TV Guide (June 25, 1954)

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... BUT FEW PEOPLE KNOW MARIE WILSON WELL Murray bounce a few lines off her, and the customers kept coming back for seven straight years. When Mur¬ ray took the show to Broadway, he made the mistake of leaving Marie behind. The show folded in two weeks. Although Miss Wilson’s generous natural endowments inspire much speculation, another and more complex query invariably is raised from the floor. Is Miss Wilson as dumb as she looks? It is not a question you gen¬ erally ask a lady, but it is a question which can be answered. By the lady. Take the instance of the benefit in Phoenix. CBS phoned her and said, “Marie, will you go to Phoenix next week to do a benefit?” Marie said no, she wouldn’t, except on her own terms. The terms: every minute of the time she was to spend in Phoenix had to be scheduled. “Why,” she asked, with wide-eyed simplicity, “should I go all the way to Phoenix just to stand up there on a stage for half an hour and look dumb?” The fact of the matter is simply that Marie has a heart as big as—well, she has a big heart. She is constantly worrying about someone, generally Mary Shipp, r., this season had role of Irma's long-suffering roommate. the last person she has seen, and is constantly offering help. If a stage¬ hand sneezes, Marie rushes off to get her purse. In it are a variety of pills, one of which is soon in the stagehand. If she is ill herself, she worries about the people taking care of her. Several years ago she woke up in the middle of the night, deathly ill. Although she didn’t know it at the moment, she was in the grip of a mas¬ sive blood clot and death was sitting virtually on the doorstep. Not until the next morning, however, did she call a doctor. Why? “He’s a very busy man and he needs his sleep.” On such subjects, Marie has a mind with all the pliability of a length of cast-iron pipe. Once she has formed a basic opinion, that’s it. She cur¬ rently has two conflicting fixations: (1) a convertible is the fashion in cars, and (2) she must never let her face be exposed to the sun. So she owns a beautiful convertible whose top has not been down since the day the factory gave it its last test. Quite possibly there is no more sympathetic person in Hollywood than Marie, yet she is extremely difficult to know well. “Nobody knows her,” a CBS associate says flatly. “There’s an invisible wall around this girl, and nobody gets through it.” A Hollywood columnist puts it this way: “When you run into Marie for perhaps the third time, she gives you the distinct impression that you are old, old friends. She prescribes for all your family’s ills; she offers her help on any problem you may have—and she means every last word of it. Yet when she has left, you suddenly real¬ ize you don’t know this girl at all.” Marie’s inability to come across to people lies chiefly in her inability to translate her almost childlike wisdom into adult logic. She is an extremely wise person when it comes to funda¬ mentals, yet almost wholly incapable of coping with everyday problems. ’