Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1942)

pretty, at least. I don't think I can take a well-bred second cousin, Mother." To which Mrs. Stern, after the way of mothers, paid no attention. And now it was the evening of Bill's second day at Charlevoix, and — as his mother had predicted — Harriette May was coming across the lawn. TJLUE, green and golden stars, from one of the Fourth of July rockets, fell against the sky behind her. Bill saw that she was small and graceful. His trained eye noticed her simple brown chiffon gown, her chartreuse slippers. And as she came closer, smiling, he saw she was that luminous golden tan which blondes get to make their hair lighter and their eyes bluer. That was only the beginning. She always wore simple chiffon gowns in the evening. By day she favored linens — sky blue, yellow, or moss green — with little cap sleeves and sharp low V-necks and white belts and buttons. She had a white sharkskin bathing suit and one of Navy jersey with a sailor collar with three rows of white braid and white stars. She had simple chic always. Every day, every night she and Bill were together. They drove. They walked. They talked. They swam. They skyrocketed all over the three lakes in the corner of which Charlevoix was located in the speed boat he hired; white wings of foam rising behind them. She drove that boat too, as effortlessly as she drove the big family car, the station wagon, the gardener's Model T, and her sleek gray convertible. Bill Stern, ace sports commentator, is on NBC daily at 6:45 and Saturdays at 10:00 P.M., EWT, and also brings you descriptions of top lootball games during the Fall season. Bill liked her low voice, her slow smile, her ease. He was charmed because she was completely without affectation; because she was as simple and casual with her ^-father's servants as she was with the men of wealth and influence they entertained at dinner and over long week-ends. He liked the clean line she made when she dove off the high board. "That's how I fell for you," he declared as they swam back to the float together. "Right off the deep end." "You have terribly nice eyes," she said, "but they do give you away, you know. They're always laughing ..." "For the last two weeks, maybe," he said, adding significantly "For the last two weeks I've been way over on the happy side." She lay on the float in the sun. She cupped her little face in her hands. Her blue eyes were level and laughing. "You sound like an advertisement," she mocked. He couldn't get her to take him seriously. Then, in what seemed no time at all, he found himself in his car with his mother, headed Eastward. All the way home he was quiet. His mother, who never had known him to be quiet before, guessed what had happened. She wasn't sure she liked it, because her son's life was built up on irregular hours and irregular habits — not at all the sort of thing a girl of Harriette's background would take to. But, wisely, she said nothing. And two weeks later Bill wrote asking Harriette to marry him. He had thought of nothing but her since he had left her. Rehearsing the Rockettes in a new routine he had found himself remembering the way her slim brown hand had looked with her big sapphire winking on it . . . Breakfasting at Reubens on scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon at five o'clock in the morning, before going home to bed, he had found himself remembering her habit of slipping her slim heels free and wiggling her brown and white slippers on her toes. He proposed to her in person when she stopped off in New York the following spring, en route to Bermuda. They went dancing at El Morocco and the Stork Club. The hosts at both places were warned in advance that Bill would settle for nothing less than their best table. Stars of the radio and sporting world, the stage and screen, came over to say hello. News photographers snapped them against the zebra striped lounges of El Morocco and again holding the unmistakable wine cards at the Stork Club. He tried hard that night to persuade Harriette to marry him. But she refused — firmly. "This is your life," she said when they were bound for her hotel in a taxi. "It suits you perfectly. But it wouldn't suit me. I have no gift for quick, facile friendships; for accepting people instantly because one facet in their personality happens to attract me, not caring about anything else. I couldn't exist day after day, night after night, in the glare of the spotlight. "I'm not criticizing your life, Bill; or you. I see what a grand, exciting life it must be for anyone who is adapted to it. I can see how dull any other life would be, by comparison. "But marriage means sharing life. We couldn't! Can't you see that?" He couldn't, or wouldn't, see it. But, nevertheless, he had to let Harriette go away, steel himself lest she come back with a diamond on her finger. He watched her at the rail of her big ship, waving, with his purple orchids on her slim shoulder, while the stretch of water between her ship and the pier grew wider. Dejectedly he walked off the pier, hailed a cab, started uptown. Then, suddenly, his heart did a back flop. He remembered her eyes and voice when she had been making her little speech the night before. Her eyes hadn't been cool and level. They had been protectively downcast. Her voice hadn't been cool and casual. It had been urgent, emotional. In a flash he knew she cared, a little anyhow. He stopped the cab to send her a radiogram. "Understand there are a couple of hot, high-pressure glamour boys on board," he told her. "Don't let them steal my heart. B." Every letter he wrote after that was a proposal. He also proposed regularly over the telephone. That was the year the telephone company declared an extra dividend. Eighteen months after they met at Charlevoix, when her father died, he fairly implored her to marry him. "Don't urge me now, Bill," she said. "I might take what you'd call a 'run-out powder' on the loneliness ahead — and say yes. That wouldn't be any good for either of us." "All right, Baby," he told her. "I've reached the place where I'd be glad to take you any way I could get you. But for the time being we'll file this away under 'Future Discussion.' " It was six months after that, at about the time Bill went over to NBC as sports commentator, that he crashed. It Continued on page 81 RADIO MIRROR