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No pose is this. Jack's proud of his practical abilities, whether with saw, paint brush, or elbow.
Cocker spaniel Butt shares the Smith house, notable for comfort, good food, good times.
The Jack Smiths make their home in
Hollywood, proving that a happy, harmonious one can be achieved anywhere — if you want it badly enough
By PAULINE SWANSON
0
in a hill-top overlooking the famous Sunset strip stands a mellowed old brick house, its clipped green lawns and spreading shade trees emphasizing an air of Eastern permanence which is rare in Hollywood.
Alongside of houses which look as temporal as movie sets put together with bailing wire and glue and "struck" after the day's shooting, the house shrieks of solidity and respectability. "Early settlers live here," it seems to say, adding "early settlers who made their money in oil — or something a good deal more substantial than the entertainment business."
Actually, it is the home of Jack Smith — radio's "voice with a smile" — and his charming wife Vickii, who are not early settlers at all, having "settled" in Hollywood — as much as they could ever settle anywhere — less than two years ago.
"And we don't even own the place," the Smiths confess, blushing with pleasure when visitors compliment them on turning their temporary diggings into the "old home place" of youth and memory.
When the sponsors of Jack's marathon-run musical show decided two years ago to move their program to the West Coast Jack and Vickii danced a small fandango in the living room of their East River apartment in New York. (It was a small fandango, Jack says, because it was a small living room.)
"At last," they chorused, "we can have a home of our own."
A home of their own had been their dream for years, ever since their marriage — on their mutual birthday — on November 16, 1936. But the dream was not to come true as quickly as "they thought. Vickii, who preceded Jack to California to stake out their claim on a piece of California earth, ran smack into the peak of the West Coast real estate boom, and found that buying a house at that time was a little like buying the Republic of Luxembourg.
"We can have a house," she telephoned Jack, "if we skip our trip next summer."
"Nothing doing," said Jack, to whom summer traveling is one of life's essentials.
So Vickii compromised and leased the big, old brick house on the hill, redecorated it with an emphasis on good, strong color, furnished it with her transplanted collection of English and early American antiques and came up with a house that is a very reasonable facsimile of their dream.
Spread all over two floors, twelve rooms, and a spacious walled-in garden, the Smiths look back on their eleven long years as New York "cave dwellers" and wonder, they confess, that they called it living. (Continued on page 91)
RADIO MIRROR for
BETTER LIVING