The Awful Truth (1932) 🇺🇸

Consider the cases of six of Hollywood's luckiest.

by Helen Pade

Ask a lady star her age, if you must. But never, never inquire of her if it is true that a girl has to pay, and pay, and pay to get on in pictures!

Besides being impertinent, the question is futile. What girl who has made her success will cast a slur upon her ability as an artist, and upon her virtue, all in one breath?

Supposing she had found detours on the path of purity and amateur ranking unnecessary, who would believe her testimony?

Dead men tell no tales, and neither do movie queens who have arrived. So no affidavits, no signed confessions, can be introduced into this case. But circumstantial evidence? Ah, that is another thing. Let us do a little detective work, and find out how good little girls get along in Hollywood.

There is no point in investigating those affluent ladies of the screen who can afford gigolos, wholesale divorces, and marked-down princes for consorts. Neither should we worry about the moral weal of such capable ones as our exotics — Garbo, Dietrich, Damita, and Bankhead; nor charge against movies the antics of ex-taxi dancers and Tiajuana percentage women.

Even such girls as that youthful, charming child of nature, a star who used to leave a wedding ring in my studio office in constant readiness for her week-end trips, need not figure in our investigation. The sort of girls they call "nice" back in Oshkosh — Rochelle Hudson, Karen Morley, Frances Dee, Sidney Fox, Cecilia Parker, and Marian Marsh — must be our test cases.

These named, and dozens of others, seem so nice when you meet them that, considering their screen successes to date, you feel "dat ol' debbil Hollywood" can't be so evil after all. But wait! Let us investigate them one at a time and weigh the evidence.

Rochelle Hudson hails from Claremore, Oklahoma. She is a brunette with lively blue eyes, a teasing little red mouth, and very white teeth. Her figure is the sort gentlemen prefer, and would make a charming Exhibit A in any courtroom.

Between these charms and the hungry world she has a mamma, an anxious, alert mamma, who followed her, footstep by footstep, all the way from Oklahoma to ingénue leads for RKO. Mamma Hudson is a very capable chaperon, and yet Rochelle has got ahead — contracts, renewals, and coveted film roles.

Hollywood, Rochelle thinks, would be a dull place if it weren't for newspapermen and high-school boys. Mamma, the directors, producers, and leading men have a lively time chaperoning her, thanks to these two leavening influences in the cinema city.

There is handsome John Darrow, for instance. After all those love scenes with him in "Fanny Foley Herself," John meets her accidentally at the Coconut Grove one night. Not late. Just about half-past eleven

Does he take her away from her high-school-boy escort? Does he cut in on a dance? Does he even make a showing for the benefit of the wide-eyed youngsters with her?

No! He advises her to get to bed, because their big scene in the picture is to be filmed next day.

Mamma Hudson confers about Rochelle with the movie executives, or almost any of the wicked studio men who are willing to listen to her. Do they think she's holding too tight a rein? She's so full of life, is Rochelle. But mamma doesn't want her spoiled, doesn't want her sophisticated too soon. She's an artist — but she's so young — seventeen.

And the bad film men advise even tighter reins, and tattle on Rochelle at the same time. Yes, she cut a geometry lesson, and they couldn't find her for a wardrobe fitting yesterday, because she skipped out to get a soda with the high-school kid in a red flivver!

Frances Dee entered pictures expecting hardship, sacrifices, and difficulties, despite beauty that had set the University of Chicago boys agog while she was still a sophomore co-ed. The difficulties didn't materialize. She got the first extra job she applied for. A contract fell into her lap.

Chevalier beckoned her into "The Playboy of Paris" from a studio cafe table, and Josef von Sternberg asked her if she would care to play in "An American Tragedy"!

The better one knows Frances the more clearly one observes her convincing bewilderment. She neither affirms nor denies, being a close-mouthed young lady, but ideas she thinks are hidden are visible on her composed but mobile face. It was all too easy! Her concealed wonderment is that the cost has been so negligible.

Marian Marsh left high school in her junior year to play bits in a few movies. A desperate woman, Marian; too pretty to be out in the wicked world. High-school boys never let her alone. They were simply too demanding. So, instead of becoming a nun, as an old-fashioned girl of fatal beauty might have done, she became an extra!

Then the handsome, wicked, prodigal, and profane younger Barrymore, John, cast a leering eye upon her. Her fragile charm attracted him. He seized her — to play opposite him in "Svengali"!

And then what happened? Only John and Marian know exactly how they got along together, but according to evidence I have directly from those famous scandal-mongers, the set electricians, they had a most peculiar relationship. John, it seems, fussed about Marian like a grandmother. He nagged her for going off the stage without a wrap, forbade her to cultivate the cigarette habit, and so on, until at last she facetiously accused him of feeling paternal toward her.

"Dammit, why shouldn't I?" the great Barrymore demanded. "Am I to be denied all the little respectabilities of life until I become palsied with age?"

Another group of studio electricians, from their high posts on the "catwalks" above the set, remarked on a curious phenomenon that concerned the self-same John Barrymore and one Karen Morley, the little girl from Ottumwa, Iowa, who made good with Greta Garbo in "Inspiration" and Mata Hari.

In a scene of "Arsène Lupin," our electricians threw off the lights so Barrymore and Karen might kiss in the dark, with cameras registering only blankness but the microphone getting an earful. The lights flashed on so quickly, signaling the termination of the scene, that neither Miss Morley nor Barrymore were expecting them. They revealed — what do you suppose? Barrymore industriously making kissing-sound effects with his hand and lips, and heaving passionate sighs as he sat all by himself, acting away for the mike with closed eyes; and Karen sitting a few feet away from him, eyes also closed — with a surprised expression on her face.

Reliable informants entirely unconnected with studio life say that Karen is free from those social handicaps so fearsomely set forth in the magazine ads. Nor does she eat garlic or even onions when she is to play love scenes. Yet the casting director who assigned her to her first job — reading Greta Garbo's lines to young men being tested for the leading male role in "Inspiration" — and the director of the picture, Clarence Brown, have been observed acting as unromantically toward her as Barrymore did.

"Karen? Oh, yes, Karen. Good kid. Yeah. Good actress." And they seem so abstracted, one fancies they are dreaming about landing swordfish off Catalina Island. None of Karen's benefactors speak of her with that subtle something in their faces and voices, that air of the cat that has devoured the canary.

Cecilia Parker, the little Canadian girl seen with George O’Brien in films, has a strange way of convincing such hardened skeptics as the electricians and property men of her '"honesty."

They say that when she first interviewed a certain studio executive, asking for a voice and camera test, she was so badly frightened that she could scarcely talk to him. Yet her test was excellent. It stood out among nearly twenty others filmed at the same time, and won her a contract. The executive admired the courage and fighting spirit required for an obviously green and frightened girl to face cameras and mike and give such a fine account of herself.

According to the electricians, however, he was all wrong. It wasn't cameras nor microphones she feared, but movie men. They say she is still a frightened little girl, looking for some dragon or ogre that hides around movie lots. This, they argue, proves that she hasn't actually met the monster. If she had, she would no longer be afraid of him.

On the other hand, Sidney Fox, pint-sized beauty, isn't frightened at anything, despite her diminutive stature. She wasn't at all nervous when Carl Laemmle, Jr., who must surely have a way with the ladies, discovered her. She was then a youthful newcomer to Broadway, appearing in the stage play, Lost Sheep.

Did Sidney pay, and then pay some more? Alas and alack, here is another case in which circumstantial evidence alone must guide us. Sidney herself doesn't say anything that may be used in her behalf, because she knows that Hollywood, like the Scotland Yard boys, will use anything she says against her.

But what convincing evidence, if viewed by a worldly-wise Sherlock Holmes! Instead of rushing out to buy new clothes, jewels, and perfumes as soon as she had her contract, Sidney immediately undertook the task of preparing herself for what she thought Hollywood demanded of a novice. She began voice and singing lessons with Estelle Liebling, and dancing with Carl Hemmer.

She not only worked with Hemmer, but practiced dancing by herself, striving to crowd months of progress into a period of a few weeks. Many a night she awoke from a sound sleep, screaming, and had to walk about getting the cramps and kinks out of her tortured muscles.

Would any girl work so hard for anything she had already bought?

On such circumstantial evidence as these cases afford, dear reader, this investigator rests her case.

If Sidney Fox paid for her contract she was foolish to exhaust herself with endless lessons in voice and dancing.

Photo by: Ray Jones (1892–1967)

Marian Marsh, protégée of John Barrymore, found him more like a fussy grandmother than a wicked star.

Rochelle Hudson, seventeen, gets contracts, renewals, and coveted roles. What's the answer?

Frances Dee expected the worst when she entered pictures — and a contract fell into her lap.

Cecilia Parker is still afraid that awful stories about studio wolves will come true.

Karen Morley is progressing famously, but even the electricians can tell no tales about her.

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1932