Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1954)

There'll Be Changes Made ( Continued from page 51) entirely on stage. It keeps them separated more than it keeps them together. It makes for romance with these two. “We have another problem. It’s crazy. After much ticklish rearranging of our schedules, Lydia and I finally worked it out so that we both could go on a location trip together. We have always wanted to see Egypt and here was our opportunity. Cecil B. DeMille is soon filming ‘The Ten Commandments’ in Egypt. And in my role as Moses, I will be able to visit the spots where the young Moses is believed to have been born and the place where he started the tribes of Israel out toward their promised land. “Now we can’t take the chance of our baby coming ahead of schedule and arriving in a land where we won’t know a single doctor. That means I’ll have to go alone and leave Lydia here alone.” “Lydia was alone during the war,” I said. “Yes. And maybe, now that I come to think of it, that set the pattern of our marriage. As you know, I’d courted Lydia from the very first day I met her at Northwestern University, where we were both drama students. Lydia was everything I was not: lively, social, alert and popular. She tells me now that the first time I managed a date with her, she reported to her friend, ‘I’ve just been out with the wildest man on the campus.’ “That was true, too. Until I went to the University, most of my schooling had been in a one-room schoolhouse in the backwoods where the ink froze in our inkwells during the winter and our boots steamed from melting snow. I was never conscious of a single girl in any of my classes. I avoided the boys as much as I could. I wouldn’t have been conscious of them, either, except that they always beat me up.” Chuck caught my bewildered look. “I was the runt of the class,” he explained. “Out on my grandfather’s twelve hundred acres in Michigan my thinness and shortness didn’t matter. My grandfather had pioneered that land. Now I own it, and my children will inherit it. The lake that is on it is called Russell Lake — after my father. “I wasn’t an only child, but I might just as well have been because next to me there was my sister Lilia, a girl, mind you, and four years younger. When you are a boy of eight or ten there can be nothing quite so humiliating as playing with a girl who is merely four or six and your sister at that. I have a younger brother, too, but he was always too young to figure in my scheme of things. So I ignored them both, prowled by myself. “I’d heard pioneering stories from my grandfather. I was very close to my father. When I was barely old enough to hold a gun, he taught me how to shoot. In school I wasn’t ahead of my grades. We had a lot of books on the farm and I’d read all the ones that were fiction. I was forever acting them out for the chickens and the cattle, but I wasn’t any outstanding brain at school. I was just smaller and thinner, that was all. “When, finally, my family moved to Winnetka, Illinois, and I enrolled in the New Trier High School, I suddenly began growing. I shot up eight inches in one year. My shoulders broadened. I’d never been really sick one day in my life, and I still haven’t. But the day I was able to go out and try for the football team was the first day I had any sense of being free. It was like coming out of prison to know I couldn’t be pushed around any more, that I was strong enough to fight back.” Mow pfcoAed Mf U ! ( and how much he’ll love you for it !) Christmas time! Trim your tree with a most precious gift — a handsome, dependable watch for the most wonderful guy in the world. There is no better way to say how much you care — and it costs far less than you think. New Hamilton Illinois watches are valuepriced from just $33.95 — other Hamiltons from $57.75. Here are just a few of the truly fine watches in the new Hamilton Illinois series. Each is fully jeweled, each has a guaranteed unbreakable mainspring. See these and many other fine Hamilton watch values at your jeweler’s tomorrow. P. S. Why not choose your special gift from the Hamilton Illinois watches on the opposite page. 76