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and 35 at the same time, it is neces¬ sary to have started one’s career at a fairly innocent age. Marjorie started when she was four, innocence per¬ sonified. She is still wide-eyed today, but it’s more a matter of simple frank¬ ness than an ignorance of the score. Then: a blonde glamor girl of the films. Miss Reynolds, in fact, has the score well under control. Ask her why she is in pictures and she answers, eyes quite wide, “Money.” “I’ve passed the glamor stage,” she says, just possibly unaware that no man in his right mind would pass up a date with her if she were available, “and Life of Riley came along at just the right time. There’s not much of a market for the working-girl actress of 35. She’s not quite young enough for the glamor roles and not quite old enough for character roles.” So along came Riley. Actually, it was a last-minute decision that made Peg Riley the attractive person she is. On the radio version of the show, Mrs. Riley was invariably pictured as the motherly type, and it was a motherly type the TV producers were looking for. Until some bright agency lad remarked that TV was visual and was there a law against Riley having a younger, more attractive wife? At which point Marjorie Reynolds was available. Too old to be glamorous, too young to be a character, she fit the role of Mrs. Riley to a T. But if Marjorie Reynolds keeps her glamor under wraps on stage with the Riley family, she unleashes it beautifully the minute the cameras stop rolling. Her figure is enticingly trim—and she could teach Marilyn Monroe a thing or two about walking. Call it the difference between a hot trumpet and a subtle trombone. Roles Came Quickly Born in Buhl, Idaho, the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. H. W. Goodspeed. Marjorie was brought to Hollywood while still in diapers. At four she was in a children’s dramatic school and landed a role in a silent epic called White Collars. She also appeared with Ramon Novarro in Scaramouche (“I was much too young to appreciate the man”) and with other such early film stars as Norma Talmadge, Lew Cody and Lillian Gish. When she was eight, her mother sensibly hauled her out of pictures and put her in school. But once she got through Los Angeles High School, she went to the studios. By this time, of course, the pictures were talking. This didn’t bother Marjorie, however. She could talk—and talked her way into well over 100 pictures. “At one point,” she says, “I was under con¬ tract to Monogram and appeared in all the Karloffs and Westerns. I was the acknowledged expert at waving goodbye to the cowpoke hero from the front steps of the old homestead.” Her Big Break Marjorie got her first big break in 1942 when she was cast opposite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in Holiday Inn, the picture that made a latter-day Stardust out of, White Christmas. “Paramount,” she remembers, “was looking for someone who could sing with Crosby and dance with Astaire. I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and still can’t, but I could dance a little so they decided to give me the part and dub in another girl’s voice.” This little device, a not unfamiliar one in Hollywood, worked beautifully until it came time for Marjorie to go to New York to help plug the picture’s opening. People kept asking her to 16