Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1949)

THE MARIE WILSON STORY a lush growth of floating lilies. The Herberts were doing some renovating, and when Marie and Niclt went back for a second visit a few months later Marie spied a brand-new fish pond in the middle of the rolling front lawn. "Oh, look, Nick," she said, "they've moved the house inside." At the same time, she was supporting her whole family — her mother and stepfather, grandfather, two brothers and three sisters and assorted aunts and cousins. Everybody knows the story of Marie's arrival on the Hollywood scene. She came into a $10,000 inheritance from her father's estate when she was sixteen, and having just seen Greta Garbo in "Camille" she decided that she would invest it in establishing herself as an actress. She bought a flashy car and a mink coat (forgetting to buy anything to wear under it), several hundred cases of canned goods to see the family through while she knocked down the studio gates, and proceeded to make such a pest of herself in casting directors' offices that they hired her after a while in self-defense. "Casting directors never liked me," Marie says, wonderingly. "And producers . . . ouch!" But the fans liked her so much in the small, undressed parts in which they glimpsed her first that they bombarded Warner Brothers with so many tons of letters that the studio was afraid not to let her play "Boy Meets Girl." "I just had to work," Marie says. "My stepdaddy was the sweetest man in the whole world, but he didn't make a lot of money." Marie was making money, lots of money, even then, but it had to be spread around a lot. Except for the now moulting mink coat, she had almost no clothes. "I had one pretty dress," she remembers. "It was cocoa satin with brown velvet Peter Pan collar and cuffs. It cost fifteen dollars. I wore it every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night for a year." But the rent was paid regularly in the big, heavily populated house on the hill, and the stock of canned goods regularly replenished. The household was right out of "You Can't Take It With You." There were nine in residence when Allen Nixon and Marie were married in 1942, and Allen moved in to make Number 10. Meal times were like a chow line in the army, Allen recalls and he says he was usually last in line. His wife, he decided, was "relative happy." Nobody but Marie worked regularly. Her stepdaddy was an inventor, which is interesting work but not very profitable. Brother Bill was working up to an audition as a singer, and had mastered the lyrics of "Wagon Wheels," which he could pick out on a banjo, but a summons to the army nipped that career in the bud. Bill went off to camp in Texas and came home on furloughs with a new Mexican wife and two children who spoke only Spanish. Bill and the Mexican wife were divorced and both remarried. On his next furlough Bill came home with a second wife and their brandnew baby, to find his ex-wife, with her new husband and children already in residence in the garage. Marie had invited them for a visit. A friend who visited at the house during that period came upon Marie ironing Bill's ex-wife's new husband's shirts. "Do you really have to do that?" the friend inquired solicitously. "Well, it was this way," Marie explained. "The poor little thing can't iron, and my maid wouldn't do it. . . . Somebody had to." The household is simpler now. The three sisters have married and moved away, Grandfather died a year ago, and Marie's stepfather just last Christmas. Marie has exchanged the big house for adjoining Normandy cottages on a Hollywoodland lot. Marie's pretty, little round mother and her half-brother, Frankie, who is studying photography at the Archer school, live in one, and Allen and Marie in the other. Marie's mother has a maid, and the Nixons have two — one who comes in the morning to clean, and the other in the afternoon to cook. Marie's relationship to the maids is like her relationship to everyone else: motherly. She would really do the work herself, she says, except that "I hate to make beds, and I hate to squeeze orange juice and besides they have to work someplace." Allen says Marie mothered him from the time she first laid eyes on him, which was on the set of "Rookies on Parade" at Republic in 1941. He recalls that she was the cutest thing he had ever seen in her WAC uniform, and he promptly asked her to lunch. At lunch she told him that he was terribly pale and probably dangerously anemic, and should really have some home-cooked meals and get some rest for himself. He was living at the Knickerbocker Hotel at the time, and the next morning found a package, with a note from Marie, in his mail box. The box contained seven kinds of vitamin pills, and the letter full instructions for their use. So he asked her to go dancing at Giro's. Very soon he was asking her with bulldog persistence to marry him and she was saying that she would love to but she couldn't because she was engaged to Nick Grinde and she wouldn't want to hurt his feelings. Nick Grinde made the mistake of leaving town on a fishing trip, and Allen pinned Marie down. They would go to Las Vegas, and right now, he insisted, and be married. Marie agreed, but only if Allen would help her keep the whole thing a deep secret. She went to Max Factor's and rented a black wig, borrowed some dark glasses, and further insisted that they make the trip by bus so that they would go unnoticed. Marie couldn't see very well through the borrowed glasses, so she assumed nobody could seeder. They hurried from the bus station to the registrar's office, where Marie carefully spelled out her legal name, Marie White, on the license application. "Thank you. Miss Wilson," the clerk said, giggling. "I hope you'll both be very happy." Her dilemma didn't register with Marie until she and Allen were half way down the hall. "Oh, dear, Allen," she cried, "hurry back and ask her please not to tell Louella Parsons." The clerk didn't tell — and neither did anybody else — for six months, because Marie couldn't bear to upset Nick. She really adored him. Nick was upset, needless to say, when he finally found out, and Marie was upset because Nick was upset. Why did she have to hurt him? He was such a wonderful man. "Why did you marry Allen," one of her pals asked her, "if you feel that way about Nick?" "Oh, he was so lonesome . . . and about to go into the service and all. He wanted somebody to write letters to, and I decided I should marry him." Which isn't quite true, for she is really deeply in love with Allen. Their one-week separation last spring, when Marie filed for divorce — and then withdrew the suit — 64