Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

1 1 ILL\*4)E_ PI w By NORTON RUSSELL THIS is really a very wicked story, because its only lesson is that the way of the transgressor is as easy as the dickens, and leads not only to a nice job every week on one of radio's top programs, but to romance as well. It points out the advantages of deception and of disobeying your parents. It will probably do a great deal of harm in respectable homes, where the young folks behave themselves and tell the truth and agree that Father (and even Mother sometimes) knows best. The hero and heroine of this shocking story are Ezra Stone and Ann Lincoln, who play Henry and his sister Mary on that funniest of family serials, The Aldrich Family, heard Tuesday nights on NBC. I wouldn't want to bet a week's pay that they won't be Mr. and Mrs. Stone by the time you're opening up Aunt Hattie's Christmas present, because right now they're in love. They've been in love ever since that day, a little more than a year ago, when an actor friend of Ezra's brought Ann up to him and said, "Ezra, I'd like to have you meet my niece." Which was starting off on a low moral plane, because Ann wasn't the actor's niece at all. She was nothing but a nineteen-year-old girl from a small town in Maine, who had come to New York because she wanted to be a great actress. At the moment, she hadn't come any nearer to Broadway than the bargain-basement of a big department store. ■ Only twenty, and Ezra Stone is a radio and stage star, a producer's right-hand man and a dramatic teacher. Ezra, on the other hand, at the age of twenty, was already a radio star, a famous dramatic producer's right-hand man, and a teacher at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was important, a Somebody. Ann hoped he'd like her and help her to get a job, but she certainly never thought he'd upset her by deciding to fall in love. Or by being so nice that she'd fall in love with him too. She'd sort of forgotten that even if Ezra was a big shot, he was, after all, only twenty, and just as susceptible as any other twenty-year-old to brown eyes and dusky hair and a special kind of innocence that doesn't, as a rule, grow along Broadway. She didn't know that her own gallant determination to be an actress would strike an answering chord in Ezra's own heart. He knew just how she felt. He, too, had wanted to be an actor when it seemed as if the whole world was against him. Now is the time for what the movies call a flashback, because you've got to understand what sort of a kid this Ezra Stone is. « doesn't mean anything to say hes the current boy, wonder of Broadway, astonishing everyone by n>s ability as actor, director, businessman and all-around showman. io have to go back to the stage-strucK youngster in Philadelphia who was darned if he'd go to college. Ezra's story must be the one i end all stories about boys w^ bucked parental opposition to go the stage. As a child, he was tn despair of his father, who had oi^ been a chemistry professor. ^ hated school and wanted only^ he on the stage and in radio, an bub, «n> iaE«s.oN **» w I* ■ 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 now 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. I T didn't impress his father. But 1 Ezra was only fifteen— really a year too young for Yale— so after various arguments he won his point, ^e was sent to New York and the Academy on the understanding that 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. rl 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) 17