Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

HOLLYWOOD'S PERFECT COUPLE Here's a Happy Pair of Celebrities Who Believe in Good Old-Fashioned Marriage, And, After Many Years Together, Are Still Madly in Love — With Each Other. by Nancy Smith Jimmie Gleason and his wife, Lucille, do most of their writing together. They have no separate workroom, and get many of their ideas and inspirations at the table after dinner. Contented? Dont they look it? E.VERY day we read about a divorce in Hollywood. Papers are full of stories of marital difficulties among the temperamental denizens of the glamorous film colony. Marriage and Hollywood are considered an oil and water proposition, as far as compatibility are concerned. "Good heavens!" we say. "Surely there must be someone in Hollywood who is happily married." There is. Jimmie Gleason, whose picture roles in "Is Zat So?", "It's a Wise Child," "A Free Soul" and many other talkies have endeared him to the movie world, and whose humorous adventures with Bob Armstrong in "Knights of the Road" have won him equal popularity with the radio public, is the happily married example. He and his charming wife, Lucille, have worked, played and fought together side by side in the long and arduous campaign that finally resulted in his fame. "We have always worked together," they said over the coffee cups at their delightful English cottage in Beverly Hills. "We alwavs intend to. Whether it is in pictures, on the stage, preparing material for radio broadcasts, or writing a play or scenario — we like to be together. "Our best writing is done, and we have our most worthwhile discussions around the dinner table after dinner. All of our dining-room chairs have backs. We stay there for hours — talking, discussing, suggesting, deleting and JIMMIE GLEASON enlarging our ideas. Our friends laugh and say 'Give the Gleason's a good cook and comfortable chairs, and they'll turn out a moneymaker.' "We've decided," Jimmie confided, "that collaboration in writing is a great deal like marriage. There should be a willingness to work fifty-fifty, with a slight mutual leaning toward sixty-fifty. Just to do a little more than is required of one always brings a little thrill to both persons." Both Mr. and Mrs. Gleason admitted that they have no use for temperamental notions in a writer. Nor in anyone else, for that matter. Temperament is another Hollywood vice that you won't find in the Gleason household. They are simple, average American people, industrious and unassuming. "You hear people say they know they could write something fine if they could shut themselves off from the rest of the world like a hermit," Mrs. Gleason remarked. "That is absurd. To write plays, books, scenarios or continuity you have to be among people. Characters in a plot have to actually live. Otherwise the reader or audience will detect the absence of human qualities. "Sincerity is the fundamental of all good writing," Jimmie put in. If a piece of writing is not a reflection of human nature, it isn't sincere." In all the years the Gleason's have been writing in different mediums, they have never had a special workroom. They write all over the house. Or in the most comfortable nook in the garden. Even in a hotel room. "We've always contended that you can do anything anywhere, if you have to or want to badly enough," declared Jimmie Gleason. And he's done enough things in enough places to know. Which all goes to show that despite its reputation, Hollywood does have some real home folks, to whom "till death do us part" and "for better or for worse" aren't just so many idle words. Pape Twenty RADIO DOINGS