Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1940)

he makes up. "All right," he'll say, "if I haven't done it, I'll go out and do it. What more do you want?" He's terrific. He'll get a reporter all steamed up with his tales of adventure and after the writer has scribbled for two hours furiously, he'll ask, "Is this true?" and John replies, "Hell, no, but it's exciting, isn't it?" He laughs at himself, you, the world — at everything but a little twoyear-old girl called Julianna. Julianna is John's baby, his love and his balance. When he and his wife, Steffi Duna, parted, they worked out a plan whereby he maintains a house for himself and one for her where he and Steffi can meet with the baby. At ten, John ran away from home in New Orleans and landed in Houston, Texas, where he pulled hot bolts in steel mills and fast ones on the side, and sold newspapers. With Barrett Booth, a sixteen-year-old adventurer, he headed "south of the border." Later they signed on a freighter headed for Singapore and all points East. He came back on another boat as assistant cook, and again went "south of the border" where he saw Barrett stabbed to death in a brawl. That, for a while, settled him. He got a job as porter in a Houston dry goods shop and even worked up to floorwalker. "Could you tell me where the corset department is, please?" customers would ask this mountainous lad from the wild life bureau. His mother, who'd come on from New Orleans, settled that job when she innocently inquired of the store manager, "Don't you think John is big for seventeen?" They had believed John when he said "twenty-seven." So, out he went on his Christmas Carroll. This time he caught a freighter bound for Honduras, God help the people, and barely escaped a waterspout. He grabbed off bits of education and did a bit of singing as he roamed. He had one semester at Northwestern University between adventures, then he hit Hollywood for the first time and couldn't make a dent. So he went back to Florida and some kind of deep sea diving, and even a bit of steeple jacking. Then, strangely enough, he was called back to Hollywood by a friend who remembered the singing giant, to test for the lead in "Hi, Gaucho." He passed the singing test okay, but they doubted his athletic ability. "All right," John said, "if I jump out this second story window and land on my jeet, can I have the job?" They agreed. John jumped. He landed on both feet and he was in "moving pitchers." Later, his part in "Only Angels Have Wings" drew the attention of Louie B. Mayer and led to John's new M-G-M contract. "Congo Maisie," with Ann Sothern is his first big assignment. He's the most deceptive guy in speech and manner in all Hollywood and do several people know it? He likes harmony and peace even if he has to beat the living daylights out of people to get it. In that melodious soft voice of his, John will say, "Yes suh, Mr. So-and-So, I surely will. But if you raise your voice again like that I'll have to mash your chest in, suh." And he will. He has. He quietly picked up a guy over at RKO studios one day and tossed him out a closed second story window with the same ease you'd toss a ball. Drapes, glass, shades, everything went. John didn't like the way the fellow spoke about a lady, please kind suh. Life, and the love of it, lives in his heart and soul. He likes the kids of Hollywood, Rooney and Cooper, because they haven't grown pompous and stilted (Continued from page 21) and important. He's a pip of a cook, has a room full of guns, and is even inventing a new kind of gun with the bullet following a light beam. I hope John doesn't shoot me with it. I want to live to laugh with him again. To catch more of that gay spirit of adventure that is so sadly missing in Hollywood these days. For as the radio comic says, "he's a baaad boy," but a grand one. — S.H. She's From Missouri "Now over here is where Jesse James once lived," they tell visitors back in St. Joseph, Missouri, "and down that street is where Jane Wyman lived. Only we all knew her as Sarah Jane Folks. It took Hollywood to make Jane Wyman out of our Sarah Jane." But then they should see what Jane has made out of Hollywood. It hasn't been the same place since that pert little Missourian landed in town to become an actress and became practically everything else. She became manicurist, model, hairdresser and secretary, one right after the other, but she never lost sight of her goal. She landed a small part in "My Man Godfrey." Jane held on to that bit part as a wedge that pried loose more small parts. And those parts led to a Warner Brother contract and good roles, right up to her latest in "Brother Rat and a Baby." Out at Warners they call her just Wyman or Dynamite. She never walks when she can bounce. Her energy leaves everyone around her limp and panting. She's a blonde cyclone on two small feet and with those streamlined curves she's the cynosure of all eyes. But it wasn't always so. When Jane first arrived in Hollywood she melted off twenty -five pounds in an effort to be screen-lined. And what's more she came out here to sing. The singing business began when Jane was attending classes at Columbia University and someone heard her sing at a party. "You're wonderful. You're a torch singer," they said. That settled it. Jane was off like a streak for singing jobs in Kansas City, New Orleans and Chicago. She never sang a note in Hollywood. She didn't have to. Her saucy cuteness won her a place as an actress. She has our vote for the most allaround talented lass in pictures. Between scenes on the set she practices her favorite hobby, sculpture, and she's darned good at it. Her ink and charcoal drawings are sought after by all her friends. Her current romance is Ronald Reagan. Long before Ronald was aware of Janey's existence, she knew he was there. But Ronnie had had his heart bashed in once and wouldn't look Janey's way for a long time. When he did, it was all over but the wedding. She's a chatterbox on an interview and in two shakes of a lamb's tail confides she buys too many shoes and bags but does economize on perfume and gloves. She averages a ninety in golf and was a tennis champion at school. She's sure she could be the best actress in all Hollywood if it just weren't for what she calls her "pug" nose and "quaint" face, doggone it all.— S.H. Peter Pan in Long Pants Burgess Meredith, the philosophical George of the film version of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," is Peter Pan with a highball in one hand and a copy of Karl Marx in the other. He can work himself into just as much of a lather over sociological arguments as the idealistic young man he so vividly portrayed in "Idiot's Delight." He'll go just as far to the Left with you as you desire, but it's quite likely he'll leave you hanging out there on the limb while he romps away to a night club, where the only subject under debate is whether the rhumba or the conga requires the more dexterous derriere. He's as interested in — and as proud of— the installation of a new windmill on his Hudson Valley farm as the size of the electric lights advertising his newest Broadway stage hit. Probably his usual unpressed, disheveled appearance saves him from creating the effect of being too utterly nice. His manners are as faultless as they are friendly. An English cleric would envy his voice, a longshoreman his vocabulary. Born thirty odd years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, "Buzz" Meredith first unfurled the banner of his rebellious philosophy when he stalked off from Amherst College in protest against campus snobbery that penalized poverty. He is the first to admit that he wasn't much of a success at any of the several jobs he held after flouncing out of Amherst. He sold neckties and vacuum cleaners in New York. He served as a reporter in Stamford, Connecticut. He worked in the office of a steamship company, and traded his desk for a berth as an ordinary seaman aboard a freighter bound for South America. When he came back to New York, he knew what he wanted to be. The one bright spot in his sojourn at Amherst had been the prize he won in an oratorical contest. Ergo, he was an actor. A friend of his knew Eva Le Gallienne. "Buzz" secured an introduction and lied about his previous stage experience convincingly enough to win a trial with the star's Civic Repertory Company. In three years he climbed from bit parts to the starring role of "She Loves Me Not," a comedy smash. It was his tender, imaginative performance in "Winterset," however, which firmly established his reputation on Broadway and evoked interest in Hollywood, where Meredith made the film version of the Maxwell Anderson play. Sandwiched in between his Broadway triumphs, Meredith has made two other films — "There Goes the Groom" and "Spring Madness." Hollywood, to Meredith's way of thinking, is a little like riding a roller coaster. "You are jammed into a vividly upholstered vehicle, swooped up, plunged down, swooped up again, while places, faces and events lash past you with centrifugal fury. Then, when you finally coast in and fumble eagerly toward home, you wonder how any sane person could take a second ride. Eventually, though, you catch your breath and consider trying it again, provided you can get another ticket." Hollywood has another ticket waiting for Burgess Meredith when his latest play, "Young Man With a Horn," closes on Broadway. Whatever the vehicle of his next roller coaster ride, "Buzz" Meredith, with his exciting intensity, will make it breathless.— W.M.,Jr. Culture in Calico Dorris Bowdon, quiet spoken, earnest little intellectual miss from Memphis, Tennessee, has just about made up her mind that she is the "farm girl of the 20th Century-Fox lot." In every one of the four films she has made since a talent scout discovered her two years ago, emoting heavily in the dramatic TTvtf i£ ijtn. HEADACHE HEARTBURN ACID INDIGESTION GAS ON STOMACH COLD SYMPTOMS TAKE A GLASS OF Alka-Seltzer THE AWFUL PRICE YOU PAY FOR BEING Read These Important Facts! Quivering nerves can make you old. haggard and cranky — can make your life a nightmare of jealousy, self pity and "the blues." Often such nervousness is due to female functional disorders. So take famous Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound to help calm unstrung nerves and lessen functional "irregularities." 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