Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

Young Doug Learns He was once the pet aversion of this noted author, and she tells how Doug himself changed her opinion ALL right, all right, I was wrong. Want to make something of it? The guy I was wrong about was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and I had to go all the way to England and spend a whole month in London to find it out. Not but what I have been wrong before. I was on Max Baer to beat Joe Louis and I thought Brevity was going to win the Kentucky Derby and both of those cost me money. But being wrong about young Douglas turned out to be one of the nicest things that ever happened to me. It was one of those funny little chances that sometimes make such a difference in life. If I hadn't gone to the Ritz bar instead of the Rainbow room for cocktails by mistake I probably wouldn't ever have seen Doug at all. And I wouldn't have known the inside story of his rebellion against Hollywood, his adventures in England and the truth about him as a person. Some day I would like to write a book about the little chances that alter lives. The telephone operator who rang the wrong room, and the girl in the right room who waited and waited for that phone call. The wind that blew away a very small note left on a pillow. The man out in Seattle who forgot to mail a letter to Boston. The bridge game that lasted too long. You've had those things happen to you, of course. Some of the grandest and some of the most tragic things in your life have hinged on something like the fact that a clock was five minutes slow. Meeting Douglas that afternoon in New York was one of those little chances that brought something fine and something pleasant into my life instead of something disagreeable and unkind. I do not like disliking people and up until that afternoon young Douglas Fairbanks had been one of my pet aversions in the whole world. I thought he was a poseur, a con ceited young pup and that he had gone British because he was at heart a young snob who didn't think his own country good enough for him. Beginning with that chance meeting I found out he was one of the most honest, one of the frankest and one of the most charming people I'd ever met. In fact, what my eldest son Bill calls a helova a guy. Isn't it nice to be wrong like that? This is the way it happened. I had a date to meet a friend for tea and I went to the Ritz by mistake. (I must remind myself to get an engagement book — some day one of my mistakes won't turn out so well. I Anyhow, there I ran across young Douglas who had just finished his afternoon tonic and was about to depart. While I waited, he sat down — politely, and it was polite because he told me very shortly that I had never managed to conceal my opinion that he was one of the world's lesser blights — and we got to talking. Naturally he returned my feeling in spades and for ten minutes we glared at each other and wondered why something didn't happen to rescue us from each other. WHEN we were crossing to England together later on the Berengaria, Douglas looked up from Gunther's "Inside Europe" one stormy morning and remarked, "Do you know, that first day in the Ritz I thought ' What have I done to deserve this?' " At the end of those first ten minutes on the boat, I found myself looking at Douglas with some bewilderment. He seemed unexpectedly a totally different person. He had assurance and a sort of definite unassuming way of saying things that certainly had never been there before. His eyes were steady and humor Doug. Jr., was nineteen when he married Joan Craw ford. Did he hale the set-up of his life even then? 14 The reports about Doug going British were intensified when he began beauing vivid Gertrude Lawrence