Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1950)

and sold it. from window to window at the factory. Those mill hands still remember me. When I go back to Amsterdam to visit my dad, they come up to me on the street and shake hands. ‘You sure were a skinny little kid,’ they tell me.” He was skinny, all right, and not just because he didn’t get enough to eat. He drove himself mercilessly from the first. His mother’s dream had communicated itself to him, and he was committed. He had to Be Somebody. When time came for him to go to high school, the family held a conclave. “I could have got a job,” Kirk knows. But his mother wouldn’t consider it. Her son was going to school. Arid college. He enrolled in the Wilbur H. Lynch High School, without telling his teachers about his outside job. Those years he was up at five a.m. every morning, to meet the New York trains, pick up and deliver the big city newspapers. He had just time enough, after his route, to get to school, often without breakfast. After a full day in classes, he went back to work, this time to deliver the afternoon papers. This took until 7:30. After a bite of supper, he was too tired to study. He landed once in the office of the school principal, Louise Livingston. He had failed to turn in a book report on “David Copperfield.” Miss Livingston questioned him about the book, he described it in the greatest detail. He had read it years before, at home, aloud, to his mother. By this time, Kirk had taught his mother to sign her own name. When he rode in the streetcar to the Temple with her on Saturdays, he would see that she was straining, through her thick glasses, to see all the signboards they passed. “What are you doing, Maw?” he’d ask. “Issur,” she’d say, painfully spelling out the letters, “what spells C-R-I-S-C-O?” “Crisco, mama,” he would tell her. “It’s a kind of fat, for frying.” “What a wonderful country,” Bryna would sigh, sitting up straight and proud. His mother, Kirk Douglas believes, is the greatest American he has ever known. His father was Superman, but his mother was a great human being. “She never did learn to read,” he says, “she tried to go to night school, but it was too much after her long day’s work. Nevertheless, all her life, people with ten times her schooling have sought her out for help with their problems.” Kirk made friends in high school. He met boys and girls whose backgrounds had been quite different from his. They invited him to their homes. “Hey, Maw,” he would shout, coming home from one of those visits, “I’ve been to Jerry’s house, and what do you think? He has a room of his own! And do you know what else? They have sweet rolls with their meat!” There was no high school activity (except for sports, his job ruled that out) which Kirk didn’t try out for and excel in. Dra matics, of course, “act ng is a kind of escape, in one way,” he says, “you can play out your dreams, believe for a little while that you are what you will be really someday, if . . .” If you never stop running. Kirk was Lynch High School’s best actor. He led assemblies, won oratorical contests, recited poetry in classrooms. When he was a senior, he was president of his class, manager of the year book, an editor of “The Item,” the school paper. He didn’t always get to his classes. Miss Livingston, his principal, recently recalled one crisis, late in his senior year. Kirk was facing a test in history, covering two weeks’ class work he had missed. If he failed the test, he wouldn’t graduate. She corralled him, for by now she had made this particular student’s problems her own intense concern, shut him in a room alone for two hours with the history book. He passed the test. COMMENCEMENT came at last. Kirk v directed all the Class Day exercises, polished the manuscripts of will and prophecy, rehearsed the graduates in a class song he had composed, presented himself with the others for the precious diploma. He got his diploma, plus a cash award for first place in the essay contest, a cash prize as winner of the oratorical contest, and the Dramatic Prize for the best performance of the year in a school play. “You know,” Kirk confided to Miss Livingston, after it was all over, “I made money on commencement.” Money, not the play, was still the thing. Kirk had been offered a scholarship at St. Lawrence University, but he felt he shouldn’t take it. His sisters had all passed up college to take jobs. “It’s so much harder for girls, to work their way through, they have to have clothes, and things.” His older sisters had married, and had responsibilities of their own. There was a place for any money Kirk could have earned. But his mother and sisters would not hear of his quitting now, “when you have come so far.” “They gave me my freedom,” he says. “Mother loved me too much to hold me. My sisters never said ‘he’s a man; why can’t he support the family?’ It’s an obligation I can never repay.” Kirk arrived at St. Lawrence University, ingloriously, since his frugally hoarded $183 didn’t provide for tramfare, riding on top of a truckload of fertilizer. He attended to first things first. He got a part-time job as a waiter, to cover his living expenses. For the first time, he went out for sports. “I felt I needed that,” he says, and not just because he still envied his father’s physical prowess. “A guy like me — with a mother like mine, and six strong sisters, who had never had his hands on a baseball bat, or learned to kick a ball, would have been awfully easily dominated. I guess I was afraid of accepting a femi Talcum Never is a woman so alluring, so adored, os on her honeymoon! 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