Rising Star

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"Let's see, now," mused Designer Norman Bel Geddes last week, when he was asked about his younger daughter's birth. "Barbs was done the year I did the Palais Royal, my first New York restaurant." Daughter Barbara never turned out to be as glittering a production as the Palais Royal (eventually remodeled into the lavish Latin Quarter). Nor has she learned to match her father's trick of the casually preoccupied phrase. Nonetheless, in her own quieter way, Barbara Bel Geddes was celebrating last week her undisputed rise to fame and glory as an authentic star in her own right.

Her name, shining on the marquee of Manhattan's Henry Miller's Theater, was there neither by producer's whim nor happy fluke. Against the weight of popular legend, she had climbed to her eminence the hard way, through years of professional trial & error, part success and part failure. New York City's critics had watched her rise to stardom in seven Broadway plays, had seen her eclipsed by lesser stars in six Hollywood pictures. But in Playwright F. Hugh Herbert's fresh and frothy comedy, The Moon Is Blue (TIME, March 19), Barbara had returned to Broadway as that rare phenomenon--an ingenue who can act.

The critical raves that greeted her prodigal return from Hollywood rang like a pressagent's dream of the perfect billboard. "Beautiful," sighed the Times's erudite Brooks Atkinson. "Captivating," cooed the Daily News's John Chapman. "Lovely," purred the World-Telegram and Sun's William Hawkins. Columnist Ward Morehouse urged all theatergoers to "hurry over to Henry Miller's and watch a lovely young actress at work."

As Patty O'Neill, Moon's naive and unpredictable ingenue, who surprises a middle-aged lecher into an offer of marriage and an amiable young wolf into a promise of chastity, Barbara Bel Geddes shines and twinkles with an authentic radiance. Her give & take with Co-Stars Donald Cook and Barry Nelson is sharp, sure, and exquisitely timed. Her poise is unshakable. In 1941, when she first appeared on Broadway, critics had called Barbara a "plump" and "promising" ingenue. Now, trimmer, slimmer, and thoroughly resourceful on the stage, she is an accomplished, soundly competent performer.

Well-Scrubbed Schoolgirl. Few Broadway stars have failed so signally to look the part. As Patty, Barbara Bel Geddes (rhymes with wed us) looks and talks more like a Bryn Mawr graduate (which she is not) than the cop's daughter she plays, and more like Barbara Bel Geddes than either. In the navy blue pullover sweater, plain skirt, saddle shoes and white dickey collar which she wears about town almost as a uniform, she could easily be confused with a well-scrubbed Connecticut schoolgirl off to the movies.

At 28, Barbara stands 5 ft. 3 in. tall, weighs a mere 113 Ibs., tosses her burnished, straw-colored hair in a girlish bob, and gazes at the world through clear hazel eyes. In a medium where pose and posture are the standards, she is almosl startlingly forthright. Painfully self-conscious under scrutiny, uninhibited among close friends, Barbara can cuss like a longshoreman and make it sound as offhand as a schoolgirl's "Jeepers." The effect of such artlessness on the stage is to make practically anything Barbara does seem credible and convincing. One mark of her real talent lies in the fact that she can be herself and still translate the flick of an eyelash or the sting of a tear across 15 rows of seats into the darkest corner of the theater.

Actress Bel Geddes still falls prey to many an uncertainty about her chosen career. Before Moon opened, she worried over whether she was too old for Patty. Now she is worried over whether she is not too immature for other parts. Actually, she has already resolved both doubts to the satisfaction of most critics. As the simple, unaffected Southern belle of Deep Are the Roots (1945), she had shown her capacity for serious drama; now she has shown her mastery of the peculiar demands of airy farce. Cornell, Bankhead, Hayes and Lawrence will not have to give way to Barbara for a while yet. But the quiet radiance and well-trained competence that Barbara had brought to Broadway was enough to give the fabulous invalid plenty of hope for the day when her elders might retire. "Barbara has a terrific future in the theater," says Moon's Director Otto Preminger. "She has a brusque honesty and an instinct for the stage that is very rare."

Three-Ringed Brownstone. Barbara's joint fear of and attraction to the limelight is a legitimate inheritance. For a generation before she entered the theater, her father Norman had rumbled and roared like an earthquake in the foundations of show business, making plans, productions, money, noise, friends and enemies on a gargantuan scale. The example of his unbridled imagination and breezy pressagentry taught Barbara early in life that the theater could be both sheen and shoddy.

A Michigander of Scottish-German ancestry, Norman Bel Geddes has been, among other things, actor, producer, director, stage designer and author. The big brownstone house on Manhattan's East 37th Street in which Barbara spent her early childhood saw an endless stream of visitors from many worlds. It was Norman's studio as well as his home, and on the upper floors busy draftsmen and artisans were always hard at work, assembling stage models, cutting out rubber animals for a Macy parade, drawing up plans for a restaurant, or laying out production schedules for some new show.

In the welter of productive activity that characterized the Bel Geddes establishment, Barbara was, comparatively, pretty small potatoes. Like Joan, her elder (by six years) sister, and a short-lived "little" magazine called Inwhich, she was the product of Norman's collaboration with his first wife, Helen Belle Sneider.* She was no match for such stupendous enterprises as Norman's transformation of New York's Century Theater into a Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle.

But in 1927, when Barbara was only five years old, that frantic, fascinating period of her life came abruptly to an end. Designer Bel Geddes and his wife separated. From the turmoil of the family brownstone, Barbara and her sister were transplanted to the quiet of a house in Millburn, N.J. (pop. 13,400). Partly because of Belle's retiring nature and partly because of their newly straitened circumstances, their life was cloistered even for life in a suburban town.

The Cloister. As she grew up, Barbara's need for a dramatic outlet became more urgent than ever. The pictures father Norman took on his rare, explosive visits show her as a leggy towhead assuming all the languorous and seductive poses common to the movie magazines of the day. When no camera was at hand, Barbara would register her soul-searing emotions before a mirror. Her sister Joan and her mother, who disapproved of the children going to movies, called it "making faces."

When Barbara was 15 her mother died, and she was packed off to Vermont's coeducational Putney School. Putney's faculty remember her as "a bubbly, vivacious, buxom girl, with a talent for mimicry and no academic skill." At Putney, she dreamed through classroom hours, let her eyes rest happily on the strange new world of young men surrounding her, romped on the playing fields, and plunged ecstatically into a production of Synge's Riders to the Sea. After the play was staged, the school drama teacher wrote Bel Geddes that his daughter had displayed no dramatic talent whatsoever.

"Barbara," reported another teacher, "seems completely unaware of how disturbing an influence she is." The perturbation was caused largely among the male student body. One evening during Barbara's second year, Putney's headmistress discovered one of the boys kissing Barbara. She wrote to Norman suggesting that he would do well to send his daughter to another school. Andrebrook, an all-girl establishment as free of temptation as a French convent school, was recommended. Norman agreed, but his daughter persuaded him to let her have a run first in greener pastures.

In June of 1940, Barbara joined Actor-Producer Alexander Kirkland's summer stock at Clinton, Conn, as an apprentice. Between walk-on appearances and rounds of scene painting, she studied the Stanislavsky acting technique with Coach Lee Strasberg. "We'd be teapots, poison ivy and other things, for practice," says Barbara, "and I just loved it." She played bits with Ethel Barrymore, Sinclair Lewis and other visiting stars, and at the end of the season she even got a fat part of her own--Amy in Little Women. Says Barbara: "I got damn good notices, too."

Blonde Apprentice. Barbara had been more favorably noticed as Amy than even she suspected, and before the end of her first semester at Andrebrook, Producer Kirkland offered her a part in a real Broadway show. On Feb. n, 1941 Barbara made her Broadway debut as an amiably nitwitted ingenue in an inconsequential piece called Out of the Frying Pan.

"Norman Bel Geddes' plump and blonde daughter," wrote the Times's Atkinson, "is still in the apprentice stage of histrionics." Apprentice or not, Barbara was on her way. Frying Pan was followed by a U.S.O. tour in Junior Miss, during which Barbara made herself ill removing the anathema of that word "plump." There were three more Broadway plays in which she got glowing personal notices ("I've been a hit in more flops than any actress on Broadway," she cracks), and another fling at summer stock. Gradually, her real talent for the theater became more apparent. But she was still far from being a dedicated actress.

In the summer of 1943, Independent Producer Hunt Stromberg gave her a screen test. Barbara failed to get a contract, but soon afterward she found a proposition even more to her liking, in the person of a handsome young electrical engineer named Carl Schreuer. After a short courtship, Carl and Barbara were married. Barbara was all ready then to quit the stage for good, but Carl himself discouraged the notion. Soon after their baby Susan was born, Barbara was called to read for Deep Are the Roots, to be directed by Elia Kazan. Carl urged her to try it. Barbara got the part.

The Whole Burden. Deep Are the Roots was a problem play about the South, which, like many an argument on the same subject, became entangled in melodrama and the more or less irrelevant question of miscegenation. But in it, Barbara's performance as a Southern girl who determines to marry a Negro, as a sort of general apology for the sins of her people, registered hard with New York's critics. "Miss Bel Geddes," wrote the Herald Tribune's Howard Barnes, "in one of the most exacting roles a young actress ever had to play, is superb." "I can't recall a single one who was her equal," said Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram, "Miss Bel Geddes not only succeeded in giving the role life but she did it so poignantly and realistically as, in effect, to carry the whole burden of the show on her shoulders."

After Roots, the Bel Geddes future seemed assured. Hollywood's ears were pricked like a hunting dog's. "Everybody," says Hollywood Director George Stevens, who was sent to New York to have a look, "had the Bel Geddes fever that year." R.K.O. entered the contest for Barbara with a contract the like of which no untried newcomer to Hollywood had ever seen before. By its terms, Barbara was to do not more than two pictures a year for the studio, at $50,000 each for the first year. She was to get equal billing with such stars as Henry Fonda and Irene Dunne, have the right to do a stage play on each alternate season and two pictures a year for other studios. Above all, she was to get a role which she had tried for and missed on Broadway--the literary daughter in I Remember Mama. "I think," said Barbara Bel Geddes, "that was cute of R.K.O."

"Mad as Hell." Director Kazan and many another of Barbara's friends in New York urged her to stay away from pictures. "She was not a commodity, a can of peas," says Kazan. "She was an actress." But Actress Bel Geddes had at last been granted a wish completely on her own terms. She was not to be turned off. "I wanted desperately to be a movie star," she admits today. She went to the coast determined, often quite touchily (as in the matter of dressing rooms), to be treated like a movie star. The one thing she could not, or would not, do was to behave like a movie star.

Hollywood has a name for such actresses. It calls them "sensitive." For one reason or another, a "sensitive actress" will refuse to do a striptease, or be hit by a custard pie, or perform other trifling tasks often deemed necessary to her art. Helen Hayes had been an outstanding sensitive in her brief flings at Hollywood. Barbara was plainly another. She met all the requirements of the star's life with open rebellion. Even the barbecue grill at her home annoyed her because it was so typically Hollywood. Besides, she says, "I hated being under contract, hated always being told what to do next."

Hollywood's hard-working hours gave Barbara little chance to see her baby. Her husband Carl's was but one of the voices urging her on with advice and suggestion. Some of the advice was probably good, but under the avalanche of expert opinion her own confidence wilted. "The self-assurance she had on the stage just vanished," says one of her best friends on the coast.

At one point, simply to avoid the incessant heckling of makeup men who complained about the difficulties of shading her "nipple" nose, Barbara went to a plastic surgeon and had it bobbed. "It hurt," she said, "like the devil." The Hollywood payoff came when R.K.O.'s new boss Howard Hughes declared that Barbara had "no sex appeal." "That," said Barbara, "made me mad as hell." After 2 1/2 years and four pictures, she and the studio parted company. "I was fired," is the way Barbara puts it.

She stayed on the coast for another 14 months, got small parts (at $35,000 each) in two pictures (Panic in the Streets and the current Fourteen Hours) with 20th Century-Fox. Then she quit. Last fall, after a brief jaunt in summer stock, she went back to Broadway and the stage.

"Something Important." Some critics argue that Actress Bel Geddes was a downright flop in pictures. The fact is that she was neither a success nor a failure. As the daughter in Mama, Barbara did well enough to be nominated for an Oscar./- She was distinctive in none of her pictures, but in none was she disastrous. Like a diamond in the wrong setting, she seemed simply to have lost the special radiance that marked her on the stage. In the proper setting, the radiance was quick to return.

New York's critics gave every sign of wanting to welcome Barbara home with loud huzzas when she came back to Broadway last fall in John Steinbeck's gauntly Saroyanesque play, Burning Bright. But in the face of Steinbeck's dreary obscurities, the best most of them could muster was a cordial hello. Last month, when Barbara at last rode into town on a good play, the huzzas were unanimous.

"I didn't realize," said Barbara last week, "how much I had missed New York." With her play set for a long run, and a seven-month contract guaranteeing her 10% of the box-office take (a figure topped only by such stars as Bankhead and Lawrence), she had time at last to spend long hours with her daughter Susan. The marriage which had been foundering on the shoals of Hollywood was ending in amicable divorce. Barbara had taken a two-year lease on a house in the East 80s, and was busy furnishing it. There were romantic and practical plans in the offing with a young stage director named Windsor Lewis, who had known and worked with her in the theater and TV.

Barbara's plans for the immediate future call for a trip to the circus with six-year-old Susan, and a summer of sailing and swimming during the run of her play. After that, she says, "I'd like to do something important. If I ever go back to Hollywood, it will only be on a one-picture contract."

* The Bel in Bel Geddes was borrowed by Norman from his wife to grace his own plain Scots name.

/- For news of this year's Oscar winners, see CINEMA.

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