Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1953)

The rafters rang when the Wendell Coreys first met each other, and life has been a series of hearty chuckles for them both ever since BY KATHERINE KINGSLEY • The audience had thrown itself wholeheartedly into the mood of the old-fashioned melodrama, “The Drunkard.” It wept with the heroine, jeered at the villain, and cheered the hero on to deeds of derring-do. At the moment, the action onstage was whipping itself into a wild climax. And the audience was silent and tense. Suddenly, cutting through the heavy expectancy with the sure efficiency of a meat cleaver, came a loud and uncontrollable laugh. From one of the actors! The rest of the cast hesitated briefly — then picked up their lines and went on with the show. That laugh again! Wendell Corey, playing the stalwart hero, guffawed uncontrollably, carrying the audience along with him in a wild burst of meaningless laughter. He made an undramatic — and unscheduled — exit into the wings. And while the other members of the touring stock company tried pathetically to weld the broken pieces of “The Drunkard” back into a play, he sat backstage trying to figure out what had hit him. Long afterwards, he found the answer; He had, at that wild hysterical moment, fallen in love. But when he tried to explain his unprofessional breakup after the final curtain that night, all he could do was point apologetically at Alice Wiley, the young actress who was playing his half-wit sister, and say, “I’m sorry. But I couldn’t help myself. Alice has the funniest face I ever saw.” Hard to believe that a phrase as unflattering as that could lead to a romance that has gone on uninterrupted for more than thirteen years. Hardly the tender words of wooing that most girls yearn for. And at the time, dark-eyed, darkhaired Alice Wiley was anything but favorably impressed. She supplied Wendell with a large and very sharp carpenter’s nail, which he kept in his pocket for the rest of the run of “The Drunkard.” Every time he was tempted to let loose again, he jabbed himself with it — good and hard. And it worked! It was a sense of guilt at first — he wanted to try to make amends for his insulting behavior — that prompted Wendell to ask Alice if she’d go out and have a bite with him one night after the show. But by the time he had repeated the invitation after a dozen or so performances in a dozen or so different towns, they both knew that apologies had nothing at all to do with why they liked being together. Looking back on the beginnings of their romance now, Wendell says, “It started on a loud guffaw — and it built up happily over a thousand mutual chuckles.” For while other actors in the stock company grew bored and unhappy trouping through a lot of New England’s less enchanting villages, Wendell and Alice found all the towns endlessly amusing, absorbing and filled with delightful surprise. This is a quality that neither of them has lost — they share a sense of discovery as acutely developed as their joint sense of fun. Even now, every time they get into a new city, they put on walking shoes, buy a local map, and start to prowl. When Wendell was playing the lead opposite Margaret Sullavan in the London production of “Voice of the Turtle” several years ago, he and Alice, they swear, explored at least 3,000 of London’s 6,000 miles of meandering streets. They found out the philosophy of life of countless Bobbies and flower girls, made friends with some down-to-earth East End barrow men and some very fashionable West End mditres de hotel — all of whom strengthened their own conviction that there is more in life to be amused by than to despair over. But things have not always been simple and entertaining for Alice and Wendell Corey. When they decided to storm New York after the stock tour during which they met and married, they found out what so many aspiring young Thespians learn the hard way— that the big city can have a heart as hard as a rock. Wendell, whose family had hoped he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and be a minister, and Alice, who had graduated from college the year before with honors — cum laude — settled into a coldwater flat in “Hell’s Kitchen.” Before long, they could have written a book called “A Thousand and One Ways to Stretch the Dollar.” Jobs of any kind were hard to get. Jobs on the stage were impossible! Alice wound up working as an usher in a Broadway legitimate theatre, and in order to get and keep the job, she had to lie — and say that she was single! That was as close as either of them got to the footlights for some years. While Alice held down the domestic fort by waving a flashlight about in the second balcony, Wendell made the routine rounds of theatrical agents, tried to badger and beg his way into parts. But nothing came of it. All he was able to talk himself into were some rather weird assignments as a “blind checker.” He would stand outside the entrance to an establishment that wanted to count the number of people who passed its doors as compared to the number who walked inside. “Why they cared,” he chuckles now, “I never could find out. All I know is that I must have been just about as inconspicuous as the Statue of Liberty,” and he gestures toward his rangy six-feet-two figure. Anyway, come rain or snow and whatever else it is that the postman survives, he’d click his little automatic counter while his thumb got number and number, his spirits fell lower and lower, and despair began to cloud his usually bright blue eyes. The Coreys managed to eat on two dollars and fifty cents a week, until one day they came up with a share-thewealth notion that spread their food allowance a little farther, and, at the same time, helped out a half dozen actor pals who were in similar straits. Every night, before Alice (Continued on next page)