Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1946)

f t 100 the wind of high quality belied by a whit of a price ... True Form girdles, turning your torso into a slim arrow headed took it as casually as most kids do sunshine. Actually, his major ambition — after he got over the usual kid routine of wanting to be a fireman and an explorer and a flier (he even tried for that in the Army but was too tall to make it) was to be a singer. That’s where Walter Pidgeon, a fine musician, came in. Can you imagine the debonaire Pidge sitting around, night after night, meekly playing accompaniments for a fifteen-year-old kid? Well, he did— which will give you a fair idea of Cojo’s charm and the excellence of his voice. His musical taste is excellent, too. While his three-years-younger sister swoons over Frankie and rolls her eyes over Bing, Cojo collects symphonic records strictly. These and snakes. He is particularly keen for snakes and does not like, though he respects, his mother’s edict that they are not to be brought into the house. But generally speaking, he hates the radio. So what was “Kiss And Tell”? The story of “Corliss Archer”! When they told Cojo that maybe, perhaps, he would get to play Dexter Franklin, he groaned, “That dope?” THE amusing part of it was that if he 1 didn’t particularly want the part, F. Hugh Herbert, who wrote the original role, didn’t particularly want him for it, either. Harry Cohen, head of Columbia, and George Abbott, the Broadway producer who was bringing the play to the screen, both were delighted with Cojo, but Herbert kept remembering the boy who had played it on Broadway. In fact, he attended a rehearsal Cojo was going through, prior to his screen test, and talked about his performance. “Why can’t you be more like him?” he demanded. “Why, he was a kind of a short Yankee type, sir,” said Cojo. “I don’t think, if you’ve got that type in mind sir, there’s any sense testing me.” Mr. Herbert, with the shouts of Messrs. Cohen and Abbott ringing in his ears, gave in. Cojo’s mother — whom he calls “Mommy” — wasn’t too sure whether, by this time, the kid really wanted an acting career or merely more time off from school. So she didn’t make it too easy for him. Westwood Village, where the Wourdimans live, is better than ten miles away from Columbia Studios. Mr. Wourdiman used the family car to take himself to his office. Thus, if Cojo meant to get to Columbia, he had either to go by bus— which takes I forever because of bad connections — or hitchhike. He hitchhiked. In fact, when his superlative notices on “Kiss And Tell” came out, his only comment was, “Well, maybe I can pick, up a hitch easier now.” (So' what happened to him on his first three I day pass in Japan? He wanted to go to i Tokyo— and the only way he could make it was to hitch. He did.) He was excited about “Kiss And Tell” , but no more impressed than he had been with “Together Again.” He and Shirley, because of their ages, formed a quick, firm friendship but he stood for no nonsense from the little queen. There was for instance, the day he beat her at Pingpong and Shirley stamped her feet angrily and said, “Oh, darn you!” She got a spontaneous Cojo reaction. He flicked a quick hand toward the spot where Mama Temple used to play the hairbrush and said, “Now, don’t be a rotten sport.” Just before he was sent overseas he signed a long-term -contract -withColumbia. There’s no doubt of the triumphant career that will await him on his return to civilian life. Cojo is pleased by that but it doesn’t occupy his whole thought. The subject who does is fifteen but already five feet nine, and part Norwegian, part French, named Marit Co’hu. She is an outdoor type of girl, very horsey, yet musical and serious-minded. There’s a little soda parlor in Hollywood, called Browne’s, which makes the best chocolate sundaes in the world and there, almost every afternoon before he sailed, Cojo and Marit sat, after long horseback rides together, eating in the prodigious fashion of adolescents and discussing life, dreams and romance, ditto. Now Cojo writes her almost daily and some of the letters are in verse, very fine verse, incidentally. The Wourdimans and the Co’hus are close friends, which makes everything very pleasant all the way around — and a couple of distant, elapsed years can reveal the character of any love. Meanwhile “Mommy” is stacking up the fan mail, which is now coming in in the hundreds of thousands and trying to send out the right answers to it, and Cojo is having what he calls “a very managed tour of the Far East” while trying to be a good soldier and both of them — and Columbia — are praying that he has, please heaven, stopped growing. The End straight for compliments. Designed to mould your figure . . . priced to balance your budget At better stores Fashion-figure Bras '<? Guaranteed by Good Housekeeping V,,, irocrKt'.co. * y Jerome Courtland with his mother, who was a singer before her second marriage. Atwater Kent and Cojo’s stepfather, Walter Wourdiman in a moment of high humor .V: