Screenland (Nov 1949-Oct 1950)

FRECKLES These are all achievements that Mercedes was unknowingly headed for ever since she came to life on St. Patrick's Day, 1918, in Johet, Illinois, the daughter of Marie and John Patrick McCambridge. Her first taste of the drama came when she played Petruchio in a Mundeleiu College production of "The Taming Of The Shrew." This and subsequent performances won her a radio contract with NBC to do ten broadcasts a week for five years — practically unheard of at that time. She got her Bachelor's Degree at Mundelein, and 14 credits toward a master's degree. "I figure that's about as close as I'll ever come to it," she adds. At Mundelein, Mercedes met the woman who has had more influence on her life probably than any other single person. It was Sister Leola, the head of the school's dramatic department. "Sister Leola was always my inspiration," Mercy explains, her eyes filling up as she thinks of the nun who's been dangerously ill in a Midwest sanitarium. Sister Leola continuously prodded the fiery young girl — "and hammered more dramatic knowledge into my hard head than anybody believed possible." The nun was also a never-ending source of spiritual guidance, which Mercedes still clings to today. When she was presented with the Look Award early this year, the actress immediately had an appropriate inscription engraved on it to Sister Leola and forwarded it to the ill woman. After her first Hollywood film, she fled back to New York and her apartment near Central Park, which was always filled with John Lawrence's toys, books, and a voodoo drum. "I thought I'd had it," she says, meaning Hollywood. When Warners offered her the role in "Lightning Strikes Twice," in which she plays a "nice" menace with Richard Todd and Ruth Roman, she figured she might as well give Hollywood another whirl. About the same time, Fletcher Markle, an attractive and successful young radio producer, who had been haunting the McCambridge doorstep off and on for several years, came to Holly wood, too. This time she said yes, and after going through the Saturday-Sunday-Monday routine, Mercedes McCambridge became Mrs. Fletcher Markle on February 20th. Right then the settling influence began to take effect, and the first thing the Markles did was rent a nice big house in West Los Angeles, and send for John Lawrence who was living with his' grandparents. "It's beginning to look as though my browsing around days are over," she said. "A wife's got to stay with her husband, hasn't she?" The brilliant Markle will undoubtedly be around Hollywood for some time to come because he was given an associate producer's berth with MGM the day before they eloped. Mercedes McCambridge is uninhibited and has liberal ideas and talks fast and breathlessly and looks you straight in the eye with her own clear blue, piercing eyes. She has definite ideas about most everything except herself. "One thing I have decided about me," she says, "is that if I've any neuroses, I might as well learn to live with them — and forget them." She has a great and lively sense of humor, an almost uncontrollable enthusiasm for life and things in general, and she wins friends quickly. She is unpretentious and honest to the point of exasperation. She doesn't hke to dress up and she never shops for clothes. She says, "Clothes just happen to be there when I'm passing by." She asks for a size 10 and takes it home without trying it on. She hates incompetence and respects talent above everything — "with the possible exception of kindness, the kind of kindness my son has." Mercedes' periodic flights to Europe and faraway places are not so impulsive as they may seem. 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