Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1954)

See hoif Soda serves more ways than any other household product You’ll find baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) saves you time, work and money more than 101 ways! Keep a package in your medicine cabinet as first aid in family emergencies. Keep a package handy in the kitchen for dozens of cleaning chores. Clean and SWEETEN your refrigerator — in Va the time. No scrubbing, no scouring! Pure baking soda emulsifies greasy film. With a wipe of your cloth, film disappears and so do musty, sour food odors that adhere to enamel. Clean silver easily, ecorioinically. Cover bottom of large enameled pan with aluminum foil or old aluminum cover. Add 1 tsp. baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) to each qt. water, bring to boil. Immerse silver so it touches aluminum. Tarnish disappears in no time! (Silver with an oxidized pattern or butler finish, should not be cleaned this way.) For g better cup of coffee. Filmy coffee oils that impair good coffee flavor are quickly removed from glass coffeemakers with baking soda. Once a week, wash coffeemaker in soda solution (3 tbs. to qt. water) for a few minutes. A Household Treasure The same pure soda you know is safe in foods, you know is safe with foods. Arm & Hammer and Cow Brand Baking Soda are pure Bicarbonate of Soda, U.S.P. Write for free Booklet on the many uses of soda to Church & Dwight Co., Inc., 70 Pine Street, New York 5, New York. 96 Driving home from Dallas one rainy night, you pick up a hitchhiker who soon slaps you across the mouth and attempts a holdup. You’re struck by the irony of it all. To go all through the war and then get it from a maniac like this, despite his 190 pounds! You fight it out in the mud beside the road and win. At a gas station you call the highway patrol. Some people accuse you of staging the whole thing as a publicity stunt. But State Highway Patrolman Everett Brandon believes differently, and he runs down a long prison record on the man. Brandon becomes your close buddy of today. It’s July 16, 1945 — your picture appears on the cover of Life Magazine and three new people enter your own life. James Cagney offers you a motion -picture contract. On a mined battlefield in France, Spec McClure, Hollywood columnist before he joined the Army Signal Corps, spies a beat-up copy of Life blowing across the field. The youthful Irish face, too young for its medals, sticks with him. It’s Spec McClure who later assists you to put down on paper your book, “To Hell and Back,” and at a Dallas airfield, a pretty, darkeyed air hostess, Pamela Archer, is entranced with you. Through the months, she becomes an ardent Murphy fan, saving every clipping — and six years later she becomes your wife. But in Hollywood, the months roll along confusingly. This is a battle you’re not geared to fight, for you’re unfamiliar with the tactics of the opposing team. Then, after all the restless waiting, when you finally get your first part — it’s two lines in “Beyond Glory,” starring Alan Ladd. But you get to West Point — on location. Then Cagney drops your option. You refuse to commercialize on your war record. As a man of action and few words, you don’t understand those who seem to be all words and no action, nor why they make glowing promises they never keep. So in Hollywood you start again as a private and work your way up — but then this has been the story of your life. With your option now dropped, you’re living in a two-by-four apartment over a noisy bus stop trying to make ends meet on your $86 pension — and still send money home. Terry Hunt, whom you met when you were mustering out of the service, insists you bunk in a resting room at his health club. You work out there regularly in the gym. You sleep on a massage table '^because it’s more comfortable for your war injuries. Now and then you still talk about going back to Texas. But Terry Hunt has a thought that can discourage it. “I always kidded him, Ralph, telling him he’d sure have to pick a lot of cotton back there to make up for what he gets in one week here. Audie’s had enough bent-over kind of cotton picking for life. I knew he had what it takes in Hollywood — if he would just wait it out. I’d remind him that the stakes are high here — and worth waiting for. Sometimes he’d help out around the club, putting the girls through their exercise routines. Not long ago one of them remarked that she’d seen a picture in a magazine of Audie Murphy — ‘You know,’ she said, ‘he looks a little like the boy who used to work me out in the gym.’ That was modest Murph. They didn’t even know who he was.” It’s July, 1948 — and your friend Spec McClure keeps urging you to start “To Hell and Back.” You want to get it all down on paper, too. “So, I won’t have to think about it any more,” you say. But you have reasons to think plenty — when you go back to France as the honored guest of the French government. Back to that land so well remembered, with every road and every ravine still an open wound. This time no booming artillery welcomes you, but the frayed clothing, the thin faces, the ghostly ruins haunt you. Near the place where you won the Congressional Medal of Honor, a whole village turns out to honor you. The old Mayor dressed in his shabby black coat, children in costumes line the street and sing Alsatian folk songs for you. Watching their faces, the tears come. You remember you directed artillery fire on that town. You hunt out another remembered terrain, too. Behind a farmhouse through rich green vineyards that stretch uphill to a cork tree, there are two German helmets. But for your own alert eye, there would be two American helmets there today — Lattie’s and your own. Back in New York, reporters swarm about you, America’s most decorated soldier, who returned to the battleground for the first time. They’re full of questions — all the same. They want to know when you are going to marry Wanda Hendrix. It’s January 8, 1949 — and your wedding captures the romantic imagination of all ”1 was sick with fear” Countless people — beset by problems of love, hope and jealousy — have found the answer to their dilemmas on radio’s “My True Story.” For this true-to-life program presents, in vivid dramatic form, the files of “True Story Magazine” — and includes people who might very well be you, your family, your friends. Listen and hear how they solve each heart-rending emotional conflict. Tune in “MY TRUE STORY” American Broadcasting Stations "THE FAMILY DRUDGE” — gripping story of a teenager who had to seek happiness away from home — is "must" reading in June TRUE STORY M AG AZIN E. at newsstands now.