Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1944)

ADVERTISEMENT “O/i boy, Pepsi-Cola — must be another American convoy overhead .** p M New thousands every day are switching to Sitroux Tissues. Because they’re proving three ways better: softer . . . stronger . . . more absorbent! Try one thrifty box and you'll prefer Sitroux Tissues for colds, removing make-up and countless other uses. SITROUX 6;: j tissues Big (Continued from page 50) This is the story he tells: He was working for General Motors in Houston, Texas, as a collector of delinquent accounts. He was still using his real name of James Henry Meador and it was the best job he had had in a vigorous career that included selling papers, being a pro football player, a pro boxer and a husky hand in the oil fields. His being in Texas was no accident. Nothing Jim does is an accident. He had got to Texas originally via the athletic scouts who swarmed over him in Tennessee while he was still in high school. He was only sixteen when he was graduated but he was just as big as he is now. Whereupon the athletic scouts had him hide out at a small junior college for nearly two years, so his skeleton would get a little more marrow in it. At the end of this time he took the best offer he got: the football team at Rice Institute. He did all right there, athletically, scholastically and financially. By the end of two college years, he had had enough of it and he sought more greenback pastures. That’s where the pro sports career came in and the Texas oil fields. “Then I got the chance to be head of the sales promotion department at General Motors,” Jim says. “I liked the idea but after I had been there awhile I asked the boss what he earned. He’d been there for years and was the firm’s big shot. He announced his salary with considerable pride — $10,000 a year.” Jim began doing some serious thinking. He didn’t think like Mr. Rodin’s little boy, a mere hunk on a rock. He did his thinking in a movie show. It gave him an idea; like Sinatra listening to Crosby and deciding he could do that, too. Jim So James Henry Meador came West and became James Craig. His sultry face beneath his ebony black hair, his ironic, observant eyes, his stevedore’s shoulders and the giant’s height of him acted as automatic passports to every casting office. Everything was all platinum and contracts until he opened his mouth and his drawl began coming at the casting directors through five layers of corn pone and magnolia blossoms. “Get rid of that accent,” cried the c.d.’s “Then come back and see us again.” Jim went back to Houston and after a year he so thoroughly parked the you-all influence that you now can’t find a slurred R in a week of his conversations. When he returned to Hollywood, he fell in love. That wasn’t in his calculations, but when you see Mary Craig you know why she upset them. She’s something very exciting to come home to, this Mary Craig. She’s blonde to his darkness. She’s very tiny and slim to the bruising hulk of him. She has a luscious, spoiled mouth and stormy eyes and her nose is as cute as Myrna Loy’s. James Jr. was born just before Pearl Harbor and let’s get one thing straight, right here, for the record. Much has been written about Jim’s calling Junior “the Bub.” Well, if Jim ever did call him that, he doesn’t now. He calls him “Son” and the way he says it makes bells ring in your heart. “Even before he was born, I knew he’d be a boy,” Jim explains. “He simply had to be. I wanted a son so much.” Jim is not working the ranch because of wanting to provide future wealth for his son. He does this as an outlet to his restlessness due to the fact that he isn’t, as 92