TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1957)

Mike's favorite), a lemon cake, and a variety of fancy split-layer cakes. The new house has ein all-electric kitchen with oven built into the wall, plus a new automatic dishwasher. It also has roaming room for Grundoon, their jet black cocker spaniel. Rosemary tells you that these are the three main reasons they built a house, but you suspect that the fact she has never before lived in a house, much less owned one, has a great deal to do with it. Especially when she tells you what a wonderful feeling it was "to go out and see all those people so busy building my house." There seemed to be a kind of destiny about the house, from the first. If their Sunday paper had been delivered as usual, if they hadn't slept late enough to retrieve the competitive Sunday paper from their neighbor's trash after it had been read and discarded, they might never have seen the advertisement. Their usual paper didn't carry it. But having read the ad they decided to take a ride and see if the property lived up to the fancy phrases describing it. When they walked through the model home, they knew this was no lark. They stared up at the mountains, the great trees. Rosemary, looking at the woods all around, already heard fliem ringing with the symphonic music she loves and was brought up on. Her father, Milton Prinz, is a brilliant concert cellist who worked under Toscanini and is a member of the Firestone Symphony Orchestra. Rosemary studied piano and voice, but chose dramatic acting as her career instead. "I knew that, at last, here was a place where I could turn the volume full and play the recordings and the radio as they were meant to be played, without worrying about annoying the neighbors. I stood in the big living room, fortytwo feet long, and imagined how it would sound like symphony hall, and how the whole house would be filled with music. I looked at Mike, and knew he felt the same way." Together they selected everything, from details to important items. "We both have to live in the house and should feel equally content with everything. My father, like Mike, has definite ideas and my mother and I like that. I'm not used to husbands who say, 'Whatever you want is all right with me, dear,' and wives who wonder later if it really is." Their white-roofed ranch house, set in an acre and a half of ground, was designed for the downhill slope it occupies. This means it has two stories at the back, the lower one being a huge recreation room leading to the patio, with utility room behind the recreation room. Materials are white brick, dark brown shingles, and mottled beige-brown wood called "pecky" cypress. In addition to the big living room, there is a dining area, the big kitchen, three bedrooms and the bathrooms. The recreation room has three cypress walls and one in pale pink stucco, with a brown and white spattered asphalt tile floor. The furnishings throughout the house are a "kind of subdued modem." What Rosemary means by this is contemporary design, but with extremely simple lines and attractively textured fabrics. For a girl who starts rehearsing in a New York studio at 7:30 each morning, is off the air at 2:00 in the afternoon, and then rehearses again for the next day's show from 2:30 to 5:30, commuting from the country presents a problem. It has changed their lives to the extent that she doesn't cook dinner on week nights, but usually meets Mike at a restaurant in town, before she hurries home to studj' her script for the next day's show. None of these things bother young Mrs. Thoma, however. She is used to work, struggled a long time to make her way as an actress before the jobs began to come in steadily and before she met Mike. In the early days she took any job she could get between theater jobs. She sold pots and pans from door to door, worked as a hat-check girl, as an alarmi operator for a detective association (on the midnight to 9:00 A.M. shift so she could make the rounds for theater jobs during the day), clerked in a department store. By the time she was called to audition for the part of Penny she had proved herself, of course — had been in many of the big night dramatic shows on television, a long list of radio plays, four short-lived Broadway plays and had loads of stock company experience. In addition, she was then playing the second female lead in another daytime drama. Because of this, she didn't push too hard when she was called to read for Penny by the program's director, Ted Corday. "I didn't count too much on getting the part, although I liked it so much. I have learned not to count too much on anything, but to take everything as it comes, a day at a time. It was a happy surprise when word came that I was to be Penny, particularly because my other show went off the air at about that time. Immediately I started to let my hair grow, like Penny's. I took a short rest, and baked cake every day. My husband had more cake than he could possibly eat!" As tJie months have gone by, Rosemary and Penny have now become more and more identified with each other. She is such an interesting teenager. Special in the way that every human being is special. Typical in the way her problems are similar to the problems of other girls in her age group. Sometimes she is the sweet, starry-eyed young girl having her first dates, her first loves. Sometimes she's still the child who flops into a chair and never, never really sits in one, and talks incessantly on the telephone to her bosom friends. The hostile girl, at times, who fights with her brother or with a boy friend, just to let off steam. The rebellious daughter who believes that her dead sister, Susan, is still her mother's favorite. Penny dramatizes every situation, and most of all, dramatizes herself. "We have a real wonderful crowd on our show, from Charlie Fisher, the producer, right on down. The cast, the crew, everyone. Wendy Drew, who plays my best friend, Ellen Lowell, is a good friend of mine. We both find ourselves dressing more like teenagers than we did. In particular, I find myself going around the house without make-up, wearing shorts or jeans or slacks with shirts and sweaters, not fussing too much with my hair. Of course, some days when I'm out I get very grand, as Penny would like to do — and I put on a sheath dress and long, dangling earrings. I like red, wear it a lot. If not red, usually some shade of blue. I like to keep everything bright and cheerful, don't go much for dull colors." Keeping everything bright and cheerful and sunny is a job she likes, and works at. "Some people believe that the late teens or even twenty is too young for marriage, because those next five years are ones in which you may change a great deal. They are right in some ways — you do change. The wonderful part about my life is that Mike and I have changed, together. We have both grown and matured, together and not apart. "We are fortunate in being interested in the same things, in the same kind of work, in the same kind of life. We want to have a family some day. We love our home. We have television in our lives, through my work, and the theater, through Mike's. He hasn't given up acting entirely, or TV either, because he had a year with a small TV station and knows every facet of the business. I haven't given up theater, although I would always want to combine it with television now. "Being 17-year-old Penny Hughes is a wonderful experience for me. I love it. As Rosemary Prinz, however, I am glad I was lucky enough to meet Michael Thoma and marry him and already have five and M a half years as Mrs. Thoma. I hope Penny ■ wiU be as fortunate." (Continued from page 44) Most often you'll see her in sport clothes. No jewelry. No make-up, except for lipstick. And most often, she and husband Mort Lindsey are at home in Nutley, New Jersey, where they live in a 75-year-old house that Judy describes as "early cracker-box." They have a baby, Steven, bom last May, who has two front teeth; a daughter, Bonnie, who looks exactly like the story-book Alice in Wonderland; an aristocratic French poodle named Dennis, an alley cat named Geneva — and squirrels. "We both love animals," says '"vband Mort, "but Judy is truly soft-hearted. We had a horrible nest of squirrels. We still ^ have them. They get into the attic and cel" lar and they dirty up things. They even throw nuts at us when we dare to eat in our own back yard. So I wanted to get rid 76 A Song for Robert Q. of them. Judy said, 'No.' So we didn't. But the pay-oflE was when one got sick. Judy called in a vet." Mort Lindsey, recording artist and musical director, is a tall, good-looking man. He and Judy met when she was singing on the Fred Allen Show. They were both at rehearsal early. Judy recalls, "We met because of my bad memory. I saw Mort and thought he was one of the Skylarks, whom I should have known. When he sat down to say hello, I learned that I was wrong, but was attracted. He's my kind of man." And what kind of gal is Judy? She is shy. So shy that she says, "I love people but it's hard for me to go out alone. I've got to have Mort with me even when visiting friends. And, even so, before I go to a party I think, 'If they ask me to stand up and sins I'll fall through the floor.' " This comes from a gal who has sung with a big-name bands, in musical comedy and fl on top-rated TV and radio shows. This is one side of her. To old friends, to other members of the Robert Q. cast, she is j ] known to be unpretentious and real, de I lightful and vivacious. « Julann Wright, another member of Robert Q's show, explains, "You can sit down j and talk clothes and food with any woman, but you hold back a little. You keep up your reserve. With Judy it's different. You instinctively know that Judy wants whatever is best for you." Judy is wellequipped to be understanding. Although in her mid-twenties, she has already lived a couple of lives and exhausted a couple of careers. At 12, she was singing with bands throughout Virginia. At 14, she was featured singer with Les Brown's famed band.