Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1963)

tasporum trees to watch Dick and Kurt, with whom he had “a personality conflict,” slug it out. Dick nursed his wounds with a horned toad which he kept in his room. “An ugly, exotic beast,” he remembers, “that seemed beautiful to me.” When it died he still kept it, hidden in a drawer until the smell gave him away. Another precious possession was a disreputable alley cat named “Tommy.” “I think I loved Tommy as I've never loved anything since,” muses Dick. “Then one day my grandmother came to stay with us, bringing a quality cat named Omar. Tommy suddenly disappeared. I was told he’d ‘run away’ but I never could really accept that. It’s funny: About a year ago I was driving down the Freeway and after all that time, it suddenly entered my mind that Tommy didn’t run away — he was killed. Children sense what’s going on. Then they don’t trust their parents.” A bothersome brat Dick Chamberlain trusted his — up to a point. He was closest to his mother, with him all day at home, and whom Dick resembled in both temperament and looks. His busy dad was off early mornings, home late at nights and Bill, well, to him Dick was mostly a bothersome brat. Introspective Dick may not have considered his home the warmest in the world. Not long ago, in Jeff Corey’s house, his eyes wandered over the book lined walls and cozy disarrayed evidence of gemutlich living. “What a warm home you have,” Dick murmured. “Mine wasn’t like this.” And a friend observes, “Dick’s been complaining a lot about his childhood lately.” Actually, family life at the Chamberlain’s went along about as it does everywhere— with successions of joys and small tragedies, calms and crises. Both boys had what they needed, in love and material blessings. They weren’t rich but there was always money enough. There were trips to family reunions, back to Indiana with the Chamberlain clan, to Northern California to visit the Bensons. But he couldn’t share with his family, or anyone else, the secret dream he had clung to since his Fourth Grade and his favorite teacher, Florence Montgomery, had thoughtfully remarked. “One day I’ll look on a movie screen and see you, Dick.” There was nothing unique about Dickie Chamberlain’s dream to become an actor. It was common, at one age or another, to almost every boy and girl in Beverly Hills. The town itself was one big such dream come true. Movies had made it and kept it flourishing. The studios were Beverly’s pulse and the glamorous stars its heartbeat. They lived up across Santa Monica Boulevard in mansions and on Wilshire you could see Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Joan Crawford or a hundred other glamorous goddesses bustling in and out of the smart shops. At any corner Clark Gable might pull up in that curious new sports car of his called a Jaguar. Their lives were town gossip, as the lives of auto-makers were in Detroit, or rich tourists in Miami. South Elm Drive was like every street in town. All around were people “in pictures.” Dick’s paper route had names on it any-'* one might know. A friend’s father was an assistant director. Dick’s own family had a close friend who made “quickies.” And right across the street in an apartment house lived a queenly beauty who was actually a star. Dick pestered her for autographs, week in and out. “I had to get new ones all the time because Billy would hang up the ones I had and riddle them with darts,” he explains. When the star moved out of the neighborhood Dick sneaked into her vacant apartment. The walls were covered with mirrors. “I think she must have had a Narcisstic complex,” he observes now dryly. — Kirtley Baskette (To be concluded next month) LIZ TAYLOR Continued, from page 43 Is she still a Jew? After violating so many moral laws, can she be redeemed in the Jewish faith?” “Doesn t Liz have a spiritual advisor to tell her she’s a sinner?” The answer to the last question was simple — and sad. Rabbi Nussbaum is Elizabeth Taylor’s spiritual advisor, but his hands have been tragically tied for the past two years. “Elizabeth has not been in touch with me since she went to Rome,” he told us. “I only hope she will come to see me when she returns to America.” A storm of controversy But the answers to the other questions were not at all simple. In fact, Liz Taylor’s behavior since she adopted the Jewish faith has raised a storm of controversy among Jews themselves. “The American Jewish Community,” Rabbi David M. Eichhorn (an active proselytizer ) told us, “is greatly concerned about the matter of the conversion of nonJews to Judaism. This is largely due to the unpleasant headlines created by the marital involvements of convert Elizabeth Taylor, and the divorce and death of convert Marilyn Monroe. To some Jews the misadventures of these more-to-be-pitiedthan-scorned female Narcissi confirm the commonly accepted folktale that Judaism has never and should not now seek converts, and that converts to Judaism are in the main a liability rather than an asset to our religion!” But in the opinion of Rabbi Robert Goldberg of New Haven, Connecticut, who instructed Marilyn Monroe in Judaism and officiated at her conversion ceremony. Marilyn did not in any way violate her vows or bring shame upon the faith she sincerely loved. “Marilyn was a warm, wonderful person whose memory should be treated with affection and respect,” he told us. “It was difficult for her to attend synagogue regularly; she felt her presence disrupted the services terribly. Even the fact that her funeral was non-sectarian Stop Corn Pain Fast ! 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