Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1959)

NOTHING IN COMMON Continued from page 51 her mother’s voice turned off the tears. Smiling tolerantly, Stewart shook his head and said, “Women!” Then he bent over, hoisted Tracy up in his arms, and kissed her tears away. “Salty,” he said, making a wry face, and his daughter laughed. He perched her on his left shoulder and with his free hand gently cupped Jean’s face, and then he kissed her. “Women!” he repeated, as he set Tracy down again in the grass, and once more he shook his head. “We’ve got some fencemending to do over there,” he said, pointing to a distant pasture, and started towards the cowhand. He took just a few steps and then turned around and came back. Again he kissed his wife gently on the forehead, and then broke away and strode off. Jean watched her husband, tall and tanned, as he walked across the fields, watched him until he was just a tiny shadow fading into the rocks of the Canelo foothills. She leaned back in the grass, closed her eyes, and felt the warm sun caress her face. Far away she could hear the lowing of cattle; near at hand she could hear the little movements Tracy was making. “And to think that it wasn’t so long ago I was asking: What am / doing here?” she said to herself. And now she heard other sounds, a voice out of her past, and she remembered what the voice said, and how she’d answered, when she announced she was going to marry Stewart. . . . “Dear, you have absolutely nothing in common with this man.” “But you forget one thing. One little, important thing,” she had answered them. “We love one another.” And here she was — a rancher’s wife. It was John Rothwell, their studio publicity man, who could take the credit. But, at the time, he was more intent on preventing publicity than getting it. “I know just the place for a quiet wedding,” Rothwell had said. “Tucson.” Puzzled, she had asked, “But we’ve never even been there.” Stewart had said, “Sounds interesting.” “I’ll arrange everything,” Rothwell promised. And he did. The wedding went off beautifully, even though Cary and Betsy Grant finally decided not to come lor fear of drawing newsmen. With Mike Wilding, Stewart’s friend for twenty years, as best man, the wedding party took off for Tucson in a private plane. As the plane neared the Arizona city, both she and Stewart saw weird enchantment in the scenes below: the wide, tawny valleys, with curves of lush green marking the river courses; the horizons jagged with mountains. On this first visit, the ranch country remained just a picture framed in the plane windows, and in the car windows as they rushed to the courthouse to get their marriage license the moment before closing time, thereby eluding the press neatly. As they said their vows in a private home in the exclusive El Encanto residential district, the windows looked out on evening darkness. Afterwards, they drove only a few blocks to the luxurious Arizona Inn, where they spent the first few days of their married life, then they drove off on a sight-seeing trip to Nogales, on the Mexican border, sixty-five miles south of Tucson. Ten miles from Nogales, she was leaning back in her seat, wordlessly happy. Her shoulder against Stewart’s, she could feel his muscles tense and relax as he guided the car along the road. She looked at his profile and thought for the hundredth time — but still with a sense of wonder — “This is my husband.” Around them now were the Canelo foothills, but neither of them knew the name. If Jean took her eyes off her husband, she admired the scenery with the detached outlook of a tourist. She had no idea that she was looking at her future home. “Such wild country!” she said. “Wonderful!” her husband agreed. Apparently, all this was just a lot of picturesque scenery to him, too. But, ’way in the back of his mind, it had a deeper meaning — as though something whispered, “This is home. Here I am — come home to me.” The idea stayed in the back of his mind — not to pop out till some five years later, suddenly but very casually, in the British style. She had just started wearing maternity clothes and she sat contentedly knitting in the living room of their Palm Springs house. At least, they had moved this close to the open country, but only to a resort town where desert and mountains were a decorative picture, to be glanced at through glass. Strolling into the room, lighting his pipe, the master of the house asked, keeping his voice casual, “Could you live on a ranch?” “I never thought of it,” she answered, knitting away, “but I suppose I could. If you want to. . . .” "Good!” Briskly, he strode out of the room. Alone, she smiled to herself. Just a few weeks before, he’d talked enthusiastically about quitting this acting business. “It’s all nonsense.” He spoke of settling down on a tea plantation in Ceylon. Whatever had happened to that notion? she laughed to herself as Stewart talked on the phone in the next room. When he came back, he said, “I’m off!” “For where?” “New Mexico. I just managed to get a plane connection to Silver City and I can hire a car there and drive to Gila.” “Heela?” Patiently, he spelled the name. “As in Gila monster.” “Oh,” she said. She thought, “Charming!” She had seen the horny, scaly, fatally poisonous creatures in westerns, and she didn’t care to get any closer. But she raised not a word of objection when Stewart returned, flourishing the deed to 60,000 acres in New Mexico. “Magnificent!” he exulted. “Completely remote and unspoiled. Practically savage country. Of course, we’ll sell this place.” Dismayed, she looked around at her lovingly decorated Palm Springs home. “Of course,” she said. “And all the furniture, too. What we’ll need is this heavy Spanish stuff — antiques. Make a real hacienda of it.” “I’d like to see the ranch,” she told her gay ranchero. “Ummm . . . later. Better wait till after the baby comes. It’s a pretty rough trip out there.” So she waited, knitting baby clothes, shopping occasionally for Spanish furniture. Meanwhile, Stewart was buying horses and making occasional treks to his ; property near Gila. Even though she and Stewart brought Tracy home from the hospital to their penthouse apartment in Bel Air, she felt no sense of permanence there. For her, it has never been more than a place to stay while she or her husband works on a picture. Tucking the baby in one evening, she said thoughtfully to Stewart, “I wish we could bring her up in a country home. When am I going to see the ranch?” “Well ... I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘country home’ — not the sort of place one dashes off to for a weekend. Matter of fact . . . it’s next to impossible to get to. Impossible to live there. But it’s a splendid investment! Horses. Cattle.” So there went another dream, gone with the tea plantation. She felt a little sorry for her husband, sensing his disappointment. For herself, she might have felt relief — but she knew by now that Stewart had really been bitten by the ranch bug. She made a pretty good guess at what lay ahead when he sug 1 gested one day, “Like to take a run down to Tucson?” “Love it.” For her, just the name still carried an aura of honeymoon magic. “I’ve got my eye on a piece of property south of there.” And they were on the road to Nogales again. Stewart felt that she shared his excitement, though he didn’t know it was ; for a different reason. He began to look a little worried as the Canelo foothills came in sight. “Look — I don’t want you to be disappointed. That’s why I never let you see the New Mexico property. Afraid it’d sour you on ranch life forever. But this is no ‘country home,’ either. Right now, it’s a widow-woman ranch.” “A what?” “Neglected. You’ll see.” She saw: shabby main building, tiles missing from the roof; ranch-hands’ straggling cottages covered with peeling paint; Continued on page 78 t THE EXCITING STORY OF A TEENAGER WHO SAILED ACROSS THE SEA WITH ELVIS PRESLEY • BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE 200-PLUS PEOPLE WHO MAKE UP The Perry Como Show all in the February TV RADIO MIRROR at all newsstands 74