Gail Patrick — Small Town Girl Makes Good (1937) 🇬🇧
Back in Alabama, Gail Patrick was a serious-minded student with average looks who pored over law books, did well in her "exams." — and wanted to be governor. If she hadn't gone to Hollywood she probably would have married the captain of the debating team and made him her campaign manager in 1932.
But during what must have been a recess, the gods tangled up her fate and she went to Tinsel Town where, five years later, she is regarded as one of the most ravishing creatures ever to walk before a movie camera.
It's a long story and it began below the Mason-Dixon line.
Gail (real name Margaret Fitzpatrick) was born on June 20, 1911, in Birmingham, Ala. From the time she put on her best panty waist (the one with lace) and entered the first grade, to the time she graduated from Howard College, she was a consistently brilliant and apt student. At Howard she was president of the girls' student body, captain of the girls' basketball team. She was prominent in college theatricals and was known as the "campus organiser." In 1931 she was singled out for College Humour's "Hall of Fame" and was chosen as the "Queen of Beauty" for the college senior year book. After graduating from Howard she matriculated in law at the University of Alabama.
Consequently, she was considered a Very Superior Young Lady who would grow up and be a credit to the old home town. She did, but not in the way everyone expected.
In the spring of 1932, while Gail was still at the University of Alabama, Paramount launched its famous "Panther Woman" contest. Friends persuaded her to enter the competition, and she was pronounced one of the winners.
It wasn't very appropriate, Gail thought, for a girl who entertained ambitions about the state capital at Montgomery, but it was summer vacation wasn't it? And what did she have to lose?
So she flew to Hollywood on a ticket supplied by the studio.
She didn't win the role of the "Panther Woman," but then, she hadn't expected to. However, Marion Gering, then directing at Paramount, thought Gail had "possibilities." He arranged for a second test which he directed himself.
What a test! Gail was given three pages of dialogue from the play Holiday. The late Gordon Westcott offered to appear in it with her, and, playing opposite him, Gail interpreted the whole scene as one of impassioned love.
A year later she read the whole play and discovered that the role Mr. Westcott had essayed in that test was not that of a suitor. He had played the part of her brother!
As if that weren't enough, the test suffered in too many other ways. Gail just didn't seem to "go together" properly. As she puts it, "no two portions of my body went the same direction at the same time." Besides that, it was almost impossible to pardon her southern accent. And as for beauty, well, it was quite obvious that the sunny south and Hollywood had different ideas about that.
But Paramount had spent quite a lot of money on that panther business, and Gail had a certain value as a publicity asset — if not as an actress. So Paramount offered her a six-month contract at a small weekly salary. But the determined daughter of Erin still thought it would be much nicer to be governor.
"I've brought along £25 to spend," she'd say. "I'm sorry, but when it's spent I'm going back to Alabama.”
Paramount was interested immediately. Then the studio heard Universal was interested too. After that, Paramount decided that Gail was a very desirable property and boosted the salary up to £15 a week.
"I'd never heard of £15 a week before," narrated Gail. "That sounded like a lot of money to a girl from the country. I was tempted."
So Paramount wrote a six-month contract which provided her a salary for 20 weeks. With her training at law, Gail was smart enough to see through that arrangement. A six-month contract would run for 26 weeks, and Gail had no intention of working six weeks for nothing.
When the studio revised the document, there seemed to be nothing for Gail to do but sign.
That's how the would-be governor became a movie actress.
Gail Patrick is one of the few beauty contest winners ever to make good in Hollywood. But on her way up she jumped through all the hoops.
She resigned herself to the fact that an embryonic actress should not trust her own judgment. She was remarkably receptive to criticism, and she got plenty of it. She didn't mind at all when people told her to do something about her clothes, to stop fidgeting with her hands, to throw back her shoulders and so on.
Sensing this, people went out of their way to help her. Thus she reaped a wealth of excellent tutelage usually denied the more headstrong youngsters.
One of the nicest things you can tell about Miss Patrick is this: To-day she's a valuable property with a weekly salary in the four-figure class, but all those people who helped her are still her friends.
Those friends turned the tall (5 feet 7 inches), loose-jointed, shy college kid of 20 years into a statuesque beauty of infinite grace and composure. They pounded and painted and operated until there was very little of the law student left.
Gail spent six months in the Paramount Dramatic School before she appeared in a picture. They curbed her southern accent and wrapped it in cotton. They cut her long hair and brushed it back from the broad, intelligent forehead that Gail had covered.
They plucked her eyebrows and threw away her rouge pot. They taught her how to make up her mouth a little fuller than it really was. They ever, taught her to breathe correctly.
They re-shaped her fingernails. They perfected her carriage and added 10 pounds to her weight. The studio paid for £300 worth of work on her teeth.
Gail also did her share of the tasks that stars have outgrown. She was guest of honour at cotton carnivals and the firemen's ball. She'd go down to the dog pound and pose with the hounds during Be Kind to Animals Week. She met trains and obligingly came over to the studio to lunch with some of the less important visitors who wanted to meet a movie star.
She was such a good sport about it all, and the publicity boys, whose job it is to arrange such things, were so grateful to her that when some publication requested a series of pictures the boys would throw the break to Gail. She posed for literally thousands of publicity and fashion sittings — and she had become so decorative that Paramount could hardly supply the demand for pictures of the girl.
Consequently Gail received so much publicity that she was a box-office draw before she ever won a featured lead in a motion picture. According to Paramount's clipping bureau, she received (and still does) more square inches of space than any other contractee at the studio, and more than most stars.
Gail balked at only one thing. She refused to pose for leg art. She was too tall, she said, and her legs were too long. The studios usually don't give way to newcomers on this point, but Miss Patrick had been so good they let her have her way.
Recently, when she was appearing in "Artists and Models," Paramount tried to get her to make an exception and don a bathing-suit for a short sequence. But Gail refused to make the scene until the director agreed to let her wear a long cape, over the brief garment.
She's married, you know, to Bob Cobb, who operates the famous Brown Derby restaurants. They were married December 17, 1936. That was a Thursday, and so every Thursday Mr. Cobb sends Mrs. Cobb a bouquet of flowers. Every week she receives a present from him. Last week it was a copper coal bucket.
Gail Patrick as she appears in "Artists and Models."
Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, October 1937