Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1933)

o/LOVE says Carole Lombard to Gladys Hall How many kinds have you had? The seventh, which she thought ideal, proved otherwise have seen somewhere and who seems to fit the selfmade picture. "Nine times out of ten, the ideal doesn't fit the person in any respect. He wears your ideal of him as a man wears a hat several sizes too large or too small. "I had that experience, too. It is the love that always leaves a faint, sad fragrance, like the breath of lavender, in your memory. Perhaps because it was so perfect, being an illusion. "AT any rate, I had created my own image of the -iVidealman. I'd read a lot of poetry and things. I was at that age. I planned out the kind of things this ideal man would do, the flowers he would send to commemorate, sensitively, certain shared and lovely hours. I dreamed of the gallantries he would exhibit, the songs he would sing, the lyrical names he would call me, the poetic things he would want to do with me. And when my ideal was all built and ready-to-wear, I met a stolid, commonplace lad and forthwith pinned my ideal to his rather prosaic chest. "I waited — on tip-toe — and nothing happened. For weeks and even months, I made myself read into his babbitty words things he had never meant to say. I answered him with flights of imagery that left him dumb — and a little cross. I interpreted his rather unimaginative actions into the shining deeds of my own mind. I worked over that love as I never have over any other. "And then, at last, I had to realize that the poor boy's feet were clay, wingless clay. So much so, that they had trampled my ideal right under them. It took me a long time to learn that lesson because, of all loves, the love you create yourself is the hardest to kill, takes the longest time to die. "There is," Carole continued, cataloging the love classifications on the tips of her pointed fingers, "the Love-on-theRebound. Which usually follows some such disappointment as the death of the Love-Ideal. It did with me. You feel so lonely after you have lived with an ideal of your own making for a long while, and then find yourself bereft of it. It must be like giving birth to a fairy child and losing him. "At any rate, after my Love Ideal was gone I turned to the nearest boy at hand. He was a lad I'd known for years and had never even thought of falling in love with. But then I discovered that my Ideal Love was nothing more nor less than a dream I had dreamed. I thought that love would never come to me. I was afraid of being lonely. I was slightly and very dramatically bitter. I talked a great deal about disillusionment Carole says she was seriously in love at the age of eight and since then has experienced all the loves in her catalog of seven and the lamed heart of the world. I was in that phase. The boy listened to all of my young, self-conscious grief and worldweariness. He did all the things I had wanted my ideal to do. He sent flowers on certain days and sang sweet, sad songs to me, and remembered places we had gone together and what I had worn the first time we danced together, and all sorts of things like that. "I tried to believe that I was in love with him. I told myself that he was real. But I had gotten over fooling myself after that last experience. 1 [e had a funny nose, and I couldn't make it straight. He had a funny curly mouth, and I couldn't make it into the mouth of a Galahad. He talked all the time and said funny things, and I couldn't recreate him into the Si and silent type. [ please turx to PAGl ',(' | 51