“The Big Parade. Long time ago, but I liked it.”
“How about Gone With the Wind?”
“I liked that, but I didn’t see much of it. I went with Carole and Clark to the opening here. Raoul Walsh was with us, too. A man who pretended he was Burgess Meredith picked a fight with us. Clark was nervous and didn’t want to sit through the picture, anyway. So we all went into the manager’s office. The manager was off somewhere, and the phone kept ringing. We’d pick it up and say: ‘Sorry, no reservations; all sold out for a year.’ We thought that was funny. Carole was a lot of fun. She liked to have a good time.”
“So did you.”
“It’s taken its toll.”
“Did you ever have any protégés?”
“I kept it all for myself. I couldn’t act.”
“Well, I know you helped Ray Milland, for instance.”
“He played my brother in Bachelor Father. The director got impatient with him. It was his first picture and he was nervous. Who isn’t, even on the twenty-fifth picture? So I told him to pretend that the director wasn’t there.”
I asked her about the plush party she gave for Johnnie Ray not long after W.R.’s death, which caught a bit of the glamour of our yesterdays, with six hundred invited and a thousand showing up.