Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

Gretchen's life. She started her early years as a stark realist, forced to it by foolish ladies who petted two pretty sisters and ignored the unlovely baby, by a poverty of compliments and nice clothes and any food for her vanity. She ended a romanticist — incurable, complete — forced to that by rigid physical discipline and the suggestion composite, in holy places, of unreality. A sense of religion, fostered in sheer romance (the romance of incense, of gold cloth, of legend, of embattled Crusades, of mystic Trinity) possessed her mind and abetted the transformation. I HERE were the books she read: the pages turning and, in turning, releasing a bright pageant of color. She heard and read nothing of things like infidelity or tragic loss or filthy poverty; always the tender gallant stood, looking upward to his lady on her balcony, adoring her in a kind of unembodied fashion — and their love was con-^ summated in a fully clothed embrace, under the watchful benignant eyes of Church and state. Gretchen followed them no further. She picked up another book instead, and started all over again. She had one short escape into the world, but even that was cloaked in the sheltered beauty that great money buys, and it did little to help. At a religious benefit the child met Mae Murray, then a top-flight star; and Mae was attracted to the winsome appeal of the narrow little face, and she invited Gretchen to stay with her for a time, and bought her dancing lessons at the Belcher school, and, after three months, offered to adopt her. Then Gretchen went back to the Convent, a little shocked by the task of refusing what her innate loyalty to her mother had made her refuse; a fraction more worldly. . . . She emerged, barely adolescent, from her shelter wearing a middy blouse and a convent skirt, with unnecessary glasses disguising eyes that might have been pretty, with cotton stockings covering well-shaped legs — she emerged thus, homelier than ever, into 1926. Into a social state gone berserk, into a rollicking, mad, screeching world, into the Jazz Era came Gretchen Young, walking slowly so as not to tip the balance of her acquired dignity, keeping her eyes half closed so as to see, even in daylight, her long young dreams. It had to happen, of course. O'HE was thirteen, then. Tyrone Power had not yet achieved long trousers. Hoover had not yet supplanted Coolidge and Fox had not yet merged with Twentieth Century and Japan had not yet done more than glower at China and Joan Crawford had not slimmed her figure, yet, nor met Doug Fairbanks, Jr. The world was static, like dynamite waiting for a spark. It was the year of "Nobody's Sweetheart Now," of California's Florida-like building boom, of De Mille bathtubs. The strongest thing you could get on your crystal set in Hollywood was Aimee Semple McPherson, who drowned out all others. At the Los Angeles Biltmore the Bush Trio crooned for crowds; at the Cocoanut Grove Harry Barris featured for Paul Whiteman, then massive; at a beach place named Balboa a youngster already known as "Bing" Crosby lent his voice to bibulous moonlight swimming parties. Polly Ann and Betty Jane, Gretchen discovered, were a part of this world. They were serenely beautiful, and they had been getting small parts in pictures (so that Betty had already changed her name to Sally Blane) and men of Hollywood called them regularly every half hour, saying, "Will you have dinner with me? Will you go dancing? May I buy you orchids?" Here was romance, given reality. Gretchen said to her sisters, "When you go to the Grove Tea dances to do the Charleston, take me, too." They answered: "Later, dear — when you're grown up. . . ." A reminiscent thing in that phrase hearkened back in Gretchen's mind to an earlier day, an earlier circumstance; until at last she remembered. She thought, I'm too old for spankings. Wherefore one afternoon Polly looked over her partner's jiggling shoulder, past the artificial cocoanut trees, to see an angular youngster clad in one of mother's dresses standing triumphantly at the edge of the floor, her eyes gleaming. And that was the beginning. You know about the next year: you know, because you've read it so often, about the afternoon when Mervyn Le Roy sent out a call for Polly to appear for a screen test when Polly was out; and you remember that Gretchen answered the telephone and, after she had raided her sisters' closets, the studio call itself. She got past the doorman by introducing herself as Miss Young. She got past Mervyn Le Roy's objections by sheer overwhelming determination. By these things she got the second lead in "Laugh Clown Laugh," opposite Lon Chaney, a little later; but by then she had changed her first name to Loretta, and had signed a long-term contract. She had not yet fallen in love with Grant Withers, though. Fate was merciful, and granted her another year of happiness before that happened. |T was a dull party. The host's bootlegger was late and so were many of the guests; Loretta sat in a fat upholstered chair near a window, watching the car lights lay their white paths up the long drive, stop at the entrance, shift to tiny red eyes as the chauffeurs drove away. I should feel tired, she thought, after this day. But I'm not. I'm never tired. She thought, Something's going to happen tonight. I know it. I'm beautiful tonight, and something's going to happen — "I can't find the hostess and I can't wait to meet you," said the pleasant voice at her side. "So I thought, if I just came up and told you my name was Grant Withers, and asked yours. . . ." She let her long lashes move up slowly, knowing that her eyes were good and that he was watching the lashes. Phrases and enchantments from a hundred books slid through her mind as she saw him; and her mind said, This is he. This is the one. She was ready, that night. She was ready for anything. And he did the right things: he said, "You're beautiful, d'you know?" He said, "My God, where did you learn to dance like that?" He said, "Now I know why I've been drunk all day, without a single drink." He said, "I love you." She was sixteen, and she married him in Yuma a few weeks later, although he was not of her church and she knew nothing about him and there was not one single reason for their marriage except a passionate need and the mood of that year. But she had said once, when she was four: Someday. Someday — when I'm too old for spankings. . . . The many loves of Loretta Young have been told often — sometimes with partial truth — sometimes with malignant variations. The authorized story of her romantic life and of her rise to fame will appear in August Photoplay. PERHAPS yOU OUGHT TO MAKE THEARMHOiE ODOR" TEST BETTY JE55«* THE SLIGHTEST MOISTURE WILL GIVE YOUR DRESS AN OFFENSIVE ODOR HOW often it happens! You have one date with an attractive man. 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