Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1939)

Romantic Recluse 'Hied from page I'.i) mi'n. And as hi that he, himself, chooses tin (airly ■ ichibitioni This i--, Mr Colman agrees, a point well taken He aaJd, Parbapi the con iK further explained by admitting that if m I an called upon to maka nu affair which I am attending in a private cain sunk, miserably self-congrettably Inadequate. If, on the other hand, n script calls for me to do a scene in which I must stand up and harangue ■ thousand extras, I can harangue away for hours and think nothing of it. Which simply means. I think, that as an actor I am neither inhibited nor self-conscious; whereas, in my own capacity as a man. I am both. SB not much of a hand at analyzing myself. But I have heard of 'split Perhaps, in my case, the split comes between my screen self and my real self. I have never thought of this before but it now occurs to me that I may have become an actor so that I could pretend to be the kind of a fellow I cannot be in real life. "To try to explain why the swordswallowing hero I like to play on the screen is so different from my unexciting self is, for me, a task almost too difficult to attempt. T is a subject about which I know very little. I am not given to introspection. The majority of my interests, apart from my work, are active interests such as tennis, gardening, sailing. Which indicates, if I understand correctly my cursory readings of psychology, that I would be classified as an extrovert. 'My way of living, then," concluded Mr. Colman. "probably does date back to my childhood. Certainly I learned, very early in life, that to make myself as unobtrusive as possible was to make myself as popular as possible." DORN in Richmond, County of Surrey, England, Ronald Colman was the fifth child in a family of six children. Now a fifth child does not occupy any particular spotlight in the family circle unless he is in some way exceptional, which. Ronald insists, he was not. Of the six young Colmans the firstborn, a boy, died before Ronald was born. There were two sisters, Gladys and Edith, girls in their teens when Ronald was in the nursery. Next to the in age came Eric; four years later Ronald was born. So that, just at the age when the small Ronald was beginning to feel the shape of his own individuality, the sisters were at the ages when their beaux and activities demanded— and got — the major portion of their parents' attention. A small boy is never considered an by sisters in their teens and Ronald was no exception to this rule. Moreover. Erie's four years seniority placed him in a position of overlordship to the smaller brother, while Frieda, born when Ronald WSJ three years old and ned to creep into his heart and affections as his best friend and concompanion, was, at first, just another reason for a small boy to b quiet and out-of-the-w.v ible. It la obvious, then, that the family ■ could not have contributed very much to the boy's sense of sclf-im nce. Charles Colman. the father and very much the head of his family, was of the old school which holds that children should be "seen but not heard." Ronald, a-. .1 -mall boy, was devoted t father, but, admittedly, a little frightof him. I joric Colman, whose maiden name was FraM i'. was, as mothers usually are, softer, more yielding than the father. Such confidences as the naturally retire to anyone he gave to her. But the family was large and the differences in the ages of the children made too many demands upon the mother for her to be able to concentrate for any length of time on any one of her brood. Ronald does not seem to recall feeling any lack in his life because of the impersonal bustle of the household. He if anything, vaguely grateful for it. He preferred to be alone. He liked to keep his thoughts to himself. He even insisted upon saying his bedtime prayers to himself, feeling very silly indeed when a nurse or one of his sisters or even his mother came in to overhear his devotions. So, from infancy, we discover, he guarded his privacy as a precious and inviolable possession. Once every month Charles Colman took one of his sons up to London with him to visit his offices in that city. One 1. And I was ungallantly dis• d when I was told that the muffins and tea must be passed to Frieda first 'because she is a girl.' "So, you see, I benefited greatly by my trips to Father's offices where I heard talk of ships coming in from" the Straits Settlements, from India, China, Japan. I liked the smell and color of what I heard. I am sure that my nostalgia for travel was born as I listened to that talk of ships and things ... I assured my Father that I would be in his business when I grew up. 'But not,' I told him, 'in the London offices. I will be in command of one of the ships coming in from the Orient. . . .' "I saw my first motion picture with my father, too. It was my eleventh birthday, I remember, and Father took me to the old Earls Court Exhibition. It was a catchpenny show, with bands, whirligigs, fortune tellers — a very dreamland of noise and excitement and innocent baits for suckers. I loved it. And here again my childhood 'conditions' my maturity. For I have never outgrown my passion for amusement parks. Whenever Noel Coward is in Hollywood we always give one evening to the Venice Pier at Santa Monica, where, Noel sharing my enthusiasm, we "WHO'S BEHIND THE GLASSES?" Answers to the Photopl ay guessing game on pages 26 an d 27 are: 1. Una Merkel 1 1 . Carols Lombard 2. Ronald Colman 12. Joan Bennett 3. Spencer Tracy 13. Joan Crawford 4. Gary Cooper 14. Barbara Stanwyck 5. Robert Montgomery 1 5. Warner Baxter 6. Merle Oberon 16. Ginger Rogers 7. Virginia Bruce 17. Ann Sothern 8. Deanna Durbin 1 8. Cary Grant 9. George Brent 19. Tim Holt, Jr. 10. Mary Astor 20. Clark Gable 2 1 . Irene Hervey month Eric would go with his father, the next month it would be Ronald's turn. The object of these pilgrimages was the father's desire to implant an interest in his business in one, or both, of his sons. The elder Colman was an importer of silks from the Orient. And the business was thriving enough to supply the family with all of the comforts of living, a few of the luxuries. "I enjoyed those trips to Father's offices tremendously," Mr. Colman remembers. "They stimulated my imagination as nothing else did. And my imagination needed stimulating, for I was not a very imaginative child. I didn't care to read fairy tales. Ididn't believe in fairies or, indeed, in anything I couldn't see, touch, hear or taste. "I remember being told by my nurse that a certain house in our neighborhood was 'haunted' and my reply was a matter-of-fact, 'Nonsense, it just needs a coat of paint!' I had none of I teams by day or nightmares Innight which delight or terrify the highly-strung child. "Nursery tea was, I am afraid, the high spot of my day. Toward buns and nd jam were all my dreams di 'do' the merry-go-rounds, shooting galleries, ferris wheels and so on. "But those years ago at Earls Court Father and I came upon an attraction which was new, at any rate to me. Over a cavernous entrance we saw a sign which read: Animated Pictures. What, I thought, were they? "We paid our admissions and went into an inky-black pit. Directly before my dilated eyes an express train was running out of the tunnel and heading straight for the bench upon which father and I were seated. The sensation it gave me of narrowly escaping a violent death did not seem to me to come under the heading of amusement. Father laughed when, safely out in the open air again, I told him what I thought of this divertissement. Then he said, 'This invention has a future, son, watch it. It is going to make the fortunes of a great many people.' "Why I remember those words so exactly all these years later I can't say. Because at the time they seemed to me to be pretty silly. If that invention was going to make money for people, I thought. I would not be among them. When we got home I told Frieda about the pictures that move,' and earnestly advised her to stay away from them!" In the mind of the grown man those early days in Richmond blend into a comfortable pattern of days spent in the garden with Frieda where they shared such projects as rearing expanding families of guinea pigs, making rabbit hutches, digging holes in the earth in the belief that they would reach China. OMALL Ronald, done up in his father's waistcoat and silk hat, enjoyed playing doctor to the various pets. He listened to their heartbeats through long and porous milkweeds which imagination easily transformed into stethoscopes; took temperatures with a glass pendant from a windbell which, without any mental strain at all, became a clinical thermometer. . . . "Quite frequently an animal masticated the thermometer," chuckles Mr. Colman, "whereupon the 'doctor' became a skilled mortician! "Of course I went through all the normal phases of wanting to be a cabby, a fireman on a train, a captain of a cr.r«o ship when I grew up. Frieda and I agreed that it would be pretty fine to see me sitting up there above the heads of my fares, cracking a whip and wearing a battered topper. I also hoped to become a fireman on a train. I was thrilled whenever I saw an engine roar past me in the night, the fires stoked by a stalwart, half-naked man who bent and rose again in the flames as he fed the gigantic bowels of the monster. I felt a very little, colorless person by comparison. Even then, you see, I 'admired' to be a man of venturesome, violent action." Yes, it was certainly a comfortable, rather commonplace childhood that the small Ronald led in the bosom of that busy family life, on the bosom of the rich-earthed countryside. And it was the kind of a life which, in no sense, prepared him for the Hollywood life, the Hollywood ways. The family lived well, but carefully. The girls had their "best dresses," the little boys had "Sunday suits" and were taught to keep them carefully brushed and hung away against "special occasions." "We always had plenty of everything but we were aware that there were limitations. We had plenty of playthings, for instance, but few duplicates. So that when Eric had a bike he had to share it with me and when I had a cricket bat I had to let him have his turn at it. We learned to share rnd share alike as a matter of course. Which rather gave us the idea that one fellow is not supposed to have more than the other fellow. "But that they were happy years, those early years, of this I am sure. Because we never thought about whether we were happy or not. It is only when we are unhappy that we give any thought to it." ClIARLES COLMAN died when Ronald was sixteen. His going was not only a deep personal grief to each member of his family, but added to the grief was a complete upheaval of the familiar way of living. For the father's death considerably reduced the family circumstances. Ronald was recalled from the Hadleigh School of Littlehampton, Sussex, which he had been attending. And there was no further talk of preparing him for Cambridge or Oxford. 84 PHOTOPLAY