Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

LOVE IS GOOD LUCK to DON AMECHE REGINALD TAVINER ON the third finger of his left hand Don Ameche wears a narrow, plain, white gold ring. That ring is never removed — if you looked closely you could see it in both "Ramona" and "Ladies in Love." Don would about as soon take off the finger itself as that ring, even while doing those romantic roles on the screen. When the director of his last picture suggested that he should take it off — the ring, not the finger — Don simply shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. The director, a very wise man, did not press the point. The absolute finality of that little shrug of Don's told him that he would have torn up his contract first. Not many handsome young leading men in Hollywood wear With Sheila, their Irish setter, Don and Honore stroll in the garden of their Beverly Hills home wedding rings. As a matter of fact, Don is about the only one. And Don wears his because that ring, to him, is a sort of symbol that encircles his entire world; it is not only a wedding ring, but a talisman. It means not only that he is happily married, but that his luck changed when he first put on that ring. From that day until this he has been riding the crests, while before that he knew only the bumps. Of course, it may have been only coincidence, but Don is a Latin and superstitious. He believes that it was the ring that brought him luck — that it was love that made him lucky. Don has been wearing the ring for only a little over four years as yet, but if you want to understand how he feels about it you've got to go back a lot farther than that. You've got to go back 'way before Don's present screen success, before his radio success, before he first ever appeared on the stage; you've got to go back to a little college town where Don and a beautiful young coed were campus sweethearts. They decided then that when Don was sufficiently successful they would be married; but it was their marriage, Don says, that led to his success. But perhaps you should go back even farther than that, before either Don or his lovely young bride were born. Because that's where the story really begins, and the setting is the steerage of an emigrant steamer ploughing a trackless furrow across the broad Atlantic towards the Promised Land: W/HEN you first look at Don you think of the romantic Argentine with picturesque Gauchos spurring across the pampas. When you first hear that name you see the gay streets of Barcelona, of Buenos Aires or Seville. And you're all wet. Don's father, down in the steerage of that emigrant ship, was coming not from Spain but from Italy. And Don himself, with a name like that, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Don shrugs his shoulders, too, when he speaks of these things. In his place — now — most movie actors would have invented a lineage that dates from Cortez and Balboa, with broad lands and picturesque haciendas and all the rest, because Don could get away with it. But he is frank and unaffected; he tells you in the most matter-of-fact way in the world that his father worked in the iron and coal mines of Pennsylvania, dug ore in Michigan, spiked railroad ties to span the continent, and so on. He doesn't even say that his father later kept a tavern, as his studio biography does. He tells you simply that when his father had saved enough money by working with a pick and shovel he bought a saloon. The saloon was in Kenosha, and by the time Prohibition came and swept all | please turn to page 111 ] 60