Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1947)

On the Dot ( Continued from, page 76) and apply for a job but to work in stock or a little theater, in the hope that the studios will come to me. The fourth, to remember that once you sign with a major studio, you have just begun. Fifth, to do as you are told. The sixth, to bear no resemblance in appearance or in your work to any star.” A little more than two years after this talk, Catherine, in Republic’s “I’ll Always Love You,” became a star. This amazing “girl with the rules” is one of those rarities— a Californian by birth. She came into being in Santa Monica, California, but at a very young age moved with the family to Alhambra, where, with the exception of a year spent in Dallas, Catherine has lived ever since Catherine went to Romona Convent to school until the Dallas move where she landed in time to take her senior year in a public school. Then the Cinderella pattern began. “I was a cashier in a movie theater in Dallas. I car-hopped. After my Dad died (Mother died when I was eight) I went back to Alhambra and, during the war, worked in a defense plant.” It was while Catherine was working in the Clary Multiplying Corp. that she met Bill Gerds. They “went steady” for four years, and on January 3rd, 1947, were married. They kept their secret well for about eight months when an Associated Press man happened to see the marriage license record in Reno, Nevada. Bill, originally from Milwaukee, is now studying at the College of Physicians & Surgeons in San Francisco, where he and Catherine live when she is not working in a picture. CATHERINE’S ardour for Clark Gable was the cause of her being expelled, although only for three days, from Romona. “In your room at the convent,” Catherine explains, “you could have pictures of your father, brother, uncles, blood cousins, the Holy Family and the Saints. In my room was a large framed portrait of Clark Gable. The Sisters told me I must take it down. ‘But, Sister,’ I protested, ‘that’s not a picture of a boy friend — that’s Clark Gable, the big movie star.’ Sister took it down. I put it up again. Sister took it down. This went on for days. One night I found it in my wastebasket, torn to tatters. Painstakingly, I patched it together again, put it back on the wall — and was expelled!” Movie magazines were her textbooks in her quest for stardom. “I practically memorized the stories of how Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman and others became stars. I found that they all agreed that an agent, and a good one, is a basic necessity and that to be approached by, rather than to approach, a studio, is to be a smart apple.” Catherine looked up an agent — in Dun & Bradstreet. Mr. Louis Shurr, ace tenpercenter, having been given a substantial bill of solvency, was paid a call and contrary to all rules was agreeable to the young unknown. 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