Magnolia Of The Movies

We had the notion that Irene Dunne could tell us a lot of show boat lore. Her grandfather used to build them on the Ohio River, and odd paragraphs here and there in the dossier of the actress with the voice that matches the golden hair, compiled by those earnest gentlemen who write such things for the cinema studios, indicated that a show boat audience had been Miss Dunne's first public. 

 Miss Dunne looked a little mystified, if not somewhat shocked, when we asked, without any preliminaries, if she would mind telling us something about her childhood in show boat melodrama.

 "Why, I had never been aboard one in my life before we made this picture," she protested, and she demanded to know, in an extremely ladylike way, of course, where we got that stuff. We blamed the press agents, the last refuge of scoundrels like ourselves.

                                                           ***

 "When I was a girl in the Ohio Valley," she said, "show boats were not considered proper places for little girls to go. We used to sit on the hilltops and wait for them to come around the bend in the river with the calliope playing the popular tunes, but we were never allowed to go to the plays. I know lots about boats, generally, though. I seem to have spent half of my life looking down into engine rooms."

 But she was more interested in that dossier. What else did it say about her?

 "It says your folks were somewhat upset when you took that role in 'Irene' in 1927 because they wanted you to be a lawyer like your father, especially since you had studied law for a year or so."

 "The truth is," she replied, "that in the first place, my father isn't a lawyer, and in the second place, I never studied law, and the third place, my family wanted me to an opera singer in the first place."

 Yes, the sketch of Miss Dunne did mention opera. It said that she had been under contract to the Metropolitan for a year. She giggled.

 "Ah," she sighed, "my opera career - a short season in Atlanta, singing Gilbert and Sullivan with a cast of young singers from the Metropolitan. No matter what I may ever accomplish on the screen or on the stage, my family will always feel that I should have been in grand opera. I couldn't stand it in the first place, and anyway, somebody told me only the other day that the Metropolitan has become simply a stepping-stone to Hollywood."

 She enumerated several opera artists whom Hollywood had lured West in the last few years.

 "That's gold in them thar Hollywood hills," she commented.

                                                           ***

 Miss Dunne's chief reason for coming East was not, she wants it understood, for that personal appearance she made the other night when Universal's "Showboat"[sic] opened at the Music Hall. It was mostly for a visit with her dentist husband, Dr. Francis Griffin, of whom she has seen precious little in the years since the original Ziegfeld "Show Boat" made her change her mind about becoming a housewife.

 She had just about decided to leave her dramatic and singing career behind when she saw "Show Boat" in 1928. She was entrance with Norma Tarris' Magnolia and decided she'd like to play the part. She got the chance the next year in Boston, and stayed with the company for its whole seventy-week tour. Then the screen claimed her for "Cimarron," and for a couple of seasons she was kept to busy to spent too much time in New York. Now she has a nifty new three-year arrangement under which she will make one picture a year each for Paramount, Columbia and RKO. She had engaged an agent who is under orders to see to it that she gets as much vacation as possible.

                                                           ***

  Paramount has some idea of casting her as "Valiant Is The Word For Carrie," but Miss Dunne doesn't think so much of the idea. She figures that even is she did consent to play it, very little of it could pass muster at the Hays office, and she thinks it would emerge with everything, except perhaps the tittle, so changed that it would be poorly received.

 Miss Dunne is still strong for the stage, even thoug she hasn't had a stage role in years. She feels that in the limits of the medium make for ingenuity and sublety in stage direction and playwritting, a couple of virtues the cinema could well do with, she thinks.

 She doesn't like radio work; the business of counting the seconds until the air lanes open up are too much like waiting for your turn in the electric chair. She used to put great emphasis on punctuality, too, because the 8:30 stage curtain used to wait for no one. In Hollywood, however, she used to find herself sitting around for minutes and sometimes hours, waiting for the less punctual dignitaries, so now she just figures on being about fifteen minutes late for everything.

                                                           *** 

 She still clings to a few stage superstitions, although she admits she has never known them to affect matters much. She never primps up her dressing room, for one thing. If you fix it up too nicely, like those gorgeous affairs in "The Great Ziegfeld," somebody else may get your part and your pretty room. She never puts hats on beds (although the maid put ours on a chair in Miss Dunne's apartment at Pierre's) and she never whistles backstage. She never stores shoes on overhead shelves, and she firmly believes that if a touring company passes a cementary on the left on the way to an engagement, the show is certain to have an early closing.

 She doesn't remember passing any cementeries at all on any of the location trips for "Show Boat." Her big regret in the picture is the absence of "Why Do I Love You?" which was left in the cutting room. The scene called for the song to be sung in an old-fashioned automobile over bumby roads. Her rendition on route was much too jerky, and one she did on a seperate sound stage was much too smooth. It apparently didn't occur to anyone, even Miss Dunne, that the sequence might have been shot in what used to pass for a filling station, for example, even if swains didn't dare park their balks horseless carriages elsewhere in the old days.

(The New York Times, May 17 1936)