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Private life of
Robert WalTcer: You saw him last as Private Hargrove. You'll see him shortly in "Thirty ’Seconds Over Tokyo"
INDEPENDENT is the word for Robert Walker — and almost the only word you can use for him without changing your mind the next minute. For he is a thousand contradictions; and only the fact of his independence shines out sharp and clear. Perhaps in this lay the curious bond of sympathy between Bob and Private Hargrove that enabled him to portray so memorably the gentle individualist in “See Here, Private Hargrove.”
“He’s shy and quiet,” say Bob’s friends, who are the Keenan Wynns, the Gene Kellys, Van Johnson and Mickey Rooney. “He never talks much; he sits in a corner by himself or he sits in a movie by himself. Guess he’s the home-body type.”
“He’s all over town, talking and friendly,” say the headwaiters of Hollywood, who watch life in their night clubs and restaurants. “He’s like mercury — rushing around our places, table-hopping, in several spots in one night. Guess he’s the night-club type!”
Contradictory? Completely! And then, of course, if you want to go back a few months to his arrival in Hollywood, there were those other opposite statements:
“He’s the happiest husband and father in the West,” said all the columnists and magazine writers. Then: “He’s a bachelor again!” shrieked the newsboys. For presto! Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones had separated, without a word of warning or, in fact, a word of any kind. One minute they were living under one roof; the next Jennifer and the two babies were under that roof, but Bob was in a three-room apartment a few miles away — in Beverly Hills. They were going to get a divorce.
Even his appearance is contradictory to his independent record in life — he looks like a quiet, skinny, bashful six-footer, with blue eyes behind spectacles in a bony face . . . the face that has become famous in “Bataan,” “Madame Curie,” “See Here, Private Hargrove,” and now “Since You Went Away” and “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.” He has brown hair above a wide forehead, slim and active hands, and a grin as engaging as a friendly dog’s tail. Behind the trailing smoke of his pipe he looks like anything but a man who lives entirely by his own rules; and yet he is that man. His life has been a struggle, too — the first sixteen years