Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1960)

TUESDAY WELD Continued, from page 29 I’d like you to see it, but it’s such a mess. I haven’t had a chance to straighten it out myself, and we only have a maid once a week — on Saturdays.” I sat on a stool while Tuesday poured some orange juice. There was so much to talk about. Tuesday’s reputation, for instance, had been mushrooming, making her into a barefoot 16-year-old sort of beatnik with too much cheek, who dated older men, smoked, took an after-dinner cocktail and said just about anything that came into her head. I’d known Tuesday from the time she’d first come to Hollywood — frightened but not dull. She was fifteen and had come out to play Comfort Goodpasture in “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!” I couldn’t believe she’d changed so much. As Tuesday set the glass of orange juice before me, she opened a fliptop box and withdrew a filter-tipped cigarette. There was nothing furtive or selfconscious about the gesture. “Whatever made you start smoking?” I asked her. She looked thoughtful. “I started smoking actually because I wanted to learn how to smoke,” she replied with the simple candor I had learned to expect of her. She was quick to admit that she was no less susceptible to pressures of conformity than most other teenagers. “I thought it was terribly chic. I had an older girlfriend who smoked. So I’d just go around with her and try smoking, too. She and everyone else would go into hysterics because I didn’t know how.” “That did it,” she smiled. “I just made up my mind that I was going to be the best smoker in town. I sat down, one night, for three hours, and my girlfriend taught me how. She taught me how to hold the cigarette, how to light it, how to flick the ashes — everything. “That doesn’t make me a freak or anything unusual!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Fifty thousand people in this part of the hill smoke. Everybody smokes. And I don’t think it gives any insight at all into my personality, which is something I’ve heard people say. It doesn’t say I’m smart and it dqpsn’t say I’m stupid. It doesn’t even say I’m nervous — which I’ve heard tell, too. All it says is that I smoke.” There was a moment’s interruption as the phone rang. Tuesday listened, then politely told the caller that her mother would be in later. She turned back to me. “The way it seems to me,” she said, not forgetting what she had been talking about, “if a girl’s old enough to get married, she should be old enough to smoke.” She seemed so sophisticated but I wondered because, in unguarded moments, Tuesday’s face seemed to wear the bewildered expression of a little girl. Maybe it was this little girl, rather than the sophisticate, that made her gravitate so much toward older men. I thought about this for a moment, then asked her about the “older men.” Did she date them because subconsciously she might be looking for the father she never had — for protection? Tuesday knitted her face in a thoughtful expression. “I’m sure it’s not because I like to be protected,” she said emphatically, “because I feel I can protect myself.” And then she got up and led me over to a portrait of her father on the wall of her mother’s bedroom. It had been done when he was thirty-two. “Wasn’t he handsome?” she said wistfully. He was. He had a lean, sensitive face, bright, penetrating eyes, and a faint expression of scorn. He’d been a stockbroker and gentleman farmer in Cape Cod, but had given it up because of illhealth just before Tuesday had been born. He died when she was only three. “I remember one thing about him,” Tuesday sighed. “I remember one night it was raining and he came into the house dripping wet. Dad was tall — six-feet-four. He took off his hat and raincoat and squatted right down and opened up his arms for me to come to him. I don’t remember what he said. I just remember him squatting down and opening his arms to me.” She turned away a second. “That’s a lovely memory,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?” She evidently didn’t want it to appear that she found it painful to think of her father. She said only once had anyone reminded her of him. “It was about a year ago,” she recalled. “I was in New York, and a boy brought me home from Trinity Church. He was a thin, blond boy, well-dressed and wellmannered. He was tall and elegant. For some strange reason, he reminded me of my father. I don’t know why I didn’t see him again, but I just didn’t.” Tuesday tried to explain why older men appealed to her. “There’s more security with them,” she maintained. “Older people just have more confidence in themselves. They have assurance. When you’re just around them or talking to them, it gives you a more confident feeling. That’s why I can open up more with older people than with younger people. But I’m surprised that all young people don’t feel that way.” Her critics had implied, many times, that Tuesday was merely seeking thrills — and publicity — by dating men twice her age. They have particularly belabored her for going out with actor John Ireland. Tuesday frowned helplessly when I mentioned that. “John and I are only friends,” she said. “We get along well. We have a lot to talk about. I have a neighbor who’s about sixty. I see him every once in a while. I talk to him. There are older men who are grips at the studios, and I talk to them. I find interest in them. There’s some kind of communication.” And only at this point, during the whole evening, did Tuesday’s attitude of detachment give way to irritation. And I noticed she was moving an ashtray around, nervously. “It doesn’t mean just because I’ve been seen at some party with John Ireland, or in some group with him, that we’re having a romance.” Her tone became one of exasperation. “This is presumptuous, to say the least. I think it’s very ignorant of people. It shows how small-minded they are.” As far as Tuesday is concerned, her friendship with Ireland has been utterly beyond reproach. “We’re usually with friends, when we see each other,” she pointed out. “He knows my mother well. Besides, I don’t think anyone should be limited to friendship based on age alone. It’s putting a definite schedule on mental development. It’s saying you cannot like or talk to anyone over such and such an age. It’s saying you cannot be friendly with so-and-so because he’s six years older than you are. Why? What if you want to seek out and learn a little more than the people you already know and have been with? “I’m friends with kids my own age, too,” she cried. “I’m not a freak! I know plenty of kids and get along very well with them. I don’t practice any class distinction according to age. It’s other people who seem to be doing that for me. I stick up for the teenagers because I think we’ve taken a bad beating!” And then she explained about her barefoot appearance on an hour-long television show a few months ago — for which she was accused of blatant exhibitionism. “I was just back from a weekend in New York, and I’d just completed a Dobie Gillis show,” she began, trying to tell me exactly what had happened. “I’d been working very hard and when I returned home I was exhausted. I’d lost about 15 pounds, can you believe it? I was just about at an end and, that very night, I was supposed to do this show. All I really wanted to do was to go to sleep.” An hour before she was due at the studio, she dozed off and didn’t wake up until ten minutes before airtime. “I could have died. I threw on my dress, grabbed my pocketbook and ran. By the time I reached the studio, I was so late that, in my rush, I somehow tripped getting out of the car. My heel snapped right off and I just wanted to cry. There wasn’t time to go home and get another pair. So, I thought, instead of hobbling — it’d look funny — it would be better to take the other shoe off since I was sure they weren’t going to photograph my feet!” But they did. And, when the interviewer inquired if her bare feet represented a "■HA Dm Minima Scoofef 20 PAGES OF SENSATIONAL PICTURES AND STORIES ON ELVIS PRESLEY vs Paul Anka • Frankie Avalon Edd Byrnes • Jimmy Clanton Bobby Darin • Fabian • Rick Nelson Lloyd Price • Bobby Rydell Will PRESLEY Still Be King? 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