The Theater: The Trouper

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Shirley's mobile face has been shaped by hard work, heartbreak and humor, as well as by grease paint. She has orange hair and eyebrows, a warm smile, a steady, brown-eyed glance. Speaking of her own appearance, she likes to quote a British reviewer who once said thoughtfully that she had a face like a cabbage. She is small and plump (5 ft. 3½ in., 127 Ibs.), has beautiful, fair skin and attractive legs. Her slender fingers are never still. At table, she is a silverware-feeler; on stage, a furniture-clutcher. When she has nothing else to do with her hands, she lights, holds and stubs out cigarettes. When she opened in The Time of the Cuckoo, her first leading role on Broadway, Shirley was given a star's customary ovation when she first appeared on stage. Later, she appealed desperately to Director Harold Clurman: "What am I supposed to do with myself while they applaud?"

Childless in two marriages. Shirley has" filled her life with pets, naming most of them after roles and phrases from her plays. Currently, she has a pale blue parakeet called Cookie and an apricot-colored, miniature poodle called Pretty Prego. One friend contends that "she's really fonder of animals than people."

Shelled In. For the most part, people are kept at arm's length. "I'm a friendly person." Shirley says, "and yet when you get to a certain place the curtain comes down." She patterns her behavior largely on what she thinks are the motives of other people: "If someone comes up to me and says cattily, T love your hair—how do you dye it that curious color?', I might snap back that my hair has always been this color. But if someone says, 'I love your hair—I wish mine were like it,' I gush: 'But it can be—just go see Natasha on Madison Avenue.' " On the rare occasions when she is really angry, Shirley stands sideways to whoever has made her mad and talks rapidly and loudly without looking at her adversary.

But mostly, she has a Garbo-like desire to be let alone. Agent McCaffrey laments: "When you ask her for dinner, you know that she'd be happier off by herself at a drugstore having an orangeade with maybe an egg in it." Shirley concurs: "I save my exuberance for the stage. I'm really a quiet person. I sort of shell in." Director George Abbott sees in this trait further evidence of her genius: "Duse was a very lone creature, so was Maude Adams. Shirley's another of the lonely ones."

Shirley's retort is: "I'm never lonely when I'm alone." She spends most of her time in her snug, chintzy, four-room apartment on Manhattan's West 54th Street, overlooking the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. Unlike the slovenly Lola she portrayed in Sheba, she is a fastidious housekeeper whose happiest hours are spent moving furniture, cleaning closets, retrimming hats, and watering and rewatering the dozen tubs of plants on her flagstone terrace. "Do you like this chair here?" she will ask her maid, June Smith, who came to work for her 15 years ago along with an apartment sublet from Playwright Marc Connelly. "What difference does it make?" June will answer. "It won't be there tomorrow."