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She will not accept the fact, for in¬ stance, that the majority of street beggars are fakes. Approached by one with the usual “I’m down and out” story recently, she poured both money and tears into his outstretched hand. The following week she was ap¬ proached by the same man at the same spot. “What a foolish little man you are,” she said. “Gee, I’m not that dumb. Why don’t you go to work like I do?” When she learns a lesson, she learns it. Pre-Irma: Marie Wiison looked like this during her early movie days. Marie was born Katherine Elizabeth Wilson, in Anaheim, Calif. Her father died when she was five years old, leaving her a legacy of $11,000, to be turned over at her mother’s discretion. This happened when Marie was bare¬ ly 16. Staking everything on the hope of getting in the movies, Marie moved her family of seven to Hollywood. In 1937 she had a screen test at M-G-M. Between bit parts she clerked in a department store. It was bad enough that she gave away toys to people who couldn’t afford them; but when she talked a customer out of buying a $25 teddy bear, they fired her. “I just didn’t think the poor man really wanted it,” she still maintains. From 1937 to 1942 she played in a number of unspectacular pictures. Then Ken Murray signed her for his “Blackouts” at $250 a week. Exactly 2,332 consecutive performances later, by which time she was making $1,000 a week, she decided enough was enough. When Cy Howard, the creator of My Friend Irma, first offered her the title role, she turned it down—not be¬ cause she didn’t want it but because she felt she wasn’t right for it. “I’d only spoil it for you,” she said. Marie lives in what she calls a “medium” home in the Hollywood Hills with her husband, TV packager Bob Fallon. The place is done almost entirely in pink, her favorite color. Even the dog, a Yorkshire terrier named Hobbs, sports a pink ribbon on his collar. Hollywood’s favorite, perhaps most revealing, story about Marie Wilson has to do with her answer to a re¬ porter’s rather blunt question. “Are you really dumb?” he asked. “Naturally,” she replied. “Do you want me to lose my job?” 17