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BY JENNIFER WRIGHT
THE miracle of Deanna Durbin is no accident. In just three pictures, Deanna has scored one of the greatest triumphs of any child star in Hollywood's history. She has won her amazing fame in the very middle of the dreaded awkward age — the early teens — which crippled the careers of every screen prodigy on record before her, from Baby Marie Osborne, Baby Peggy and Virginia Lee Corbin through Jackie Coogan and Mitzi Green. Which hangs today like a threatening thundercloud over the brilliant tops of Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, Freddie Bartholomew and every youngster in the business.
The studios make pictures frantically before the storm descends. Deanna sings in the rain.
She is the only one ever to do this. She is the only young star in Hollywood who has ever been able to face with a merry, fearless laugh the gangling clumsiness, the shy self-consciousness
of adolescence. Indeed, a town jealous of its sophistication and savoir-faire eagerly acknowledges her as the most perfectly poised, fresh and charming person it possesses.
All that is the miracle of Deanna Durbin. And it is no accident. I found that out after I had been with Deanna two minutes.
I discovered it when I told her what I had come for.
I wanted, I said, to learn her secret. If she had one, I said, there were millions of young people all over the world who would be eager to learn it. Early adolescence was no joke. It was sometimes tragic — too often torturous.
Frankly, I had small hopes of a sound answer. Self-analysis at fifteen is rare.
Deanna looked me straight in the eye. Her eyes are variable — sometimes they are a bright blue, sometimes grey, sometimes hazel. But they are always clear, frank and intelligent.
"I think I know what you mean," she said at
once, "and I think the answer is, 'Be your age.' If you try to hold on to your 'little girl' years when you're really growing out of them, you look foolish. If you try to be grown-up before you really are, you're just as silly. But if you can manage to look and act like just what you are, there's nothing at all to worry about. It's mostly," concluded Deanna, "a matter of common sense."
"And it's funny," Deanna went on, "your mentioning that subject. All morning I've been doing that very thing on the set. In 'That Certain Age' I'm supposed to be infatuated with Melvyn Douglas. So, to impress him, I dress up in my mother's evening gown, put on her jewelry, paint my fare, do up my hair and parade across the room."
"What happens?" I asked.
Deanna laughed. (She doesn't giggle, she laughs.)
"He laughs, of course," she said. "So will everybody else, I think, when they see it. That's why they put it in the picture. You see, when you're pretending to be something you're not, you're really just giving a comic performance."
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