No Sooner Said Than Dunne!

"Impulsive? Am I impulsive?" Irene Dunne, curled up in her favorite chair in the library of her Holmby Hills home, asked herself the question I had asked her. There was a note of amiable vagueness in her voice. As if she had never thought about the matter before. As if she wouldn't know the answer offhand.

 I had advanced the contention that, after years of being poised and dignified and always-a-lady, she had gone amusingly unpredictable in The Awful Truth. And that public surprise at the extent of her impulsiveness in that script had been partly responsible for public delight with the picture.

 Irene, mulling the question, suddenly laughed in self-amusement.

 "Well," she said, smiling, "I certainly was impulsive yesterday morning...

 "You know, I have a pet car - a little one - that I like to drive around by myself. When I have to go all over town, and be hours in each place, I think it's silly to keep a chauffeur outside waiting for me. So, on days like that, I just drive myself.

 "Yesterday morning, I went out to get the car, and it wasn't there. Frank - Dr. Griffin - had just eased out with it, without 'bothering' me. I was furious. My day was, to put it mildly, ruined. I said to myself, between clenched teeth" - she illustrated - "I said, 'If I had him here with me, I'd choke him!'

 "I couldn't wait for him to get back from whereever he might have gone. I had to get out the chauffeur and the big car. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard, and I was still fuming, and keeping a weather eye out for my car, when I spotted it coming from the opposite direction. I told the chauffeur to honk at the Doctor and stop him. He honked - but the Doctor didn't stop. Now I was positive that when I laid hands on him, I was going to choke him.

 " 'I'll bet he has a guilty conscience!' I said. I told the chauffeur to turn around and chase him. We raced back, and as we got in sight of him, the chauffeur kept honking. Still the Doctor didn't stop. Finally, we pulled up alongside and then in front of him, to force him to stop. I started piling out of the car. And - all the things I was about to say died on my lips. The car wasn't mine; the driver wasn't Dr. Griffin.

 "This man looked at the chauffeur and me as if we must be crazy people or as if I was a gun moll out hijacking with one of the gang. 'So sorry - my mistake,' I said weakly, and shrank back into the limousine. And then started laughing at myself and what my fury had accomplished. And the fury evaporated instantly. 

 "It's like that with me. I can get so mad about things, so burned up - and then I start laughing at myself, and it's all over."

 Having this proof that Irene is at least as impulsive as the next woman whose husband can be vexing at times, I set out to discover if, perhaps she wasn't a little more impulsive. If, perhaps, her whole life wasn't influenced by impulsiveness - unknown to her public.

 "Oh, I don't think so," she protested, mildly. "I'm pretty conservative. When it's something that really matters, I consider it pretty carefully."

 "Always?" I prodded.

 "We-ll... perhaps not always... This career business certainly didn't start from careful planning... You know, I don't think I've ever told before the whole story behind its starting...

 "When I was a little girl, I had never been anywhere, and I never excepted to go anywhere - particularly after my father died and Mother and I went to live in a little town called Madison, Indiana. I remember distinctly having the idea that I was going to live there the rest of my life. Not that I liked the idea, particularly - but I couldn't get away from it. 

 "I was sixteen or so when, one day, there was a great flurry in the house. Mother had a letter from an old school friend who lived in Memphis. And the old school friend said, "Your daughter must be quite a girl now. Wouldn't it be nice for her to come to Memphis and visit us?" She even said, 'Don't worry about clothes' - which was lucky, because I didn't have many. 'Girls here wear lighter things than they do in the North. We'll see that she gets fitted out after she arrives.' The next day, I was on my way to Memphis, thrilled to death, filled with romantic ideas about the South. Which, by the way, I still have.

 "That friend of Mother's was marvelous to me. I had grander clothes than I ever had before. I had dates. I went dancing. I 'rode to the hounds.' Every day brought something new. I stayed four months. And every moment of it was like a dream. I went back to Madison, convinced back to Madison, convinced that I could never be contented there again. But it still looked as if I would have to be.

 "I had always sung. Mother had always wanted me 'to go with my music.' But I didn't see how that particular dream would ever get me out of Madison. Music study would take money - and money was something we don't have.

 "Finally, I got tired of just sitting around, doing nothing. I decided, impulsively, to try an examination to be a schoolteacher. I passed it and was given a school in Hammond, Indiana - which happens to be quite near to Chicago. I went up early, a couple of weeks before school was to begin, to get settled and, maybe, find a choir-singing job on the side. Somebody happened to tell me about the Chicago College of Music - the one founded by Florenz Ziegfeld's father - offering three musical scholarships, in public tryouts.

 "I obeyed that impulse. I got on a trolley one morning and went up to Chicago and sang in the tryouts with fifty other contestants. I don't know how, but I won one of the three scholarships. I resigned the job I never actually held - the one as a teacher. Some relative in Chicago took me in - some relatives I barely knew until then. And I went to music school..."

 After the long course was over, and Irene had won the gold medal at the final concert, she went on to New York to try to get into opera. In Chicago, she had know a friend of her mother's with a daughter about Irene's age, for whom she had stage ambitions. They went on to New York at the same time Irene did, and the woman mothered both girls. Irene sometimes went along when they went into looking for jobs. And that was how, at the tryout for the musical comedy, Irene, she was picked off the sidelines for the title role, and "went to all the little towns in the world."

 Back in New York after that road tour, she walked into the New Amsterdam Theater Building to see a producer about a job. Waiting for the elevator was a man whom she recognized as Florenz Ziegfeld.

 "On an impulse, I was about to smile recognition. On another impulse, I didn't. On the way up in the elevator, I felt him looking at me. At his floor, he stood aside to let me off first. I indicated that I was going up farther... I had been in this other producer's office about two minutes when in rushed a girl who said, 'Are you the young lady who just rode up in the elevator with Mr. Ziegfeld? Why yes, I was. 'Well, I'm Mr. Ziegfeld's secretary. He'd like to see you right away.'

 "It seems he had guessed I was one more girl coming to ask him for a job, and when he had guessed wrong, I was of tremendous interest to him. He had his secretary ask the elevator man what floor I had gone to, track me down, and ask me to see him immediately. The Show Boat engagement came out of that. If I had tried to see him, probably I'd never have got past the application desk. That's life."

 And that's what a couple of impulses did for Irene Dunne's career before Hollywood. Pin her down - and you can get a further admission that one little impulse led her into the present cycle of comedies.

 "I was so sick of magazine stories about 'Irene Dunne, the perfect lady.' I was so tired of playing heroines who were always on their dignity, no matter what. I was hopelessly typed. Finally, making Show Boat, I asked Jerome Kern, 'Isn't there something I could do that would be a little different?' He said jokingly, 'Well, you might do one of those blackface mammy dances.' I said, 'That's it! That's just what I'll do!' He was flabbergasted. The studio was dumbfounded. They tried to argue me out of it. I kept insisting. 'This is pretty important to me,' I said... And, well, you know what happened. People collapsed when they saw me do that shuffle dance in blackface... That led to Theodora Goes Wild. Then The Awful Truth. And now The Joy of Living."

 So Irene had "never thought much about being impulsive"? I asked her about those surprise trips she is forever taking without letting anyone, including her press-agent, know. Are they carefully planned?

 "No-o, I guess they aren't," she admitted, reluctantly. "I guess they wouldn't be as much fun if they were. Doctor and I just got back from the grandest trip. We were sort of planning a little cruise somewhere, maybe to Hawaii. When, one night at a dinner party, someone happened to mention a place called Painter's Cottage. I'll bet you never heard of it. I know I never had until that moment.

 "Where is it?" I asked. It's a crispy white little place run by a Mr. and Mrs. Painter, on a little island near Victoris, British Columbia. Nobody ever goes there except artists, and not many of them. And besides seclusion, it has wonderful fishing... Well, two days later, we were on our way to Painter's Cottage, which we liked so much that we stayed three weeks. We left for there in such a hurry, thoug, that we didn't have time to shop for outdoor clothes. We got those on the way, in San Francisco."

 She is full of impulses whenever she is in New York. She always stays at a certain hotel on Fifth Avenue in the early Sixties - not because it is on Fifth Avenue, mind you, but "because it's so near Central Park Zoo." If a zoo is anywhere around, she can't stay away from it. And she always eats the strangest things, once she arrives in New York. Like the time - one of the coldest nights of the present century - when she and Mildred Knopf walked fourth in a blizzard to find the nearest Schrafft's because they had a hankering for Schrafft's ice cream cakes. They consumed two apiece and were still shivering three days later. They weren't sick after the first twenty-four hours, though.

 Not that she is exactly unimpulsive in Hollywood. Prop men at Columbia still talk about the time, on the set of Theodora Goes Wild, when Irene turned cartwheels - on a dare. When she has some question on her mind about a picture, far be it from Irene to mention the matter to go-betweens. She obeys that impulse and goes direct to the Top Man. ("I like to know where I stand," she explains. "I figure I'll keep out of trouble that way.")

 The fact that Irene's adopted baby is the blue-eyed, flaxen-haired Mary Frances - not some other child - also is traceable to a spontaneous Dunne impulse. Under pressure, she will admit it: but only under pressure.

 "Yes, I think I wanted a boy. But when I laid eyes on Mary Frances - well, it had to be Mary Frances. I didn't want to look any farther."

 In short, there is an accumulation of evidence, that Irene wasn't unnaturally impulsive in The Awful Truth. Enough evidence for Irene herself, curled up in her favorite chair in her library, to say amusedly, at the end of our interview:

 "It sounds to me as if you almost have a story that could be titled, 'No Sooner Said Than Dunne.'"

("Hollywood", July 1938)

                                                       top

                                         magazine articles main

                                                  press main

                                                      home