Photoplay (Jan-Sep 1937)

Then came his stage play, "The Claw." Irene Fenwick joined the cast and like a bolt from the very heavens above, love, uncontrollable, uninvited, unexpected, struck the heart of Lionel. He was humble, meek, helpless before it. Doris Rankin understood. And so, after their divorce, he took the lovely blonde Irene for his wife. The love they had for each other grew and expanded as the years passed by. Lionel came to Hollywood, and it handed him a fool's cap and a jester's stick and said " Be funny." He clowned. If it crushed his pride, he said nothing. He was a funny man among funnier men who never appeared on the screen. But it was while he was making a picture near Ithaca, New York, two things of far reaching importance happened to him Lionel met, and loved as a brother, Louis Wolheim, a professor at Cornell. Secondly, he sustained a broken knee cap that led to the excruciating agony he suffers today. He kept on with the picture despite it. K was too late when the doctors finally were called in to examine the injury. The damage had been done. But Lionel considered the time well spent because during the hours he was laid up he had persuaded Wolheim to seek an actor's career. When "Wolly " a screen idol in Hollywood, passed away and out of his life, Lionel lost his best friend. You see how unhappiness has always dogged him and why "Renee" became even more precious to him fTlNALLY Hollywood, emerging from swaddling clothes to pinafores, gradually grew up to Lionel Barrymore. He became a vital, fixed part of the business of making motion pictures in Hollywood. He bought a home [ please turn to page 99 | Lionel and Renee as they looked when they wed, and on the opposite page, as they looked recently when illness was laying its heavy hand on both of them Lionel Barrymore* s love for his wife was his whole life. Their marriage was one of the most devoted in Hollyivood By SARA HAMILTON 49