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*V AS IN BARNUM 259 found themselves drawn to him, and why they soon began calling him "the fourth ring." Nor had the prophets of doom reckoned with DeMflle's talent for inducing stars to risk their high-priced necks for their art, or at least their art as portrayed by the dashing producer in puttees. When Betty Button elected to try her hand at flying, DeMille promptly and gleefully assigned as instructors two "catchers" and two of the best women aerialists in the field, Lynn Couch and Antoinette Concello of the once-famed Flying Concellos. The vivacious blond star went into two months of training on Paramount Sound Stage 3, generously hung with rigs and pendulous trapeze bars like stalactites in Carlsbad Caverns. Betty's daring gymnastics startled her trainers; almost daily they entreated DeMille for help to rein in his star performer before something serious happened. Long before she took her turn before the camera, with remarkable grace in the key flying scenes, Betty was the talk of the Paramount lot. Understandably, the press received, if not with contempt, at least with vast cynicism the reports that the star would do her own flying in the picture. Her aerial accomplishments did not make the columns until she staged a special exhibition, convincing the doubters that the glowing rumors were not spawned by zealous publicists. Gloria Grahame, too, caught the fever in her elephant-girl role. She consented to a piece of bravado that might have turned easily into disaster had the animal been startled as he lowered the bulky paw to the tip of Gloria's nose. DeMille merely sug- gested the scene, left it entirely to Gloria to make up her mind; he would not place loyalty above possible disfigurement DeMille took the affair in stride. He had affectionate memo- ries of similar demonstrations. Years ago, Gloria Swanson per- mitted him to arrange a scene in which a lion placed a paw with uncut claws on her bare back. On that occasion DeMille, pistol