The Cinema

The Cinema

She comes of a farming family in North Carolina, and when she moved to Hollywood and was forced to live in cramped rooms with narrow openings, she longed always for a spacious house of her own, in whose broad garden she could practice what she had learned in her girlhood of the arts of gardening, and of keeping seeds until their planting time comes round...

... For two whole years Ava Gardner went on searching for this house, until her wish came true and she bought herself a pink house on the shoulder of a high hill, and moved into it with her refrigerator, her stove, and her maid. Her greatest pleasure lay in furnishing the various rooms and arranging them to harmonize with her personality and her own feminine temperament... considering, in all this, comfort before appearance...

Most of the rooms, yellow in color, look as though they were bathed in sunlight! — just like Ava's pure blonde hair.

Besides her surpassing beauty and her skill in acting, Ava is distinguished by her ripe taste in choosing her books and her collection of music; and when the need arises she is not incapable of carrying out all the tasks of the house, of every kind...

... And who does not know Spencer Tracy? Of whom it has been said in Hollywood: were it not for Clark Gable, he would be king of the actors outright. It may please our lady readers to learn these amusing facts about him...

Spencer Tracy's wardrobe, like actors' wardrobes generally, is packed with many elegant suits, but they are confined to three colors and no more: blue, gray, and brown — colors that harmonize with his red hair and his clear blue eyes — for this sedate actor wears no other colors. As for his shirts, they are all white! — all, that is, except one shirt of light gray that can hardly be told from white!

Tracy hates "make-up," and whenever the "make-up man" — the person who prepares the actors' faces to suit their roles — comes near him, Tracy flees from him as from a leper, lest he force him to put creams and powder on his face. In this respect he is like Clark Gable — both of them are men, and both believe that adornment and the beautifying of the face are the business of ladies alone! Even on the screen.

Among this actor's habits: he takes to his bed at half past eleven every night, and sets to reading books of history and legend until his eyelids grow heavy and he sleeps... only to spring up at four, before dawn, wrap himself in his house coat, and go down to the kitchen, where he boils his coffee himself and sits by the stove, sipping it and puffing his cigarette. All this as a prelude to studying his new role and preparing himself for it... And everyone who knows this actor wonders how he manages to balance his calm, even nature against this scant measure of sleep!

In many of his habits and traits he is like children: he loves sweets to the point of madness, hunts for them more than his two children Johnny and Susie do, and his pockets are never without them...

And he has a tender, gentle heart that will not allow him to watch a bird slaughtered or hunted. For this reason alone Tracy hates hunting, and does not encourage his children to take it up...