Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1962)

66 and have — the best. So he is philosophical about their choosing their separate roads. “It’s just the way things happened,” he says. “Connie and I can’t get together. Any plans we’ve had in the past have all been set aside. Connie’s going ahead with her career, and I’m going ahead with mine. She’s perfectly free to go wherever she wants and with whomever she wants, and the same applies to me. I’ve been dating a lot since we broke up. There are no holds, no ties, no plans.” No quarrels, and no recriminations, of course; neither Connie nor Gary are bitter. They may not reveal everything that’s in their hearts, but that’s understandable. “Words,” the saying goes, “are often used to hide things, not reveal them.” Some of Connie’s intimates maintain that Connie, at one time, would have married Gary, but that it was he who backed away. “Gary felt that she was getting much too far beyond him,” one source said. “It wasn’t the difference in their religions, or the fact that Gary had been divorced.” Still another friend, someone extremely close to Connie, declared, “Connie still cares deeply for Gary. He’s in her thoughts far more often than most of these fellows the columnists have her dating. But she’s just not sure. She still doesn’t think she can mix marriage and a career.” It is ridiculous to say, as some busybodies have tried to infer, that Connie, the big success girl, deliberately discarded Gary. Connie may be “panicky about success,” but she has not yet been spoiled by the Hollywood sickness. This reporter believes that Connie, for the first time, gave an outsider a peek into the secret places of her heart when she said, “Gary and I just couldn’t stay on that same high plateau forever. The time came when each of us had to move on. Things might have worked out for us if we had married a few years ago, but it’s too late now; that ‘right moment’ has been passed. “I think the fact that we waited so long to get married fouled things up. It was not so much a matter of careers, but other things. There were too many ‘romance’ stories about us; too much unkind and untrue gossip. We quarrelled. We fought about the stories in the magazines. We got sick of people giving us advice, telling us what to do. “I’d heard about the Hollywood fishbowl, the constant, continuous harping on ‘Are so and so really happy? Are so and so truly in love?’ But I didn’t think that kind of thing would ever hit me. And yet it put doubts in our minds, made us wonder if we were suited to each other. Now that all the tension is over, I’ve stopped worrying and I’m more relaxed. Yes, I still see Gary; we’re better friends now than ever before. He’ll make it some day; that I know. But right now it’s over between Gary and me. I’m ready for a new phase in my life.” An older man The new “phase” in Connie’s life made blazing headlines. The new phase was a fling with the much older, far more sophisticated Glenn Ford. All at once, it seemed, Glenn had forgotten his “great love,” Hope Lange, for Connie. Forgotten, too, was Connie’s quickly-flaming, quick-to-burn-out romance with Elvis Presley. Yes, she had gone to see Elvis on location— “but my sister-in-law was along,” said Connie, “and besides, I was visiting actor Michael Dante, an old, old friend, as much as I was visiting Elvis.” As for Glenn Ford, and the out-of-leftfield, “unplanned” trip to Paris, the lifted eyebrows all over Hollywood, the buzz of gossip . . . well, there was nothing, really nothing, to worry about. Or so Connie protested. Warner Brothers, Connie’s studio, had given her their paternal blessing; they told her she was free to go. And, anyway, Glenn was — and is — a perfect, perfect gentlemen. Laughed Connie, “And you can’t hardly find that kind any more.” Was Connie’s sudden trip to Paris with Glenn “a romantic interlude?” Not according to Connie. The two had met at a house party Director Delmer Daves had given some months before. An old friend of both Connie and Glenn (he had directed each in several pictures), Daves had introduced them, saying, “I think you two ought to know each other.” Glenn was delighted to find a new playmate, but Connie, always impressed by Big Names, was literally overwhelmed. A girl with “a heart that cannot help but love,” Connie dropped all her other beaux for Glenn. Then one night he said, with his charming little twisted grin, “Look, Connie, how about a quiet dinner, and a good movie afterwards?” “Sounds wonderful,” said Connie. “Just one thing, though,” Glenn went on. “The dinner has to be in Paris, at Maxim’s, and the movie, well, the movie has to be the premiere there of my new M-G-M picture, ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ Okay?” “What a mad, wonderful idea!” Connie trilled. “Okay, and okay.” And so they left for Paris — with the approval of Connie’s studio. She had worked hard, doubly hard, pre-recording some of her “Hawaiian Eye” songs, filming three or four of the TV series in advance. In Paris she shopped, went sightseeing, traveled about in a limousine provided by mighty M-G-M, Glenn’s studio. What if Hollywood gossiped, “misinterpreted” the trip? Connie never had had so much fun, never basked so ecstatically in the limelight in all her young life. She lived only for the day— for Glenn. Then, back home again after two deliriously happy weeks abroad, Connie denied having gone skiing with Glenn in Switzerland, protested that the whole jaunt had been only a “friendly” trip to help Glenn with his new picture. No romance, no heartaches; just gaiety and fun. Only the fun ended abruptly when Connie quarreled with her studio over a big, outside TV show they wouldn’t let her do (“That money would have meant a lot to me!”), and found herself temporarily suspended, or at least off salary. “The quarrel was not,” studio officials said piously, “because of the talk-creating rendezvous with Glenn.” All the emotional shock tvas just too much for the easily-hurt Connie. She went into Glendale Sanitarium for a week to calm her shattered nerves, to “fight off a virus,” to get away, as her doctor ordered, “from that incessantly ringing phone.” No, Connie wouldn’t talk about Glenn; there was just nothing, absolutely nothing, to say. Was she in love? No comment. Marriage? Ridiculous. Glenn was “just a good, good friend,” no more. And that was that In a way, you could say that Glem saved Connie from further pressure fron the press about their May-December ro mance. Glenn saved her by shipping o! to Europe for a film — with Hope Lange And, of course, once in Europe, their ro mance blazed again. If Connie was hurl she didn’t show it. She kept herself busydating Gary Clarke — again. Then seeim Elvis — again. Then seeing the baseball player who dates more actresses than an actor — Bo Belinsky. She kept herself bus; on her TV show “Hawaiian Eye,” whici this season boasts a new private eye — Con ' nie’s old pal, Troy Donahue. Scuttlebut had it that Connie was madder than a we hen when Troy was added to the show (He replaced Tony Eisley on the show. , The word was: Connie was so put ou by the switch, she accidentally-on-purposr | missed the plane (hat was to take thi cast to Hawaii for background filming. Th< “feud” got lots of space — but the trutl J is Connie and Troy are pals — and hav been for a long time. Once, in a possibly too-critical mood, sin described herself as “just the nice-gir type, the one who’s every guy’s sister anc J nobody’s girl friend.” This, Connie con fessed later, was only partly true. She di< say it as a joke, and the comment, printer later, was taken seriously by her fans. Thd fans began writing to all the young-men about-Hollywood, scolding them for no falling in love with a nice girl like Connie “I pretended,” Connie admitted ruefully “that I was just Miss Pollyanna, but really!; I’ve never had any trouble meeting men.'! “My husband will have to . . Marriage may be on her mind, but shJ feels that it is something than can wai for a while. She still has a lot of livini to do — a lot of years to hold back. “ ! don’t think I’d make a particularly gooi wife,” says Connie. “Not right now, any way. I’m stubborn and hot-tempered, am I have to have my way about certaii things. I keep asking myself what I wan most— marriage or career — and the answe is both. My husband will have to undei stand that I will go on working afte marriage.” In this, she is honest — as always. What she doesn’t say, and what som of her friends believe, is that Connie, i she hadn’t become a star, would hav married some ordinary Joe by now am had a flock of kids. The fact that she ha bought herself three different homes ir stead of living in a hotel spells out he very real love for the domestic life. “A it is, she’s searching all the time, cor I stantly seeking love,” a close woman frien ) commented, “I believe she’s both attracte jj and repelled by the idea of marriage1 afraid that it may hamper her caree ! ambitions. Later, when she has what sh | thinks she wants, she may even marry a; I older man, because she’s always had thi J father image.” Shrewd and down-to-earth as slje is I Connie sometimes achieves a kind o dream-like quality when she fashions he j world of men. “Look, Connie,” a questione i once asked her, “if you had your choic 1 of men and they were unattached, whor 1 would you pick?” “That’s easy,” Connie laughed. “Car , Grant. Paul Newman, President Kennedy a