Glamour Girl in Socks By Jane Porter A teen age actress is usually more trouble than she's worth to a movie studio. Just when you think she's a lady, she behaves like a brat and vice-versa. It's quite disconcerting at times. So when Warner Brothers signed up Joan Leslie and made her a star on her sixteenth birthday, you can rest assured that the young lady had plenty on the ball to make the studio overcome its prejudice about actresses of her gentle youth. You'll be seeing a lot of Joan Leslie in 1941. She's stacked up four pictures in a half a year -- High Sierra, The Wagons Roll at Night, The Great Mr. Nobody, and now she is playing Gary Cooper's wife in Sergeant York! People are aghast when they learn that the child is playing the wife of veteran Gary Cooper. "What is it?" they gasp. "A story about Kentucky mountain marriages?" Don't worry. It's about a soldier who comes back from war and marries a 16-year-old girl. Already Joan has given her studio a few anxious moments because she is at that crucial in-between age. She is half child, and half woman, and you don't know which half is going to predominate until it's too late. In between domestic scenes with Gary Cooper, for instance, she goes to school on the set. This makes young Joan Leslie quite unpredictable. She looks like a cool, poised young lady, but her heart is wrapped up in history dates, not dancing dates. An important New York writer was being shown around the set when the studio greeter duly introduced him to Joan. "Golly," whooped Joan in unrestrained joy. "Am I glad to see you!" "Really," said the visitor, preening. "How nice." "Yes," continued Miss Leslie. "If you hadn't come at exactly this minute, I'd have had to take a geometry exam." You see, that's what the studio is up against. Joan, God bless her, isn't old enough to be tactful. She has the directness of youth. Young youth. The only time that Joan fell wholeheartedly into the idea of fibbing was about her age. That was when she was a little squirt of 11, and she tried to tack almost 10 years to her age. She and her two big sisters, Mary and Betty, were a singing and dancing trio. They had all studied dancing in Detroit, where they were born. They were a swell act. Sing, dance and plenty hot. They were Irish and snappy, but of the three, the little one -- Joan -- was the show-stopper. The audience melted when she came out on stage and did her cartwheels and back flips. Everything would have been fine but for the vigilance of the Gerry's Children Society, whose job it was to see that little girls were home in bed instead of on the stage. Often, the act was stopped cold when the sisters sniffed a Gerry official backstage. Joan was then hurriedly whisked out of the theatre and into bed, where the little angel pretended to sleep as though she had been there for hours. A talent scout spotted Joan when the girls played the Paradise Cafe in New York, and sent her to Hollywood. Joan might as well have been locked up in a vault for all the good that trip did her. She played a few minor parts -- the sort of roles that you might miss altogether if you blink your eyes. Then she rejoined her sisters. Later, Mary took Joan by the hand and led her back to Hollywood, on the assumption that two could dent the movie-makers' sensibilities where one might fail. Mary obtained some minor parts -- she's a looker herself, that Mary! -- and she never lost an opportunity to stalk to the bosses in the Front Office and talk about her kid sister. But always the same turndown: "We're not interested in kids her age. They're neither child nor woman, fish nor fowl." Finally Mary prevailed upon a Warner Brothers' talent scout to give Joan a chance. She was only a youngster, but the studio saw what other studios had failed to see: that Joan had retained all the charming and effervescent qaulities of youth. She wasn't a 15-year-old trying to act like a sophisticate. Here was a young girl who had the breathless exuberance that was almost a lost quality in Hollywood. They featured her in a short, Alice in Movieland. By being completely natural in it, Joan was different. So the studio tested her further by putting her in a succession of big pictures until now they've rewarded her with stardom and the lead opposite Gary Cooper. All within a year! "Can you imagine," shrieks Joan, running a hand vigorously through her long blond mane. "Last year I wrote Mr. Cooper a fan letter. This year my name is next to his. Glory be!" By some miracle, the deleterious effects of sudden stardom haven't touched Joan. Usually a young, overnight star becomes as spoiled as an uncorked bottle of champagne. But Joan comes of a hard-working Irish clan who won't tolerate any kinardy. Joan still shares a bedroom with her mother. She helps around the house, setting the table, washing the dishes, straightening the chairs. The fact that Mr. Warner has put a gold star on her dressing room has not affected her status at home at all. Being a 16-year-old star isn't the snap it appears to be. The Board of Education insists that Joan gets a minimum of three hours' schooling a day, and believe it nor not, it's a ruling that is rigidly observed. When Joan is through with a scene, she rushes to her dressing room to bone up on her lessons with her teacher. One day she had a difficult crying scene on the set. When she was through crying, she went into a huddle with her teacher on her French lessons. Fifteen minutes of French and she was called back on the set to cry some more. After the cry, back to her French again. That went on all morning, and at the fifth take, the poor child was so dizzy that when she took her place before the camera, she cried in French! Kissing scenes are most difficult for her because she has never kissed a boy, has never been in love. It's difficult to feel the ecstatic happiness of love when she doesn't know what it's all about. So she worked out a solution. "When I have to kiss someone," she says, "I close my eyes and think of something that would make me very happy." She had to kiss Gary Cooper the other day. She closed her eyes and was such a picture of love in bloom that the director pronounced it a perfect take the first time. It was so good, in fact, that he suspected Joan had finally gotten herself a boy friend on whom to fasten her thoughts. But it was nothing of the kind. Joan looked blissful for another reason. "Geometry," she explained. "I imagined that I passed it with an A." No one got a greater kick out of that than Gary Cooper. |
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