Silver Screen (Nov 1939 - May 1940)

66 Silver Screen for February 1940 Betty Made It The Hard Way [Continued from page 64] on "Three Men On A Horse" in Boston. "I tried out for one part/' she says, "and got another. A better one, it was the feminine lead, the wife of the greeting-card Longfellow. Joyce Arling created the role in New York and when she left the company they shifted me into that spot." When "Three Men On A Horse" closed she fell into the part of the girl in '"Boy Meets Girl" for four weeks in New York and a whole season on the road. Then, in succession, she appeared in "Room Service," "Angel Island" and then "What a Life," opposite Ezra Stone, himself one of the theatre's up-and-coming. After six months with this she was cast as the ingenue in "The Primrose Path," an effort very slightly related to primroses. Paramount's director, Tom Reed, saw her ■'n it playing opposite Russell Hardie and signed her up quickly. {Richard Watts Jr., the acidulous critic, said she was humorous, engaging and even touching in this) . If you stop to consider that this girl is only twenty-one now and that she has forged up without benefit of agents (except for movies), you're apt to hear yourself doing a low whistle of astonishment. Miss Field, though, is not the pushing type. For more specific statistics, let it be known that she is the daughter of George and Katherine Kearney Field. She stands five feet five inches tall and weighs in at 110. She really does ride, and often. Her present apartment once belonged to an artist and he painted the bathroom full of nudes. She says she wants to wash the nudes too, everytime she bathes. At the interview she was wearing a brown tailored suit and brown hat. She wore little makeup and practically no jewelry — only a leather bracelet and leather cuff links in the cuffs of her waist or shirt, or whatever a shirt is called when it finds itself on a woman's back. Suddenly she remembered that two other interviewers had seen her in the brown ensemble and gosh, people would think that she didn't have another suit, a blue one, at home in the closet. Miss Field has a blue suit at home in the closet — advt. She loathes walking and the subway, but has a passion for sightseeing buses wherever she goes. She loves Helen Hayes and collects all the Hayesiana floating about. One cute bit concerns Monte Woolley, the star of "The Man Who Came To Dinner," currently on Broadway. Woolley was seated in the office of a throat specialist, exhibiting a sore throat. "Oooooh," bellowed Woolley in his upper register to show the doctor how he felt and at the same time occupy the center of the stage. "Wooooonh," he roared from his lower register, "you see. Doctor, I accompHsh nothing today." With that a door flew open and a mousey-cute creature popped her head in from the next office, saying pertly, "Mebbe not, but you've broken three windows in here!" Naturally it was Helen Hayes. At this writing Miss Field was in New York on a six month's leave from Hollywood and rehearsing with the ill-fated "Ring Two," a play concerning an old actress who moves to the country and has servant trouble. Backstage to visit her was Hollywood's Louise Campbell. They worked together in stock once, in Ivoryton, Connecticut. Some time before the Ivoryton business, Betty was learning more about stock and acting in upstate New York. Perhaps, the best part of the engagement was that they had time to study the different stars who appeared with the company. One afternoon, watching Miss June Walker work onstage, she became so absorbed in Miss W's performance that she unconsciously drew her knitting from her bag and started the sleeve of the sweater she was making — and she was sitting in the front row. "Young lady," Miss W. interrupted the play, "if you must knit, I insist that you do it in the privacy of your home!" Miss F. was mortified, to say the least ! It was this unashamed enthusiasm, plus her youth, that made them call her "The Kid." Then when she went to London she found that she was older than most of the young crowd in the theatre and so she lorded it over them and no one mentioned the odious nickname. Hollywood isn't quite sure whether to take it up or not. "Paramount is so big," she confessed, "that I felt lost for a long time. After all, I was used to the intimacy of the theatre, where a small group sits on the stage and works out problems. I think that maybe I liked the Hal Roach lot a little better because it's smaller." Vastness isn't the only surprise she encountered in Hollywood. For over a year and a quarter she had played the part of Barbara Pearson in "What A Life" without any noticeable complaint from anyone. Naturally she thought she knew Barbara pretty well, at times almost too well. So you could have knocked her down with a studio cobweb when the makeup man handed her a dental brace and said: "Hook it on, Honey." She thought he had mistaken her for someone else but one look at her script told her the awful truth — the beauteous Barbara of the stage was the homely Barbara of the screen! Shades of Adolph Zukor! "But," and she grinned, "everything worked out alright by the time they loaded the second reel into the camera. Off came the brace — I wore one once myself— and they waved the hair they had kept straight, and what a relief! "But I like the movies. I enjoyed making 'Seventeen' better than 'What A Life.' And while 'Seventeen' was officially a 'B' picture, I think Paramount did an 'A' job on it. Perhaps it's because everyone loves the story of Willie Baxter and Lola Pratt. I wish I could have seen Ruth Gordon do the original Lola, twenty years ago. . . ." At the age of one, Miss Field would most likely have registered her approval of the goings-on on the stage with violent chirpings. Now at twenty-and-one she herself was playing Lola in "Seventeen" but she was not the Lola Pratt Mr. Tarking Lovely Rita Johnson, whose latest is "Congo Maisie," starring Ann Sothern, believes in simple backyard sports. ton wrote about nor the one Miss Gordon portrayed. In this 1Q39 streamlined edition, automobiles, radios and false eyelashes on Miss Pratt figure into it. Genesis, the colored servant, is briefly in and out, and the bread-and-butter-and-applesauce of little sister Jane is seen but not referred to. Willie's "Ye gods and little fishes" has lost the "and little fishes." Willie's father's tails are too big for him he says but they fit the much smaller Jackie Cooper perfectly — but that's Hollywood for you. As Lola, Betty introduces something that Mr. Tarkington, for sure, has never even remotely heard of. It's a method of talk called, variously, "ski-talk" or "delayed-talk" and it goes like this: "Where'U it get you — in the end?" The dash indicates a pause and the voice goes up on what follows the dash. Some more of the same: "What are we having for dinnermother?" and "What's that in the road — ahead?" and "What should I do when my wife drinks — likker?" Colonel Stoopnagle is reputedly the originator of it. Floppit, the dog, is not Miss Field's own, really. Her mother has a kennel full of Irish water spaniels in Morristown and she shows them at all of the best shows, including Mrs. Hartley Dodge's annual dog show. No, if Betty had a dog it would be an Irish water spaniel. But Betty Field's success is her own, definitely, and it seems more than likely to be a growing and ever-growing thing. She will have three movies about and she will be back in Hollywood working on other productions. You could do worse than make book on Miss Field. . . .