Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1940)

one studio's poison can be another studio's meat. For here was Ruth, at 20th Century-Fox, doing occasional little bits and getting nowhere. The day her contract expired, her agent sent her to Walter Wanger, who was looking for a pert girl, who could put over a song as it should be put over. When Ruth's try-out flashed on the screen the other contestants just oozed away. Ruth's father, Milton McMahon, a huge six-feet-three Irishman, thought she was wonderful. Ruth has been entertaining the public since she was a child, and doing it well. At fourteen, she "doubled" between Loew's State Theater and the Hollywood Restaurant in New York, singing four times nightly. Daddy thought she was wonderful. At fifteen, Ruth had moved on to singing at the Royal Palms Hotel in Miami, Florida, and when on the following New Year's Eve at the famous Chez Paree cafe in Chicago, as she was putting over her songs with her usual zip, a note came back from Joe Schenck (that man gets everywhere) asking Ruth how she would like to try pictures. Daddy thought it would be wonderful, so off she went to 20th CenturyFox. After "Slightly Honorable," Ruth went back to New York to sing at the famous Casa Manana before resuming her movie career. She was born, October 21st in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and finds the modest little Hollywood bungalow quite a haven of rest after her hectic travels about the country. Her brother Stewart, another six footer, is a student at the University of Southern California. Ruth herself is a bookworm, the cutest of all worms. She never studied voice and somehow just naturally knew how to put over the torchiest, hottest love songs. Her nose must have rammed on the brakes for the red light and then forgot to go on, for it just stops there on her face much too soon. Her brown eyes twinkle. She's five-feet-four, and her legs are something, her shoe size 41;2BV her hose size 9 (well-filled), her bust 34, waist 24, hips 341/-> inches. And Daddy thinks she's wonderful. All Hale Broke Loose: Hale, currently of Warner's "Irene" even after thirty years in movies will be the first to tell you he's kidding when it comes to his romantic sounding name. In Washington, D. C, where Alan was born on a cold February 10th, he was named by his doting Scottish parents, Rufus Alan MacKahan. At eighteen, when his family had moved to Philadelphia and he'd had a go at the University of Pennsylvania, Alan decided to become a newspaper man, but try as he would, he could get no drama, love interest, or suspense into his obituary reporting so he became an osteopath. He rubbed osteopathy .right into the ground in no time and, changing the MacKahan to Hale, he went on the stage. In Philadelphia the old Lubin Movie Company was next to his favorite bakery; because it was so convenient to his favorite scones, Scotch Alan become a movie actor. That was in 1911. Since then he has acquired a wife, a home in Hollywood, two children, many silver threads among the gold, and a lot of gold among the silver. He's the most incongruous person in Hollywood. For instance, when a director wants a good, tough he-man fight, he thinks of Hale, and if lucky enough to get him (for Alan works all the time), the director would get a knockdown, drag-out sequence. But that night he might wish he were going out with the boys, and when he'd call Mrs. Hale to say, "Look, Gretchen, I'll be late," a voice from the extension upstairs would say, "What's the matter, Pop, going to be late? Well, I think you'd better get home early." And that would be Jeanne who, as Mr. Hale says, rules them with an iron hand. Jeanne came to the Hales when their boy and girl were babies. The Hales advertised for a nurse, and this French girl was the first to answer. Jeanne's official title is now roost-ruler, and the Hales adore her. Another astonishing incongruity about our hero is his straightforward he-man adventures into business, and his utter submission to his horoscope. If the stars say yes, he goes ahead. If not, you could build fires under him and he wouldn't budge. From his father, who was a manufacturer of patent medicines, Alan inherited the urge to find new ways to help humanity; not by the "pink pills for pale people" route exactly, but by the inventing, or backing the inventions, of helpful commodities. Hence his flyers into the promotion of greaseless potato chips, sliding theater seats, automatic car brakes and, lately, miniature fire extinguishers. "I'll probably make a million dollars on the extinguishers," Mr. Hale says, "and I don't want it or need it." His home is an easy, natural habitation with each member of the Hale group maintaining his own room furnished exactly as he wants it. Eighteen-year-old Bud usually has all Alan's ties in his room and Alan is lucky to get one wear out of the blue polka dot. Several months ago he and Mrs. Hale celebrated twenty-five years of marriage. Right here in Hollywood. Mrs. Hale was overcome when Alan presented her with a legal document that read: "I hereby take up your option for another twenty-five years." A Trouper Who "Kept A-Comin' " "Rich fellas come up an' they die. An' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. Can't nobody wipe us out. Can't nobody lick us. We'll go on forever. We're the people." — Ma Joad. Everyone in Hollywood is pretty well agreed that one of the finest pieces of character delineation the screen has seen for many years is the compelling portrait of Ma Joad, the uncomplaining, courageous "Okie" matriarch of "The Grapes of Wrath." And everyone, particularly the old timers who have seen several generations of film stars born in a blaze of ballyhoo and die out with the fading of public fancy, is pleased that at last Jane Darwell is having her day. For twenty-five years Jane Darwell has been plodding along in pictures, one of that little army of dependable character actors and actresses who supply the unspectacular background against which are silhouetted in bold relief the more richly rewarded performances of the stars. The names of these dramatic dray horses seldom reach the headlines devoted to the leaders in the cinematic steeplechase. A line among the screen credits of the cast, an occasional mention in a buried phrase in a review, are their only recognition. But behind the scenes they're known for the all-important mood and tempo they set in a film, and their steadiness often saves many a more elaborately spotlighted star from disaster. "Troupers" they call them in the show business, and for a quarter of a century Jane Darwell has been proving her right to that brave badge. She won it quite young, that actors' accolade of trouper. For Jane Darwell was never an ingenue who aged into character roles, a star who slipped back Jti rtfe SAME GIRL! Eileen Blackwell came to the Success School in the Richard Hudnut Salon, New York, a timid, awkward girl with an inferiority complex. Six weeks later she was a new Eileen, with posture corrected, and a figure of proper proportions. Trained in a beauty routine, she is now poised and confident, with a loveliness she knows how to keep. NEW HOME BEAUTY COURSE Shows YOU the Way to GLAMOUR Now, wherever you live, you can learn to develop your own beauty. 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