Photoplay (Jan-Sep 1937)

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Forhan's {CLEANS TEETH SAVES GUMS DOES BOTH JOBS WOMAN'S GLORY Keep It Glorious With jLHcktf/i#et BEAUTY OIL SHAMPOO Woman's crowning glory is always her hair, regardless of how often styling may change Lucky Tiger Beauty Oil Shampoo clean i and beautifli the bair and corrects harsh, brittle hair better than anything you've ever used. NO SOAP -NO FOAM Gets bottli of Lucl riger i: auty Oil Shampoo. i It accordlnn to directions for thirty days you'll be amazed al the wondi rfu] Improvi mi ni i" youi b ni and .' ilp \ on ii be di lighted how much longi i your m \t permanent la I At Druggists. Be.mticians. or write LUCKY TIGER MFG. CO., Kansas City, Mo. BASICALLY OLIVE OIL AND OTHER FINE OILS During the next few months she had plenty of reasons to regret her impetuousness. Sylvia was only sixteen then, and looked even younger. She went from one manager's office to another and no jobs were forthcoming. They looked at her and laughed. "Go home to your mother, baby." But she did have talent and a determination so strong that it couldn't be downed. She had a terrific sense of the importance of the theater in her life; the theater which all through her childhood had been her one means of escape from a world she found unpleasant and unreal. CYLVIA played her first really important ^role on Broadway in "Crime," which turned out to be one of those terrific hits which run on and on. That was about ten years ago. After "Crime" closed, role after role in Broadway productions was offered to her. Unfortunately, Sylvia went to no one for advice, but chose the roles she herself liked, and invariably she chose the wrong plays. For four years she appeared in nothing but flops. Her father (Dr. Sigmund Sidney who adopted her) figured out that she spent more time one year rehearsing for plays than actually acting in them, so quickly did those shows, once produced, close. During this time Sylvia's reputation for being temperamental grew steadily. It meant nothing to Sylvia to tear up a script on which some writer had worked hard. It meant nothing to her to jump a contract if the situation was not to her liking It meant nothing to her to turn on a director or fellow actor in a fury and tell him how impossible she found him. If someone invited her to a party, she might accept, and then at the last moment, simply because she didn't really feel like going, call up and say she had a headache. She did this repeatedly, until people grew tired of her rudeness. She didn't know what it meant to think twice about anything. Such was the Sylvia Sidney whom B. P. Schulberg discovered when he went to New York and saw "Bad Girl." Sylvia Sidney's was a magnificent performance, and Schulberg recognized it as such. He asked her to come to Hollywood and make several pictures under the Paramount banner. Now almost any young player, when a contract is up for signature, turns to a competent lawyer for advice, or at least to some friends she knows and trusts. Sylvia didn't. "They handed me a typed note on a slip of memo paper — the kind they use for interdepartment correspondence — and asked me if I'd sign. Instead of saying, 'I'll think it over,' I signed immediately. Afterwards I went yipyip-yipping all over the place because I had nothing to say about choosing my own pictures." In Hollywood Sylvia continued her policy of going wherever her impulses led. She found, to her regret, thai they led her to both emotional disaster and financial folly. I don'l want to write of tin emotional (lisa ters, for ii would be impossible to do so withoui hurting Sylvia Sidney, and I like her too i h i" do that. But everyone who knows Sylvia realizes that in her emotional life as in thing else, she allowed her hearl instead of her judgment to rule her. And financial folly came when Sylvia Sidney went on an orgy of spending. All around her Sylvia saw Hollywood actors buying large homes and apparently finding great happiness in them. The theory was that the more rooms you had, the happier you were. So Sylvia rented a twenty-room house in Beverly Hills. It even had a private projection room. "I rented that house on an impulse," Sylvia told me, "and like all my other impulses, it was a mistake. "I think the real reason I rented it was because I wanted to give myself a feeling of security. In Hollywood the sword of Damocles is always over you; you know that careers end overnight; people come and go. Because they have so little natural feeling of security, Hollywood people feel that they must have large homes, with sweeps of lawn and beautiful gardens. These material possessions give them a false sense of security, a feeling that they have something to hang on to. "Perhaps I'm unjust in saying that's how other Hollywood people react. Perhaps I'm just judging them by myself." Obviously, though Sylvia needed only a few rooms for herself, she couldn't live in a home in which most of the rooms were empty. So each of these rooms had to be filled with furniture, and Sylvia squandered her money on Sheraton book cases and other beautiful things that she could ill afford. She began to splurge in other directions. She walked into a Hollywood shop and when the models paraded before her, she nodded her head and said, "I'll buy that and that and that." She bought a chiffon evening gown, a green gown paler in color than young grass, a lace gown, sports things, afternoon things, semi-formal things — more clothes than she could possibly find time to wear. She bought two cars, and she even decided to go social. She had been criticized for never going to or giving parties, and she now began to give a few. But they were failures For at heart, Sylvia is not a social creature and claims she makes a very poor hostess. "What first made you realize that the house in Beverly Hills wasn't for you?" I asked Sylvia. "That didn't take long," she said grimly. "Mother and I were all alone in that huge house, and sometimes when Mother was in New York I was by myself. I was surrounded by many walls — none of them pleasant to look at. I thought, 'What am I doing in this place? Why have I got two dining rooms? I can only eat in one.' I began to look upon the empty bedrooms as so many mausoleums. " I stood it a year and a half and then moved to an apartment. My lease wasn't up at that time, but I couldn't endure it any longer. It was better to take a loss on the apartment." A BOUT a year ago Sylvia Sidney's four ^months' marriage to Bennett Cerf, the publisher, collapsed. Her career seemed ^to collapse too. She appeared in such pictures as " Heboid My Wife" and "Accent on Youth" and in her own opinion, she "smelled up the screen." Sylvia Sidney decided to quit Hollywood, and she came to New York to live, hoping that Paramount would not be able to find another story for her before her contract expired.