BY KAY PROCTER

NOBODY knows exactly how or why, but Irene Dunne certainly gets away with murder in Hollywood.

 Now Hollywood has one strage unwritten law. It say in effect that it's all right for every-day folk like you and me to lead sane, normal lives but a star must make a veritable three-ring circus out of every 24 hours of living, particularly if the star is that rara avis, a glamor girl. She's got to have exciting things like leopard-skin chairs and walls of purple glass. She must give and attend lavish and unique parties that awe readers with its details. She must seem, at least a cut-glass bird in a shimmering crystal cage.

 Dare to disobey and glamor is pffft! When her glamor is pffft, she is too, as a star, for that synthetic substance is the phantom stuff that is the life-blood of her appeal.

 So says it Hollywood, although you won't find it written anywhere down in just those words.

 Irene dares to disobey. She says a polite "Hooey!" to the rules and points to her own code of living as the clincher for her argument.

 "Hooey!" wasn't her exact word, but it was what she meant.

 She said actually: "Hollywood makes me tired! The way it kids itself about this business of living the way the rest of the world thinks it lives, or ought to live. The trouble is, after awhile it really believes all the nonsense. You don't have to do it. Look at me!" 

 Let her point to her own tranquil life and sreen success in proof. But - many an actress before her has cherished that same quaint notion that their private lives were theirs to lead as normally as they saw fit, only to lose out in fan popularity while she blithely continues to climb to ever great heights. Adhering to the same policy, they lost and she goes on winning. That's what's so maddening - and so amazing.

 She thought at first it was because her basic code of design for living was so fundamentally sound. It says live today as fully as you dare; plan tomorrow thoughtfully; make happen what you want to happen; and wake up to your potentialities. 

 Granted that those are swell ideas; but they don't work in Hollywood. They ought to, but they just don't. Yet she makes them work! How, for the love of Mike, does she get away with it?

 Irene laughed a lovely, warm laugh. 

 "Well, what exactly am I getting away with that's darned unusual?" she asked.

 Her unique marriage to the noted New York dentist, Dr. Francis Griffin, for one thing. I told her. She said she thought that was taken for granted buy this time.

THAT'S just the point. It is taken for granted, and sleeping dogs let lie. Yet let any other Hollywood glamor girl be madly in love with her husband and live on the Pacific coast for ten years while he hung his hat on the Atlantic side of the continent and it wouldn't be taken for granted in a thousand years. It would be hashed and rehashed in vivid and imaginative detail in the public prints year in, year out. Devious reasons would be ascribed for the mysterious seperation, criticism and gossip would fly right and left. Rather than leaving it to pursue its natural and logical course as it had done for Irene and the doctor, Hollywood would worry that marriage like a terrier puppy until it had been destroyed completely.

 "Yes," she mused. "I see what you mean and I am afraid I have no answer unless it could be that we ourselves set the pattern of thought by attaching no special significance to it or making a public whoop-ti-do about it."

 Those seperations, fortunately, are getting fewer and of shorter duration. They happened in the first place, you know, quite by accident. When Irene first left New York City and her husband for Hollywood she had no inkling the move would become almost permanent. Originally it was to be a jaunt, just time enough to make her first picture (which she thought would be her only one). When the doctor saw her success and the opportunities to be grasped he insisted she remain to make the most of them. His own successful career had taught him what such work could mean to another.

 It may be true, as Irene contends, that the separations are getting fewer because her stellar ranking gives her the privilege of making fewer pictures and hence more times for reunions. But since I notice the doctor is coming West with greater frequency, I'm inclined to think Missy is responsible. Missy, of course is Mary Frances, the adorable little daughter they adopted.

 "But Missy brings up another how-do-you-get-away-with-it," I said. "She is one of Hollywood's most famous babies yet I've never seen a picture of her in a newpaper or a magazine. That's nothing short of heresy!"

 "You never will, if I can help it," Irene said quickly and with a show or temper.

INCIDENTALLY, in case you don't know, she's about the most enthusiastic of Hollywood mothers I have encountered. She glows when she talks about Missy and to hear her tell it, no other baby possibly could be half as smart, beautiful, and altogether wonderful as hers. She spends hours every day with her, even though it means crowding the rest of her day's schedule to a fever pitch and snapshots of the child are forever popping out of her purse, her pockets, her scripts. With or without invitation or provocation she exhibits then anytime, anywhere. It's almost a complex!

 "That's two," Irene said. "What else do I get away with?"
 Tranquil vacations, quiet parties, being seen rarely in public, even her home itself, to mention but a few coups. Take vacations.

 "Is that so remarkable?" she asked.

 No, but the fact she is allowed to do just those things without benefit of a studio press-agent making it a gigantic exploitation stunt with receptions, interviews and milling mobs of fans all along the route is more than remarkable. It's unheard of!

 How, for instance, did she manage to stay at a famous resort in Santa Barbara for four days, with her name plainly written on the hotel register, without once being accosted or bothered?

 There was a naughty little twinkle in her eye when she answered, "I have an idea it may be because I stop being a movie star when I leave Hollywood," she said. "It can be done, you know."

 "But the studio..."

 "The studio knows now I prefer it that way," she said quietly.

 She prefers it that way! Just like that! Those anguished moans you hear in the distance are a lot of other stars saying "Don't we all!" And a lot of good it does them.

THEN take the matter of entertaining. That unwritten law of Hollywood glamor demands lavish and unique parties whose extraordinary features are publicized, photographed and talkes about for weeks. Despite that, Irene confines her hostessing to intimate affairs of eight or so for dinner and then on to a concert, the theatre or dancing for all the world like Joe and Betty Doakes who live next door to you. Parties nobody ever hears about out here because there's nothing spectacular to hear.

 When she celebrated the preview of The Awful Truth, for instance, she took her business manager and her publicity counsel to ane insconspicuous corner of a famous cafe and discussed the merits and faults of the picture over a glass of champagne. Yet do you know what the code says for preview celebrations? A whole big shebang with everybody connected with the picture having one elegant time at the star's expense!

 Studios frequently insist on the glamor girls being seen in public places in the company of some handsome man. Sometimes they even provide the man! It's supposed to add to the aura of her romantic appeal for parties of the first and second part or something, even it it's dull as dishwater. Well, only once in the blue moon will you ever see Irene in another man's company in Hollywood when the doctor is in New York, and the studio big-wigs can take it or leave it.

 Irene has a charming home in Holmby Hills, an exclusive Hollywood suburb, and here again she's guilty of stellar insubordination. It's no typical movie star's home at all! It has no swimming-pool, no stables, no kennels, no courts. Not even a high wall around it in protection from the vulgar gaze of the public. It's just a home in good taste such as any cultured, well-to-do couple might build anywhere in the United States.

 "You know that's treason," I said.

 "Uh huh," she agreed, "but it happens to be the kind of house we wanted, and so we have it that way."

 Yes, Irene Dunne gets away with murder and nobody knows exactly how or why. But a lot of people out here would like to find out.

(Motion Picture, July 1938)

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