We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
By Virginia Sullivan Tomlinson
i
/ne/'e /s Lai/^nte/'
IT IS his voice you are conscious of at first. He comes into a room and you look up, and say to yourself, "There's a nice boy!" His smile is never the bland, sweetly-conscious smile of the professional actor. There is a dreamy gaiety to it; there is laughter in the crinkling brown eyes, a look of fluid strength about his six feet of blond masculinity. There is even a little-boy-lost quality in the way he greets you.
And then he speaks. In that curiously resonant voice that has such surprising overtones; that voice of moonlight and honey — huskily vibrant, with a quality of magnetism that throbs like a living flame. And you know the answer to his sudden success.
His name is Tom Drake. At least, that's what the Hollywood studios have named him. It is really Alfred Alderdyce; and, back in New Rochelle where he grew up and went to school, the persuasive magic of that voice began at a very early age to upset a great many things. In particular, it upset the very conservative, orderly plans his father had for the future of his only son.
"Dad wanted me to be an architect," Tom tells you. "We lived in a big old house in New Rochelle; Dad was a linen merchant — all his friends and my mother's friends were conventional, solid citizens; the sort who automatically place acting in the same category as tattooing. It just isn't done1"
When he was twelve he'd made up his mind that he wanted to be a doctor.
"That was after I'd gotten over an ambition to be a motorcycle cop," he says. "The arguments we had over that idea resulted in an emotional problem. I never argued; but I was going to be a doctor. You know what Mencken says: 'When the other fellow is set in his way, he's obstinate; when you are, it's just nrmness.
That question settled itself, however — in the first tragedy of his young life. His father died when he was barely thirteen. He attended public school in New Rochelle, then went to Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania — a prep school for Princeton. And he was still determined to be a doctor. "But the trouble was," he says ruefully, "I never studied. I've got a photographic mind — you know, an ability to read a page and sort of know it. So I got high marks. I never opened a book until just before the exams; then Mother would get me a tutor, and I'd pass. It was in my third year at Mercersburg, however, that this happy habit caught up with me. I couldn't bluff any more. And since I didn't have the habit of study, I was lost! And I sure was scared. To make studying attractive to myself, I remember I'd go out into the dinette, armed with five or six brand new pencils, an eraser, also new, and a new pad of notebooks. I'd write my name carefully in all the note-books — all the props! I'd say to {Please turn to page 87)
Top, Tom and Donna Reed, his co-star in new MGM film, "Faithful in My Fashion," clown on the set with famed character comedian Edward Everett Horton. Above, rehearsing with director.
Young man going places fast: Tom Drake, after his hit in "The Green Years," studies script for next picture, "Faithful in My Fashion," left; tunes in on a recently enacted scene, above.