Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

au dette ert s to tard om By ALLEN TAYLOR Even ai six Lily Chauchoin was an active soul. She tied her own hair bow here — and today wears one like it SEPTEMBER sunlight slanted down into the Sunday streets of Paris and made warm the straggling faithful on their way to church; it was 1907, and there had not yet been a war, and bustles weren't funny, and people had time for things. M. Chauchoin, who ran the pastry shop on the Rue Armand Carsel (in the silent little suburb of Saint Mande), stood in the doorway of his apartment house and fingered his silver watch and thought vaguely that it was a little unfortunate, Jeanne's having a baby on the thirteenth of the month — it might be unlucky for the child. He wished, suddenly, that it would be a little girl with brown eyes. His watch said 7:45 and the church bells had begun to ring when they called him in. The new baby's lusty howling clashed with the bells, but somehow there was a triumphant note in both. Madame held the bit of embodied noise out to her husband. "Take her up the stairs," she commanded weakly. It was a tradition in that family that the newborn would have a finer future if it were carried upstairs immediately after birth. Chauchoin went up six flights with the infant that only a fewyears later America would come to know as Claudette Colbert. This is the story of an ugly child in a family of beautiful people; of a husky-voiced little foreign girl with an unpronounceable name and half socks, in an unsympathetic American school; of a young woman burdened with shyness and an inferiority complex who (quietly and without too much apparent effort) has become one of the greatest stellar names in the enter tainment world. It is a portrait primarily, a success story secondarily; but from it you must catch some small degree of the warmth, the great beauty, the decided personal power of Lilv Chauchoin The first installment in the fascinating life history of an ugly duckling who transformed herself into a glorious swan Her father, handsome and kindly and very gullible, didn't lose the pastry shop and thus have to transplant a protesting family to America until Claudette was eight; so that her childhood, in a strict French sort of way, was happy enough. At any rate she remembers very little of it when you talk to her now. "The young daughter of a thoroughly middle-class Parisian family is not a personality," she explained to me. We sat in the paneled library of her famous Holmby Hills house — Claudette with a stiff neck and a hot water bottle, I with two packages of cigarettes and a liqueur. "What really got me was that my brother could do as he liked, run around with all the grubby little boys in the neighborhood, disappear for hours at a time. I remember so well the Bois and the gorgeous dirty streets — because I could play quietly in the park, if I liked, with Mother watching. But the streets were forbidden." Pastry shops do not make for great fortunes, or even little ones; there was no governess, no nurse. Chez Chauchoin was five crowded rooms containing Madame and Monsieur and Charles, the small boy, and Lily, the Ires petite jeune fille. But the five rooms were spotless, always, and the table sparkled every night. The children were well dressed, inevitably— because Jeanne Loew Chauchoin, besides being a beautiful woman, was a good housewife and mother. First memory for Claudette, aside from the lovely unapproachable gutters, was the visit one brilliant April week end -....■' • This enchanting picture of Lily before she came to America stands beside her Mother's bedside in Claudette's new Hollywood house 14