Blanche Sweet’s Love Story (1936) 🇺🇸

A strange friendship led to this star’s recent marriage

by Adele Whitely Fletcher

They stood under an old gnarled tree on which apples hung October red, Blanche Sweet and Raymond Hackett; and the Justice of the Peace of that little Connecticut town, closing Raymond’s big brown hand over Blanche’s small white one, said, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

Blanche wore a beige crepe suit with fox fur and there was a spray of those yellowish, greenish orchids pinned on her shoulder. Dorothy Gish, who has been her friend since the two began their climb in motion pictures some years ago, stood up with her. And Raymond had his brother, Albert [Albert Hackett], for his best man.

A friendship which had woven itself haphazardly through a dozen years and a romance which had grown dear through as many months came to its happy ending.

It’s curious, I think, how two lives will cross, how two people will meet, talk about a dozen things, say goodnight and part to be caught up in their own lives again. And how all this time they will be completely unaware that the patterns of their two lives swing closer and closer and that it’s only a matter of time until they will merge and blend to become one pattern happier and more complete than either in itself ever was.

That’s how it was with Blanche Sweet and Raymond Hackett.

They saw each other first at Catalina Island, off California’s coast. Raymond and two companions, after a week-end on the island, had left for San Pedro in a small boat and had had to put back when a storm came up. Raymond was concerned because the following morning he had an early call at the studio and he knew there was little chance of reaching the mainland once darkness fell. Where upon the host of the small yachting party of which Blanche was a member invited Raymond to return with them.

Blanche didn’t sit behind the canvas lashed along the side as protection against the storm on the way back. She likes the feel of the spray and the rain. And it happened Raymond does, too. They sat aft, alone, talking sometimes, sometimes silent while that gray, rainy Sunday settled into chilly darkness.

“I remember,” Blanche says now, “that I liked the way Raymond reacted to things. Frequently in answering something I said he completed my thought for me. But when we docked at San Pedro and said ‘Goodbye, be seeing you some other time perhaps,’ that was the end of it.”

The next some other time for them turned out to be a dinner party over a year later. The table was long and Blanche was only vaguely aware of a familiar face in the misty glow of the candles burning. After dinner she didn’t see him at all. for he went off to the fights with some of the men.

Months lengthened into years. Raymond, reading Blanche had signed with Metro, and Blanche, reading Raymond was to play with Ruth Chatterton in Madame X or appear in The Trial of Mary Dugan, would remember the bite of spray on their cheeks and the smell of damp clothes and steamer rugs.

So it went. It was the year before they both arrived in New York to work in the theater and saw each other again. On Hollywood Boulevard this time. “There’s Raymond Hackett,” the friend driving with Blanche announced, nodding toward the young man waiting at the crossing.

After that, Raymond played with Lillian Gish on the New York stage in No. 9 Pine Street and Camille. Blanche went on a vaudeville tour.

She was preparing to open in Chicago — in fact the bills advertising her appearance already were posted — when her agent telephoned he had signed her to go on tour with The Party’s Over and that she was clue in New York immediately to go into rehearsal. She went to the vaudeville management and asked to be relieved of her Chicago engagement. They laughed at her.

“Surely,” they said, “anyone who’s been in show business all her life, like you, knows that is impossible.”

Blanche did know it. But something that had nothing to do with reason, something pressing and urgent and frantic, impelled her. And at last she managed an appointment with the manager of the theater where she was billed to appear.

“If you’ll relieve me of this engagement now,” she promised him, “I’ll come back later on and play a week for nothing.”

It may have been her urgent voice, it may have been the blue of her eyes, or it may have been her yellow hair — it’s hard to tell what makes hard-boiled business men kick over the traces and turn sentimental, sometimes — but he told her to go ahead and to come back and play for him whenever she could.

It was when The Party’s Over went into rehearsal that Blanche and Raymond Hackett took up the friendship begun that rainy Sunday years before. “Hello,” she greeted him when they met in the big rehearsal hall. “Imagine seeing you here!” And he grinned and said, “This is going to be nicer than I’d counted on.”

They were as casual as you please. And it’s just as well perhaps that they were casual while they could be. For it wasn’t long before the one who got to that rehearsal hall first began to stand around a little tense and nervous waiting for the other to arrive. Raymond began showing Blanche bits of technique, glad to help her feel her way back into the theater.

The play opened in Philadelphia. “All my life,” said Blanche. “I’ve heard a lot about baseball. And I’ve decided it’s high time I saw something of it for myself.”

She may have known Raymond was a fan and she may not have.

“I’m the man to explain the game to you,” he insisted.

And he may have been the man to do this or he may have boned up on the game with the help of the sporting page.

However it was, afternoons found them at the game.

“The first day,” Blanche says, “we sat in a box and were very elegant. But later on we sat high up in the stands. I liked the view better from there and the hotdog and popcorn men came around oftener.”

However, for all Blanche’s feminine interest in hot dogs and popcorn, I’m reasonably sure she gave Raymond all the warm attention that could be crowded into those dark blue eyes of hers while he explained what the game was all about. And I’m also sure he frequently took longer than necessary to make his points for the sheer joy of those eyes and that warm curving mouth smiling up at him.

Swiftly now the patterns of both their lives were swinging together. Each was becoming more and more aware that for them to move apart would mean severing strands that would allow all the color and joy and happiness to run out of things.

After a while they returned to New York. They hurried through busy days to meet for dinner. Last winter, when Blanche began her successful engagement on Broadway with Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest and soon after that started her WABC broadcasts three mornings a week, she and Raymond had a frightful time arranging working schedules so every day would give them enough hours together.

Then Blanche sent to California for her family to come on. Her family numbers one, a grandmother more than eighty years old. The day her grandmother arrived she and Raymond planned that he would come in at tea-time. Over a cocktail they would surprise the old lady with their news.

Blanche met her at the train, and grandmother’s eyes, hardly less blue than Blanche’s, went searching this way and that.

“Looking for someone?” Blanche asked.

“No, no,” the old lady said, “just looking about. Just looking about, my dear.”

When they reached Blanche’s apartment she seemed to continue to look about even before they sat down to the coffee that was waiting for them. And she showed great interest every time the door bell or telephone rang.

“Are you expecting someone?” Blanche asked at last.

“No, no,” she said. But she didn’t seem any too sure.

Raymond came in about five. And at once the old lady’s eyes brightened.

“I’ve been waiting for you, young man,” she told him, before Blanche even introduced them. “You took long enough coming, I must say. When you weren’t at the train I thought certainly you’d be here waiting.”

Blanche and Raymond looked amazed, a little disappointed, too. They’d been rather anticipating being a little dramatic about their news.

“But Mother,” Blanche said, “I never told you I was about to present you with a grandson-in-law!”

The old lady shook her head.

“Living,” she said, “you learn things. And when one letter from a girl is idiotically happy and the next is a little sad and it keeps on like that, well, when you’re as old as I am, you know there’s a man in the picture and you wait, knowing it’s only a matter of time until his name will pop out.”

She smoothed her skirts. “I wonder, my dear,” she asked Blanche, “if you have any idea how many, many times you’ve quoted Raymond. But there, I’m sure you haven’t.”

Raymond Hackett thought it all too wonderful. He tilted back Blanche’s chin, the better to kiss her. And said, “You never let me know you found anything I said worth quoting.”

“I wonder,” interrupted grandmother, “if we might have those cocktails now?”

And so they stood under an old gnarled tree on which apples hung October red, Blanche Sweet and Raymond Hackett. And grandmother, wearing silvery gray, and for once in her life as quiet as a little mouse, stood proudly beside them.

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• They met a dozen different times without knowing that there was love between them.
• For Blanche Sweet’s beauty program, turn to page 50 — 12 o’clock col.

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What is the missing chapter in Fred Allen’s life?

Coming in the March issue of Radio Mirror — a fascinating feature on radio’s ace comedian that gives you the first authentic story of his childhood.

Collection: Radio Mirror Magazine, February 1936