Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1939)

s«***x" Melvyn, at the age of two Aged eight, after a year in Germany 1 « OF THE MOVIES A shatterer of conventions, a stormy petrel struggling for freedom — Melvyn Douglas. Beginning the vivid story of a rebellious youth BY HOWARD SHARPE THE man's nervous fingers were not quite lure Oil the keys and the particular Chopin Nocturne he was playing thereby suffered. Still, the familiar chords were soothing; April sunlight came through the windows and struck tiMtrs of rich wine in the polish of the old square rosewood piano. From upstairs, a discordant \v;nling sound suddenly argued with Chopin ever a passage and, involuntarily, Professor Edouard Hesselberg transposed to another key — the key in which the person you have come to know as Melvyn Douglas uttered his first cry on this earth. It was symbolic, since here was the birth of discord — a brawny, lusty Discord who, even on the first evening of his life, proved his nonconformism by falling on his head from a nurse's clumsy arms and surviving with no perceptible injury, either mental or physical. It was a tough head. It still is. But perhaps the jolt it received on that night thirty-seven years ago dislodged the little normal scale which, in the brains of most men, weighs convention with convention to prove a stolid balance. In any case young Melvyn turned out, to his parents' surprise and often to their horror, to be a renegade. He was not as other babies, nor as other boys. Often in the quiet night — Macon, Georgia at the turn of the century, was a peaceful town, especially after curfew — the professor and Lena (nee Shackleford), his good wife, would discuss this thing. They thought perhaps the child's mixed ancestry . . . Edouard was Russian-born; Lena had been a Kentuckian, with muddled English and harsh Scotch blood cooling her veins. The combination, felt these two artistic intellectuals, might be forming a strange alchemy of emotion and mentality in their son. They were wont to remember, wincing, during these discussions the trip to Europe they made when Melvyn was six weeks old. It was the first evidence that he was going to be a Trial. In persistent opposition to the rules most babies follow he had wept copiously and thrashed around in his basket all night, sleeping in peace throughout the day while the Hesselbergs, hollow-eyed, napped at noon and nodded at dinner. That trip, agreed the Hesselbergs, had been hell. But they were optimists. Smiling hopefully, they planned to mold the boy and map his future and his ideas for him, as he grew older. "He will be a musician," Edouard would say, nodding his head and tapping his knees with his sensitive fingers. "Or a lawyer," Lena would modify. She was a practical woman and she had been married for many years to a musician. "The law pays well." The Professor had learned the habit of compromise. "He will make his own choice — " She nodded. But neither meant it. They were people of a small world, of intense possessiveness. This son was a treasure to be nurtured with passionate care, to be shaped like modeling clay by ceaseless, watchful work; and the shell they built around him through the early years was of adamantine, made of too much love and too much solicitude and the deep-rooted belief of the Hesselbergs that a child must be a reflection of his parents, mindless, until manhood. Then, they seemed to feel, the personality of ego would spring into being suddenly, fully developed, at the stroke of noon on his twentyfirst birthday. 16