Silver Screen (Feb-Oct 1935)

62 Silver Screen for March 1935 Why Stars Click! [Continued from page 25] KC30L MILDLY MENTHOLATED CIGARETTES CORK-TIPPED SMOOTH SLEDDEN' If you've never tried a KGDL, try one when your throat feels all smoked out. Ready? Light up! Didn't know any smoke could be so refreshing and so good — did you? The mild menthol cools the smoke, soothes your throat, and brings out the choice tobacco flavor. Free coupon with each pack is good for handsome merchandise. (Offer good in U. S. A. only.) Send for FREE illustrated premium booklet . . . and switch to the cigarette that keeps your throat KGDL SAVE COUPONS for HANDSOME MERCHANDISE Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Louisville, Ky. given on the screen. Gable's popularity shot up like a skyrocket. According to a recent contest in Silver Screen he is today the most popular of the male stars. Clark Gable found his mood in a hitch-hiking scene. And Gable, in real life, is very much like the casual, likeable newspaper reporter in the picture. Money and fuss and fine feathers mean nothing to him. He doesn't think he's a particularly hot actor, he thinks he just got a break, and he's darned glad to get it. He hates to dress up and go to parties. He'd rather have fun with the boys. Every chance he gets he grabs his guns and makes a dash for his cabin in the High Sierras where he hunts and fishes and tramps in the snow and cooks messes over a camp fire. He's no sissy. He's a regular guy, and not just a leading man lor glamorous ladies. George Raft is another guy who flopped around Hollywood for a long time before he got his break. Raft was discovered in "Scarface." The scene in the picture that put him over was the long "dolly" shot of him as he walked away from the gangster he murdered. George once told me of the day the director took that scene. "Gee, I can't do it," he told the director, "You're not taking the picture in sequence. I haven't murdered the guy. There isn't any body. So how can I act the part?" "If you had just murdered a man, how would you walk away from the scene of the crime?" the director asked. "I'd deadpan," said Raft. And that's how he played the scene that catapulted him to fame over night. This "deadpan" I suppose is Raft's mood. He can do it better than any actor in Hollywood. Completely opposite from George's deadpan is the personality grin of Dick Powell. Powell, a popular young master of ceremonies from Pittsburgh, was brought to Hollywood and tested for all sorts of parts. "What to do with him, what to do with him," groaned the supervisors, and then as sort of an afterthought they stuck him in "The Blessed Event," to play the smart alecky orchestra leader, which part smacked slightly of Rudy Vallee. Dick Powell, grinning, bubbling over with healthy fun, and lilting up and down as he put over a song, became an instantaneous hit. Dick Powell was merely playing Dick Powell— and he was exactly what the doctor ordered. Dick Powell is the Rudy Vallee of the screen and, just as there has never been anyone to take Rudy's place on the air, just so Dick Powell is completely typed on the screen, and no one can do a Dick Powell role but Dick himself. About seven years ago J. P. MacEvoy, the well-known writer, wrote the sketches for the first "Americana" in New York, and was aiding in the production of it. Mr. MacEvoy had a very nice, conscientious, but apparently dull and colorless secretary who seemed to have no talent despite the fact that he had graduated from Notre Dame. "I want to act in your revue," the secretary, none other than our own Charlie Butterworth, told Mr. MacEvoy, and that genial gentleman, because he, too, was an alumnus of Notre Dame, said, "Okay, but I'll keep your secretarial job open for you." Charlie was stuck in a sketch at the last minute and went over big on the opening night. New York had never seen such a peculiar brand of comedy before, and they were crazy about it. "Hell," said Mr. MacEvoy to Mr. Butterworth, "you were either scared to death, or you're an actor. Can you do it the same way again?" Charlie has' been doing it the same way ever since. Somehow or other he didn't click in pictures when he first came to Hollywood, so back he went to New York to score again in "Flying Colors," and then back to Hollywood, and this time success. In fact, so swell was he in "Forsaking All Others" that Metro has announced that he will be made a star. Strange to say, in the same show in which Mr. Butterworth made his debut was a rather pretty girl, named Helen Morgan, who had a sobby sort of voice. Helen was given a song to put over on a large stage with a dance ensemble, and the act was a big flop. "She can't sing worth a dime," the stage manager told Mr. MacEvoy. "You better can her." But Helen didn't want to be canned, and made the suggestion that she sing out in front of the curtain while they were changing the scene, and "I think I'll sit down," said Helen, "I'll sit down in the footlights and make it sort of intimate." Well, the footlights weren't very comfortable, and they had a habit of getting Helen quite toasted before the song was over, so the stage manager, who had become reconciled to Helen, suggested she sit on the piano. So Helen sat on the piano, twisted her handkerchief, and sang a low crooning blues song, and the audience went wild. Miss Morgan has not been able to get down off the piano since. Bing Crosby used to sing at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. He had an agent, oh dozens of agents, who tried to get him in pictures, but he was chubby and not particularly handsome, so the producers simply said "No sex appeal" and let it go at that. Today, mind you, Bing Crosby has the second biggest fan following of any male star. No sex appeal? Why, practically two-thirds of the female population of America, especially the young school girls, are just "mad" for Crosby.. When his pictures are previewed at Westwood Village, a college town, the poor theatre is practically torn from its foundations by the ecstatic young co-eds who'd rather flunk in chemistry than miss a Crosby preview. And I'll never forget the little girl from Tennessee I was showing the Paramount studio to. "There's Dietrich over there at the table in the corner," I said proudly, "and there's Carole Lombard and Jack Oakie and Gary Cooper." But not one glance would the child give them. She had found Bing Crosby, in an old slouchy yellow sweater, and she was in heaven. After all the studios went thumbs down on him Crosby went to New York and there became a mild sensation on the air. But. even then, the major studios wouldn't give him a tumble. He made slap-stick comedies for Mack Sennett. And then Paramount finally got wise to things and signed him. Well, just try and get him away from them now. It was the gentle poise and quiet beauty of Norma Shearer that changed her from a star into a genius. As far as beauty is concerned there has never been anything on the screen to equal her performances in "Smilin' Through" and "The Barretts." Wally Beery 's uncouth humor and beefy heartiness raised him from the ranks of "just an actor" and made him a genius. Joan Crawford gave up being a hey-hey girl, in which parts she was only mediocre, and with "Possessed" became a dramatic actress, serious, tragic and exotic. She gave up romping around and ringing doorbells and took to seclusion, gardenias and Franchot Tone. Bette Davis was just another blonde ingenue on the Warner lot, and not a par