Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

THE CREAM OF CROSBY 339 ir'i I any better than the next man. One oi nt these bathing suits, according to the It; fashion announcer, was — it says here — "a ry lastex impossible girdled by a very fine nl shade of turquoise which (it says here) li is a leprous shade of yellow." It was also ^3 shirred, scalloped, appliqued and was fee j covered with what I gathered was unf ' picked fruit in unabashed sharkskin. So I j much for fashion. ! Consistent Lady ONE OF the grimmer aspects of fame is the newspaper interview which, through unfortunate technological advances, 4 is preserved forever in the files. This is nice for the interviewer but rather hard on . the interviewee who is frequently transj fixed by a statement he made in 1902 and is stuck with forever after. Most interviewers are far better informed on a celebrity's state of mind and opinion ten years ago than the celebrity himself and can confound, contradict and in general louse him up with his own prior declara• tions. Well, I was browsing through the files of Miss Dorothy Gish, the first woman I ever loved — I must have been about eight years old — and discovered that for about a decade she had been saying that the making of movies isn't any fun any more, that the pioneer excitement had long since been abandoned for spit and polish. This seemed like a long time for a lady not to have changed her mind on a subject so I conducted an investigation to see if she still felt the same way. She docs. Miss Gish — it seems hardly possible — is now fifty-three years old, looks a little like something out of Louisa May Alcott, is sprightly as ever, and is pioneering again in the new medium television, her fourth (stage, films, radio, TV.) "Television is exciting and it's great fun to do. It's very much like the pioneering we did in the early days of the movies. I'd much rather be in at the beginning of any medium than at the end when it's all on an assembly line." Miss Gish thinks television has vastly improved in three years, a highly debata' ble proposition, but she is not at all a "I-think'it's-all-too-wonderful" girl. She thinks a lot of things on TV are not only not wonderful, but downright silly. However she harbors what I consider unwarranted faith that TV will outgrow the silly phase, will some day be an important educational medium. As for its resemblance to early movie days: "We have to improvise so much in television. In television it's lack of space. We had to improvise in the silent movie days because we didn't have any money which sometimes, I think, is a big help." (I agree.) "There's great excitement working with these young directors like Fred Coe, Martin Ritt, Frank Shaffner and Donald Davis. I should think stage people would be better in television if they were brought up in the theater as we (Dorothy and Lillian) were. There's a tempo you learn on stage that you don't learn in pictures. But there's one thing in television you haven't any training for. If you blow up in your lines, you have to get out of it yourself. You can't be prompted. There's that microphone hanging there and the prompter's whisper sometimes sounds louder than the actor's lines. Nobody's going to help you then but God. Rely on Him completely." Movies made Dorothy Gish one of the world's most famous women in the '20s but she takes a dim view of pictures now. When she quit the movies, she didn't see a picture for two years. She still worships her early director, the late great D. W. Griffith, and has for years been vainly trying to get the picture people to do the story of his life. The Griffith story was done recently on television with Lillian Gish as narrator, was altogether a splendid production and was also almost an outspoken declaration of war by TV on movies. The contemporary film producers were pictured as tough, uncreative business men who were interested only in when the Cadillac convertible was to be delivered. That's a little harsh on the modern film producer who has a great many headaches besides Cadillacs, including a bad slump at the box office, a lot of it due to television.