Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1941)

embarrassment. She did what sensitive childhood usually does under those circumstances. She escaped into dreams and books. She read constantly, devouring every word she came upon. She read everything from the Book of Common Prayer to the recipes on the baking powder tins, from the novels of Sir Walter Scott to the poems of Oscar Wilde. Her mother insists that she knew her letters before she was 3, but Greer recalls only that she was continually endangering their lives by crazily tipped oil lamps when they were in London and by candles hidden under the bed sheets when they were in Ireland, as she read far into the nights when she was supposed to be asleep. She grew up, entirely surrounded by her elders, her grandparents on both sides of her house, her uncles and her aunts. They were elders, quite literally: On the Garson side, Presbyterian elders (Greer is simply an Irish contraction of the Scotch "McGregor" and her being named thus equally for her mother and her father is like her character, half wild Irish, half sedate Scotch and a devil mixed up in the middle of it) ; on the Greer side, Protestant Irish and, as any son of Eire will tell there, there's nothing in life so severe as a Protestant Irishman. She met few children, either in her ailing winters in England, or in her carefree summers in Ireland. Naturally, when she did meet other children, she did not care for them greatly and they returned the lack of feeling, for she was little Miss Prim, overspoiled in one way and overdisciplined in another, and older than she will ever be in her life again. Redheaded Rebel (Continued from page 55) "I get consistently younger," Greer laughs now. "I am so much younger today than when I was 12 that I fully expect by the time I am 40 I'll be young enough to play ingenues!" She can remember no time when she did not dream of being an actress and she was acting every moment of her waking life. Her favorite parlor trick as a very little girl was portraying a quarrel between the big fat policeman and the long thin man. She did both roles and she still can bring those two to life for you so plainly that you can see them in any room. And also, though she isn't aware of this, you can see that lonely little girl, running away by means of her two make-believe characters from the unpleasant facts of her own existence. THESE dreams and her reading took up ' all her hours and the reading began to make its influence felt in her schooling. Afternoons when the rest of the class was out on the playing fields, she was glued to a microscope in the botany lab, or forging eagerly through the Aeneid, and she zoomed ahead of the other children in her lessons just as fast as she was going ahead of them in height. So by the time she was 9 she had won her first scholarship and by the time she was 15, she had won her second. A miraculous scholarship, this one, that gave her the right to enter either the University of London or the sacred, austere precincts of the hallowed Oxford or Cambridge if she so chose. She wavered on Oxford, that "city of dreaming spires," as she now describes it. The scholastic life appealed to her as safe and comfortable. The money the scholarship brought her was a blessing to herself and her mother. But the more she considered Oxford, the more her keen mind realized that it was a retreat from life, not an entrance into it. And suddenly, there at 15, she was eager for life and sick of dreams. SHE wanted to know people and things. She wanted to see, not pictures and old books and good furniture and gentle hills, the things to which she had been accustomed always, but stores and crowded streets and slums and office buildings. She had known always that she would have her own living to earn and that whatever she got out of life she must wrest for herself. With the money from her scholarship, she saw the path to this. So she turned down Oxford in favor of London University, where she could not live on a campus but must live in a boardinghouse out in the city itself; where she would not be sheltered, but must survive or be lost in the shuffle. The family's idea was that she was to become a teacher and she saw no way, for all her dreams, of escaping that. The summer before she was 16, while waiting to enter the University, she taught at a girls' school. She had her mop of hair pinned high on her head and she was so excessively dignified that her charges did not remotely guess that she was only two years their senior. She went back to London in the fall and got her first chance at amateur theatricals — Shakespeare, of course, as you would guess from her highbrow atmosphere. "I wish you could have seen my Shy