Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

ushered into Selznick’s office in Culver City. “I thought this was the moment when my dreams would all take real form,” she reports. “Somehow I had found out that they wanted me for ‘Rebecca,’ to co-star with Laurence Olivier, under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. My head was filled with this upper realm of acting which I was about to enter, and I planned to conquer Mr. Selznick with my poise and beauty. “ ‘How do you do?’ I began, as soon as I was in his presence. I waited for him to jump up and greet me. “ ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I want to look at your teeth.’ ” Mr. Selznick got to look at Anne’s teeth, and she did not, as was her wild impulse I at the time, neigh like a horse while he was peering at them. In any event, the tests (she made eight of them) did not win her the part she was up for. The makeup man did his best, but Anne kept i looking more like Olivier’s daughter than ■ his bride. The role went to Joan Fontaine. | Eut Anne had made an impression, and I within a few months she was offered a term contract for $350 a week at 20th 1 Century-Fox Studios. She was still only I fifteen. Her father’s business was in the East, i Her mother wanted to stay with her husband. But a great new world was calling Anne, and they had only to look at their daughter to know that she would explode on their hands if they did not give in to her. Mrs. Baxter came to California again to establish a home for Anne. Mr. Baxter set about trying to transfer his business interests to the West Coast as well. It was to take several years before he succeeded. In that time Anne had worked with Wallace Beery in “Twenty Mule Team,” with John Barrymore in “The Great Profile,” with Dana Andrews in “Swamp Water” and with Orson Welles in “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Wallace Beery was aghast at her eager beaverness, and urged her to slow down. John Barrymore watched her trying to give her part everything she had, gestures and all, and asked sarcastically, “Does she have to swim?”' She was properly impressed by her first co-starring role, but in her following picture Orson Welles had only to glower at her once to calm her down. Anne at seventeen looked it, or perhaps less. She hadn’t the mature appearance that some girls achieve early. She was truly unsophisticated. Once, in a scene in “The Great Profile,” Barrymore let loose a long string of invective in her presence, but she wasn’t aware that he was cursing until director Walter Lang made him apologize to her. Anne had never before so much as heard any of the words Barrymore had used; she certainly didn’t understand them. As a matter of fact she spent a great deal of her time then trying not to be shocked — or at least not to look shocked — at the things she was hearing and seeing in Hollywood. With a sort of schoolgirl instinct she tried to conform. When people she was with laughed at something, she laughed too, though she generally had no idea what had been said that was funny. She used a little mascara, a little lipstick and felt she was a dud in conversations because she had no “line.” She had been a good student and could talk well on general subjects. But Hollywood conversations had a gambit all their own, which ran to gossip about persons, studio opportunities, romantic opportunities, any old opportunities, beds, houses, love and cars — in about that order. On such subjects she found herself nettled because she wasn’t in the know, afraid of being considered gauche. She came home from parties dissatisfied, impatient with having not yet lived, and vaguely convinced that she owed it to herself to do something about it. And about this time she had her first “adventure.” It had its beginning when her mother was called away and asked a friend of theirs to act as a companion and chaperon for Anne. After her mother left, Anne decided that she didn’t like this arrangement. She told the chaperon that she was going to spend the weekend with a girl friend in Catalina, and promised to return Monday morning. She actually did go to Catalina on Saturday, but she came back to Hollywood on Sunday instead of Monday. Instead of going home she got into her car, which she had left at the boat dock, and drove off. That evening the car was parked alongside the lake in Sherwood Forest, and Anne spent the night in the car seat. It was an escapade in every sense of the word but one — she was alone. Choked with restlessness, feeling strange compulsions, she sat frozen through most of the early hours, sometimes weeping, and shaken by the fancy that she was rehearsing to be a bad girl. That night, Anne came to comprehend something about herself that she now knows to be true and is trying to correct: Her thinking had mostly just an emotional basis. And she knew, too, that this would be a heavy burden for her. “Like carrying yourself on your own back,” she thought. But there was nothing she could do about it then. “The world to me was like a boy I was crazy about and going out with,” is the way she has described her feeling of this period. “The boy carries himself well, he is smart, he smokes and drinks and knows all the latest references, and I haven’t cuticura guarantees lovelier skin IN 7 DAYS ... or you get your money back! Here's your chance to see how lovely your skin can be with proper care and the proper soap . . . that means, lather-massage a full minute morning and night with Cuticura Soap. Cuticura Soap does such wonderful things for your skin because it is: Mildest of all leading soaps by actual laboratory test. Uniquely superemollient to help maintain the natural moisture and normal, healthy acidity of your skin. Mildly medicated for extra skin care and protection. 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