Silver Screen (May-Oct 1939)

62 Silver Screen for September 1939 She'll Take Deanna's Place [Continued from page 27] keep their own shoes clean. Anything they can do, they must do. For Gloria Jean is the second daughter in a family of Four Daughters. And all four daughters know discipline as well as love. There is Sally Kay, who will soon be fifteen; then Gloria Jean, eleven; Lois, ten, and Bonnie, the baby, four. Bonnie will appear in Gloria Jean's next — and second picture. Bonnie, too, has a Voice. Gloria Jean was born in Buffalo, N. Y., but when she was six weeks old the family moved to Scranton, Pa., where they made their home with Mrs. Schoonover's Aunt Cora and Uncle Jack Davies. Gloria Jean's Daddy, a welding instructor in Buffalo, became a piano salesman in Scranton. When Gloria Jean was fifteen months old she started to sing (Deanna, you remember, started to sing when she started to talk, too!) The first song the baby sang right through, air and words, was "Little Annie Rooney." And it was her Uncle Jack, a Welshman, himself a famous singer in his country and his time, who first realized that there was something in that infant throat . . . something more than a larynx and a pair of tonsils. It was Uncle Jack who took her in hand, Uncle Jack who put her before the public at the age of five, singing the beautiful old Welsh songs (in the difficult, old Welsh tongue) at local Welsh festivals. When she was five, too, her mother told me, she became interested in opera, forsaking dolls and Cops 'n' Robbers to spend whole afternoons, from two to five, listening to the Lucky Strike operatic programs on the air. She liked to read books about Jenny Lind, and books about the lives of musical composers. "I don't know where she got it from," her mother says, "I say it is a gift from God, that it just was to be." In all other respects the little girl was just a little girl who went to school when she was six. She hated arithmetic, loved history and geography. She loved to play with dolls (and still does) especially her Princess Elizabeth and Deanna Durbin dolls. She would put on whole operas, singing for the dolls herself. When she was ten she was taken to New York to study voice under Mme. Leah Russell. She filled one "professional" engagement, with a small opera company in New York. And then, one night, a stranger appeared at the door of the small apartment name-plated Schoonover. The stranger gave his name as"" Mr. Nooglebauer. He lived in an adjoining apartment, he said. . He had heard a "young woman" singing. He wanted to know who she was. Told that the "young woman" was a child of ten the stranger all but carried her picka-back down to the office of his friend, Larry Waterman. Now, thus do the Fates embroider the design ... for Larry Waterman is Joe Pasternak's secretary in the East. And almost as immediately, and quite as salubriously, did Larry Waterman carry the small Gloria into the sanctum of Mr. Pasternak. And right away, Mr. Pasternak "fell for her," as we say in deah old Hollywood, suhs. He fell for her even before he heard her sing. For here, after the 500 odd other children he had heard "do their stuff" was a natural little girl with, obviously, no "acting instructions." And here, astoundingly, was a little girl who didn't want to sing for him. For when the accompanist began, the child asked to be excused from singing. Asked the why of this incredulous reluctance she said, embarrassed but firm, "The piano is so badly out of tune, sir, that you wouldn't get the benefit of my voice!" I think it was then that Mr. Pasternak must have realized that out of the mouth of the babe the genuine Artist was speaking. And so he listened to records the child had made for her teacher, records of Annie Laurie, the Bell Song from Lakme and others. And one month from that day small Gloria Jean and her mother arrived in Hollywood, the child was signed to a long-term contract and went to work in her first picture, The Under pup. So this, then, is Gloria's "background." And now, here comes Gloria Jean herself. When I stepped onto the set of The Under pup, at once the child came to greet me. Quite a little girl, slenderly fashioned, with smoky blue, wide-set eyes under a serene brow, golden brown hair, neither "touched up" nor permanently waved, the indeterminate nose of childhood, a noticeably sensitive mouth. I was impressed, right off, with her calmness, her poise, her manners which are not the manners, I am happy to tell you, of your "professional" child, but such manners as any nicely brought up little girl in any nice American home would have. Almost at once, Gloria Jean was at pains to explain to me that the stains on the bosom of her blue and white checked gingham dress were not "just dirt." She said: "They're really chocolate stains, you know, but they're supposed to be blood on account of how Pip-Emma, that's my name in the picture, gets into a fight. . . . I don't want you to think I just spilled something!" Reassured that I understood the exigencies of one's Art, Gloria Jean answered my stock leading question "How do you like making movies?" by saying, with an eleven-year-oldish hop, skip and jump, "I love it! It's lots more fun than playing games at home. I don't know why it is, but it is!" Heavens, History, how you do repeat yourself, methought, for I went back with a three-year-bang to the young Deanna on the set of her first picture, telling me, "It's swell, playing in pictures! I'll bet I'm having more fun than any girl in the world!" Here were similarities just falling into my lap with soft, small plops . . . they both love what they are doing, neither of them ever speaks of their work as "work" but always as "playing"; there is in both of them that rich, warm glow of contentment which suffuses anyone, child or adult, who is doing what they were born to do. But there are, I soon discovered, some dissimilarities, too. As Mr. Pasternak was to point out to me, their voices arei entirely different, Deanna being a lyrio soprano, on the "heavy" side rather than the light, Gloria Jean a coloratura. And,! Mr. Pasternak told me Gloria Jean's career will never "follow" Deanna's in the sense of playing the game of Follow The Leader. Every individual is different,! he said, which makes it foolish to say that Gloria Jean is Deanna's successor. Gloria Jean differs from Deanna in that she is more a little Girl of the People than Deanna was. She is nearer to Mr. and Mrs. Average Folks There is a touch of "Skippy" in her. "I love children," Mr. Pasternak told me, "and I was losing Deanna, a little. It is, with me, much as with parents who bring one daughter to marriagable age,' and realize that the day will come when they must lose her, and are grateful that' the next child is "coming along" so that the house will not be empty of childhood . . . and if the older child has turned out well the parents will try, naturally, to follow the same pattern with the younger one. Deanna," smiled Deanna's producer, "has turned out 'well'! And so we will try to follow, with Gloria Jean, the same general pattern we used for her. We will try to bring Gloria up in the same 'proper' way. "As with Deanna, we will not try to make Gloria Jean other than what she is, a natural, unspoiled little girl; we will try, instead, to keep her just as she is. I predict for her a very brilliant future. In her next picture we may put her on the Lower East Side of New York; in the picture after that, on a farm. We will try for a laugh and a tear as we go along, all the way through ... a dream of childhood . . . there is no lovelier dream. And so," continued Mr. Pasternak, "Gloria Jean steps into her first picture as Deanna steps into her first screen love . . . and so it goes ... the pattern will be much the same . . . the threads the girls weave into the pattern will be the threads of their own personalities . . . their own differences . . ." One such "difference" I soon discovered. It is that Gloria Jean shows a more effervescent enthusiasm about things and people than the more contained Deanna ever did. Perhaps this is because Deanna was an "older woman" when she began, being thirteen to Gloria's eleven. At any rate, whereas Deanna could never be inveigled into spoken enthusiasms about other stars, would never commit herself jj always saying "I like them all" and em-] ploying the same politic method with all other pertinent or impertinent questions, Gloria Jean has no such reticences. On the way to her portable dressingroom, the child confided in me. "When I stepped off the train and knew I was in Hollywood, I couldn't believe it was me! I said to my mother: "Just imagine, I'm right here, where Deanna Durbin and Shirley Temple are! And Charles Boyer, too, I said, because he is my very favorite grown-up actor! "You see, my hobby back home was going to movies. And I was just crazy about Deanna. I did dream, back home, that I might meet her some day, just to say 'howdeedo,' you know, but I never, never thought I'd ever really know her. I never, never thought I'd be in the same studio [Continued on page 79]