Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1950)

p CRIODIC tort. *•* £, ,*«*i <°! vja^js re\\eMes mens* R M 92 what different from most girls, I guess. A great deal of my work has to be done at night — the memorizing, studying, the research I'm doing for my book and such, I like to do after the house is quiet and I can go off to my room with I my poodle pal, Bobo, close the door, shut off the phone, be alone and think. I almost never get to bed before two, and I am a girl who needs eight hours' sleep, and likes ten. So I get up around noon. I suppose some people would call that lazy. But for me it is efficient. Because it works. So does the long stretch I allow myself for a bath before bedtime. I do up my hair, cream my face, climb into a tub full of hot, foamy water. I have all my toilet accessories right over the tub on a little glass shelf — the manicure equipment, the hand cream, the sweet smelling soap, even, if I feel like it, a good book. I can lie in a hot tub for an hour, just revelling in relaxation. It's a long time, maybe, but I don't remember ever spending a sleepless night in my life. On the week-ends, the routine is a little different. The pace doesn't change, particularly, but the background does. My sister, Chris, and I usually drive to Long Beach on Saturday to stay until Sunday night with our parents and our sisters and their families. It's a pleasant, busy time — but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what makes it so busy. We sit around the house, and talk, and drink endless cups of coffee, cook the meals and do the dishes, and in the evenings— sometimes — we sing. Mother gets out her old five-string banjo and pretty soon all of the Staffords might as well be back in our native hills of Tennessee, for the air is filled with mountain music. On sunny Sunday afternoons, I sometimes walk around the golf course with my father or go to the beach with my little nieces and nephews. It's a far cry, I suppose, from Hollywood, and yet I think my coming from a big, happy family accounts for whatever success I have had professionally. In a house full of people you find out early that you can't have all the attention. That other people have problems, and, more important, that other people have talents. I'm sure I was not five years old before I knew, deep in my bone":, and in sharply personal terms that people in this world are dependent on one another, that we have to help one another if we are to survive ourselves. It would never occur to me, for instance, that I had to know everything about anything. Even when I had almost full responsibility for the Chesterfield show, I managed to delegate work to people I knew were good, and then trusted them to do it. I needed help, I asked for it, and I got it. The writers did the writing, the conductor did the conducting. I sang. It never occurs to me to tell anybody else how to do his job. I know a lot of people in my business who feel they are not fulfilling their roles as stars unless they have the final word on every phase of their programs or pictures. But to me that doesn't make sense. It's healthier, and happier, to be lazy. Oh, I had a few frantic days when I first started out as a "star" singer. I worried and fretted and stewed, and then at one point I just sat down and cooled off. "What can happen if something goes wrong?" I asked myself. The worst thing, the very worst thing that could happen, I had to answer, was that I would be fired. That was mighty unlikely. And even if I did get fired? Would that be too catastrophic? I relaxed, and tended to my job — the singing. Nothing terrible happened. This is an important thing. Most of the terrible things we worry about happening never happen. I know women who can work themselves into a frenzy over a small dinner party. (When they aren't even responsible for the cooking.) I took a tip on that score a long time ago from my good friend, Margaret Ettinger. Maggie can have as many as thirty peoole at a party, and yet somehow you still feel at the end of the evening that she has spent the whole evening at your side — making sure you had a good time. It's nice if the food is good at a party, I admit that. But it's not the essential thing. What counts is being relaxed enough, as a hostess, to make a party a party. It's better not to give a party if you're too tense to enjoy it, and, equally, it's better not to go to one if you're too tired to be a good guest. I used to find it very hard to say "no" to anything — whether a social invitation, or a request to do a benefit. But I had to learn how to do it — and not just because I'm so "lazy." It's always a mistake, I've found, to do any more in a day than you can take on happily and do well. It all adds up, this laziness business, it seems to me now, to a state of mind, a point of view. All of us are equipped for this life with a certain amount of inner drive, or life force or energy. Whatever you want to call it, it's limited, and it's precious. The way we spend our precious energies determines, in the long run, whether we'll be successful or unsuccessful, happy or unhappy. Spending mine the "lazy" way has proved, for me, at least, the most profitable. I have watched a close friend of mine, an intense, terrifically talented young man, explode away enough energy in five minutes when he found himself tied up in traffic at a stop light to see him calmly — lazily, if you like — through a whole day. The perfectionists squander theirs, too, and the people who have to do everything because nobody else does it quite right. They may enjoy a brief hour of triumph — you've seen them come and go, but naming names would be unkind. But they wind up burned out, sick, and alone. They wouldn't go into the streets and madly throw their money away. Why are they willing to do it with their even more valuable energy? I'm not making a plea here for the lackadaisical, too-carefree, too-dependent attitude of too many people. Everybody has to move forcefully once in awhile. Everyone has to get mad now and then. What I am aiming for, and urging upon all the unlucky people who haven't found out what fun it is to be lazy, is a relaxed and happy medium. Face up to the pressure — when it's necessary. Blow up if it's important to blow up, but only when it's important. You'll be amazed how many golden, unhurried hours you save to just lie back and be lazy! Are you as lovely | as you can be? See page 19 j Paid Notict