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BY JOHN R. F R A N C H E Y
It happens even in the best American
families: A boy starts out to be President and ends
up a movie idol. A "nothing sacred" story about Jeffrey Lynn
ASK Jeffrey Lynn how come he's ^ the Warner Brothers' four-star meteor (male model) not to mention the object of general feminine sighing and swooning and he shrugs his ishoulders. He might even ask you in that merry, crisp voice of his what you think of skirts cut on a bias, or, maybe, Chinese poetry.
He doesn't know.
He never toddled out at the age of 6 before a Sunday-school audience to recite Robert Louis Stevenson's "I Have A Little Shadow."
He never used to harass his family and neighbors by staging tent shows during his adolescence.
He emphatically was no parishioner of the Drama when he was a highschool man of affairs.
The plain truth is that he started out to be a lawyer and wound up a movie idol, in spite of himself.
By all odds Jeffrey Lynn — Ragnar jLind's his real name, although he doesn't like it — should have reached journey's end as a top-flight lawyer.
FEBRUARY, 1941
His background is in the great-lawyer tradition or perhaps that of a U. S. senator, but definitely not that of a cinema sensation.
He was born on a small farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, the second eldest in a brood of eight, the son of a Swedish immigrant who ended up in Massachusetts, found it fair, married a true New Englander and settled down to wrest a living from the soil.
The second-born of the Linds burgeoned into a bright-eyed lad who romped through the grades like nothing and was ready for high school at 13.
"It was quite a ritual," he'll tell you today, "this business of enrolling for higher education. I had never been to Worcester, the county seat, and my older brother was commissioned to go along to see that no ill befell me. The metropolis was dazzling. I used to he awake nights thinking of it."
Every morning he walked a couple
of miles — books and lunch under his arm — to the streetcar which whizzed him into Worcester. It took fourhours out of every day, this commuting, but Master Jeffrey didn't mind it. As he walked home afternoons he doped it all out. He'd make a distinguished lawyer out of himself. Then he'd annex the Presidency.
He was ready for college at 16. There was a quiet powwow between his parents. Lind pere had an affection for Harvard. Mrs. Lind scotched that entry in short order. Hadn't she read in the papers that Harvard boys were hellions?
It was finally decided that young Jeffrey would go to Bates College pending the arrival of an A.B. degree. After that, once he had reached maturity, he could go on to Harvard and enter the law school.
He remembers his first descent on his alma mater with more than nostalgia. That September morning when he arrived at Lewiston, Maine, the trees were (Continued on page 81)
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