Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1944)

p M M SHERUlif , perfumer ^/’S'C'oc/s <7 yres^,s/tfaM/fnf /rafra/f CO' ■ • ■ mtA ^e fifaZ/Yy <y yoy^t^S /nifs/c />? e’y&Yy Z/hye/Yoy e/ro^ (yu'/Z ny&ar //■ ^or yay&Zy — A«/Sy>Z/) e>s6 . . .yor zA& y^/} y SOuyAZ eyZsr, HY^eY’&Y&r you yo/ Perfume, 6.50— 3.50— debutante size, 1.10. Dusting powder, 1.00. Other Frolic fascinators— Toilet water, 1.75. Talcum powder, 50t. Jeff in a Jiffy (Continued from page 47) The .incident requires a bit of explaining and we’re sorry these pages aren’t wired for sound so the reader could enjoy the rich hint of Irish in her voice as she tells it. “It started when I went for a ride in a — well, I can’t tell you in a what because it’s a military secret. Anyhow, I was warned it would be a very muddy ride I had on a light suit — my very best suit, it was a Christmas present — so a very nice Colonel sent over a pair of his old pants for me to wear. They were large, coming almost up under my arms, so a Captain gave me a pair of his silver bars to pin them up with. “The military secret jounced up and down and when we got back I looked as though I were wearing a mud pack all over. I went to my tent to clean up and hung the Colonel’s trousers up to dry. He didn’t send over for them, so the next morning when I was leaving I called out to one of the soldiers, ‘Tell the Colonel not to forget his trousers are in my tent. He left them there yesterday.’ When I saw that private’s stricken face I didn’t know what to do — so I just went on my way, but quick, and figured the Colonel could explain it himself!” lEFF was born, believe it or not, in a boys’ reformatory. Her dad was superintendent of an institution at South Windham, Maine, which accounts for her seeing the light of her first day in a juvenile jug. Later, the family moved to the Maryland Training School for Boy% which is where she first had cause to appreciate her two-gender name. “What would a kid with a name like Beatrice or Gwendolyn do in a setting like that?” she asks. When she was a tot she served as a sort of special award to young inmates who had lived up to certain behavior standards. That is, a boy who had been especially good would be allowed to skip his routine tasks to take care of small Jeff for an afternoon. “I used to love to play house,” she recalls, “only I always wanted the boy to dress up in skirts and be the mama. They were in a spot where they had to do what I asked them. I look back now and wonder if after an afternoon with me some of those poor kids didn’t begin to wonder if virtue really was its own reward!” When she grew old enough to show definite tomboy tendencies, she was sent to public school to see what little girls were like and her lessons were supplemented with private tutoring by her mother, who was a schoolteacher. Since her earliest expressed ambition was “to be a stage director, marry a considerate man and have ten children,” her parents did what they could to take care of the preliminaries. At least they enrolled her in ballet and tap-dancing school as a prelude to a theatrical career — and trusted she would be able to carry on with the rest of her ambitions herself. After high school she enrolled in the Leland Powers Dramatic School in Boston and her all-inclusive course took in not only such phases as lighting, make-up and prompting, but also acting. The director of the drama school, a tall, blond (and considerate) young man named William R. Anderson, encouraged her to concentrate on acting. He thought she had something there. He was right, she did have something — Mr. Anderson himself. They Ask the man in uniform; then give generously to the Red Cross War Fund. 75