Cinema: Living the Daydream

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"When I have a song to sing," says Betty Grable, by way of explaining her success as a movie star, "I feel good singing it. I don't think, 'Gee! I'm the greatest singer.' " Neither does Miss Grable think, gee! she is a great actress: "I just say and do the things I do every day of my life. Gosh, it could be me up there on the screen."

Betty Grable up there on the screen is about all that millions of U.S. moviegoers really want. This week, the Grable fans who flock to see her latest picture, a Technicolored trifle called That Lady in Ermine (20th Century-Fox), will be bitterly disappointed if it is not very much like the last 15 Grable pictures. By sedulously being her pretty, blonde, brittle self, in one cinemusical after another, St. Louis-born Elizabeth Ruth Grable has become one of the highest salaried (close to $300,000 a year) women in the world.

In a business fraught with hazardous gambling and desperate financial uncertainties, Betty Grable comes about as close as Hollywood can get to a surefire, gilt-edged investment. The profits from her movies (something like $15 million over the last eight years) have left her boss, Producer Darryl Zanuck, free to dabble with such weighty but financially risky topics as political history (Wilson), lynching (The Ox-Bow Incident) and anti-Semitism (Gentleman's Agreement).

Each week, some 10,000 admirers (zealously cheered on by her studio's press-agents) take the trouble to write Betty fan mail. For six years U.S. theater managers have ranked her among the top ten in box-office pull.

Attainable Goal. As Betty herself readily admits, her talents are unremarkable. Unlike some other movie stars, she can lay no claims to sultry beauty or mysterious glamor. Her singing and dancing are pleasant and spirited, but not highly skilled. Her peach-cheeked, pearl-blonde good looks add up to mere candy-box-top prettiness. Even her intensively publicized legs (immortalized in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater, along with Gable's ears and Barrymore's profile) cannot compare in symmetry to Dietrich's.

Why do moviegoers flock to Betty's pictures with an ardent persistence they have never offered to other stars of greater beauty and larger gifts? Betty Grable, long-shanked, blue-eyed, 5 ft. 3½ in., no pounds, knows one answer. "Girls," she says, "can see me in a picture and feel I could be one of them." A wag with a parody spoke for the male audience when he sang, with no perceptible rancor toward Betty's bandleader husband:

I want a girl, just like the girl That married Harry James.

To millions of Americans, the pert, sexy, but basically "nice" girl that Betty plays on the screen is young American womanhood at its best. To the eager young man, the ambitious stenographer, the Hollywood-hungry mother resolutely dragging her little daughter off to dancing school, Betty represents an attainable goal, a daydream that might come true. Grable's own life is a proof of the dream.