Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1949)

p I can BE I ; GLAD DAYS ! 1 1 I 1 ■ PERIODIC PAIN i 1 CBAMPS-HEABACHE-' BLUES" 1 He hates to leave a party once he gets to one, hates to go to bed and hates even more to get up any morning. He admits, “I’m always late. I never mean to be but I always am. I sleep until the last second.” When he is due at the studio at 8:30, he sets his alarm for 8: 00, leaving a half hour to dress, eat breakfast and get there. His favorite evenings are spent at the home of the Sol Chaplins whom he calls affectionately his “extra pair of parents.” He has Sol play the piano while he hums along in a noise popularly referred to by them as Farley’s monotone. He doesn’t like garden parties and seldom goes to a night club unless “there’s an act I want to see.” On a date, he prefers to listen to records, play charades or go sailing. Most of Farley’s friends are older. Nick Ray, the Gene Kellys, George Coulouris and Arthur Lawrence, the playwright, all agree Farley’s twenty-three is just a number. “It has nothing to do with his age. He is more mature than his years.” ANY reference to Farley’s stardom gets a vehement protest. “I don’t like it when people call me a star, because I’m not,” he says. “I don’t think any actor has the right to be called a star until he’s proven himself. Nobody can become a real star overnight. I don’t want to be a flashin-theHollywood-pan. Acting is my career. I want to stick around for a while.” Ask whether he was surprised when he was given a movie contract with no previous experience and you’ll get an equally frank, “No, I wasn’t. I had dreamed about acting for as long as I can remember. When they told me I had the part in ‘North Star,’ I felt it was as it should be and the way it was bound to be sooner or later. ' It was just sooner.” That Farley was meant to be an actor was evident from childhood when he’d come home from a movie matinee, sit on the steps in front of his house and go through the entire picture again — acting it out for the neighborhood kids, line for line. He made his first dramatic appearance at the age of five, at a Christmas program. His part was confined to a toddle-on in one act, but when one of the other boys became ill, he changed clothes and went back in the other part, too. “All my relatives out front were so proud of me,” he laughs. “They thought I was a real trouper.” His only other dramatic appearance was at a Little Theatre in Hollywood with “The Wookie” in which he played Cousin Hector with a cockney accent. This opportunity came about through his father’s acquaintance with Harry Langdon. “What would you do with a kid who wants to be an actor?” Pop Granger asked him one day. Langdon suggested getting him into a play a friend of his was directing. An agent, who knew that Goldwyn was looking for a seventeen-year-old boy for “North Star,” came backstage opening night and made an appointment to take him to the studio for an interview. He got the part and an exclusive contract with Goldwyn, who then lent him out for “Purple Heart.” In February, 1944, Farley enlisted in the Navy. He was stationed in Hawaii and received his honorable discharge in 1946. Farley feels his responsibilities of citizenship strongly. On movie location just prior to the national election, he planned to vote by absentee ballot, but he was happy when it later developed he was able to come home and not miss participating in his first national election. There’s a serious set to his handsome face when he discusses vital foreign issues. He absorbs knowledge like a sponge. In the presence of authorities on any known subject, he sits silently filing the facts away in his mind. You can take the word of Sol Chaplin and his wife Ethel that Farley was New York’s star sightseer. “Our feet still ache from walking with him,” they laugh. And on an interview, it’s Farley who asks the questions: Name the stars one likes to interview. Why? What constitutes good copy? Why? What is good copy? Also why. “But I want to know,” he protests when reminded that it is he who is being interviewed. Sailors who served in his outfit in the Navy say they didn’t see much of him off duty. He was usually lying on the beach reading Plato. For when Farley gets a crush on a book — currently it’s “The Naked and the Dead” — he just can’t put it down. A confirmed bookworm all his life, he can even read in a refrigerator. In fact he almost jeopardized his job at the market where he worked as a stock boy after school, doing just that. He was never a success at routine jobs anyway, and he was usually putting the wrong boxes of groceries in the wrong cars and people would always get home with a different bill of goods than they ordered. But at night, when he was supposed to be stocking the refrigerators, he would block off the front of the box with bottles of milk and pounds of butter, so the manager or customers couldn’t look through, and then he’d take out his book and really “gold brick.” Farley’s future is always completely flexible. Other than being a good actor, he has no definite plans. Any questions about what he’s apt to be doing five years from now always stop him. “With me life is always subject to change beginning with tomorrow.” One thing is certain, though. Farley’s star is in the ascent. The End Mr. and Mrs. North America Listen In This Sunday to Radio’s Most Controversial Commentator WALTER WINCH ELL Inside Stories — Exclusive Tips — Hot Predictions Sunday Night Over ABC Stations FLASH! 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