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Unromantic childhood recollections of M-G-M's romantic star: "Every winter was a nightmare of long woolen underwear, colds, bronchitis and cod-liver oil"
she and her girl mother left with a tiny income of a very few pounds a year and a big gloomy house a few miles outside of London.
There was also a string of small, all-alike houses in a dull and dreary district near by, a half-forgotten investment that now presented an obvious economy. So into one of these they moved. Although they made the little house gay and charming inside, the locale was unlovely and uncongenial. "We had some kind neighbors," Greer says, "but we lived very much to ourselves and longed for the summer months when we escaped back to Ireland for heavenly long visits to my grandparents' home in the sweet green countryside.
"Ours was not a dramatic poverty," she confesses today as she sits in her charming Beverly Hills home, her beautiful mother close beside her, a punctilious butler serving tea from an exquisite silver tea service, the candlelight from crystal sconces nickering down upon bowls of fat red roses scattered everywhere. "Ours was that niggardly, cramping poverty of budget books gone over every week, of one pair of shoes supplementing one dress, of one pair of concert tickets weighed against paying the doctor's bill. We always had enough to eat, Mother and I, and we always were warm and housed, but there always was fear, too, fear that we wouldn't be able to make our money go quite around."
Her childhood, on the whole, was not a very happy one. She was always frail. "Every winter was a nightmare of long woolen underwear and colds, bronchitis and cod-liver oil," Greer confesses. "I was ill regularly, six weeks every autumn, six weeks every spring, ill enough to be put to bed for those intervals."
"People said I'd never raise her," her mother adds. "I thought, 'She'll never live to be 21.' By the time she was 15 she had had enough illness to fill most lifetimes."
At school, she was naturally good at hockey and tennis but not strong enough to play them and her weaknesses, combined with the blight of her red hair and the fact that she grew tall inches and inches beyond her small schoolmates, caused her agonies of (Continued on page 89)
FEBRUARY. 1941
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