Jane Bryan — She Knows What She Wants (1939) 🇺🇸

April 25, 2025

And when it comes along, Jane Bryan will gladly forfeit fame and fortune

by Mary Mayes

It would be a grand thing if American girls — yes, and American boys, too — could take a leaf from the book of Jane Bryan. That leaf, I mean, on which are written down in a strong, clear hand the well defined ambitions from which Jane hasn’t wavered a wiggle since she was a little girl; on which are written down the ideals which go hand in hand with those ambitions, the resolutions, many of which begin with, “I will not.” “I will not be satisfied with a cheap, easy success, no matter how well paid. I will not waste my substance on cheap, easy romance, no matter how much pleasure seems to go with it. Though I shall, of course, make a thousand mistakes as I go along, I will not make mistakes about important things like my work, love, my family, husband, children and home.”

Ah; yes. If the millions of young people who come out of schools and colleges every year — some of them pathetically starry-eyed, others pathetically cynical, so few of them knowing what in heaven’s name they want to do — if they could acquire some of the blessed certainty about important things which little Jane Bryan possesses, they’d be in a happier position to tackle this none too happy old world that we live in.

I talked with Jane over a late breakfast in a hotel dining-room. She hasn’t changed, outwardly, in the something over a year that she has been in pictures. The combined wiles of the studio make-up department haven’t been able to make her change her glossy, natural brown hair to a shade more golden. Her eyebrows have remained where nature put them on her intelligent young brow. She wears lipstick and nail polish and simple, straight, unbedecked clothes. There was nothing about her to cause the other late breakfasters to look up and wonder where the Klieg lights were. Otherwise — yes, most decidedly — she is different from other girls.

She brought along a girl friend. Not a member, as I feared at first, of her studio’s publicity staff or of the Mutual Protective Association. Because both girls indulged in a little mild studio panning, much in the manner of a couple of New York wage slaves exchanging details of office hardships over Schrafft sandwiches. Jane said she isn’t very good at interviews yet and she thought Peg might be helpful.

I found that though the little Bryan’s intelligence goes way ahead of her twenty years, her little girl appetite hasn’t quite caught up yet. She tucked into a hearty amount of cereal with cream and drank considerable cocoa. Lucky girl — she doesn’t have to count up the calories and drink black coffee. While I drank black coffee, I launched into Interviewer’s Stock Question II A — but I did not receive a stock answer.

“You’ve come quite a way in a short time,” I said. “What do you feel you owe to yourself, and what do you owe to others.”

“Well, of course, I owe a tremendous amount to Bette,” said Jane. She ponders a moment before speaking, which is another good idea. “Bette Davis has helped me immeasurably in the tricks of the trade, for one thing. I mean, make-up, and technical points about acting before the camera and all that. But mostly, I think, I’m thankful to her for giving me a picture of what a really important star is like. The whole thing… her problems and difficulties, and all the sadness that comes with the glory, and everything. She’s shown me what I might be like if I ever achieve what she has achieved. And,” Jane’s big gray eyes looked straight into mine, “I don’t want to be like that. It’s too tragically lonely.” This made me ponder for a moment before speaking, and Jane went on. “I adore Bette. I worship her. She’s a deep-feeling, warm-hearted woman. She’s tempestuous and vivid. She’s the kind that starts a gale of excitement the minute she enters a room. She’s the stuff of which great women are made. But she’s a woman before she’s an actress, and she has struggled so hard to keep the things which are precious to a woman… and she has failed.”

“Yes, lately she has been going through a bad time,” I said. “But perhaps it will work itself out. Perhaps she and Ham Nelson may even yet get back together again and be wiser and happier for it all.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Jane answered slowly. “I don’t see how any Hollywood marriage can survive such a set-up. I really don’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t see how any important woman star can have a happy marriage. I think those who stick just muddle through, at best. If any two people ever struggled to keep things on a sane basis, those two people are Bette and Ham.

“Bette doesn’t have a thing that money can buy that I couldn’t buy with my modest salary. Clothes, jewels, cars, house — nothing. She doesn’t care about them. Ham works like a dog. Why he isn’t up with the other high-powered orchestra men is just his miserable luck. But even if he were a huge success in his work, I don’t think that would have helped. The only thing that might help would be for Bette to give up her work, and that she couldn’t do. It would be like removing an arm. That’s why I say, much as I love Bette and much as her success is to be envied, I wouldn’t want to be like that.”

I simply couldn’t, in that shining, young presence, summon enough crude courage to bring up the gossip which has linked the Davis name with the name of an actor who is young, handsome, famous and wealthy. Anyway, Jane continued talking and gave me another slant on the Davis breakup and, at the same time, another slant on her own mature personality.

“You know,” she said, “I think it may be much more important to like the person you marry than to be passionately in love. Of course, I’m not going to even think about marriage for many years to come, so maybe I shouldn’t talk. No, there’s nobody in my life,” she made a little face over the phrase, “and there never has been. But some day I shall get married, I feel sure, because I shall want children.

“I do honestly feel that, though the idea of romantic love is exciting, wouldn’t it be just awful to be madly in love with a man and yet be driven crazy by niggling, unimportant little traits of his, little personal idiosyncracies that make you want to scream? I think it’s much more important for two people to live in sweet accord than to be fainting with love at the sight of each other.”

I maintain, folks, that that is an unusual point of view for a girl of twenty. I asked if the Davis situation had prompted this opinion, but Jane deliberately avoided the question.

“I read an article a while ago,” she said, “in a woman’s magazine about career girls. It said that over sixty percent of all the patients who go seeking aid from psychiatrists are married career women. The reasons for their mental mix-ups are familiar to us all. Wife more important than husband, wife makes more money than husband, wife subconsciously despises husband because she is more important than he is. It all wound up with the rather depressing conclusion that woman’s place is in the home. The most depressing thing about it is that, in my heart, I really agree.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it, Jane Bryan?” I asked. “You say you don’t want to be a star.”

“I don’t want to be a movie star,” she corrected me firmly. “I’d give my eye teeth to be a really great stage star. For that matter, I’d give my eyes or teeth to do even the smallest, if good, role in a play.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Usual objections to pictures?” I asked. “No chance to sustain character in scene-by-scene shooting? No audience? All those things?”

“That’s part of it. But mostly I feel that, on the stage, I could look back on a piece of acting I had done and say, ‘I did that. Me. Jane Bryan.’ Not the director. Not the cameraman and the electricians. They make the pictures — not us. I’m going to do a stage role soon,” she finished.

“When? What will it be?”

“Oh, I don’t mean I’ve anything lined up,” she laughed. “No Broadway producer has been scrambling for my services, drat it. But I know I’m going to, because that’s what I’ve always wanted. Pictures are just an interlude. A lucky interlude, and I’m happy enough, but I never lose the feeling for a moment that I’m just waiting.”

“Well, now,” said I, “do you think you’d stand a better chance of combining fame with happiness in a stage career than in a movie career?”

“Perhaps. The life isn’t so out of focus. But I don’t think I’ll try any combinations,” she said slowly.

I’m young, for which I’m devoutly thankful. I don’t want to get married for at least five or six years. In that time, I shall find out whether I’m a really good actress or not. Versatility, interest, excitement— there are all those attributes to acquire, as well as doing a sincere job with nothing phony about it, as I’ve tried to do so far.

“I’ve wanted to be an actress ever since I was a child. I know exactly the kind of actress I want to be: I’d like to be a composite Bette Davis, Margaret Sullavan and,” she ducked her head, eyed me quizzically over her shoulder and just whispered the name, “Helen Hayes! Oh, there’s nothing small about Bryan! But seriously — that’s a big order and don’t I know it! I want nothing half-way. I must be first-rate or nothing. Maybe I’ll get an awful blow between the eyes one of these days and find out that I haven’t got the stuff. If so, I hope I can take it. I think I can.”

“And when romance comes along?” I asked.

“Career is tossed out of window,” she answered promptly.

“You think you mean that, but you don’t. You wouldn’t quit when it came to a show down.”

“I do! I would!” she cried emphatically. “To think any other way would be a most greedy way of looking at life. It’s just too much to hope that I’ll fall in love with a man — and he with me — who will be as important in his way as I hope to be in mine. Even if a staggeringly happy break should come my way, I don’t see how it would work out.

“I don’t want to marry an actor. And a man in any of the professions — lawyer, doctor, engineer, whatever — why, such men want a home to live in, not a hotel. They want a wife, not a room-mate. And then — children. I don’t want anybody to bring up my babies but me! No nurse and governess partnership for my kids. Oh, I’d like to feel that there was some way of having everything — career, love, marriage, husband, home, children — but I’m convinced that there just isn’t. And I know what I want most. After I’ve had my little chance to prove myself, I want love, marriage, home, husband, children — and the deuce with a career. Any female who says she doesn’t want these things and prefers her ‘independence,’ is lying in her teeth.”

There. I said she wasn’t like other girls. Remember the little Bryan is twenty.

“But Jane,” queried the girl friend, who up to that point had had no chance to take a part in the conversation, “what in the world would you do if you weren’t acting? You would die with boredom if you tried to take part in the usual sort of social life. And I can just see you being the leading lady of some amateur Little Theatre Group. You’d be miserable.”

“Would you get any kick out of running a house — beautifully, efficiently, being a charming hostess and all that?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know the first thing about it,” she said in a small voice.

“Well, then?” demanded the girl friend and I together.

Oh, those details would work themselves out,” Jane maintained stoutly. “In the first place, I’d have two or three children as fast as the statute of limitations would permit. I hear tell that can keep a gal pretty busy. And I’d want to be responsible for seeing to it that somebody provided tasty meals and dusted and sent out laundry and all that. I’d want to be a good manager — a good household executive. If you don’t think that the haphazard manner in which these mundane details are looked after in some of our best Hollywood homes has a great big effect on the divorce rate— you’re crazy. Many a big, strapping man is dining off lettuce to such an extent that his nose begins to wiggle the minute he enters the house.”

“Hmm. I can’t quite see you in the role,” I said. “I wish you luck. I hope you don’t run smack up against some situation that won’t fit into your scheme of things.”

“I guess I’ve sounded pretty smug and know-it-all,” said Jane. “But I’m honestly not. I guess I’m like the trite folks who say, ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.’ Me, I certainly don’t know much about life yet, but I know what I want.”

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