Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1945)

"I used to think baby powders were all alike, but look at these differences . .. • Most baby specialists all over the country say that Mennen is the best baby powder* . . . • Comparing 3 leading baby powders . . . microscopic tests show that -Mennen is smoothest of all! (No wonder, ’cause a special Mennen process makes this powder satin-smooth). . . • 3 out of 4 doctors say baby powder should be antiseptic; being antiseptic, Mennen powder helps fight harmful germs . . . "So. Mom, ple-e-eze help protect my delicate skin against painful chafing, prickly heat, scalded buttocks and other skin troubles— with the best baby powder, and I do mean Mennen ! It makes me smell so sweet, too” I * According to survey $ [ buij the hesf • Mennen./" Also ... 4 times as many doctors prefer MENNEN ANTISEPTIC BABY OIL as any other baby oil or lotion.* A Rather Remarkable Man ( Continued jrom page 43) riper, mellower vintage none will deny, for these young : men with a future are all the more interesting because they have a past. Take Knox, for instance. He was born in Ontario, Canada, thirty-odd years ago. His father (like Wilson’s) was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother (also like Wilson’s mother) came from a long line of Presbyterian ministers. Maybe the original John Knox was one of them. That Scottish reformer would make a dour ancestor for anyone, though distant and eminent enough to be proud of. Alexander went to grammar school and high school in London, Ontario, eventually enrolling as a medical student at Western Ontario University. But he soon found he preferred writing, elocution, acting, newspaper work, debating, politics and what not. He was ambitious, self-confident, sure of himself — and if you are not sure of yourself before you are twenty, what chance have you later on? He played Hamlet in a university production, then joined the Boston Repertory Theatre before his college career was finished. The year in which this happened was 1929 — just about the hardest to be ambitious in, even for a youth. So presently he went to the other London. That milder, less hectic atmosphere proved congenial, so that within a short time Knox found himself playing the part of a young American in an Edgar Wallace play in a West End theater. He was also writing his first novel, as well as his first reviews of other people’s novels. FOR several years after that he crossed the Atlantic back and forth, “commuting,” as he says, between England, New York and Canada. 1937 saw him putting in a season at London’s celebrated Old Vic. Then he appeared in a Bernard Shaw play called “Geneva” — which, with prophetic appropriateness so far as Knox was concerned, dealt with the League of Nations. In between whiles he even wrote a play himself and acted in it; then he took a writing assignment with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. If one thing had become almost inevitable by this time it was that Hollywood would go after him, even if he didn’t choose to go after Hollywood. He didn’t, particularly, but Hollywood did — characteristically and capriciously, so that presently, with a touch of the divinity that shapes people’s ends, “Wilson” began to appear on his own and Hollywood’s horizon. A matter of general as well as technical interest is that he never took the usual kind of screen test for “Wilson.” He made a voice-recording of the entire part, and it was the voice, one gathers, that clinched the matter. (This, I suppose, gives him something — if anything — in common with Frank Sinatra.) Of course Knox and I talked a good deal about Wilson — not only the picture, but the man in the picture, and also the man in history. Knox is the sort of person who would naturally read all the books about Wilson he could get hold of, for sheer interest in the subject — in contradistinction, let us say, to Madame Sarah Bernhardt, whose acting ability and silver-tongued utterance were both superb, but whose intellectual concern with what she was up to was sometimes so slight that she was said not to read a play completely, but merely to know her own cues in it. (It is only fair to add that some of the plays she appeared in fully justified this economy of effort.) Anyhow, it did not really surprise me to find that Knox was something of an authority on Wilson, since intellectual as well