Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1942)

Monica to Santa Barbara was heaven for kids — summer at Las Tunas was one hundred percent heaven for Betty. Wearing your bathing suit or your shorts all day long, swimming three or four times a day, tramping up in the hills after rabbits, lying on the sand in the hot sun and getting a swell tan, going up to Malibu with the other kids to play tennis, and she was getting pretty good, too, for fourteen. Even Johnny said so, and Johnny was super. They had all made a pact at the end of last summer. They would all come back, honest-to-goodness. Johnny's mother had carted him off to New York, and Bitsy's father was a doctor and he was always squawking about it was too far for a busy doctor, and Ted and Matthew's folks talked about sending them to a dude ranch for the summer, and Sally's folks had moved to San Diego because her father had a job in an airplane factory. . . . But that was all winter stuff. It wasn't too important. Parents, after all, ought to think about their children and what was good for them, and they usually did if you kept at it long enough and hard enough and often enough. So they had all agreed to make their folks come back to Malibu no matter what. Of course Betty stayed there in the winter too and went to Santa Monica to school. Not exactly at Malibu. Malibu was beautiful and exclusive 32 A warm number, thought Betty, eyeing the girl in the car. You could tell because she wore so much lipstick and that sweater — the Hays Office would have something to say if she ever wore it in a picture and filled with movie stars and directors and writers who got big salaries. But Las Tunas was only a little way on your bike and Johnny was swell, too, about getting her in his mother's station wagon and bringing her home when they stayed late and cooked hot dogs on the beach. When they said good-by, they all hollered, "See you next summer for sure," and that was really the pact. Johnny had made his mother promise all right and Johnny said his mother was a little screwy, being a writer, but she had never broken a promise. And Johnny sent Betty a picture of himself in his New York Military Academy uniform, which was super, too. His last letter, even, said, "I will be seeing you this summer at good old Malibu. I like it here a lot. I am on the rifle team which is okay, but I will sure be glad to see good old Malibu, you bet, love, Johnny." Now everything was changed. Everything was awful. The quarter in her hand felt sticky, she was clutching it so hard. Right out there in that ocean where they had been swimming every summer since they were little kids, where they took their kayaks and went paddling clear out to the fishing barge, were submarines. Last summer, if you saw a stick coming out of the water with a flag on it, you knew it had drifted down from the "Yank In The R.A.F." location at Point Doane, and everybody raced through the water to get it first. This simimer — that was just around the corner — if you saw anything sticking up out of the water, it might be a submarine with some horrible, mean old Japs, who wanted to kill people and were spoiling everything. Last summer, when everything was simply super, they used to watch airplanes all the time, Johnny and the other kids got so they could identify them all and even Betty could teU the P-38 because it sort of had two tails, and once the B-19 flew over. A ferry pilot was stuck on Ailine's big sister, who was a sort of a dope but pretty, and he used to buzz back and forth on test flights and they all got to speak to {Continued on page 74) coios mm\] sekies ^Lixuine ^t^iiij: Appearing in M-G-M's "Fingers At The Window" page 33 ''Jiltcnc iPc-wez: Appearing in Twentieth Century-Fox's "This Above AH" page 36 ^ ulct yllaliite: Appearing In Twentieth Century-Fox's "Footllght Serenade" page 36 ui^m:: Appearing In Republic's "In Old California" page 37 dc.uiT (f^cnict^: Appearing In Twentieth Century-Fox's "Orchestra Wife" page 37 <=r^tcitc ^^Udiiic: Appearing in Unlversal's "Lady In A Jam page J/0 PHOTOPLAY combined with movie mirrcii