Everything Happens to Joan! "Nothing ever happens to me," moans Joan Leslie, who goes to Coney with New York's Mayor, wears a lily pad for a hat, and has a season pass to Ebbetts Field! By Nancy Winslow Squire "No," the producer said firmly, settling back in his chair. "There's no sense in your reading for that part; you couldn't play that part --" It was an argument Joan Leslie was weary of. If you came to Hollywood when you were fifteen, and you never bothered to put on purple nail polish and tight skirts, you stayed fifteen to everyone. Here she was twenty, and the only roles they threw at her were sweet, shy jobs. She wanted a change of pace. She wanted, in short, to test for the dramatic part of Bessie Watty, the cockney tramp in The Corn Is Green. All the producer wanted was for her to go away and not make him laugh. "Why, I've seen you ride past on a bicycle with an apple in your mouth --" he said. She grimaced. "You make me sound like a roasted pig -- and I'll sell the bicycle. Only give me a chance --" He gave her nothing, so she went away, but she came back a couple days later, dripping cockney accent. "It's good," he said finally. "But Joanie, baby --" Short pause: "This girl steals purses, and she flirts!" A little bitter, a little amused, Joanie baby went home to mother. "I was supposed to recoil in horror," she said. "What kind of a prissy young stuffed shirt do they think I am in this town? Maybe I've been sweet sixteen long enough; maybe I ought to let 'em know I wear high heels and go out with real live boys --" It was the beginning of a radical change that continued through her trouble with Warners and the year she was out of work. She took college courses in psychology and literature; maturity, she realized, was a state one reached after slow and painful progress, and every college course would help. The workless year over, Eagle-Lion offered her the lead in a picture called Repeat Performance. Louis Hayward was to be her co-star; the film also had Richard Basehart, the young stage actor, who'd won the New York Drama Critics award for his playing in The Hasty Heart. It sounded like heaven to Joan. "Imagine," she said to her family. "No more Pollyanna. In this, I'm a successful dramatic actress married to a has-been playwright--" "Imagine," the family said, chuckling with pleasure. Every night Joan went home in a blissful fog. She couldn't even hear people through it. "If you'd only listen," her mother said once, plaintively, in the tone of a woman who has been talking to herself for half an hour, "here's a letter that came--" "Thanks," Joan said. She opened the letter absently, and then she yipped. "Mummy! The Junior Chamber of Commerce -- I've been chosen queen of the convention--" "Why, Greer," Mummy said. "Lower your voice, dear." You can't get big-headed in that house. invitation from "dem bums"... The Chamber of Commerce convention was at Long Beach, California, and the queen got a present from every state in the Union. A season's ticket to Ebbetts Field; a box for the Kentucky Derby; apples and snowshoes from Maine; silver dollars set in dice from Nevada; a bottle of water from Florida. The Florida delegates showed up covered to the necks in raincoats, however. "Some gag," said the queen. "Did you ever see a bluer sky?" The Florida group pulled its slickers even tighter. "In a minute," the queen announced to the conference at large, "they'll open up those coats and let out their horrid Florida mosquitoes." Florida was crushed. Some time afterward, the queen actually had a chance to use her Ebbetts Field pass, because once Repeat Performance was finished, Joan and her mother came to New York. They stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, but not very much. First off, Joan had to see Happy Birthday. Helen Hayes is next to cleanliness, with her. They thought Brigadoon was beautiful, too, and they had dinner with the Earl Wilsons at the Copacabana, and Joan and Earl discussed the merits of respective chorus girls with clinical detachment. "I think that one's prettiest," she'd say. He'd sneeer. "That one? That one's knock-kneed--" Mrs. Wilson, who tried to keep things on a higher plane, mentioned that she had a new Buick, which reminded Joan that she had a new Town and Country convertible. "My first car, but I've been driving for a year and a half." "You drive yourself?" Earl cried. "No chauffeur? That's pretty middle class." "It's all right," Joan said. "I hire a lot of little boys to run after the car and yell. Footmen, you know." "Well, that's different," Wilson said. "For a minute, I was afraid you weren't our sort." "Oh, I speak French and everything," Joan said smugly. Two days later, she and her mother were in a restaurant, and the headwaiter came up and said something innocent, like, "Bonjour, Mesdames --" "Oh, he speaks French, Joanie," said Mrs. Brodel. "Joanie, speak to him in French." Joanie claims that being told to speak to anybody in French is like being told to be beautiful or intelligent. She compromised on "bonjour," slipped in a "vichysoisse" or two, and an "au revoir," and considered the evening a raging success. One of the New York evenings that was not a raging success was taken up by Joan's first radio appearance. Scared wasn't the word for her. And around a radio station, the performers act over-casual. They're elaborately half-dead. "Just be natural," they say, stifling their yawns with their elbows. Joan was set to be natural, but the huge clock kept ticking away in front of her, and when they said, "Fifteen seconds to go," her stomach started ticking on its own. Bill Leonard boomed out: "This is New York --" and Joan's tongue froze to her teeth. "You did fine," they told her eventually, but she didn't believe them. She felt all alone in an alien world until the kids caught up with her on the sidewalk outside the broadcasting studio. She signed the books tenderly. "Little do they know I'm a hopeless failure," she was thinking. There was another time when Joan came out of a theater to find a whole border patrol of fans waiting for her. She signed gladly, and was about to take off in a cab, when a small girl piped up. "Miss Leslie, did you know Miss Rosemary De Camp was in town?" (They're always quite formal.) "Really?" Joan said. "I must phone her." "She's right across the street, in Sardi's," said the small girl. "Why don't you stop in and say hello?" The upshot was that the small girl rushed across to Sardi's, and led Rosemary De Camp out onto the pavement. Then she stood back with an air of having righted the universe, while Joan and Rosemary exchanged embarassed pleasantries. The kids are amazing. There was the boy who came up to Joan and said, "You're gonna meet the mayor over at Loew's State, ain't you?" and caused Joan some astonishment. (Actually, she and Mayor O'Dwyer were going to Steeplechase Park, in Coney Island, to sell the first tickets to a charity outing.) "How do you know?" she said. "I just found out myself five minutes ago--" "Oh, I delivered the message to your hotel," he said. "I woik at Loew's State." She wanted to tell him not to fall down any open manholes while reading other people's messages, but he was cute, so she resisted. What she couldn't resist was shopping. There's a store called Schwarz's which has the most fabulous collection of toys in the United States, and Joan almost went mad trying to decide what to get Rusty, her sister Mary's child. If in doubt about a cowboy suit or an Indian suit, why not get both, is the way her mind works. With herself, she wasn't so generous. She did a bit of clothes shopping, but cautiously. Last time she came to town, she bought two beautiful expensive suits that were absolutely no good in California, and she resolved that this trip, she'd say no ten times before she said yes once. There was a Carnegie print, though -- brilliant chartreuse, with blue and pink horses. She said no ten times very fast, and then one howling yes, as they wrapped up the dress. Speaking of clothes in connection with that last New York visit, Joan had a funny experience at Lily Dache's. It was about five years ago, and the Mark Twain picture was being publicized. Warners, which had flooed the country with "leading frog bean-bags," decided that Joan should have a leaping frog hat. Lily Dache agreed to design one, and some time later, Joan went over to her establishment to pick it up. It was a magnificent hat. A pink sweep of velvet, a huge, jeweled clip -- "Only what has it got to do with a leaping frog?" asked Joan, troubled. The assistant smile tolerantly. "Miss Dache gave the matter some thought. This hat is the lily pad!" Tads, pads, as long as you're healthy. Joan's going to make an Eagle-Lion picture called Northwest Stampede next, and that's a joyful thought because it's being shot on the Prince of Wales' ranch in Canada. The place has never been photographed before, and it's lousy with glorious scenery, and the picture has a white horse in it, and the whole thing is in Technicolor. After that comes a possible trip to London (a J. Arthur Rank deal) and happiness is just a thing called Joan. |
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