Alice Brady is Like That! (1934) 🇺🇸

You don’t know very much about Alice Brady, do you? Except that every performance she gives is superb. But — I mean — the lady herself hasn’t been plastered all over the magazines in story and picture; you haven’t been invited to read an expose of her love life; you haven’t seen her pottering domestically around a prop kitchen — or lolling on Malibu’s sands in beach pajamas. Right? Right. And you never will. Because Alice Brady just isn’t like that. I’ll try to give you a picture of what she really is like.

The publicity boys and girls didn’t find Alice Brady very good copy. Too independent. Too truthful. Too natural. What do you think?

by Hilary Lynn

Hollywood’s suavest comedienne (who is also one of Broadway’s greatest tragediennes) lolled back on a white leather couch before the fireplace in her red and white Empire drawing-room, nibbled at a lamb sandwich and sipped a glass of sherry.

It was tea-time. Jessie de Brady, Sammy de Boy (born Hayworth Thane — much too aristocratic a name for him, so Alice Brady changed it), Nina Hopkins and Hotcha Lavinia Mannon solemnly gnawed at enormous beef bones spread bare at our feet on the thick biscuit-colored rug.

In order not to confuse you, let me quickly introduce the above-mentioned bone-gnawers. They’re Alice’s three wire-haired terriers and one very sedate Scotty.

“A well-meaning woman once asked me why I always wore black,” Alice was saying, “and I answered, ‘Because I love red so much!’ She didn’t know what I was driving at. But what I meant was — if once I started wearing red, there’d be no stopping me. So I keep as far away from it as possible and usually dress entirely in black. That’s safe!”

Certainly there was no doubt about her passion for all shades of red. What wasn’t white in her striking drawing-room was red. And through the open archway which led out into a combination library-bar, one saw cozy red leather chairs and lounges and red woodwork. Also such warnings as “Ladies not permitted to smoke” and “Dogs not allowed.” But since the dogs hadn’t yet learned to read, those signs didn’t disturb them!

The predominant color in the dining-room was also red — several shades of it. Red-flowered wall paper, red frames on the pictures, red tones in the furniture and woodwork, red and white crystal candelabra and the glow from a California winter sunset in the rich red Bohemian glassware on the buffet.

You know, I rented this place furnished,” Miss Brady was saying, “and then decided that the furniture in the house just wasn’t me. So I stripped it bare and started all over again and the result is what you see.” She watched me amusedly for a moment as I glanced around the room.

“You don’t have to be polite about it,” she said. “Be frank and say what you think. It wouldn’t surprise me if you thought exactly what Adrian did.”

It seemed that shortly after moving into her new Beverly home, the whimsical Miss Brady, all hopped up about her original ideas for decorating and furnishing, rushed into Adrian’s studio at M-G-M to tell him all about it and to get the reaction of a connoisseur. When Adrian heard about the red-flowered wall paper and that large slap of still life — the red flowers in a red frame — on that particular flowered wall paper, he threw up his hands and groaned with horror.

“It sounds frightful, Miss Brady,” he said. “Come out and look at it before you convict me,” suggested the unperturbed Alice. Adrian did.

Politely, he suggested that perhaps there was just a leetle too much red in the room for comfort. Perhaps it might hurt someone’s eyes, said he. Gently, he advised that she might improve it by removing that large blotch of red flowers from the wall.

“But I didn’t,” said the redoubtable Miss Brady, jingling the bangles on her wrist. “As I said to him, ‘You’re a lamb to give me your frank opinion, Adrian, and I’m sure you’re right. But I’m afraid I prefer to rot in my own bad taste.’ No matter how wrong it is — it expresses me!” And Alice Brady is like that!

Alice Brady is one of the few actresses — or women, for that matter — who is completely sufficient unto herself. In the disapproving face of the most violent objections, she goes blandly and contrarily on her own sweet way. Unconcerned, cool and filled with lazy mirth over the consternation caused by her perfectly harmless, legitimate foibles. In this typical Brady, but most untypical movie star fashion, she lives in Hollywood exactly as she might live in New York, London, Paris or Kamchatka.

“I’m one of those people who is never affected by environment,” she once told me, with a flash of her French eyes and a broad flicker of her Irish grin. “I suppose I’m just too lazy to live any other way. That must make me a terrible worry to the publicity department of M-G-M. Not good copy. What a blow!”

If she only knew! Vividly I remember the day of my first appointment with her. Just before going out to her house, I called up that much-harassed department to get some idea about the mentionable virtues or vices of Broadway’s famous dramatic actress.

I knew nothing whatever about her, except that she was the daughter of William Brady, the theatrical producer. And that she had made the rôle of Lavinia Mannon in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra burn with such malignant, tragic passion that some New York critics, who were pre-convinced that Nazimova [Alla Nazimova] would carry off the honors overwhelmingly, staggered out of the theatre wondering whether Alice Brady hadn’t stolen the show.

I also knew that her first screen performance — in which she portrayed that scatter-brained, tactless, modern Mrs. Malaprop of “When Ladies Meet” — panicked her film audiences. I knew that all her subsequent screen rôles had done likewise. Panicking ‘em with her humor in each picture. And now, in “Miss Fane’s Baby,” playing such a different sort of rôle — that of a hard-worked, ignorant farm woman. And how she plays it. But there — that’s all I knew. Just about what you know yourselves, isn’t it?

“I don’t know what to tell you about her,” said a solemn young man at the other end of the telephone wire. “Frankly, we know nothing about Miss Brady ourselves, aside from the usual chronological facts you could pick up on her automobile registration card. You know — ‘white, female actress…’

“She doesn’t go around much; she works like a demon on the lot; her friends here seem to be among the writers rather than the actors; and she spends most of her time away from the studio at her home.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Eating and sleeping, as far as we can figure out,” came the rather tired answer. Then, worried, because he might have committed a faux pas, the young man at the other end of the wire hastily added, “Of course, I was just kidding.”

When I repeated the young man’s statement to her about “eating and sleeping,” she was positively gleeful.

“Well, that’s about the truth,” she said, again giving me that disarming Brady smile. “What else can I do here? I’m not by any far stretch of the imagination an outdoorsy person. I loathe athletics, although I suppose I shouldn’t admit it. That’s why I refuse to let them pose me in a bathing-suit, or on the tennis court, or, of all things, on a bicycle in shorts. Fancy me in shorts.

“Anyway, when I’m not working on a picture, I’m more apt than not to be sleeping. I just got up about a half hour before you arrived.” (And I’d arrived about 3.30 in the afternoon.)

Can you imagine any other feminine star admitting her laziness with such capsizing unconcern? But that’s Alice Brady.

“I’m sure that my laziness accounts for my preferring to be a sort of recluse. I am perfectly happy alone in this house for days, never desiring once to go out that front door. Sleeping, playing with my dogs, and reading detective novels.” (Five new mystery stories had arrived by special delivery during my visit.) “Then, after a while, I get a terrific desire for companionship. I want people around me in clumps! Not one but dozens.”

Apropos of people “in clumps,” reminds me that Alice Brady has been pleasantly disappointed with Hollywood in one respect.

Before she came out here, her New York friends warned her against a peculiar breed of creatures who inhabit only Hollywood; creatures who spend most of their time bursting in on innocent newcomers at any hour of the day or night — of course, without invitation — and insist on making whoopee whether the newcomer likes it or not.

Being a person who values her privacy more highly than almost anything else, Alice Brady desperately resented and feared the rumored invaders; and had already, before arriving, worked out several schemes by which she could evade them on her arrival in the wild and fuzzy west.

It was delightful to hear her relate, naively, with genuine surprise, that no one had as yet pounced in on her and that she was almost ready to believe that no one would.

Another thing that quite confounds Alice Brady about Hollywood is what she quaintly refers to as the “motherliness” of everyone in the studio. It might give some of those hard-boiled electricians and burly members of the technical crew a shock to learn that Miss Brady thinks they’re so motherly. But that doesn’t worry Alice.

She insists that everyone, from the highest executive down to the humblest office boy, has adopted “such a kindly, protective attitude” toward her. She never found it with the people she worked with in the theatre. “They’re so much nicer in Hollywood,” she insists.

I didn’t dash her illusions by suggesting that “they” might not have had such a motherly attitude toward her if she hadn’t early proved to the studio that she was worth coddling — perhaps even humoring!

And there’s Alice Brady — how do you like her?

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Bill Brady’s daughter, with her French eyes and her Irish grin, has given the screen a number of superb comedy rôles. (opposite page, left) “Should Ladies Behave?” was one of the finest. In “Miss Fane’s Baby”, (right) she plays a very different sort of rôle. Yes, believe us, that’s Baby LeRoy, with his hair and face blacked up for the part.

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How is Helen Hayes bringing up her daughter?

She has very definite — and interesting — ideas about the training of little Mary MacArthur. Ideas that every daughter's mother — and mother's daughter — will be eager to read.

This story will appear in Modern Screen soon

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Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, March 1934