The Irene Dunne Site
She Made A Hole In One
By FRANK CONDON
SOMETHING over a year ago a young lady with sable tresses was a visitor in California, looking about speculatively and wondering if a person could get a job behind those tall, formidable fences where they make the dramas on running film.
The young lady was Miss Irene Dunne, and she was just a Louisville girl with a mild urge to show the movies that Kentucky produces nothing but the best. A year later her name was among the five that went before the annual awards meeting of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the others in this extremely select list being Marie Dressler, Ann Harding, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich.
This young stranger from the Blue Grass had appeared in Cimarron, The Great Lover and Consolation Marriage - three and no one-hundredths pictures - and of these, Cimarron did the business for the Dunne family.
The heroine of Cimarron is a young slip of a thing at the beginning and elderly toward the close, and Miss Dunne felt sure she could handle the job, for she had played Magnolia in Mr. Ziegfeld's New York production of Show Boat. The R.K.O. studio was reluctant to hand over the role to such a new girl, but finally decided to take a chance, and since then nobody has been sorry.
She was born in Louisville, but the family migrated to St. Louis, where the younger lady proceeded with her education and discovered, to her astonishment, that she could sing. Looking over the field of human endeavor, she elected to become a school-teacher, an instructor of the eager young, and through hard study she secured a teacher's license and stood ready to inform children that the principal export of Ireland is young cops. But she had no school, and no matter how good your license is, you cannot teach the young if you have no school. Influential friends stepped in in the right moment and subsequently got her a school in East Chicago, and the Dunne girl moved to Chicago and waited for the fall term to open. This was the nearest she ever came to being a school-teacher.
Passing along the peaceful streets of Cicero, she observed a billboard which announced a contest at the Chicago Musical College and invited those who felt like singing to come in on the fourteenth and warble before the judges. The waiting schoolmarm joined the contestants and won first prize, and that was the day she decided never to be a school-teacher. She embarked upon a career of song and wound up singing Magnolia in Show Boat, leaping thence into Cimarron and a white house in Hollywood.
Seeking Success in Far Places
SHE firmly believes musical pictures will return some day, and as she desires to remain in the films, she studies with coach and tutor, and this helps her avoid the boredom that some Hollywood folk combat by gadding around nights and giving bridge parties.
According to her own testimony, she is constantly busy and has no time or inclination for social affairs, so Hollywood sees little of her. She has a husband in New York, but it is not one of those husband-in-New-York families, because every so often he takes a train for California, and between pictures Miss Dunne goes to New York. The last time they arrived, together, eager photographers tried to make them dress in costumes of aviators, but this seemed wrong to them, as neither will ride in a plane; so they declined the googles and overalls, and were photographed leaving a Pullman.
In Cimarron Miss Dunne was called upon to make a political speech, which she did with such ardor that Mr. Will Rogers, a prominent fist-nighter, was deeply impressed. Standing outside the theater when the show was over, he said: "That is the best political speech I ever heard a woman make. If women could make speeches like that, they would be still in the politics."
So that she may keep slim, and because she loves the grand old game, she plays a golf at Lakeside, and plays earnestly and diligently, but is inclined to give evasive answers about her scores. She declares, with every appearance of truth, that she once broke a hundred. This occured on the Oyster Harbor course at Cape Cod, which is far away from Hollywood as a person attending to break a hundred can go.
In motion-picture circles Miss Dunne is spoken of as a certain success and is also regarded as a truthful person. She has blue Irish eyes and a frank, open manner, and everyone says she would rather die than temper with the truth; and yet there is something queer about the hole in one which she says she made at Pebble Beach golf course, Carmel, California. It is to be noted that when Miss Dunne performs a notable feat on a golf links, she goes from five hundred to three thousand miles away. She had done nothing on the local course but get tanned.
Accompanied by her husband and two Hollywood caddies, she drove up to Pebble Beach, taking her golf clubs, and almost immediately made the hole in one referred to, accomplishing the feat on the famous seventh hole, which is a little island at sea. You stand on the tee and hit one out to the little island at sea, and if you do not hit the little island, you land in the Pacific Ocean and lose a golf ball.
On this difficult hole Miss Dunne performed her exploit, but as she had brought the caddies from Hollywood and had no other witness but her husband, she realized the thing would look suspicious to the golfing public. So what did she do? There were six Italian workmen digging a trap near by, and four strange golf players on No.8 tee, waiting for the twosome to go through, and, thinking quickly, Miss Dunne asked all the strange golfers and all the Italian trench diggers if they would kindly step up to the hole and see if it contained a ball. They did, and it did. All present then signed a legal document, which was witnessed by a notary public and the local chief of police, and those are the facts relating to Miss Dunne's hole in one.
Pebble Beach is the personal and private golf course of Mr. Samuel G. Blythe, the political seer, and No.7 is the famous hole whereon Mr. H. L. Wilson drove sixteen new balls into the briny deep - all he had with him - and then threw his clubs overboard, one by one, followed by the bag, and would have finished with the caddie, who left at that moment.
There is a commercial aspect to making a hole in one and Miss Dunne immediately received many prizes, including such articles as golf balls, safety razors, auto tires, bath robes, ash receivers, pencil sharpeners, toothpaste and furniture polish.
When she is not actually engaged in making a picture at R.K.O. studios, she is kept fairly busy with minor activities relating to manufacture of drama and can be seen shaking hands with the Georgia football team, or with Gatty and Post, receiving delegates from the National Education Association, dedicating a palatial new filling station or christening a yacht. In between times she snatches an hour here and there, and rushes over to Lakeside, where she never despairs of breaking a hundred.
Losing Her Love for the Heights
MISS DUNNE is five feet, four and a half inches tall and lives in a large house on a corner. The house has a prominent doorbell, which is rung at hourly intervals by forlorn persons who want two dollars each for purposes of personal upkeep. When the rising star first arrived in California she was fascinated by the beautiful, rugged mountains, and told her mother, who lives with her, that they must have a home in the lovely hills, where a person could gaze down upon the world and feel exalted. She came in the midst of a rainy spell, hired a motor car and drove up to look for the house, and on a shining stretch of mountain road she began to skid and was barely saved after sliding halfway to Minneapolis. She then decided to live permanently on a flat place, and has done so ever since.
She likes to eat hard-boiled eggs dipped in vinegar. She is enraptured with the motion-picture business and stands ready to work twenty-four hours a day. Everybody in Hollywood likes her and hopes she will make either one or two million dollars and become the greates living actress.
Good-looking men depress her and she likes the plain, homely fellow. In general she likes men better than women, as the men seem more sincere and straightforward. This growing disregard for women by women is quite marked of late, and if it continues, there will nobody left to like women, except a few scattered men.
Her greatest pride is in having won first prize at a dahlia show, and when not at the studio or otu at the golf course, she can be noticed in her garden, urging the dahlias to increased efforts. She doesn't drink and believes that persons who imbibe are inclined to be stoutish and have dark circles under their eyes; and she smokes only when she is in company of mixed persons who might pont her out as and oddity if she didn't.
Her saddest experience was in the railway station at Brussels, whither she had gone thirty minutes before traintime to arrange for shipment of her trunk. Officials at the station spoke no English that day, and the thirty minutes' leeway was not enough, in view of the fact that the trunk had disappeared. She lost her temper, lost her trunk, missed her train and spent the night talking with officials of the constabulary.
In spite of Louisville and St. Louis she laughs easily. She has traveled in England, France, Holland, Switzerland and Italy, and of all the cities in the world, she prefers Paris. She wears one of those high-school bérets without any visor and squints when the California sun opens up, or rather did squint until someone warned her she would acquire sun wrinkles. Now she wears dark glasses and looks like the girl detective in a play called The Paper Cup.
A certain publication, anxious to have her views, sent a tall, pale man to the studio, and she invited him politely to lunch with her in the restaurant, a regular, normal studio restaurant, with actors eating rapidly and waitresses hurling dishes. The young man was either shy or unaccustomed to the hurly-burly of studio life, and spoke in low tones. In fact, his tones were so low that Miss Dunne heard nothing he asked from beginning to end, and made responses by the simple process of guessing the questions. She likes brown and blue, and hates red.
She enjoys living a natural life, which consists of rising early, playing golf for excercise, going home to dinner and early to bed. In New York she knew show girls who preferred the artificial life, where you rise about five in the afternoon, have dinner with some wealthy young scion, go leisurely to the theater and labor until midnight. At one in the morning you have supper with another wealthy young scion, and join a crowd of merrymakers, who go places until the milkmen begin delivery. Following this method, you see the sun Decoration Day and Michaelmas. Miss Dunne likes to see the sun every day, all day long, and besides that there is always the chance of making another hole in one.
(Saturday Evening Post, June 1, 1932. Thanks to Masha for this article!)
And here is the official proof:
