Screenland (May-Oct 1942)

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I After dinner, while he was cleaning up line dishes, I was snooping through the i est of the house as girls will when they i et into a bachelor's place. I came to the loset in the bedroom and there was a liundry bag big enough to hold a day's /ash from the Ambassador Hotel. It was Irammed full. I said, "Andy! What's this?" ' Oh, that," he answered carelessly. "It's jaundry." ! "Why don't you send it out:" I persisted. ! "Too much trouble," he explained briefly. [When I need something clean. I just buy : new one and stuff the old in there. It's iimpler." His parents were both dead and his rother was back east. I knew then he e^ded someone to look after him. When ou begin to feel that way about a man |ou're sunk. I was eighteen at the time but today, after ;ine years of married life (even though he aised me during the first few years of our carriage) I still have the feeling I have to ne ther him as well as our two sons. He is the most unselfconscious man I ve ever met. If he wants a pair of socks reaches blindly into a drawer for them. he wants a shirt he'll reach for it while ie's talking to me. He doesn't care what olor or kind they are as long as they're :ocks or shirts. It's kind of nice in one way but, in an■ther. it becomes a little exasperating at imes. Often I've had to say to him, in xactly the same tone I use to Tad (our even year old), "Go back and comb your ;air again. And this time look in the glass ■ ile you're doing it." Fortunately we both like exactly the same hings. In the fall we go hunting, in the pring and summer we go fishing. We both ike horses and we both detest night clubs. Occasionally, when Tommy Dorsey or some »and like that is in town we'll go wherever they're playing to listen to them. But w-e ;c to hear the music and not to visit a light spot. We're both wild about music— verything from Kostelanetz to boogievoogie — as long as it's well played. The light of Andy's life is his pidgeons. Se has a flock of racing pidgeons that he rains and breeds himself. On Saturdays, Juring the racing season, he'll ship a crate o wherever the race is to start. Each bird >as a little tag around its leg. held there •y a rubber band, with its registered num■>er on it. Just before they are released the ■ecretary of the club stamps the time on the and when they reach home the owner buts the tag in a time clock that stamps he time of arrival and automatically seals fie tag in a capsule. After that it's delivered o the local office of the Association. If the ;eal is broken it's thrown out. So there's 10 chance for cheating. He knows approximately how long it will ake the birds to get back and on Sunday ifternoon we go out to the patio, way in the sack of the farm (that he calls his Shangri-La) and wait. You've no idea how excit ng it gets as the time approaches for them : :o be winging in. It's like a long drawn> out horse-race. I His buddies all over the valley, who beI ong to the club, will start phoning in. "Any I your birds home yet?" "Naw," Andy'll drawl. "I haven't even seen a feather. Yours home?" Probably all of them will have one or two birds home by that time but none of them will admit it. They're like a bunch of kids, each trying to slip something over on the others. Half the time, despite all the daborate training plans and secret feeding tormulas they've worked out, some twelve year old will turn up with the winner ! That homespun quality of Andy's you see on the screen is no put-on performance. That's the real Andy. He loves people. His father ran the Beall Hotel in Kingman, Arizona. If you've ever had any truck with the proprietor of a small town hotel you know how they love to chin with the guests. Andy lias inherited that and there is nothing he gets as much kick out of as chewing the fat with people. One of the things I love most about Andy is that he enjoys talking to the gardener just as much as the head of a studio or the biggest star in the business. People who know Andy well and know how happy-go-lucky he is, get a bang out of seeing him in the role of the stern father. He is as close to both boys as Saturday is to Sunday but when he tells them to do something he isn't fooling — and they know it. We both detest spoiled children so years ago, before Tad was born, we made an agreement that when one of us was correcting or disciplining the children, regardless of how the other of us felt, we wouldn't interfere but would settle the problem later between ourselves. I mean, as far as the children are concerned, we always back each other up. It's worked out fine and, in contrast to many kids, ours are only halfspoiled. Almost invariably on Sunday afternoon Andy takes the boys to a theater that show's only Westerns. Of course, when the circus is in town he's a pushover for that. And, before they closed it, it was a question on Sunday mornings which could gulp his breakfast down first, Tad or Andy, so they could get to the monkey farm. It is a sort of ritual in our house that whenever anyone has a birthday the honoree gets to order the dinner — everything he likes. It's a panic on one of the kids' birthdays to listen to Andy trying to sell him a bill of goods and persuade him to order what he likes, rather than the boy's favorite dishes. The first picture Tad ever saw was "Stagecoach." He was about 2>Vi or 4. As he glimpsed Andy on the screen he let out a whoop that put to shame the Indians in the film and yelled excitedly, "That's my daddy !" When Andy came home that night he was, naturally, anxious to hear about it. There was no word of commendation from Tad about Andy's acting but he was thrilled to the marrow over Andy's ability as a stagecoach driver. The Judge and Andy Hardy, with their man-to-man talks, have nothing on Andy and Tad. Of course, Denny is only Z1/* but he and Andy are also beginning to have fireside chats and Andy usually sits with him while he's having his supper. Despite the close bond that exists between Andy and the boys, he refuses to worry about them and is constantly after me to leave them to their own devices. I remember once when Tad was only six he'd gone horseback riding with some older boys. When it grew dark and he hadn't returned. I began to grow uneasy. By 7 :00 o'clock I was frantic and by 7 :30 I was a raving maniac but all the sympathy I got from Andy was "He's O.K." When the young man finally strolled in at 8:00 I was ready for bed and a nurse but Andy just grinned and sat down to listen to a" detailed account of the afternoon's adventures. There aren't many men who enjoy having company in their homes as much as Andy does. "He's never so happy as when he knows someone is coming for dinner or to spend the evening. Possibly it sounds dull but we don't play games. We just talk. I think it's a proven fact that men are just as big gossips as women but most of them try to act so superior about it and pretend they aren't gossipping. Well. Andy loves to "dish" as he calls it. and makes no bones about it. Many's the time I've been talking to someone who was just about to serve "up a choice tidbit when Andy would be called to the phone and yell, as he left the room, "Hold everything 'til I get back ! I don't want to miss this." He is on a rigid diet now. When therewas first talk of a draft Andy used to kid and say, "I guess I'll stay fat and flatfooted." But since Pearl Harbor it's killing him that he isn't 21 and slender, so he's working like heck to get his weight down. Meantime, he does whatever he can in the way of war work — drives, benefits, etc. Whenever he has a day off from the studio he and Norris Goff ( Aimer of Lum & Abner) go out to March Field and teach the men and officers skeet-shooting. It isn't that he eats so much. Actually he doesn't eat as much as many men I know. It's only that he hasn't a nerve in his body and, where most actors lose weight on a picture from nerves and worry, Andy has a swell time. The trouble is, between shots he sits around gabbing with everybody. The result is, he gets no exercise and everything he eats turns to fat. He is the most considerate and generous person on earth. Last fall I was out one day and saw a man in a 1912 Ford. "Want to sell your car?" I asked. "Sure," he said. "Thousand bucks." "You Wouldn't want to cut me off at the ankles, would you?" I snapped. "Well, you see," he grinned, "I rent this car to the studios and make about $500 a year out of it. I've refused to swap for a better station wagon than you're driving." I told Andy about it that night and ended with, "I've never wanted anything in my life as much as that old Ford." A couple of weeks later I'd forgotten about it. He was asking what I wanted for Christmas and I said, "Nothing. We'd better be saving our money." "How about a new car?" he insisted. "No," I replied, "and I want you to promise me you won't buy one. We don't need a new car." Christmas morning he took me out to the garage and there was my Ford — a 1913 model — that he had dug up, had overhauled and equipped with new tires. "I onlj promised I wouldn't get you a new car," he laughed, then sobered up and added seriously, "we can always use it as an evacution car if it becomes necessary. The tires are so small that even if the government commandeered every tire in the country these wouldn't be any use to them." So, except when I use it to go marketing in, it's carefully tucked away in the garage against an emergency!^. Perhaps Andy isn't the sort of chap who makes a girl sigh for a canoe on a summer night (for obvious reasons) but we can still get a bang out of looking at the moon together and today, after nine years of him. if anyone asked how I feel about Andy, I could only answer, "My one regret is that I didn't meet him nine years sooner !" Answer to Last Month's Puzzle