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HOLLYWOOD?" There was a gay, carefree note in Honore Ameche's laugh. "I'm not afraid of Hollywood. Hollywood can't hurt us."
I wondered how many wives had uttered those same brave words — and then had been forced to sit and watch their homes, all that was fine and precious in their lives, crumble slowly away under forces they could understand but couldn't fight. So many — so very many — that it has become almost a maxim that happy marriages can't exist in Hollywood.
It isn't Hollywood's fault, really. Hollywood is only a symbol for what happens. Gossips say, "Oh, So-and-so has gone Hollywood, and he and his wife have split." But what they mean is that So-and-so has done what countless other men in countless other professions have done since the beginning of time. He's suddenly made a great deal of money and achieved a great deal of success and received a great deal of praise, while his wife stayed home and minded the babies and kept his house in order and — worst of all — stood still. Left behind.
Yes, many wives have said that, but none of them with the calm assurance that shines in the gray eyes of Honore Ameche. With her, the wish isn't father to the thought. She knows. She knows that the talisman exists which will make her and Don proof against Hollywood's adulation and
flattery and false values. It's her Hollywood insurance.
"It isn't that Don is better or stronger than other men," she explained seriously. "Or that I'm cleverer than other women. It isn't even that he and I are more in love with each other than others have been who have come here and then separated. We're both human. But we have one protection— Don's radio work, his attitude toward it. His devotion to it is almost a religion."
That is hard to understand, unless you go back to Don's very beginning, back to a day when, bewildered and defeated, he knelt in the enfolding gloom of a little church in his native Madison, Wisconsin, and poured out his soul in a prayer for Divine guidance. A long line of sturdy Italian peasant forbears had instilled into him a deep religious fervor. His cares and troubles seemed to slip away in prayer.
Don Ameche was a failure. In deepest shame, he realized it. Behind him were two heart-breaking years of frustration on Broadway. He had wanted to be an actor, but he had failed; had come home to a life of dull, sordid, underpaid work, stretching ahead of him endlessly.
At home was a sick mother, crippled from a motor accident. A father who faced his old age bereft of the small competence he had worked a lifetime to secure. Seven brothers and sisters looked to Don for food and clothing.
WH
YOUNG MAN BECOMES A MOVIE IDOL HE USUALLY LOSES HIS