Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1954)

Robert Wagner — Valiant Prince ( Continued from page 65) has stayed behind in Detroit to settle business problems before coming West to become a manufacturers’ representative for the steel industry. Christmas 1937 — a day you will never forget. Santa Claus brings you a squirt gun and a bicycle and an electric train. But better than that — to a lonely little boy — he brings your parents in time for the whole family to celebrate Christmas Eve together in your new Bel Air home. This really is the year to remember. It marks your first appearance on the stage — -in Hollywood Military School’s production of “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” You play Priscilla, complete with costume and curls. But your manly honor is avenged with pathos in the challenging part of the cripple Tiny Tim in the Christmas play. And this is the year, too, that your imagination is fired by the daring and brave exploits of a comic-strip character called Prince Valiant. Athletics you like. And you excelled in swimming, diving, tennis and track. However, schooling in less active subjects holds small interest for you. Impartially, you try them all: Fairburn Avenue Grammar School, Emerson Junior High, Black Foxe and Harvard Military Academy. Some you leave. Others invite you to. At Black Foxe in Hollywood, they put it politely at the end of the term. If you want to come back, if you will apply yourself, if you will be regimented . . . but, for you, there’s too much marching and too much discipline. At Harvard Military Academy too many demerits mean too much marching. And one day when a classmate delivers a jibe while you’re marching off a few of them, you start a one-soldier riot on the field. Yes, you always were an active boy, as a boyhood friend, John Derek, can well affirm. “You can say that again, Ralph. R. J. was always plenty fast on his feet. He was three years younger than the rest of our group and small for his age. But he was always tagging along the way a young kid will tag after bigger guys, always wanting to get in on things. We kept our horses at the same stable in Bel Air and rode together. We went to the movies in Westwood and we hung out at the same malt shop. And wherever we went, there with us or ahead of us was R. J. He learned to drive an old ’39 convertible I had. After my break in pictures, we didn’t meet for some time. Then one day photographers were shooting a magazine layout of me in Westwood when I heard his familiar ‘Derr.’ He told me he’d signed with 20th Century-Fox and was prepping for some tests there. I’d spent some time at 20th and nothing had happened. With all the good-looking guys with experience sitting around waiting to work I was afraid it would be the same story for him. My break had come right out of the blue, or I’d still have been sitting, too. I wished him luck in the movies, but I wasn’t too hopeful. Although I should have known R. J. wouldn’t miss out on any action. He never had.” These are typical teen-age years for you, Robert Wagner. With the help of your pal and neighbor, Bob Green, today Lieutenant Robert Green, U. S. M. C., you build a hot rod combining a Model-A Ford and a Mercury engine. You spend Saturdays sanding it down and knocking off the chrome. It clocks 120 miles an hour at the Lakes. The hottest rod in upper Bel Air. At sixteen, sweater girls are edging out jalopies in your life. Like any teen-ager today, you’re plagued by the folks’ famous last words, “Where are you going?” Also, “What time will you be in?” One morning you get in pretty late. As I’m sure you recall. . . . “Do I? I’d borrowed my dad’s car for a big date that previous evening. We’d been looking at a few lights of the city and were returning when something went wrong with the fuel pump on the car. I got home at 4 a.m. and my folks were really burned up. They thought mine a very unlikely story and said so in no uncertain terms. Later that day when dad took the car to work he got stuck with the same trouble. ‘I’m sorry about last night, kid,’ he said when he got home. Next day? New fuel pump.” In 1946, as today, in any teen-ager’s life, truth seems sometimes stranger than fiction. Your friend, Lieutenant Robert Green, now stationed at Camp Pendleton, remembers still another time when half of Palm Springs was out searching for both of you. “At least half, Ralph. We were living in Palm Springs and ‘J’ was dating a beautiful little blonde. The four of us went horseback riding early one morning. In an adventurous mood, we didn’t want to stick to the usual trails. We wanted to go where nobody else ever went. And we just about did. We rode clear up to the snow. Tired and hungry, we got lost on the way back home. There was one silver lining. It was so dark, and the girls were so scared they couldn’t keep close enough to us, riding back. We got in around eleven p.m. to find search parties out looking everywhere for us. My father had his own searching party. So did Uncle Bob, ‘J’s’ dad. For a while there — joining the Foreign Legion seemed like a fine idea.” During your own normal, eventful teen years, a blond star by name of Betty Grable has been pinned up all over the world and her famous legs imprinted in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese. A crooner from Spokane, Bing Crosby, has won Hollywood’s highest acting honors for “Going My Way,” and time is growing shorter between now and that fateful hour when you too must decide your rightful destiny. . . . Through Jack Anderson, a friend of Warners’ talent-head, Solly Biano, you get a reading at that studio. He likes you, but three days later there’s a strike and the studio closes down. To earn spending money you haunt places of employment where you can brush shoulders with the stars. On Saturdays you cover Clover Field, presumably a salesman but usually polishing stars’ planes and firing questions at them. When you won’t accept a tip for polishing Brian Donlevy’s plane, he leaves you the money anyway and says, “Here, kid. Go buy yourself a book on dramatics.” You two are to meet again in a few years guesting on the show at the Stork Club in New York, where you’re making personal appearances with your first starring picture, “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.” Through a school friend, Carol Lee Ladd, you meet Alan Ladd and ask his advice. You take a job caddying at the Bel Air Club, making seven dollars a day and a million dollars worth of acting tips from Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Fred Astire and Ken Murray. Eh, Ken? “As I remember, there were a couple of shots when I needed Prince Valiant for a caddy too, Ralph. Bob was a good-looking kid. Quiet, well-mannered, with a quick alert mind and his eye always on the ball. It was apparent to me then that whatever Bob did he would do his job well. Go the whole distance.” P.S. However, to you, Robert Wagner, in 1947 — that distance still seems too far. . . . Yours is one of the voices in the glee club of St. Monica’s High School at Santa Monica — remember. . . “All hail Alma Mater Green and Gold our colors hail. We’ll sing to you always On and on through all the years. For all the Santa Monica’s Our love will never fail. All hail to Alma Mater To the Green and Gold all hail.” Here at Santa Monica’s for the first time you feel you have an Alma Mater. You realize the serious importance of an education and regret those years you might have studied more. Although a non-Catholic, you’re impressed by the unselfishness of the priests devoting their own lives to helping others without monetary reward. One in particular, Brother Hilary J. Deering, a young Irish priest with red hair and humorous brown eyes and a thick brogue, is a great inspiration to you. Long after his own weary day is through, he works tirelessly at night and on Saturdays in the physics lab with you, tutoring you on the alloys and the processing of steel and preparing you for the future. However, at first, yours is a more immediate incentive, as Brother Hilary will remember well. “Indeed I do, Mr. Edwards. R. J.’s father had promised him a trip East with him during the Easter recess if he mastered his studies of steel. And R. J. really wanted that trip. But as months went on, $1,000.00 REWARD ... is offered for information leading to the arrest of dangerous "wanted" criminals. Hear details about the $1,000.00 reward on . . . TRUE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES Every Sunday Afternoon on MUTUAL Stations r Be sure to read that True Detective Special — a double-length feature — "Diary of the Dead Bride" — an exciting headline case — in July TRUE DETECTIVE Magazine at newsstands now. 84