IRENE DUNNE "NUCLEUS"

"LOVELY to look at, delightful to know" - let's give her a party!

 Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach must have been inspired when they wrote those songs for "Roberta" for they fit the lady who sings them like a glove, and now the whole country echoes them. The radio sends them to places where the picture perhaps will never be; orchestras play them in restaurants and night clubs, women hum them as they go about their work, delivery boys whistle them as they make their rounds  - and all that means the thing is a hit. The whole world seems enchanted by the melody lady who is so lovely to look at and delightful to know.

 

 Not that Irene Dunne, as an excuse for throwing a party, is anything new. It's been going on for years. That girl is just a natural inspirer. One has only to look at the knot of people crowding around her, like bees about a flower, and one thinks, now I must give a dinner for Irene and invite - and before she knows it the hostess is wondering where she will be able to hire chairs enough to accomodate all the people who will want to see Irene.

 

 I don't know what it is about her, a certain womanly charm or dignity of manner and warm friendliness - anyhow she seems to be the sort of girl that men think they could tell their troubles to and be understood and advised, but not entangled. And the women know that here is a girl to whom they can proudly introduce the boy friend and he won't be vamped right from under their nose. Not that Irene couldn't, but she wouldn't.

 

 In Hollywood, however, there are no parties for her. Bed at ten, up at six thirty is her schedule and she sticks to it, so between pictures, if there is enough time, she comes to New York and has her little fling. But even there work is never entirely out of her mind. She coaches every day, and laughed as she told me: "My friends say, 'What aren't you through taking singing lessons yet?' They don't realize that a voice can't be neglected or allowed to rust any more than a pianist could neglect his daily hours of practice, or a machine function smoothly without proper oiling.

 

 "But that isn't work to me. What is hard work is a continual and dizzy round of pleasure, house parties, luncheon, dinner and supper parties. It may be the irregulartiy of the hours, but after a few weeks of it I'm a wreck. This time I've actually lost weight and had to go on a diet. Imagine it. Of course, I want to see all the plays and as much of my friends as I can, but I've got to go back to Hollywood pretty soon to get some rest.

 

 "The other night an old friend of mine asked me out to her country place for a quiet little evening together. And how I looked forward to it. Well, there were sixty people!"

 "You can't blame your friends for being proud of you," I said.

 

 An extremely modest young woman, Irene then procceded to tell me that the people weren't interested in meeting her particularly, but she had been to Hollywood and she knew, she must know, Clark Gable! Gary Cooper! Merle Oberon! Myrna Loy! What were they like? Did Norma Shearer ever bathe her little son herself as other mothers did? Was Gary Cooper really shy? 

 "Do you want to see the house that never will be built?" Irene asked gaily, changing the subject abruptly, and placed in my hands sketches of a perfectly precious house southern Colonial with roses clambering over the white pillars of a door that opened out upon a charming garden. 

 "And why aren't you going to build this lovely place?" I wanted to know. 

 "Well," said Irene, "If all the studios move east a home in California won't be very helpful."

 "You certainly aren't taking all that nonsense seriously?" I asked.

 "Well, everyone in Hollywood seems to want us to. There is a lot of excitement about it and while it doesn't really make much sense one never can predict accurately what will happen in Hollywood."

 

 Irene talked over the air while she was here, on the Lux hour, which Hollywood takes very seriously. Some of the stars make the trip to New York just for that appearance. The thing about it that interested Irene most was the mechanical effects used: for example, when a door is broken through the splittering sound is made by crunching two wooden baskets together. The mechanical part of pictures always interests her, too, which is unusual for an actress. 

 

 She looked very natty that day in a dark blue tailored suit and ivory satin blouse, and for a corsage she wore one purple red carnation. I never saw such a georgous shade. She hates conventional corsages and in fact anything that hasn't individuality. She is not extreme, however. I mean she wouldn't wear a red and yellow dress just so everyone would exclaim 'look at Irene Dunne in that red and yellow dress.' Everything she has and wears is in perfect harmony; even the perfume she uses.

 "There is nothing new about having perfume blended to suit an individuality, but it always gives me a thril to know that it is made especially for me. It is made for me here in New York and the last I got I'm simply mad about. (I was too.) The only thing is that when I like it so well I want other people to have it, too, so it won't be exclusive very long.

 

 You will soon see her in "Show Boat," which she did on the stage. She knows that river country very well, having been born in Kentucky and made several trips up and down the tempestuous Mississippi. She is not as interested in musical plays as she is in plays with music - dramatic stories, which give the opportunity to sing a song or two, but that is all. When there is too much music the dramatic tempo is weakened.

 

 I remember when Irene first went to Hollywood, or I should say came, as I was out there then. She had been imported from the New York stage to play opposite Richard Dix in "Cimarron," and my what a clacking there was about it. Every stage importation was glared at in Hollywood those days and everyone wanted to know who Irene Dunne was and why almost anyone else could not be as good. The New York stage, musical comedy, a year at the Metropolitan (a kind of mixup it looked like) and for her first experience in pictures she picked Hollywood's biggest plum of the year. She was about as welcome as a rattlesnake.

 

 However, the picture wasn't finished before quite another buzzing was going on around her. The quiet charm, the sincerity and sweetness that is Irene Dunne leveled all envious barriers. She was not only liked, she was respected because she could troupe.

 How she flashed in her quarrel scenes with Richard and how utterly lovely she was in her submission to his driving urge to settle a new territory. She made you believe that she was woman enough to follow the man she loved into a prairie, though she had been gently reared and sheltered, and lady enough to establish that gentle breeding in the wildness of her new home. Many such women lived and loved and worked to build this country of ours, but not everyone who tries to make them live again on the stage or screen succeeds in making them real.

 It requires more than technique to do that. It requires sympathy and human understanding and Irene Dunn has both.

 

(Silver Screen, July 1935)