Radio-TV mirror (July-Dec 1954)

(Continued from page 57) Mickey Emerson, of Valiant Lady. Not long ago, we were walking down the street and I heard a couple of girls gasp and say, 'Why, there's Mickey.' One of them whispered, 'Isn't he good-looking!' And the other said, 'Isn't it wonderful to run into him like this!' No one paid any attention to me I was the one who felt shy then." "You needn't have," Jimmy said, "because you'll remember that, just then, Faye Emerson happened by — and nobody paid any more attention to me, either." And they both laughed at the memory. People often come into night clubs where Jim and his partner, Lee Goodman, do their comedy act — places like the Ruban Bleu, the Bon Soir, and Cafe Society — and at the first opportunity they go up to Jim and tell him, "You know, there's a kid in a daytime television drama who looks so much like you it's unbelievable. You should watch him some day." This also amuses Jim and Muriel, because, of course, he is that kid — even though he's sometimes up until 3:30 earlier in the morning making the night-club rafters ring with laughter and applause Actually, then, there are three Jimmy Kirkwoods — or, perhaps more accurately, four! The night-club comedian; the host to teenagers and spinner of popular platters on a radio program; the youthful Mickey who is trying to take his dead dad's place in the life of the valiant Emersons on television; and the real Jimmy Kirkwood, who is a combination of all the others. The real Jimmy is a rather quietacting, shy-seeming fellow, a lean six feet in height, with dark brown hair and rather dark blue eyes with the suspicion of a twinkle most of the time. A fellow who is a little star-struck himself, in spite of being a star, a little afraid to ask a girl for a date because he thought of her as 'way up there! "I didn't ask, for a long time," Jimmy admitted. "Lee and I were working, and Muriel would come into the club with this escort one week and another one the next, and I would see her and be conscious of her all evening, but I was still a little shy of her. Then, when I was doing the role of Toby Smith in The Aldrich Family, on radio, some of us were invited to a party for one of the cast members of the stage hit, 'Wonderful Town.' I can't even remember now who the actor was, or anything about the occasion. I only remember that there was Muriel, at the party, and that I must have been feeling particularly pepped up after our show. Muriel had on a big picture hat. Her long black hair was caught up under it, with just a fringe of careless bangs across her forehead. Her eyes looked even bigger and darker and more beautiful than I remembered them . . . "I suddenly walked up" to her and bent over and kissed her! Just like that. Without a word of warning, to her or myself. "She didn't slap my face, as I deserved, and she didn't say anything. She just looked startled, as well she might. Not to be routed again by my fears, I grasped the advantage. 'What are you doing for dinner tonight?' I demanded. "She had come with a date, but somehow I managed it so that the three of us left together, rather early and perfectly amicably, in search of dinner. During the evening we 'lost' Muriel's date. He wasn't a steady beau, only a good friend who had asked her to the party and didn't seem to mind getting lost" " Muriel says that the reason Jimmy kept M up his interest was that he fell in love with her dog, a black miniature French poodle inappropriately named Too Much, Valiant Young Man and nicknamed TM. He's a friendly little fellow who drapes himself across Jimmy's ankles and looks up as if to comment, "Now you see how cozy this is?" Muriel insists that it was Jimmy's fondness for TM which drew him back again and again. Jimmy says that the greatest bond between them, from the first meeting, was their ability to laugh together, to find the same things amusing, to discover they shared a sense of the ridiculous. In spite of the fact that Muriel has the darkly glowing face associated with the portrayal of dramatic emotions, she has a fine flair for comedy and most of her dancing has been along comedy lines. Yet their first dates didn't always run smoothly. Jimmy was working in a club, starting his job at 10: 30 or 11 at night, when Muriel's work at the Ballet Theater was finishing. If she could manage to stay awake, she would wait around for him. Then, when he began to do the role in Valiant Lady, a noontime television show, he still had night-club commitments and would often go to his early morning rehearsals at the TV studio after only three hours' sleep. "This made for a very cranky boy at times, and I don't see how Moo — the name I had begun to call Muriel — put up with me at all. When I had a free evening and we went out together, I could hardly keep my eyes open. This was great companionship for her! A lot of the time, I was learning my scripts and she had to sit around and cue me, instead of being out and having fun. My mother often came over and helped things along. She and Moo get along famously." (People who remember silent motion pictures knew Jimmy's mother as a beautiful little girl called Cuddles, and later as a grown-up, beautiful actress named Lila Lee, who married a tall, handsome matinee idol named James Kirkwood— Jimmy's father.) Trying to make up to Muriel for some of the things she was missing, Jim outdid himself on a Christmas present that first winter of their friendship. He knew she wanted a black fox muff, and that's what he got her. "I was overwhelmed," Muriel recalled, "and not at all sure he should have done it. I just never dreamed anyone would buy me anything so lovely." Her eyes filled up a little as she talked about that first present of Jim's. Last Christmas there was a pearl ring and matching earrings, something else she wanted very much. Her first Christmas present to him was a watch. "I broke it," he said. Her second was a camera. "He lost it," she said. But there's a ring he hopes to keep forever. Muriel gave it to him last summer, when she was leaving to travel with an ice show as the assistant choreographer and Jimmy was going to stay in the East to do summer stock, and they would be separated for the first time. They were having dinner at Sardi's before she left, and Muriel was wearing the plain gold band she always wears on her little finger. "Jimmy had a habit of grasping my hand and twisting that ring, and when he put his hand over mine that evening, I said, 'Wait a minute. I want to show you something.' I dug into my handbag for a small box, opened it, and took out a similar ring. 'Try it on,' I said. Jim put it on his little finger, commented that it almost fit him, and started to hand it back, thinking it was the mate to my ring and I had decided to wear both. You're supposed to keep it,' I told him. 'Look inside.' " Jimmy took the ring, held it up to the light, and read, "To Jim, with love, from Moo-Moo." And the date. Then his eyes filled. The fact that in re-sizing the ring to his finger the jeweler rubbed off a bit of the "love" hasn't bothered them. It has nothing to do with the facts. Muriel isn't a girl who likes much jewelry, and Jimmy dislikes seeing a girl hung with a lot of gew-gaws, so the pearls and the ring that is like his are the pieces she wears the most. The first time they danced together, Jimmy was really scared, partly because Muriel is a professional dancer and partly because of the surroundings. It was the occasion of the Ballet Ball, a fashionable, social and lovely annual party. Muriel had been invited, but there was no extra ticket for Jimmy. But she had called at the last moment and said she knew there were unused tickets available, if Jimmy could get there in time. Wouldn't he hurry and dress and come over? His dress clothes had been hung aside because he wasn't working in a club at that time. And, when he went to take them out, everything was hopelessly out of press. It was too late to find a tailor and, while he was wondering what to do, his mother came in with a guest, a newspaper woman who was visiting her from Washington. "My mother volunteered right away to do a pressing job, but she was never very handy at such things and we both laughed at what the clothes might look like when she got through. Then this newspaper woman said, 'Give them to me,' grabbed the board and the iron, and did a bang-up professional pressing job. What a good sport she was! I felt like Cinderella being sent off to the ball. "Until I got there — and realized I was going to dance with Muriel for the first time. 'This is it,' I told myself. 'This is where you make an idiot of yourself. With all these trained professional dancers, and these society people who have been versed in this sort of thing from their childhood, you'll be the only awkward lout there.' " "He wasn't," Muriel broke in. "He danced very well, so well I was amazed. No one had ever built up his confidence about dancing, that was all." Someone has, since then — namely, Muriel — so much so that he has added dance steps to his night-club routines, and one of his proudest moments was when he read a recent review of a new club show he and Lee had done and it mentioned his dancing very favorably! Jimmy and Muriel have never quarreled over dates or dancing or anything at all important, but they have had spats over small things. "Silly little things," accord. ing to Muriel. "We'll be talking and Jim may be telling me about something — and I will break in and say, 'Oh, Jim' — and he will stop and ask, 'What did you say that for?' Maybe I didn't say it for any reason that seems important enough to argue over, so I will say it wasn't for any particular reason — and why not go on and finish what he was saying? But he won't, because by now he's really curious about it, and maybe by now I won't even remember why I said it, and we'll start fussing at each other as if we were really angry. Then we see the funny side of it and start to laugh, and it's all over." Jim isn't the bossy type, but Muriel is glad he "bossed" her about her hair when she wanted to cut it short. If she had, she would have faced a problem when she suddenly got the role of Lover George, the Angel, in the ballet called "The Small House of Uncle Thomas," a wonderful sequence in the stage hit, "The King and I." A wig just wouldn't have been satisfactory. She was happy to get that role, but it's separating them — because, three weeks after she took it over, the show was scheduled to go on the road, all the way to the