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■ First he changed Ann's name to Lincoln — and perhaps he'll soon be changing it again — to Mrs. Ezra Stone.
ended up by flunking his father's own subject — chemistry---in his last year of high school.
And so, then asked Ezra reasonably, why not forget college and send him to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York so he could learn to be an actor? For he'd already had enough experience in local theatrical projects to know how much he didn't know about acting; and the fame of the American Academy, which has turned out such distinguished alumni as Spencer Tracy and Jane Cowl, had mightily impressed him.
IT didn't impress his father. But Ezra was only fifteen — really a year too young for Yale — so after various arguments he won his point. He was sent to New York and the Academy on the understanding that he'd take only the junior course and
JANUARY, 1940
would then be tractable and enter college.
After the six-month junior course, however, the Academy took a hand in Ezra's future and invited him to remain for the senior course — an honor reserved for only fifty or so of the three hundred ambitious youngsters who each year enter the Academy. Frantically Ezra begged to stay, and once more his father consented.
Even senior courses at the Academy can't go on forever, and in another six months the gates of Yale were opening wide to swallow one Ezra Stone. He was all packed, ready to leave Philadelphia for New Haven — when a telegram came from one of his former Academy teachers, now directing a Broadway revue, offering him a job. Well, his father reluctantly conceded, after Ezra had used up some oratory, all right.
The revue was a quick flop — so quick that by hurrying Ezra could still have entered college before registration closed. But before his father could get wind of the show's failure, he had scurried around Broadway and found a part in another production.
It flopped too.
Let's skip the gory details, but for a year Ezra was just one jump ahead of college. The worst of it was that every time he managed to get a tiny part in a play, the show would go to Philadelphia on a try-out tour. Sometimes it would even close there, leaving him stranded right in the clutches of his college-minded family. That made it tough, but always, just in the nick of time, he would manage to find another job until at last he made the connection with George Abbott, one of New York's most successful producers, which led to stardom as Henry Aldrich in the play, "What a Life." And "What a Life," of course, led just as naturally to The Aldrich Family on the air.
He was playing Henry on the stage and in radio (on Kate Smith's program) when Ann Lincoln met him. Ann just wasn't getting anywhere. The only stage experience she'd ever had was in high school dramatics, and when she told this to managers and theatrical agents they had trouble concealing their pitying smiles. She finally found herself a job in a department store, but here it was November and the theatrical season was in full swing and she (Continued on page 72)
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