Screenland Plus TV-Land (Jul 1959 - May 1960)

Why Diane Varsi Quit Hollywood continued from page 17 like the way he writes," Diane told me later. "I think I would enjoy meeting him some time." This was a bond between us, and I promised her that the next time John came home from college, I would invite her over for an evening at our house. When she talked of her favorite writers — Rilke, Herman Hesse, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings — I understood, because my son was devoted to them, too. She and John were both painfully young; they were, like so many youngsters in ferment, rebellious, searching for some truth, often puzzled and dismayed by the pains and torments of growing up. But Diane was not — or so I was sure — a "beatnik" or even a member of the so-called beat generation. Her values were different; her aims were more lofty. She was uncertain but not afraid; often depressed but not despondent; and she was aware, as she once said, "that everybody has kind of a rough time growing up." "There's so much to life, even the negative side," she went on, with her sweet smile. "Some people see only the ugly things. Even they have much to live for. Just living. I don't know where I'm going, I'm just going. I never knew where I was going, even when I was 15, I didn't know. But it's good to live." Of course, it was no secret to those close to Diane that she was still visiting an analyst, spending huge chunks of her not-too-big salary every week. I knew, too, that she was under regular treatment by a skin specialist, who was helping her clear up the acne she had suffered from her early teens because of her problems, her irregular hours, the lack of proper food and sleep. It was known, also, that though she had finally divorced her second husband, James Dickson ("He criticized me until I had a nervous breakdown"), she was still seeing him now and then. This was part of Diane, the girl who followed no pattern. IF SHE was off-beat and a rebel, she was a wonderfully likable one. One day I met her carrying a toy music box under her arm and playing with a bright red yo-yo. A friendly photographer had given them to her as presents, saying "I wish these were diamonds." Another time, not long afterwards, I encountered her outside the 20th Administration Building, when she was climbing into the light blue Ford pickup she was driving then. It was a loan from Tab Hunter, whom she didn't even know. The battered pickup had been turned over to her by Dick Clayton, who was her agent as well as Tab's. I asked her what had happened to her little Volkswagen. "I let somebody borrow it," said Diane, wryly, "and it got wrecked. So I'm getting along with this, until my car is repaired." 56 But most of all, when I heard about her sudden break with Hollywood, I remembered some significant things she had said, and a little two-line "poem" she wrote which summed up, in a phrase, all that was troubling her. A week or so after she returned from the verdant, small-town Maine location where she had worked in "Peyton Place," Diane said, "I really fell in love with those people. They were so real." She has never forgotten that town: the village square, the 150-year-old church with its white pointed steeple, the quietness at night and the wind that murmured through the leafy oaks and maples, the emerald lawns, the picket fences, the lonely, haunting wail of a train hurrying through the dusk. Somehow, to Diane, this meant peace — a peace that she could never seem to find in Hollywood (or, before that, in San Francisco). It was a peace that she believed would finally be hers in the lovely, green-hilled college town of Bennington, a little place of some 12,000 people, near the Massachusetts-New York State line. THIS was all part of that "simplicity" she was seeking — a simplicity that even she could not define. She could only say, "I must find it, before I can ever truly learn to accept the responsibility of my own humanity." And then there was the third thing — the little poem that many laughed at and few understood. It was less a poem than a cry from the heart, and there were only two lines, like this: Go away and don't bother me, Cant you see I'm lonesome? She had, it seems, always been lonesome, ever since she could remember. Diane Varsi is not the first brilliant, promising actress to forsake Hollywood in mid-career, but she is probably the only one who quit deliberately at 21. The great Garbo was well along in years when she sighed, "I think I go home." Mysterious Jean Arthur was reputedly nearing 40. Gene Tierney, hopelessly in love with playboy Aly Khan and nearing an emotional breakdown, was 34 or 35. June Haver went into a convent in her late 20's. (She came back within six months, later to marry Fred MacMurray.) There were others too who had fine talent and were doing well careerwise when they suddenly, and apparently, for no reason, quit Hollywood. All these unhappy stars had, seemingly, grave problems. But Diane Varsi's infancy and childhood were more bitter than aloes — so cruel, so tortured that one wonders how she escaped insanity. Her parents were both ill, emotionally disturbed, unable to cope with the world or even their children. (Diane has a sister, Gail, two years younger than herself.) At three. Diane was running down the streets of San Mateo to her grandmother's, begging to be taken care of. At four, she was placed in a Salt Lake City convent, the youngest, smallest child there, where she had to live alone. When she was seven, she fought with her mother over some new shoes she thought Mrs. Varsi had hidden. Her mother slashed back at her, "Diane, if you keep on like this, you will have a face that is forever ugly." "I could never cry, even as a kid," Diane once said. "People ask me, 'How can you seem so calm?' All the time I'm screaming inside. I'm unable to show emotion. I can't release it. It just stays within me until it finally explodes. "I think this all goes back to the day when I saw my father and mother cracking up. I looked at them and I was aware of what was happening. After that, whenever my father yelled at me, I knew he was frightened. And I refused to cry or yell back. I'd go back to my room and play the radio real loud, or I'd 'run away' up a tree." School was another horror. She had virtually no companions. Schoolmates called her "a tramp" and avoided her. Once she ran away to Canada and got a job as a waitress. The police hauled her back. She ran away again, only to have the police after her once more. She was afraid to love anything or anybody. Her grandfather, on whom she relied, petulantly ordered Diane and her mother out of his house. Her parents got a divorce. She ditched school at least two months every year, often turned in blank examination papers, failed in all her studies. She finally quit high school when she was a junior. SHE wanted to simplify her life — or so she thought — but what she did, subconsciously, was to de-humanize herself. Said Diane, "I took a big pair of shears and I cut my hair to about an inch long all over my head. I never wore make-up. I was studying yoga and I meditated a lot. I was so quiet, I was spooky." She picked apples, worked as a waitress, packed candles in a San Mateo candle factory. Then one morning when she was about 16, she told her mother, "I'm going out for a walk. I'm going to walk and walk and walk. And I may not come back. I'm going on a kind of religious pilgrimage."' What she did, of course, was to hitchhike to Hollywood with another girl — a girl she barely knew. She had less than $50. She thought she could become a folk singer, singing her own songs. She danced for a week with Perez Prado's Cuban band, then was back to starving again. Her clothes were one pair of blue jeans and one sweatshirt. She shared a room with a stranger in a cheap Hollywood rooming house. There were times when she would have gone hungry except for an infrequent hamburger or cup of coffee that she got, quite literally, from "pickups" — sympathetic students she encountered on Hollywood Boulevard. Her