Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1943)

Paillette's in Love! (Continued from page 67) another Meredith manager and crony, was being fitted to a sport jacket by his favorite tailor when Meredith stalked in, asked for the manager «nd demanded to look at something special in an English pattern." "You, Buzz!" Jimmy called out, incredulously, from the dressing room. "Planning to abdicate your title?" The title he was referring to was Meredith's undisputed claim to the honor of being "the worst-dressed man in pictures." Meredith was nonplussed. "When you travel top-drawer, you've got to dress top-drawer," Meredith replied, light as a lark. Meredith the bon-ton was only one of the many transformations. From that day on, something new was constantly being added to the old Mere • dith. Take athletics, at which Paulette is a wow, and at which Meredith has glared, lo! these last five years. "I suppose you're quite a sportsman," Paulette happened to remark one day. "Just you name the sport, honey," replied Meredith, nonchalant as you please. "Fine! How about a game of golf?" "Why not?" He was snoozing that next Sunday morning when the telephone rang. It was Paulette. "I'll be by in half an hour," she said blithely. "Be waiting at the curb with your clubs." Well, they trotted out on the links and it was a shambles. Meredith chalked up a fast 85 — for nine holes. Paulette turned in a card of 43. "How about tennis?" Meredith suggested on the way home, remembering a season, three years back, when he had shellacked Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Myron McCormick — a game apiece. "I'm not much at tennis," Paulette said, apologetically. They met, Meredith in a basque sweater; Paulette, in a tennis getup of breathless design. Meredith was swiftly annihilated. PING-PONG, pitching horseshoes, swimming — it was all the same. A rhumba addict, Paulette took the melancholy Meredith in hand and transformed him into a veritable Latin. They were going to town at Ciro's one night when someone tapped Meredith on the shoulder. It was Cesar Romero. "Nice going, amigo," smiled the town's top rhumba artist. "Who, me?" Meredith sputtered, blinking. When civilian Meredith was called to the colors, things looked dark indeed for a while. It wasn't being called to the colors that made things look so dark. The rub was in being sent to a camp clear out in the Middle West. Paulette saw him off, bade him a fond farewell. He wasn't gone forty-eight hours before Paulette took up knitting on the set. "A horse blanket?" Dona Drake remarked one day, observing the huge expanse of red wool. "For your information," Paulette said tolerantly, "I am knitting a sweater." "Not for Laird Cregar, by any chance?" quipped Dona. Paulette, who never blushes, kept on knitting. The lovers' gloom was of short duration. Hardly had a fortnight passed before Private Meredith was back, looking the veriest picture of a soldier, hale and martial. 74 "A.W.O.L.?" gasped Paulette. "Nope. Transferred." That, of course, was over a year ago, and considerable bombs have plummeted down on Tokyo since then. Also, there was the smile of fate this summer when Paulette went East and Burgess, happily within range, spent many blissful hours at her Nyack farm. In the interim, Private Meredith had been advanced to Lieutenant Meredith, attached to morale and given a roving post that takes him cross-country every other week practically. But it also takes him back to Los Angeles, Los Angeles and Paulette. Things could be lots worse for the lad whose early days were marked by an almost incredible aimlessness. I N FACT, history records that just be' fore Burgess got around to trying the stage, the veteran of a dozen careers, all of them nipped in the bud, hit upon an idea that would capitalize on his buffetings at the hands of Fate: Who, if not he, was an authority on the vexing problem of job-getting? Answering his own question, he sat down at a typewriter and, with the frenzy of an Old Testament prophet, struck off a brochure entitled "How To Land A Job," which he sent to a publisher he knew slightly. The manuscript came back promptly — by return mail, as a matter of fact. "You most certainly have a book in you, young man," the publisher wrote, "but this isn't it. The book you ought to lose no time in writing — and reading — is not 'How To Land A Job' but 'How To Keep A Job.' " With a resignation born of some twenty-odd years consumed in the trialand-error system, Meredith folded the letter into a paper airplane and cata pulted it out of the window. Matters had been proceeding at this rate since the scion of Dr. William George Meredith, Cleveland physician and surgeon, had turned ten. At that time he was notified that he had been named by the celebrated Paulist fathers as one of the eight best boy sopranos in the land, an honor accompanied by a scholarship to the Paulist Choristers School. The scholarship offer was turned down. Mrs. Meredith, after thinking it over, decided that a Catholic school was no place for the grandson of a famous Methodist revivalist, even so illustrious an institution as the Choristers School. But the seed had been planted. The following fall Master Burgess was packed off to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine Choir School in New York as chorister and student. HIS four years at the Choir School were a sensational, if nonmusical, success. He spent the first year in a futile attempt to get his fellow choristers to put zip into the liturgies of the church, discovered that century-old traditions were not easily budged and gave up his futile labors. The second year was more productive. Maintaining the minimum level of scholarship, he set about to bag for himself the lead in the annual school play, "Peter Pan," which role he executed with so much "zest and imagination," to quote his mentor, that he was publicly cited by the faculty. His last two years at the Choir School added further laurels on the cap and buskin side of the ledger and settled one point for sure: Burgess Meredith wasn't meant to become a singer. His career in music washed up, Bur :-.'■':■: :? , to First step wards Hollywood — and Paulette Godda r d : smal I Meredith playing the lead in "Peter Pan" The holder of the title, "The worst dressed man in Hollywood," in his formative years — Burgess Meredith rHOTOFLAY combined with movie miffor