgotten I was with her. She was looking at a statue of the Virgin Mary at whose feet fell the last rays of a setting sun. Slowly Madame Boyer sank to her knees. Her head bowed in prayer, a prayer I was sure, for the safety of her son, the safety of France. IN the midst of this tension, Charles arrived home for a brief visit with his mother and to establish Pat in Figeac before returning to his film work. I sat with him for about an hour at noon on a rude wooden bench in front of his mother's house on the Boulevard Woodrow Wilson, near the market place. One after another of his boyhood friends stopped to say hello and farewell. Many of them Boyer had watched march away to the last war when he himself, a thin, sickly schoolboy, had been too young and too delicate to enlist. War had seemed a gay game then, a challenge to chivalry, an invitation to some intoxicating, mad adventure that would make fine stuff for evenings of gossip when the shadows fell on the Cele and the sidewalk cafes near the Pont Gambetta were filled with eager listeners. Charles had watched them come back, too; those who did come back. Broken. Battered. No glorious tales of victory on their lips, only an aching silence. For four years, his last four years at the Champollion College in Figeac where dreams of someday playing Rostand's "Cyrano" at the Comedie Francaise in Paris first took root in the bud ding actor's ambitions, young Boyer had taken a troupe of his classmates about the hospitals, giving performances for the wounded. The strained and pain-worn faces of those grey-robed audiences in the long white wards had left an indelible memory in Charles Boyer's philosophy. Charles Boyer, the mature man, knew what war meant. He wanted no part of it. And so when I asked him that sparkling summer morning in Figeac if he would go if war came, his answer was almost bitter. "Of course. I'll go. I'll have to. We'll all have to, this time. But there will be few of us that will want to go!" He shrugged. "I'm not a soldier. I have no desire to be a soldier. But if I'm called. I'll go. I'll be mustered into service here in Figeac and then sent to some barracks for training." I asked Boyer in which branch he would enlist. "It's not a matter of enlisting over here," he explained. "There are regular classes that are called in order." DY reason of ill health in his youth, Boyer had never served the usual required two years in the French army and was therefore not subject to the first calls. But his name would be reached in the general mobilization of men without previous military service. His prediction proved correct. Just forty years old, the actor was in the age limit of the first general mobilization. Mustered into service a day or so after the outbreak of hostilities, Boyer donned no trim tunic or shiny brown leather belt of an officer. His rank and regalia were that of the poilu. the common soldier, who marched to the battlefronts of the last war singing about "Mademoiselle From Armentieres" and shuffled back into their bulgy blouses for this one, muttering despairingly of "that Hitler." A few days before he donned the blue uniform of a poilu, I saw Boyer for the last time in Nice, at the Victorine Studios, high in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, where Rex Fashion takes a busman's holiday — with the accent on hats! Exhibits A and B: Jeanette MacDonald and Joan Crawford, at the opening of Gladys Parker's gown salon, with Allan Jones Ingram used to make pictures. But war clouds had halted production on "Le Corsaire" as effectively as storm clouds cancel location schedules in California. One by one technicians and prop men had been called away from their studio jobs to join their regiments until finally the picture was being filmed by a bare skeleton staff. And then came news from Paris that the insurance on the production had been cancelled and the business heads of the company decided that their only course was to abandon the half-completed picture. The order to hrlt came in the middle of a sweltering afternoon on an outdoor set. Boyer had driven ten hours the night before, from Figeac to Nice, arriving just in time to <=lap on his make-up and wriggle into the hot, leather costume of his pirate role, before the first scene was called. All through the morning, rumors of the picture being stopped flitted about the set. It made any sort of concentrated work difficult. And then, after luncheon, during which everyone sat around and discussed Hitler's next probable move to the exclusion of the usual shop talk of setups and scenes, word came that "Le Corsaire" was shelved. And suddenly Charles Boyer joined the rest in realizing the imminence of war. He had been full of talk of his plans for the coming winter, back in America; his return for his weekly radio program the first of November and his next Hollywood picture with Deanna Durbin. soon after Christmas. Until the very last, the calm, detached artist had refused to believe that war was certain. Now he knew, and was rushing back that afternoon to Figeac to spend the few final hours of peace with the two loyal women he loved best in life. WE talked a moment of news of other film folk in France; of Tyrone Power and his bride Annabella, safely speeding across the Atlantic on the Yankee Clipper; of Norma Shearer refusing to scurry out of Paris in the first frantic evacuation. And then with a shy but cheerful smile Boyer bade me farewell. A handclasp, a heartfelt hope we might meet again in Hollywood someday and I watched him go, that fine, sensitive-faced head held high, his stride a little brisker than before. I had been somewhat dazed by the significance of our good-by, and I stood there thinking back to what we had been saying. "I've just laid away my make-up box," he had remarked. "For the last time in a long while, I guess. Pretty soon now I'll have to lay away these civilian clothes with the rest of my costumes." "He's laying away laughter, too." I had thought to myself, "and lights and music and love and all the little luxuries of day-to-day existence." And a sudden chill gripped me as. like a fey, foreboding fancy, the prophetic lines of Rupert Brooke came tumbling into my mind: "Blow, bugles, blow! . . . These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality." 78 PHOTOPLAY