The Theater: The Trouper

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After the final curtain on the Broadway opening night, she made the traditional visit to Sardi's Restaurant. It was crowded with first-nighters who had just seen her show. In an unparalleled tribute, they rose as one and gave her an ovation. Shirley—this time not acting—turned around curiously to see who was being applauded. After Sheba, following a favorite dictum ("An actress should make you forget everything she has done before"), she took a secondary role in the musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

One morning during rehearsals, the telephone rang in her husband's bedroom. Shirley called out: "Why don't you answer it, Bill?" Alarmed at his silence, she hurried in and found him dead of a heart attack. Shirley stayed away from rehearsals for several days and then, in the best tradition of the stage, went back to work. When Tree opened, she stopped the show with a raffish number called Love Is the Reason, and was showered by the critics with a new set of rave reviews.

A Nugget, a Diamond. Paramount had bought Come Back, Little Sheba, and it now made—for Hollywood—the daring decision to let Shirley, who was unknown to moviegoers, play in the movie the same role that she had already played to perfection on Broadway. She flew to the West Coast, shot the movie in a single month, and scored a complete and effortless conquest of the movie colony.

Bringing all the precision and adaptability of an old trouper to the set, Shirley found the job of acting in movies remarkably easy: "I didn't have to project. It was like telling someone about it confidentially. It all seemed so much more intimate, as, of course, it was, with the camera practically in your navel.'' Her fellow actors were entranced. Burt Lancaster says reverently that Shirley is "a nugget, a diamond, a pot of gold. She's Babe Ruth. She's Mickey Mantle. It's a nice note for this town that a woman like Shirley can come in and by sheer personality bowl the place over." Starlet Terry Moore was breathlessly thrilled: "Shirley is so lovable you want to throw your arms about her like an old shoe!"

When Shirley was given the Academy Award as the best film actress of the year, there was scarcely a dissenting voice. She went to Manhattan's International Theater wearing a blush-pink Valentina dress, specially cut so there would be no danger of her tripping on the steps to the stage. With millions watching on television, Shirley tripped anyway. But she managed to make it look likably human.

Lady Macbeth? How great an actress is Shirley Booth? What are her limits and capabilities? Audiences are usually so completely taken in by the character she is playing that they are unconscious of Shirley as a skilled performer. But they are likely to remember the character for days or for years to come. Radio listeners who have only known her as Miss Duffy would swear that she is a hilariously funny bit of fuzz-brained fluff. Moviegoers who have seen her only as Lola in Come Back, Little Sheba have difficulty imagining her as anything but an aging frump in a kimono. But lucky theatergoers have been persuaded, at one time or another, that she was an intense, good-looking young schoolteacher, a tippling grass widow, and a well-girdled, wisecracking career girl.