Cinema: Ideal Woman - TIME

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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.

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