Getting a Line on Leslie Triple threat Joan Leslie: actress, singer and dancer, gets the coveted role in Warners' "Marilyn Miller" By Mickell Novak THE STORY SO FAR: An abundantly-talented, red-headed kid named Joan Leslie debuted professionally at the fragile age of two in a song-and-dance act with her sisters, Mary and Betty Brodel. After playing in vaudeville houses and night clubs of note in the Eastern states, Joan was picked up and signed overnight by a talent scout on the MGM payroll. Her first bit was in the great Garbo's "Camille," after which Joan was lost in the Hollywood shuffle until her small but forceful performance in Warners' "Nancy Drew, Reporter," forced a long awaited contract out of that studio. At sixteen she played the lead opposite Gary Cooper. Since then, she has worked with such intrepid troupers as Fred MacMurray, Jack Carson, Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, Dennis Morgan, and James Cagney. A LOOK AT TODAY: Through sheer hard work, ability, and more work, Joan has now won herself the coveted title role in "Marilyn Miller." This is undoubtedly the biggest job of her career. She is tackling the intricacies of recreating a remembered and beloved stage figure with her usual sobber conscientiousness. On the day the studio handed her the part, she girded her loins with the traditional tutu, and began working with ballet-master Robert (Buddy) Eson in order to learn the fine points of toe work, for which Marilyn Miller was so famous. With Eson she has worked out as rigorous a dance schedule as ever confronted a pupil at the renowned St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet School. A day with Leslieskaya, as Buddy calls her, is exhausting even to mere spectators. At 10:00 am sharp every morning, Joan reports for rehearsal and puts in a good hour and a half of toe and soft-shoe ballet. Then comes lunch. Just thirty minutes of resting her feet high against a wall while she juggles a salad and makes shop talk with Buddy. After lunch there is tap work until tea time, then an hour of ballet technique to round out the schedule. Eson, once a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and partner to Mme. Fokina, and dancer with Adolph Bolm and Albertina Rasch, knows good technique when he sees it. And apparently he sees it sticking all over La Leslie, because this is what he says about her: "I believe Joan is the only star in pictures who is able to do ballet and toe as well as dramatic work. I definitely think she has the possibilities of becoming a great ballerina, if she is given a chance to keep up her work. And I've never seen a girl with such a great capacity for work. If she isn't perfect in every movement, she repeats it over and over until it is perfect. She drives herself constantly." LESLIE AT WORK: When mass picketing closed the studio's doors and Joan was taken off salary (along with other Warner contract players) she refused to quit practicing. "Look," she pointed out, "if the strike ends suddenly and the studio starts production on this picture, I'm the one who'll suffer. If my dancing isn't up to Miller calibre, nobody's going to blame the labor situation or Jack Warner -- they're going to criticize me." Consequently she rented a dance rehearsal hall in Hollywood and worked out four hours a day, including Sundays, with the inexhaustible Eson. Three days after her rigorous training began, Joan's toenails revolted and began in-growing. Painful though this revolt was, she continued her pliés, her pirouette, and her fouettés, without complaint. She spent her spare time oiling her nails, wadding lambs wool under the corners, and jamming her feet back into her toe shoes. An incident typical of her wonderful determination to get things done -- and done right -- happened the day we watched her work out. Buddy was banging on the piano and Joan, on point, was leaping gazelle-like about the room. "One and two -- Cabriole, cabriole, tout j'eté, tour j'eté, cabriole -- now do it back on the other side and watch your turn-out," Buddy shreiked above the tinny piano. Joan, unlike her interviewer, understood the cabalistic yelps and ended the combination with a gold line arabesque. Then she promptly collapsed into a chair. She undid miles of pink satin ribbons, yanked off her slippers, removed a wad of lamb's wool, and surveyed her toes drearily. "They still hurt," she observed, "they still hurt." But she put on a pair of well-used, soft-soled dancing slippers and went back to another two hours of workout. LESLIE AT PLAY: "My idea of a perfectly heavenly evening," Joan says, "is to see as many movies as possible. The other night Mother and I went to see "Kiss And Tell." We got out early, hopped into a street car and went to see "Love Letters." Then we trolleyed back and met Dad on time. It was wonderful!" She admits to getting a little miffed at the screen ladies who (as she says) act rings around her, but she thinks the smartest and truest slogan ever heard was "motion pictures are your greatest entertainment." They're hers. And then there's dancing. Hours of the ballroom variety send her into ecstasies. And there's tennis. And restaurants that simply reek of atmosphere. She loves them all. But people are her hobby. Sometimes she'll grab a streetcar or bus, going nowhere in particular, just so she can scrutinize the passengers. She says, "It's fascinating to watch people. Their reactions, their mannerisms, their nervous habits -- all of them are wonderful studies for characterization. James Cagney impressed that on me while we were doing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." He pointed out some unconscious business the wardrobe woman was doing on the set, and then he used the same routine as a clever comedy bit in the picture. I've been following his advice ever since. "Try it sometime. It's really surprising to discover the lazy way we all have of looking without seeing. Since I've learned the trick of using my own eyes, I've put that 'seeing' to work." She goes on: "I like to study, too. I like feeling I'm stretching my brain. My French and Spanish have improved tremendously, and I've done quite a few foreign language broadcasts. I felt pretty proud of myself, too, until some fans wrote and told me I spoke Spanish with a French accent. PUBLIC RELATIONS: Busy as a bird dog in quail season, (her government and commercial broadcasts, her publicity work, her studies and her incessant work), Joan's still never too tied-up to entertain service men in military camps, in hospitals, and in her own home. That Burbank house is a week-end messa for visiting GI's, and she entertains simply and graciously with badminton bouts, ping-pong, home-made cookies and pleasant chatter. Her popularity with men in uniform is, they claim, because she's "so much like the girl next door." They keep her telephone lines humming, deluge her with mail, bombard her with gifts. The gifts are fantastic: A hula skirt made of 24,000 braided strands of parachute silk; a wood-inlaid box with her name on the lid in pearl; a hand-painted vanity case beaded in Oriental design; a perfect model of a Messerschmitt from Germany; wedge-soled sandals from the Philipines with hand-carved design on the hardwood wedges, and with tops of purple and gold cloth. FAMILY RELATIONS: "My family is important to me," she says. "And that's why I don't understand girls who move away from home when they begin clicking in pictures. They take an apartment and forget their family ties. To my way of thinking, Hollywood can't give them anything substantial enough to make up for their loss of family. Why, I wouldn't know what to do without all the Brodels. They give me so much: encouragement, moral-boosting, constructive advice; they tear me down when I feel cocky, they watch my health, they -- well, they're a big part of my life. I wouldn't even trade one of them for the fanciest career in the world." Working on a share-and-share-alike basis, the Brodels get along beautifully. When Joan's brother-in-law, band leader Dick Russom, was still a ferry pilot stationed in Washington, Joan sent him boxes of soap. Dick carted the stuff to Europe on his regular ferrying flights and distributed it to the soapless children of France, Belgium, and England. Discharged now, Dick and Mary (Joan's sister) are working in Palm Springs. Mary sings with his band to an exlusive audience that demands a large and varied wardrobe. When she had run the gamut of her own evening wardrobe one day, Mary rushed to Burbank to borrow something from Joan's closet. Joan was caught short. "Good night," she shreiked. "Betty's using some of my stuff in her nightclub work, and the rest of its being cleaned through the studio, and that's closed because of the strike!" Dad Brodel poured oil on the troubled waters via a phone call, found the name of the studio's cleaners and trotted off to round up a wardrobe for his child. It took him a couple hours, but Mary made it back to Palm Springs in time for her show that night. She looked very chic in Joan's gowns, too. WHAT'S ON HER MIND? Rest. "If Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest," Joan asks, "why don't people do it? They yelp all week about the relaxation they're going to get over the weekend, then they go out and play golf or tennis till they're ready to drop in their tracks; or else they get a fine case of nervous indigestion by taking the family for a drive in heavy traffic. "People are always preparing to live, but they never seem to enjoy life while they're about it. Sometimes I find myself doing the same thing. Studying and working day and night, until I realize I'm forever cramming like mad for something that never happens. Maybe I'm not expressing this thought well -- it's kind of a new one. But it bothers me. I keep wondering why we drive ourselves at such a furious pace; what are we heading for? It's been on my mind a lot lately." What else is on her mind? Food! Kept on a perpetual diet because she's inclined to be overly curvaceous, Joan's thoughts are always on chocolate eclairs or some-such. An inveterate doggerel artist, she penned the other day, "Nothing could be crueler than a cruller." And this point poses a problem, since Joan loves them, and Dad Brodel wants them on the table every day. Joan's forte is not cooking. "As a cook," she says, "I'm a darned good actress." She has a habit of disappearing into the kitchen to whip up a batch of cookies for the family and eating half of them before they're even cool. There's an amusing device her pie-loving pop uses to keep her from temptation. When the mobile bakery in the Brodel's neighborhood sounds its familiar klaxon, Dad Brodel (who's been waiting around the house for hours for this moment) makes a great show of impressing Joan with the fact that he's going out to get her a loaf of special diet bread. It takes him about half an hour to complete this cumbersome purchase. Curious after weeks of this routine, Joan followed him one day. She discovered her father intercepting the baker about two houses down the street. He made quite a ritual of selecting a fresh lemon meringue pie, a dozen crullers, a box of cookies, and a special kind of cake. Then he chugged back to his own yard and hid his pastries in the family car. Ten minutes later he ambled into the house innocently bearing Joan's lonely loaf. She says she has never told him she's onto his tricks because then it wouldn't be fun anymore. IN THE CRYSTAL BALL: "I want to do a musical from time to time," Joan says, "but I'm really aiming for good, straight drama. I wish the studio would give me more pictures like 'The Hard Way' and 'Too Young to Know.' Maybe," she says a little wistfully, "maybe if 'Marilyn Miller' is all I hope it will be -- maybe they will give me a part that calls for really good emotional acting."< |
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