Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1948)

p DREADED DAYS CAJS BE ! ACTIVE DAYS up on that shut-eye until I have to call him back to work. The only thing is, I don’t sleep so well myself! Can you “catch” insomnia from a friend? Watching a star’s sleep isn’t, strictly speaking, a wardrobe man’s job. Neither, for that matter, is watching his diet. When Spence told me he wanted to lose a little weight, I pitched in. The man drinks rivers of coffee with cream and two heaping spoons of sugar. I give him one spoonful. Once in a while he looks at me as if I were trying to starve him to death. I never saw a guy so crazy about sweets. He’ll call me over and whisper, like a conspirator: “Got anything for me today, Larry?” I keep a box of candy hidden and I ration him. Just two or thjree pieces which I put in a drawer in his dressing room. I keep a lot of milk on ice, too. It’s good for him, especially when he gets tense over a long, hard scene coming up. Spence has his black moods as well as his cheerful ones. He worries about every picture. “It’s a stinker,” he says almost invariably when I ask him about a new script. He hasn’t changed in this respect even though most of these “stinkers” turn out to be hit pictures. Two of them brought him Oscars. He thought those two, “Captains Courageous” and “Boys’ Town,” were going to be “stinkers,” too. RELIEVES FUNCTIONAL PERIODIC PAIN mMK-HOBACHl-'BLm'' “What a DIFFERENCE Midol makes” 'Vjjfs HEADACHt CHASES "BLUES He’S a restless man. That’s one of the reasons he has taken up oil painting. Relaxes him, he says. I believe I’m one of the few people, aside from his family, who has seen any of his work. He calls them “daubings” and he’s shy about them. But he’ll chin by the hour about things he’s read about art and artists or good paintings he has seen. He’ll chin by the hour about anything, in fact, especially if he has a cup of java in his fist. He goes hospital-visiting pretty often, and he meets a couple of vets and invites them up to Hollywood. He gets me to fix up a little dinner at Romanoff’s and the four of us get together for a spread. Spence will probably take a shillelagh to me for telling it. A few years back I had an operation which, at the time, seemed pretty serious. Spence called up my doctor, and said: “You take care of Larry, and never mind the cost.” I heard about this in a roimdabout way much later. It so happened I didn’t need any help that time, but if I had . . . well, it’s good to know you’ve got a friend like that in the pinches. You visit his ranch house and watch him with his wife, a very lovely person, and with his children, Johnny and Susie. You see their stables, where they keep some pretty fine thoroughbreds, including Mrs. Tracy’s Halsworthy. But the stables don’t house just the runners. No. You find there all of Spence’s old polo ponies on pasture, I like hunting and fishing, but somehow I can’t get Spence to go along. He doesn’t say so, but I have a feeling he’d feel sorry for the game birds and animals and wouldn’t be able to shoot. I remember a time we all went down to Florida on location. I rented a little motorboat and took Spence out on what I meant to be a fishing trip. We wound up having a picnic on the beach, but no fishing. So you add up a number of things like that and you come to that one conclusion about the big Irishman who for my dough is the best actor on the screen. This is it: Spence can kid and throw the blarney and he can get burned up about things. He’s not a guy anybody’s going to push around. But you take him apart and what do you find? A big softie? Well, you could call it that. I call it heart. The End A BAD SKIN Get Tills ^ TREATISE FREE Don't Wait Until Some Ugly Pimples, Blackheads, Coarse Pores or Other Blemish Ruins Your Real Beauty! 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