Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1953)

arouses the mother instinct in women — when he is honest, they feel that he is hurt; when he confesses ambition, they weep that he is discontented, when he admits restlessness, they sob that he is despondent. Even his friends offend him with unwanted and unprovoked sympathy. John was lolling around the house with Pati and Russ after winding up his role in “Mission Over Korea.” A friend called him on the phone. “What you been doing?” he asked. “Oh, nothing much,” John drawled. “Just working around the house.” By no stretch of an overworked imagination was John complaining about inactivity. He was merely taking it easy, by choice. But his friend felt impelled to cheer him up. “Don’t take it too hard, John,” he urged. “Things will be better.” This sort of thing happens all the time. “Very often,” John says, “people call me up and say too bad so-and-so got that part. They’re dying to sympathize with me — when the truth is, I was never even up for the part!” The minute John admits to anybody there’s something he’d like to do that he’s not doing at the moment they decide something is making him unhappy. Many of John’s friends are top movie stunt men who work with horses, and he frequently spends time with them at Corrigan’s Ranch, where they shoot a lot of Westerns and stage Wild West shows. One afternoon John confided wistfully to a cowboy friend, “Some day I’m going to fight a calf.” The cowpoke eyed John as if he’d gone bereft of his senses. “Why, you dum fool!” he snapped. “You’ve got what most guys would give two legs for.” John had said nothing about giving up movies — but just because he’d expressed an ambition to do battle with a calf, the cowboy assumed that he must be fed up with his lot as a screen star. Johnny does plead guilty to many ambitions. He takes his profession seriously and wants to advance in it. He’s realistic enough, and honest enough, to covet the rewards that come with advancement. Both Johnny and Pati have been like a couple of enthusiastic kids about the new baby’s coming. And after hours of discussion they decided it would have the same name, boy or girl. “If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Sean,” John decided. “If it’s a girl, Shawn. They’re spelled differently, but they sound exactly the same phonetically. And if the baby doesn’t like it later, it’s always easy to adopt a different nickname.” As to a new baby altering plans to take advantage of those picture offers abroad, John doesn’t think so. “Why should it?” he asks. “She’ll be able to travel when she’s four months old.” Boy or girl, the new Derek baby has an interesting life in store — possibly the most itinerant of Hollywood infants — diapered in Madrid, burped in Paris, tucked into bed in London. But nothing pretentious. No frills, satins or laces. Just a devoted big brother and a couple of stimulating, adventurous and loving parents. The End His Lady Is Lucky ( Continued from page 62) rooming house, furious, when he heard about that. “If anybody tells an actor in my picture he’s no good — it will be me. I’ve seen the rushes, and I’m sure you have a great future,” he told Dewey. The way some people figure, “Hollywood’s like a street fight — if you can sling mud the hardest, you’ll win. But you have it, kid, and you’ll get there.” What the director didn’t know was that no “street fight” could have discouraged Dewey Martin. That was pretty tame stuff by this time. As for Hollywood, the former farmboy who’d hitched his pony to a cart and hauled trash every Saturday for the treasured dime to go to the movies, found it a wonder that he was even there. Dewey’s dad died during the depression ! “and things got so tough — my brother and I hired out to relatives to help them farm, until my mother could work and get us back together again.” He worked for his uncle in Oklahoma during the big drought. ■ “There wasn’t any water. You drank water pumped from mud holes. It hit your stomach like lead.” When his mother could reunite the fami ily, they moved to Long Beach, California. I Dewey worked from 4:00 p.m. until mid) night doing scrub work around a restaur iant and from 5:30 until 7:00 a.m. at a service station, while attending school. When war broke out, he was determined, education or no, to be a Navy combat pilot. This too, he achieved the hard way. He burnt the midnight oil studying, and he was one of 200 enlisted men in the whole fleet who passed the special required I exam that admitted them to flight school. Of his inherent drive, he says, “I’m not too proud of it. I envy people without it. They I live longer.” But without it, Dewey Martin would never have made it in Hollywood. ilt was during the war, when a USO unit of “Hamlet” came to Honolulu, that I “first got the idea of becoming an actor.” After the war, he worked up his own trucking operation, but his heart wasn’t in it. “It kept eating on my mind — that I wanted to act. If I didn’t try it, I’d be wondering the rest of my life if I’d made a mistake.” Trucker Martin got himself a theatrical magazine which listed all the summer stock companies, and one afternoon he sat down and wrote a letter to every one of them. “I got an answer from one in Maine, accepting me on the GI bill, as an apprentice. I rode a Greyhound bus for four days and four nights. I didn’t even know upstage from downstage.” Later, he moved to New York and continued his studies with a drama coach. But when some people driving to Beverly Hills offered him free transportation if he would help drive, he went along. He got a job ushering in a Hollywood theatre and finally, through a friend, got a reading at Paramount studio. “I’d decided to make the big try. I had one good suit, a blue serge. Realizing I’d need an agent to represent me, I put on my blue serge one afternoon and walked in and out of every agent’s office.” Dewey told them about his reading at Paramount, and one agent picked up the phone and called the talent department there. Then he hung up the receiver and said, “I think you’re wasting your time.” Dewey remembers how much that hurt. Finally through another agent he got the reading that resulted in his part in “Knock on Any Door.” And Director Nick Ray encouraged him to stick around. Dewey thought jubilantly, “Now I’m set— I have some film.” Everybody he met had inquired whether he had “any film.” As Dewey says now, “I was so set I didn’t work for a year.” He worked at a service station, as an usher at CBS, and finally wrapping packages for a department store. 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