Screenland (May-Oct 1940)

This group of screen celebrities flew from Hollywood to New York on the same plane. From left, Alexander Korda, Norma Shearer, a stewardess, Samuel Goldwyn, who's suing Director Korda for breach of contract, Mrs. Goldwyn, Merle Oberon (Mrs. Korda). Andy Hardy Meets Debutante Continued from poge 27 Polly's nose elevated itself a half inch closer to the ceiling. "Of all the ridiculous, little boy exhibitions !" she sniffed. "Collecting pictures of a perfectly awful girl he's never even seen." Andy's back was against the wall. "I have too seen her," he protested desperately. "I — I met her in Detroit, almost two years ago, and at first sight she liked me far more than she ought." Beezy's retort was only the one crushing word, "Applesauce." but Polly's, though not so terse, was the more devastating. "Why, Daphne Fowler goes around with grown men!" Her voice was withering. "She wouldn't look twice at a small town schoolboy !" "Yeah?" Andy's inventive mind was working with the speed of an Edison. "Well, she's so crazy about me she wants me to come and have the first dance with her when she makes her' debut," he lied desperately. "I — I been begging my father to let me go to New York but he says I got to keep on with school." "You could always run away from home," Polly said in a way that showed she hadn't believed a word he had said. "Sure, you could hop a freight!" Beezy sneered in a voice equally skeptical. Andy looked at them with quiet scorn. "Maybe you'd want to break your mother's heart that way, but I've been brought up better." With a quick gesture he gained possession of the book and held it firmly under his arm. "It'd sure be terrific if I could only get to New York! But I guess we all got our crosses to bear in this unhappy world." And with a martyred shrug he opened the door and left. But he couldn't dismiss fate as easily as he had Polly and Beezy. It struck at dinner that night swiftly and without warning. Judge Hardy was going to New York to fight the Trustees of the Carvel estate. And the whole Hardy family was going with him. Even Aldrich Brown, his sister Marian's beau, who had become a reporter on the Carvel paper, was going with them to report on the law suit, much to Marian's joy. Everybody was happy except Andy. Once New York would have meant a glorious adventure, but now it only meant the certainty that the lies he had told about knowing Daphne would be discovered. Andy's sins were catching up with him. Fate had put him on the spot. And once having put him there that same pitiless fate aided and abetted by his own father was moving him relentlessly toward New York. Andy tried every ruse he could think of but all of them failed. He rallied every symptom of practically every disease fatal to man and paraded all of them before the family. There he was on the very verge of death itself but it made no difference to the Judge's plans. The Hardys were going to New York and Andy was going with them. It didn't help to have the telephone ring the morning they were leaving and hear Polly's voice jubilantly telling him that she and Beezy had decided to print the story of his flaming romance with Daphne in the high school magazine. "You better make good with that debutante, 'cause you'll be the talk of the town when you get home," she giggled, and Andy felt practically at death's door. "We know you'll send back a photograph of darling Daphne and you to illustrate the story." Andy tried a last illness, heartfailure coupled with a complete nervous breakdown. But the Judge, more puzzled than ever at Andy's desperate efforts to stay at home, showed no signs of relenting. So there was the train streamlining its way to the metropolis and there was Andy riding to his doom. Then New York ! They crossed on the ferry from Jersey so they could see the city as the Judge had seen it first, from the water. Tall buildings, ocean liners riding at anchor at the docks, the thrilling taxi ride through the city to the apartment the Judge had wired his friends, the Booths, to get ready for them, and then after an elevator had swept them up to the dizzying heights of their new home, the complete anticlimax— little Betsy Booth. She was teetering on a step ladder in the tiny kitchenette when they came in, reaching for a coffee pot on the shelf above her. and when she saw Andy she almost fell over backwards in her excitement. Time had not helped her infatuation. She was as completely Andy's victim as she had been back in Carvel. "It is a cute apartment, isn't it, Mrs. Hardy?" she said breathlessly, her eyes focussed adoringly on Andy. "Mother and father were away when your telegram came so I found it myself. And you know, Andy, it's perfectly swell to see you and I brought my radio over for you." She stopped, appalled at this revelation of her adoration, and turned to Mrs. Hardy. "It's just common gratitude, Mrs. Hardy, because back in Carvel, Andy took me to my first grownup party." "Son, how do you do it?" Judge Hardy grinned as Betsy ducked back into the kitchenette. "Aw gee, Dad," Andy's face flamed. "She don't mean anything. It's only hero worship." "Well,'' the Judge leaned down and picked up one of their bags, his face averted so Andy couldn't see the smile he was unable to control, "come on, my hero. Let's get unpacked." New York might have been everything people said it was. Andy wouldn't know. His own problems weighed his spirits down so that the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty were as nothing but a blur of stone. Somehow, someway he would have to meet Daphne Fowler or suffer the taunts of Carvel High forever after. Finally one day in desperation he gave the adoring Betsy a hint of what he was going through. "You see, it's me against the City of New York," he explained enigmatically. "One of us is gonna be ruined in the struggle." "Would it help to use mother's car and chauffeur while the folks are away?" Betsy asked. Andy brightened. The car certainly did help even if Betsy went with the car and he had to drag her around with him. But she had promised not to ask questions. And she was trying desperately to keep that promise when Andy came back from his first attempt at meeting Daphne. He had gone down in ignoble defeat when he attempted to deliver the letter hehad written to her. When he got back to Betsy sitting in the car parked around the corner from Daphne's house, he could still feel the clutch of the hands of the glamor girl's bodyguard on his shoulders when he had thrown him out of the house after that one fleeting glimpse of his beloved. Even the thought that they had taken him for a kidnapper or something equally desperate didn't help much. "Andy, what's the matter?" Betsy cried as he sank into the seat beside her. And then contritely, "Oh, I promised not to ask questions !" "I have just aged fifty years," Andy said 82