ON THE AIR TONIGHT: Helen Hayes,
starring in a different half-hour play each week, on CBS at 8:00, E.S.T.,
rebroadcast to the West Coast at 7:30, P.S.T, and sponsored by Lipton’s Tea.
Unless you’re a fanatical devotee
of Charlie McCarthy (or unless you live in the Pacific Time Zone, where Helen
and Charlie aren’t on at the same time), you couldn’t do better than to tune
Helen Hayes in tonight. Most radio acting is good, but hers is magnificent.
You’d never guess than Helen was
one of America’s greatest actresses if you watched her rehearsing her radio
shows. She loves radio, but is quite willing to admit that other people know
more about it than she does. No displays of temperament ever go on at a Hayes
rehearsal, and afterwards, when the script has to be cut so it won’t run
overtime (it always does have to be cut, too), Helen goes home and lets other
people wield the blue pencils. “ I’d only get in their hair,” she explains.
Besides acting on the air, Helen
is starring in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” This
means that she doesn’t have much time this winter to spend at her home in
Nyack, N. Y. She usually stays in New York the latter part of the week, traveling
up to Nyack Sunday evening after the repeat broadcast, and commuting between
Nyack and New York Monday and Tuesday nights. Her playwright husband. Charles MacArthur,
and her two children, Mary and Jamie, live in Nyack the week around.
Your first impression on seeing
Helen offstage is one of disappointment. She isn’t as pretty, you think, as you
expected. Then she begins to talk, and you realize she’s much prettier. Her whole
face sparkles with animation; she tells a story, and her gestures and the
intonation of her voice bring the characters in it to life right in front of
your eyes. Just now, for her role in “Twelfth Night,” she is wearing her hair
in a way that ought to be a fashion for small women—it curls in crisp, tiny
blonde ringlets all over her head. You can see that style in the picture above.
Helen is a lot more domestic than
you’d expect an actress to be. When she’s at Nyack, not working, she runs her
home very efficiently—does the shopping herself, with special reference to her
husband’s likes or dislikes in food; spends a lot of time with the children,
putters around in the garden, and so on.
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