Ideal Woman

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In an expert piece of sentiment called Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a young English actress, who looked rather like a goddess sculptured in butterscotch, made her brief screen debut, and without fair warning even to herself, stole the film. Though nobody clearly realized it at the time (four years ago), she also started something new in screen history.

The something new was to make Mrs. Miniver and Random Harvest two of the five greatest screen hits ever manufactured. It was to explain every success that the young actress, whose name was Greer Garson, has had since. It was slowly to crystallize and congeal Miss Garson's vivid, rangy talent for acting, and to lift it to an eminence comparable to that of St. Simeon Stylites: high, conspicuous, and not without grandeur, but without much room to turn around in. In fact, it was to doom and royally imprison Cinemactress Garson, very possibly for the rest of a career which culminated this week in the soberly splendid scientific romance, Madame Curie. For Hollywood and for Greer Garson, the picture was one of the scariest jobs either had ever undertaken. But, given the fusion of their compensating formulas, success was almost chemically inevitable.

For what cinemaddicts saw in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Greer Garson, was something old and cherished in their hearts, but new and unexpected on the screen--the Ideal (if overidealized) Woman. Not a full-bosomed, cottontailed babe, a chromium goddess, an uncrowned martyr or a vampire bat, but a woman who simply looked and acted the way any grownup, good woman should. Miss Garson's beauty was neither parasitic nor predatory, but rich and kind. She wore the sort of ample, archaic dresses in which many cinemaddicts tenderly remembered themselves, their wives, or their mothers. She did not make love like a saber-toothed tiger. She treated shy, fumbling Schoolmaster Chips (as every shy, fumbling cinemaddict could see) gaily, gently, generously. She turned him into a shining and confident husband. And when she died in childbirth, she mowed down her audience in great emotional windrows, and left them gnashing their handkerchiefs and begging for more.

Beauty and the Box Office. Through Cinemactress Garson, Hollywood had stumbled upon, and reawakened in millions of people, a recognition of the dignity and beauty of mature womanhood. It had also stumbled upon one of the richest box-office formulas and one of the greatest potential box-office figures in its 50 years of prospecting. Not knowing at first what a radioactive element it had in hand, Hollywood kept right on stumbling and immediately miscast Miss Garson. Of her next film, Remember, she says simply: "Let's not." Pride and Prejudice was a harmless excursion into literature, but in the Garson career it was a round trip. Blossoms in the Dust at least surrounded Miss Garson with children, though they were other people's, and illegitimate, to boot. More important, it first mated this predestined dove with Walter Pidgeon. Blossoms was Miss Garson's first real hit as a leading lady. But where Blossoms fumbled for the Garson beam, Mrs. Miniver found it, and rode it into box-office history. Random Harvest rode it right out of the park.

With Madame Curie, the new cinematic element embodied by Miss Garson is finally isolated. The Ideal Woman is at last presented in simple cinemapotheosis. Greer Garson is Her greatest, indeed Her exclusive, Prophet.

Baby Bluestocking. A somewhat precocious child was mother to this Ideal Woman. Little Miss Garson was high-strung, bronchitic, given to fainting spells, and ill at ease with her nasty little peers (who called her Ginger). At an age when the average young Neanderthaler is spelling out "I HATE BOOKS," Greer was already too old for Alice in Wonderland. She sprinkled her porridge with table talk from succes d'estime like Colley Gibber and His Circle. "I was," she recalls, "rather a stuffy child."

At the University of London, which she swooped through in three years (on scholarships and with honors), Greer played in amateur theatricals. Her college yearbook thumbnailed her as "a unique blend of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Goldilocks and the Three Bears." This unique blend returned from a year's study at Grenoble with a passionate desire to become an actress. Cried her Presbyterian grandmother: "No granddaughter of mine will ever lift her legs upon a stage." So Greer set up and operated a market research library for a London advertising firm, soon rated a respectable -L-10 a week.

One day she wangled a letter to the business manager of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Miss Garson strong-armed him into starting her at -L-4 a week instead of -L-3. For two years she played leads. After that, Greer did walk-ons and held garlands in highly respectable and futureless productions of Shakespeare in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. She was about to leave the theater a suicide note and go back to Commerce. But one night, while Greer was in the bleak gentility of The University Women's Club, high-glazed, handsome Authoress Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring) sauntered over and said: "I've been watching you all through dinner; are you by any chance an actress? It's ridiculous, I hardly know you; but I feel you're exactly the person we want."

Popcorn and Ping-Pong. Two years later, Greer Garson was one of the most promising young British actresses of her generation. She shared a handsome flat with her handsome mother in brightest Mayfair. She swapped fancy conversational popcorn with Bernard Shaw, was friend, colleague and mental ping-pong partner of people like Noel Coward, Sylvia Thompson, Laurence Olivier, Margaret Webster. In two years, during which she had only two weeks' vacation, she worked in no fewer than eight plays. Nearly all of them were flops. But Miss Garson was never a flop. She had ability. She had presence. She had a ferocious and exacting belief in herself. And she had an almost pathological need for continuous hard work. Envious inferiors called her Ca-Reer Garson.

One night Fate scratched timorously at Ca-Reer Garson's dressing-room door. There was a man to see her. "If it's stockings," called Miss Garson, "I don't want any." "Beggin' your pardon, Miss," said the stage doorkeeper, "He's from Mr. Mayer." "Hyphens and all?" gasped Miss Garson.

But Louis B. Mayer, Greer soon found, was not a corporation. He loathed the show, but he liked Greer very much. Actress Garson had her stage career, to be sure. But had she ever seriously reflected on the immensely greater significance of the cinema? She thought she was not photogenic?

"There's nobody," said Louis B. Mayer flatly, "who can't be photographed." Salary? Miss Garson held out for--and (reputedly) got--$500 a week, which was (reputedly) the biggest salary ever paid a beginner in films. Soon she was in Hollywood. A little later, she was in hell.

Neurosis in Limbo. For the first time in two years of unremitting work, this taut-nerved, physically unstable young woman who lived on work had nothing to do. There were tests for various pictures. Nothing came of them. Miss Garson sank into that terrifying limbo, known to many Hollywood newcomers, of the regularly paid, politely Forgotten Woman. Years before, she had injured her spine. It began to hurt her again. She wore one thick and one thin-soled shoe, hobbled like a crone, went outdoors only at night. For months, she says, "My only screen tests were X rays; my best parts, the spine." Doctors advised an "intricate operation."

One week before Greer's contract was to expire, word came from the studio. In his search for Mrs. Chips, Sam Wood had tested half the top-flight actresses in Hollywood. Desperate, he asked for every test M.G.M. had ever made, and for the first time became aware of Greer Garson. She was it. They would go to London at once for the shooting. Greer took the part chiefly in order to get away from Hollywood and back to England. Her spine has not troubled her since.

For it is curative to be referred to by Louis B. Mayer as "my prestige star," to occupy Norma Shearer's former dressing room, to know that your next contract will raise you from a (reputed) $2,500 a week (plus stentorian bonuses) to a salary more suited to what is grandiosely called M.G.M.'s First Lady. It is gratifying to receive never fewer than 1,000 fan letters a week even if so many of them are from middle-aged lawyers, bankers and clergymen. It is perhaps even more gratifying to learn that one class of the Army Air Forces Bombardier School at Midland, Texas, has voted you "the girl we would most like to be alone with in the nose of an AT-II." It is most harmlessly gratifying of all to realize that, though there is no extant Garson cheesecake (except the sporran shots from Random Harvest), you get nearly as many requests for pin up pictures as Betty Grable herself.

Well-Paid Cowhand. Nevertheless, Cinemactress Garson's life is rather like that of a munificently compensated cowhand. She gets up at a quarter to 6. She is at the studio by 8. She takes time off for a cup of tea (two bags, the cream goes in first), at 4:30. She invariably stays to study the day's rushes at 6. She is home by 8. Often as not, she goes straight to bed to eat her one ravenous meal of the day--a truckdriver's helping of Irish stew or rare roast beef. Their respective jobs keep her and Ensign Richard Ney (Mrs. Miniver's son; they married last July) from seeing much of each other. Miss Carson's most constant companion is her mother.

The Ideal Woman does not follow Greer Garson into private life. Offscreen, Cinemactress Garson is as much like Mrs. Miniver as Mickey Rooney is like Sir Galahad. Her extraordinary cedar-colored hair, intense face, vigorous body and wholly undomestic demeanor belie her serene cinematic impersonations. She is shy, and she takes out her shyness in polysyllables, parody, sentimentality and histrionics. She is voluble, with a remarkable memory and an intellectual ostrich's appetite for miscellaneous knowledge. (She once floored a shipmate of Ensign Ney's by asking if his ship used Worthington pumps.) She is playful. Sometimes she ribs the Ideal Woman by describing herself as "Metro's Glorified Mrs.", "a plushy-bustly-wifely," "a walking cathedral." Occasionally she enriches the English language with lines like her description of a visiting businessman: "The gentleman surprised me, young, gallant and full of schmaltz and flair and je ne sais quoi besides!"

But if Cinemactress Garson sometimes acts when she is off a set, she never acts up when she is on one. Those know her best who know her at her work. She never blows a line, never turns up late, never plays prima donna. When the scriptwriters were beating their brains out trying to find the proper "lift" to end Madame Curie with, it was Greer Garson who brought them some lines by a Polish poet which Marie Curie had liked. Those lines turned the trick. It may have been sentimental, but it was certainly indicative of the kind of professional regard Greer Garson inspires, that when Madame Curie was finished, the company presented her with a ring inscribed, "To Our Sweetheart."

The New Picture. Something of the cooperative spirit this act suggests inspires Madame Curie. The picture is much graver and more deeply felt than Mrs. Miniver. It was more daring and more difficult to make. It devotes itself to dramatizing matters seldom attempted on the screen: the beauty, dignity and calm of a marriage earnestly, rather than romantically, undertaken, the binding and illuminating power of a rare intellectual companionship and of grinding work performed in common. Madame Curie is probably as unerotic and maturely human a romance as Hollywood has yet attempted. It is equally successful in its popularization and humanizing of science, most successful of all in its tribute to its central character, who is all but canonized.

As Scripters Paul Osborn and Paul Rameau, Director Mervyn LeRoy and Producer Sidney Franklin have composed it, Madame Curie is not the story of Marie Sklodowska Curie's life, but of her association with Pierre Curie, of their first meeting, their shy, almost unconscious courtship as they work side-by-side in the laboratory, their surprised recognition of their love, their years of heavy labor in the cold and leaky shed where they finally isolate the mysterious new element, radium. The story ends almost immediately after Pierre's sudden death in a street accident.

The producer, scripters and Dr. Rudolph Langer of Caltech spent months picturizing the search for radium. The sequence presented paralyzing problems, both scientific and cinematic. One of the most difficult pieces of research ever attempted had to be made understandable to an intelligent child. Long years of desperately static work had to be made dynamic, on the screen. There were temptations to visual melodrama. In the early stages of production, Mervyn LeRoy wanted Frankensteinesque sparks to swizzle from the quartz piezo-electroscope through which the Curies first got on the scent of radium. "Well," groused Dr. Langer (with success), "dramatically it would be false to science."

One proof of the picture's success is Scientist Robert Millikan's approval of the script. Another is the suspense in which, with almost no time out, a lecture-hall subject succeeds in keeping cinemaddicts for more than an hour. Highlight: the moment when at last, in the darkened laboratory, radium first manifests itself, as a strange, Grail-like glow. The special quality of this glow was tried a dozen different ways. Producer Franklin and his associates even thought of Technicolor. They talked about using real radium, found that they could not get enough, and if they did, it would not give off enough light. They finally got the effect they wanted with a complex arrangement of a lamp under a film of water.

Most of the production shows the same endless, elegant patience. In fact, Madame Curie emphatically establishes Director LeRoy in Hollywood's top drawer, and frail, modest Producer Franklin in the seven-league shoes of the late Irving Thaiberg. Almost every member of the supporting cast, from Dame May Whitty to Albert Bassermann, plays his part with pride and devotion. As Pierre Curie, Walter Pidgeon is knowingly professorial and unworldly. Greer Garson plays Marie Curie with a kind of scientific saintliness. In fact, her Madame is so ultimate an embodiment of the Ideal Woman whom she first gave to the world in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Miss Garson demonstrates, in this difficult theorem, such limpid intersections of romance and reality, that short of the Maid of Orleans (or possibly the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg), it is hard to imagine a part that can possibly lead her further onward & upward.

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