Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 91

ON THE set of "The Man in the Iron Mask" I ran into Alan Hale, all done up in a velvet robe, with a huge cape fastened with a silver buckle the size ol Seabiscuit's front hoof. The banquet scene for a Louis XIV dinner made him think of a friend who had just let himself in for a bedroom suite, around which he has built his house. It once belonged to a Pharaoh or a Rameses or a Ptolemy, or anyway one of their descendants. "The mahogany in the two canopied beds is so heavy," says Hale, "that my friend had to hire four stevedores to get it into the room, which had been especially built for it. Originally it cost $32,000.

My friend paid $600 for it. It was copied from an Egyptian original for a famous person who would have died in it if he could have afforded such luxury at time of demise. As it was, he sold it and eventually it came to rest in my friend's new home. It is all gold and silver trimmed, as elaborate as anything Cleopatra ever dreamed, but it takes a stronger soul than mine to sleep in one of the beds. "My friend is such a soul.

He cant sleep without something bizarre going on around him. He's a great fellow for extravaganza. He bought a bathroom which had once been the delight oi a great star. She paid some fantastic sum for it, but he had it installed for a nominal figure. The tub is of mother-of-pearl; the fixtures of pure gold And every door-knob in his house is solid silver.

"I have a theory about such things. I believe that things have a vibration which eventually brings them to the person for whom they were actually made, regardless of how many hands they pass through in the interim." They had to put the SRO sign on the Monday night radio theater program when Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert appeared in "It Happened One Night." A lot of water has run under the bridge since these two played in the film version, and I'm afraid they have grown up quite a bit. I wonder, indeed, if they could put the same abandon into their acting as they did then. Gable was a sigh of sartorial elegance in a beige colored sports coat, with big patch pockets, slacks just a shade off sheer white, brown suede shoes and a brown tie. His hair, done for the role of Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind." is attractive as a sort of fram for his smiling face and Clark's smile is a warming and soul-satisfying grin.

He didn't seem at all nervous, but went into the part of the reporter with enthusiasm. Claudette Colbert, in a smart black crepe frock with gold ornaments, her hair done in the little girl style so much in vogue, looked a shade demure as she climbed up on a high stool for part of the broadcast. She wore long white kid gloves, crushed around her wrists, and carried a watermelon pink chiffon scarf-handkerchief. Thoroughly grand Claudette and Clark but I fell in love with the bus driver, Harold Burns, who was a guest on the show. There's a lad with a smile that would make a million for any tobacco company.

And I noticed that both Gable and Miss Colbert gave him a hearty hand as he lumbered off, thoroughly pleased with himself, De Mille and the world. AaLLACE FORD declares business is so bad in one Hollywood night club that the manager is putting red lanterns on the white tablecloths to keep the waters from becoming snow blind. Some of the other spots will have to push their waiters out in the snow, if the management doesn't stop gypping the customers. A rumor seems to be running around that Billy Rose offered Dorothy Lamour some fantastic price to appear at the New York Aquacade, with sarong. She resents this cheap brand of publicity and says she never received such an offer or heard a word from Billy Rose about such a thing in her life.

By Grace Wilcox YOU are going to see and hear a lot of Louis Hayward from now on. With my usual penchant for dropping in at the wrong time, I discovered him in bed. In bed, asleep, breathing rhythmically, done tip in a Louis XIV costume that would have looked lovely on his real wife, Ida Lupino, or his screen wife, Marie-Therese. He is starring in "The Man in the Iron Mask." He insists, when awake, that there is something about a lace jabot which seems to be a little too much but, says he, "If Louis XIV could stand it, why not Louis Hayward?" Why not, indeed? "I don't mind Louis XIV," he said, pushing back his lace frills, "or, that is, not until he begins to eat. The old boy certainly knew how to stow away his victuals and spill onion soup down his shirt-front.

It's ghastly to see him do it in such beautiful surroundings; gold plate pushed under his nose by an army of servitors; light gleaming from a thousand prisms; gorgeous flowers on the table; Dresden candelabra; chairs upholstered in red velvet with his crest. And he slobbers like a baby. Doesn't seem right, but laundry bills were cheaper in those days." Young men who come right out in meeting and say they would rather act than eat make a hit with me. Clark Gable is one and Louis Hayward, hero of our present consideration, is another. No beating around the bush for Hayward.

He hasn't starved or lived in a garret for his art, but he has had a ruddy round of rows with his family. They wanted him to take an interest in his uncle's Pitchwood Importing or to go in as clerk in a ship broker's office, but he wanted to act. So he skipped out of the brokerage concern and chased a rainbow westward in the general direction of Hollywood. Ever since he played ice hockey in "The Duke of West Point," Hayward has been receiving letters asking him if he were actually playing ice hockey. "Probably think I was going in for knitting," he remarks, dryly.

As a matter of fact, he learned all sorts of sports at the same time he acquired a little Continental polish at the St. Xavier School in Paris. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Louis Hayward never knew his father, a celebrated mining engineer of the Transvaal, who was killed in a runaway accident a month before his son was born. "Maybe it was my mother who first put the idea of acting into my mind," he says, with a faraway look in his eyes. "I remember I used to get up on the table and do imitations of Charlie Chaplin.

She probably liked them and that was the childhood fixation which remained with me. Regardless of what she thought of me as a child actor, she certainly tried to keep me from going on the stage as long as she could. Yet she was a very good sport about it when I told her I was going to act or die in the attempt. She loaned me enough money to back a stock company so I could get experience. I got the experience but the company went broke." He likes to look back to his days on the New York stage when he played with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in "Point Valaine." It was soon after this that talent scouts brought him to Hollywood for a test.

Hayward also likes to remember playing with Sir Gerald du Maurier, Constance Collier, Gladys Cooper and Raymond Massey in various stage plays in London. "Since 'The Duke of West people don't 6eem to have so much trouble remembering my face," grins the young actor. "Edward Small doesn't make so many pictures that I don't have a little time in between, and I'm going back to the stage from time to time, I hope." If it is experience Hayward wanted before tackling important roles on the screen, he certainly got it in "The Flame Within," "Condemned Woman," "Midnight Intruder," "The Woman I Love," "The Luckiest Girl in the World," "Trouble for Two," "A Feather in Her Hat," "Anthony Adverse," "The Saint in New York" and "The Rage of Paris," in which he had a lot of fun talking French to Danielle Darrieux, who was supposed to think in English and forget her French. OAH BEERY, is some--- thing of a pet around Hollywood. Right now he is at Columbia studios, but for several years he has been making Westerns at Universal He is an independent young fellow, my lad, who has taken care of his mother fof some time and is now engaged to Maxine Jones, daughter of Buck Jones, whom he has known all his life.

He is saving his shekels to add to the acreage of his ranch and to improve it in various ways his hobbies are horses and sculpturing. Both go together in his case, for he carves horses out of everything he can lay his hands on, from putty to clay to marble to stone to bronze. He likes to run down to Mexico and come back with all sorts of Mexican things bridles, saddles, spurs, ornaments for the ranch house and hand-made pots for plants in the patio. His nickname is Pidge, and whatever success he has he attributes to the interest and encouragement of his mother. Marguerite Beery, who coaches him for all his parts.

"I just looked the field over and decided I couldn't make money any faster than in pictures," he said the other day. "Besides, it's in the family blood, I guess." They had a made-to-order bomb explosion in a jail on Paramount'! "Mr. and Mrs. Bulldog Drummond" set tha other day. After it was over, Reginald Denny, Heather Angel, E.

E. Clive, Eduard Cianelli, Jacques Lory and John Howard looked at one another, aghast. They were as white as the family ghosts wandering around Glamis Castle. "It wouldn't be so bad," explained Howard a few minutes later, "but all that dust has com- Eiletely covered our Dictionary game, so nobody who won." For those who may have, forgotten, John Howard originated this game, which rages regularly between scenes and takes the place" of knitting among the men in tha cast. yl ICHAEL CURTIZ had a J.

J. terrible time at Carmel-by-the-Sea. The wind and the waves completely defeated him. He took the entire company of "Family Reunion," including Lola, Rosemary and Priscilla Lane, John Garfield, Fay Bainter, Jeffrey Lynn, Claude Rains, Gale Page, to the little town for scenes. But he couldn't make the sun come out and it's deucedly foggy this time of year in the Monterey country.

However, Carmel turned its Bchool children loose to see some real, live, honest-to-goodness actors in the flesh, but they became an added hazard. They heckled M. Curtiz and his crew, showing no proper respect for anybody. It was just too, too grim. Finally the harassed director pulled up stakes and left Carmel-by-the-Sea to return to its regular routine.

It's easier to move Carmel, complete with sea, to Burbank than to take a "Family Reunion" to Carmel, apparently. Joan Blondell couldn't have her picture taken for trying on hats. She was supposed to be in a couple of places at once: in the gallery for fashion pictures and on the set of "Good Girls Go to Paris." "And what," inquired Joan, "do they go to Pans for? For hats, of course! And that's just what I'm doing buying hats." When somebody in New York asked John Barrymore how he happened to come back to the stage, he replied: "Just to see how much 'hamming' I've actually been doing in Hollywood." It was good to tee William Powell lunching at the Vine Street Brown Darby the other day. He looks lean, but brown and healthy. He held an impromptu reception and when he got a chance to eat, I don't know.

He is about to go into another "Thin Man" picture..