Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

Claudette Colbert's Climb to Stardo m docks and small Lily jumping up and down with grief. He wrote them almost immediately. "Our friend was right," he said; "I have a position already in the First National Bank here. I'm sending on the money for your tickets so that you can leave at once." Charles, they left with his Grandmother. "We'll be back," Madame told him decidedly. "It won't be long until I see you again." [ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 J ticular school had two buildings in which the boys were separated from the girls so that they met only at recess, and then momentarily. The teachers were kindly, of course. To them, she was a strange child with a great handicap; a problem in this new business called psychology (it was 1913, and only intellectuals had heard of Freud). They set to work to help her, and succeeded so well that within a few months Lily not only could read her lessons and The knees have il! Andre Leeds and Frank Shields, former tennis champion, at the Los Angeles Tennis Club pool. Both have parts in "Come and Get It." Under contract for a year, during which he has been studying acting, Frank has refused many offers to go back into the tennis game It wasn't. She sent for him as soon as the family was established in the new apartment on 53rd Street between Lexington and Third. And in the autumn he went to Public School 59, with little Lily tagging after. POURING that first ghastly year she spoke '-'nothing but French, and you must know what an opportunity for sport this was to the ol her children. Besides, her last name sounded very much like "Shoestring," a word that could be shouted with shrill nasal intlection after the thin little girl with the wide brown Charles managed to be fiercely protective when they were together, but this par 76 understand what was said in class, but she could also reply, in kind, to the brats who tormented her. At home, the family life of the Chauchoins — and especially of Lily — went on much as it had in Paris. Charles, as always, did very nearly as he liked, had multitudes of small, noisy friends and got himself, and them, into innumerable scrapes. For Lily there was the old discipline, the same careful observation. She came home from school every day to find her mother dressed and smiling, ready to take her to the park. "She had been cooking and scrubbing and sweeping, making our clothes and mending and sewing all day," said Claudette, shaking her head. " Still she looked like a duchess at 3 o'clock. I'll never be able to understand that." Lily loathed Central Park. In the first place it was as dull a place to be as the one at home in Paris. And again it was surrounded by delightful streets in which other little girls, unattended, played at jacks and marbles and dolls. Charles might have been some help if he hadn't disappeared the minute they arrived every day. She met a little French boy named Jacques, one afternoon, and Madame Chauchoin, after querying him at length about family and habits, nodded her approval. So with her one playmate Lily spent the few free hours before dinner playing languid tag or indifferent catch under the trees. In the evenings she read, and went to bed early. The entire family (with the exception of the irrepressible Charles) followed the same lonely routine. Madame did not learn EngKsh for ten years and the French Colony in New York was very small. She had but two intimate friends who called occasionally. For Lily there were other tribulations, other differences. She wore socks when the other children wore stockings, so that in winter her teachers said, "Good heavens, child! Aren't your legs cold?" She could reassure them truthfully, because she was used to the socks — but she did so much want to wear what the others did. There was the candy, too; the white and pink and green, sticky glucose, penny candy for which each American youngster has traditionally a daily cent to spend. " When you come home from school," Maman told her begging offspring, " I shall give to each of you a piece of milk chocolate and some bread to eat it with. But no money for that sickening stuff of jawbreakers and licorice whips and angel pies. And if you accept any of it. as a gift from the others, you'll get a spanking and no chocolate to eat, either." "I wanted the pink goo," Claudette said, remembering. "Chocolate seemed so unexciting." Even in the family she was a little inferior to everyone else, being the youngest, the most inexperienced, and the only one with straight hair. While her parents, and Tante (of whom you will read on later pages) and Charles went directly to bed with only the preliminary of teeth brushing, Lily spent at least half an hour each night twining kid curlers into her unruly brown mop. There was much hair, and many curlers. I F the tempo of this story has been laggard be 'assured it is because the paragraphs have followed so exactly the pace of Claudette's childhood. Uneventful (except for the "great blow" and the "great journey" in L913), a little precise, certainly a little tragic, so far as the girl herself was concerned. What poise she had at the age of sixteen was acquired, not from association with other people, but from extensive reading and an inherent understanding of any situation. In high school she was on the basketball team, and belonged to a club or two. But at home the persistent guardianship of morals and virtue persisted. Young Jacques, who had I PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 78 |