Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1963)

FRED: Do you get a chance to answer all your mail? HAYLEY: Well, the ones I read, the special ones, sometimes I answer. And I always try to answer presents. FRED: Do a lot of them want to be actresses, too? HAYLEY: Yes. FRED: What do you advise them? HAYLEY : Well, I tell them they really have to want to act. Don’t start unless you really want to act. FRED: Your entrance into adulthood is causing lots of publicity and magazine stories about you. HAYLEY: Well, it had to come. I had to grow up. I have still got a long way to go, though, I think. FRED: Are you afraid of growing up? HAYLEY: Afraid? Uh. well, I suppose a little, because I’m longing to save time, you know. FRED: Hayley, dear, how does your dad feel about your becoming a full-fledged actress? HAYLEY : He’s the nicest, most wonderful person about it. He really is — you know. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be anywhere or anything. FRED: What has he taught you about acting? HAYLEY : Everything, really. I suppose one knows the sort of things like open your mouth and shut your mouth and smile, you know. But he’s always there, always sort of helping you. He’s marvelous, he really is. He’s so generous — FRED: Has he ever actually sat down with you and taught you acting, or is it inherited? HAYLEY : Well, I have grown up with it; perhaps it’s sort of rubbed off. I think everyone has it. if they just know how to use it. Sounds terribly accomplished. doesn’t it? . . . Anyhow, lie’s just wonderful. FRED: What kind of advice has your father given you, Hayley, that you think could be helpful to others? HAYLEY : He’s given me a lot of advice all through my life. He always said, whatever happens, try to be very sincere, be real. And he’s really the most ordinary person you could meet anywhere. I think that’s terribly important. Otherwise, you lose everything. FRED: You are a very normal girl. It’s a very healthy thing. I wish you the best, and many happy returns, Hayley Mills. — The End You can see Hayley in “The Chalk Garden,” U-I; “Summer Magic,” Buena Vista. Fred’s “Assignment Hollywood” is heard on coast-to-coast radio. In the New York area, you can hear “Robbin’s Nest,” over station WNEW, Sundays 8 to 12 P.M. Continued from page 35 good deal of dignity. He is also a man seeking emotional security, a man with emotional warmth and conviviality, a charming lover on-screen and an even more ardent one off-screen. A man who has everything and nothing. A lonely man. And if you don’t think it possible for a top movie star to be lonely, you should visit some of these beautiful people in their beautiful houses. Picture this: a mature man who has romanced many women but a man whom love has always eluded; a man who is supposedly in love with twenty-one-year-old, talented, bright Yvette Mimieux. Yvette who is, of course, married, has been since she was seventeen, and who, to date, has made no motion to change her marital status. Nor, furthermore, does she have any notion of becoming Mrs. Glenn Ford. Yvette’s faceless wonder I doubt if Glenn has ever met Evan Harland Engber who married Yvette on December 19, 1959. Very few people in Hollywood have. To the press, he is a faceless wonder never photographed, and to whom Yvette has never admitted being married, although I understand it was a radiant girl who said her vows to the Reverend Stephen V. Frichtman, Unitarian minister in Glendale. Yvette has mentioned Evan’s name only once — shortly before her marriage she did an interview with Louella Parsons. When Louella inferred that she was so very, very young and had probably never been in love, Yvette said, “Oh, I have a boy friend.” After some coaxing she named him, explaining, “He’s a student at USC. I like him so much because he’s studying psychology P which I’m interested in and he’s brilliant. He always talks sense, not the silly chatter most young men talk today.” He was in the graduate dental school and fellow students who knew him then agree that he was brilliant and charming. But that was the end of public knowledge of Evan. She married him and started her climb to stardom in films with a publicity campaign based on silence. “I don’t want to sound mystical, hut you have to reserve a part of yourself. Otherwise, you give too much of yourself away and what’s left is just surface. One door leads to another, and you have to decide where you’re going to close doors. Open too many and there’s nothing left behind where you can hide, where you can live.” However, it has become increasingly apparent to Hollywood that the door to the little clapboard house she rents in Beverly Hills is less and less frequented by her phantom husband. Glenn spent one Saturday helping her paint the place. Glenn, Charles Boyer and Lee Cobb have all been known to drop by for a game of chess, and Yvette’s appearances about town are either solo or in the company of married friends. A divorce has been rumored, but it was assumed that if and when that occurred it would be veiled in the same silence and anonymity as the marriage. But the recent rash of publicity as Glenn’s inamorata would make this considerably more difficult. Understandably, the headlines have angered the pale beauty no little. How can a dignified man with Glenn’s know-how get himself in such a romantic mess? Well, it was comparatively easy. . . . Friends brought Linda Christian to a gala party at Glenn’s house, after which he had four dates with her — dates interspersed, of course, with Glenn’s usual round of social activities. He was seeing a great deal of Hope Lange, took Rita Hayworth to the preview of “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” recently enjoyed the Caribbean in the frequent company of much divorced Rhonda Fleming, has parties at his own home and everyone comes — from Angie Dickinson and Barbara Stanwyck to former wife Eleanor Powell who has become Glenn’s close and dear friend. At any rate, five dates later, Linda suggested he come to dinner at her house and he did. They had cocktails, then dined on a dish made by the lady’s own hands. That was the night Linda called columnist Harrison Carroll and announced the engagement, then handed the phone to her prospective “bridegroom” and let him chat with Harrison. Glenn now insists the whole thing was just a little gag. Why Connie’s mad A few nights later, Connie Stevens had dinner at Glenn’s. It was a charming evening, a foursome. One of the four must have mentioned the occasion to someone who relayed it to someone else because that item broke in the columns, too, complete with the menu. Glenn was furious. He had always valued Connie’s reticence in his behalf when they were dating. Now it seemed that she had betrayed him, that he was being hounded from every corner when actually, he was marking time, waiting for the most important moment of his life. The Welchman Ford lost his temper. He who dislikes personal publicity contacted Louella Parsons and told her the truth: (1) that nothing bugs him more than young ladies who accept his attentions and then run to the nearest columnist and (2) that he was really, seriously interested in someone but was not free to say whom. In two or three months, he’d have, he hoped, an announcement. . . . When it ran in the paper it read, “Your eyebrows would fly off your face if you knew the blond actress Glenn Ford was really interested in, and I don’t mean his good friend Hope Lange.” That started it! Her name sprang up in columns everywhere, putting the lovely Yvette in a most embarrassing situation. She chooses to have the door firmly closed on her personal life. She has not made a gesture toward divorcing Evan. The press assumed she’d be flying to Mexico for a quickie. Perhaps Glenn also assumed. And perhaps she will. But at the moment she won’t answer his phone calls. Without meaning to, Glenn had opened that door. And Yvette, who looks as delicate as a fairy tale princess and as bland, is, in reality, a strong-willed girl, an ambitious girl who feels it her destiny to be a star. As a child she was aloof and self-conscious because she had to wear the same dress to school every day. “I locked doors on the world then,” she admits. “I shouldn’t say I don’t believe in people, but let’s say there were so few things I