Cinema: This Side of Happiness

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Betty has worried some lately about her special problem of getting the right husband. "I could marry someone in the business who was higher up than me, or making more," she says thoughtfully. "But when a real man comes up against the situation where he gets second billing, he walks. I don't know how I'm going to be happy."

On Top. This side of happiness, Betty seems to have just about everything. She has far outstripped sister Marion, who borrowed the Hutton name and made her own show-business success as vocalist with Glenn Miller's orchestra and in radio and movie jobs. Betty's children have all the things she went without, including a nurse to change their beautiful dresses five times a day. After moving ten times in five years to successively grander Hollywood living quarters, she has an eleven-room ranch-style house in Brentwood, flamboyantly decorated by a Paramount set designer. But she has her eye on the Robert Montgomery house on Sunset Boulevard: it has two stories instead of one, and its furnishings look "musty, as though ancestors had lived in them."

Betty's career has towered to a point from which she can look ahead to greater glories. Next she will do a movie for Paramount about the silent screen's Mabel Normand; later she is committed to two pictures for MGM. She bubbles with the idea of playing in a big Broadway musical, and she longs for a return match in London's Palladium, where she murdered the people last year. It was hard to say how Betty could pick up any more steam, but it was even harder to imagine that she might ever slow down.