Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

~TG« JLcdljuvAx<rifc^Sfe*^c^ BY BARBARA HAYES SHE'S Mulligan stew in a golden dish — an honest, straight-talking Irish girl who brought her beauty and her warm rich voice from a New York Hell's Kitchen tenement to this pink and white satin dressing room, with its scent of Tabac Blond clinging faintly to the frills. A purist decorator would have done that room in Kelly-green linen but Alice Faye is now too great a star for anything so uninvolved. And anyway she likes it as it is. She thinks it's beautiful. She lounges there, occasionally these days, on a pale and fuzzy chaise longue, reflected in many mirrors — she lies there, on the verge of her first wedding anniversary and in the midst of her first separation from Tony Martin, and realizes with a kind of pleased astonishment that she is still married to Tony, after a year of uncertainty. Twelve months ago she would not have believed it. But twelve months ago she wouldn't have been there at all, because then she did not lounge, ever. She walked. She trotted. She ran, galloping from sound stage to rehearsal to radio broadcast to party to still gallery to set. She worked hard, as she has always worked, for what she got. The life of Alice Faye one year ago was still a kaleidoscopic thing, impossible and frantic and brilliant and muddled. Her own personality reflected it, so that when I talked to her for the first time I caught only a hodgepodge portrait — a confusion of ideas and pictures which meant nothing. Only one thing, one genuine heart-warming impression, edged through the jumble: a spark of rollicking hearty humor which said, "Oh boy, am I in a mess. And am I loving it!" With that spirit in her voice she told me, finally, "I'm married two days and I hardly know the guy. I don't know what's going to happen any more than you do. Tony and I went off to Yuma between fights and I don't see any reason why we won't go on battling. Only this — " her jaw went square, determined — "I'll make it last if I can — or as long as I can." Now, many months later, she told me, from the chaise longue, "It'll last now. It's changed in the last months. Tony and I are happy now, for the first time." They eloped between quarrels— and the intervening year has not been without doubt and uncertainty for Alice and Tony. But now — She made this second prediction with justified triumph. There were so many things that, with an ordinary person, would have made such an outcome impossible. There was working together the first two or three months. "That should have finished us," Alice admitted. "I still don't understand why it didn't. You see, both of us had been used to freedom, to spending long hours alone when we felt the need of silence, to seeing other people whenever we liked. Then, quite suddenly, we were forced to be together every second of the day and night. "You can't imagine what it's like, waking up with a person beside you in the morning as a starter; then sitting across the breakfast table from him; then working together on the set. He used to have to make love to me for a scene and while he was reading his sentimental lines I was thinking that he'd had a grouch that morning, or the toast had been burned, or we'd disagreed about the political situation. "And then lunch together, and the afternoon, and dinner, and then a party, and then the night ... I tell you, there were times when I thought if he grinned in just that way again — the way I had always loved before — I'd have to brain him and take the consequences. And he felt the same way about me." IHEY survived the making of "Sally, Irene and Mary," somehow. But the experience left its mark, a jagged scar on their nerves and a notto-be-forgotten blemish on what should have been the happiness of their first weeks together. In solemn conference, after an interminable period of angry recriminations interspersed by haughty silences, they agreed never again to work in a picture together. That, felt Alice, was the crux of everything; and thus the future must necessarily stretch smoothly ahead, their problems translated to minor matters of everyday living. Whereupon, Alice was assigned to the lead in "In Old Chicago" — and the whole thing started again, on another and far more important plane. Because that way lay stardom for the blonde child with the husky voice — stardom of the first magnitude, with all that stardom means. Fingers of light drawing brilliant streamers in the sky when her pictures opened. Autograph (Continued on page 68) 28