Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1944)

Alan Ladd Comes Home (Continued from page 27) back home where he could get the right kind of food. “We can’t serve special diets in the South Pacific or in Italy,’’ they said. “You’ve got to be able to eat what comes your way and you are not up to it. You have to coddle that bread basket of yours and you won’t have any chance to coddle it if you’re overseas with the boys, so go on home and make the best of it. "niere are plenty of other guys who couldn’t make it. You’re not the only one.” It was no consolation to Corporal Ladd to hear that other guys hadn’t made it. He felt that this was the worst blow fate could have dealt him. He’d been reading about Clark Gable and other Hollywood boys who had shown the world that actors could also fight and he wanted to get in there and give the Axis something to remember him by, too. “I NEVER felt so lonesome in my life ’ as the day I took off my uniform,” Alan told me. “I don’t know quite what it’s like unless it’s not being able to go back to school the next semester when you know all the gang is going to be there. You make friends, close friends in the Army the way you do in school and you want to go on with them through the whole business. “When I was in the hospital there were many cases of guys’ being left behind when their companies shipped overseas and cynical people will tell you that they probably were delighted at having been left in a warm safe bed, but I can tell you they weren’t and I understand it. There is no more desolate feeling in the world than to know the boys you trained with are taking off and you’re not going. “There will be folks who’ll want to contradict me when I say that men just like to fight, especially when they think their country’s being shoved around by some no-good monkeys. Most of the fellows I know are in this war with the same spirit that they’d have going into a football game. They want to clean up the enemy and get back home to normal life. They can’t wait to get it over with. “And when you hear how the boys are coming back home bitter and disillusioned, don’t believe that either. I saw plenty of them in the hospital with their arms and legs gone and otherwise messed up and I didn’t see one who was bitter. They were all just the sweet kids they’d been before. Just sweet American kids like the ones you knew in your own home towm. Some of them got battered up a lot but it hasn’t soured them on the world. It sure gives you faith in the United States to see those kids and talk to them as I did.” Alan said the doctors told him it was his perpetual habit of worrying that had thrown his digestive apparatus out of gear. “I’m naturally a defeatist,” Alan explained to me. “I keep worrying about everything and the closer I get to it the bigger it gets until every little thing swells up like a great big mountain and the first thing I know my stomach is all doubled up in a knot and my food isn’t welcome. My little wife Susie is just the opposite. She burbles along over hill and dale with such equanimity it floors you. “It isn’t true what you hear about my refusing to undergo an operation in the Army hospital. There was never any talk of an operation.” Gail says any girl can have hands so inviting to love. “My own hand care is very easy,” she says. “But it works almost-professional wonders against roughness. Use Jergens Lotion.” Most Stars use Jergens. That’s specialized hand care you have with Jergens. Contains 2 ingredients so effective in promoting soft, smooth skin that many doctors prescribe them. And— glory be— Jergens Lotion leaves no sticky feeling. Uncondifional Axis surrender means uncondifional American sacrifice. Fourth War Loan. oj llie ddorotle HaiuU BROWN, STARRING IN PARAMOUNT PICTURE, ''OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY" GAIL RUSSELL AND JAMES THE Tke*lmovui£ HanACwie Je^i^enA Xotum,7tol