SIDE BENEFITS
513
her best point, could emphasize itself ... yes, but what is she
like?
Good God, said he, you must ha\"e seen her in a hundred films.
She lives, has lived, a life of improbable probity, married to a
single man, with never a breath of scandal; remains a lady who
insists on maintaining what she describes as the high standards of
Hollywood.
Not long ago, I heard, she turned down a part which would
have involved her battering to death her husband (in such a way that
it would look as if someone else had done it) so that she could benefit
from his will. That was, she claimed, nothing but unmotivated nasty–
mindedness. Soon afterwards she was pleased to play a part where
she battered to death - but openly, as it were nobly - a lawyer lover
who tricked her out of a fortune.
Fairly straightforward really, daylight stuff still, as is this-
A certain English gentleman, a sort of semi-lord, being a middle
son (he refers to himself with a rather tetchy refusal to conform to
current prejudices as well-connected) lives in a large country house
but alone, as his wife died shortly after their marriage. Alone, that is,
apart from his man-servant. Failing to remarry, the usual rumours
gathered about him and his way of life, dark tastes of all kinds were
hinted at, and the women who had not succeeded in marrying him
allowed it to be understood that it was their discovery of his secret
which had cooled their pursuit.
He had been a widower for more than a decade when he was
taken to what he called "a show." He did not care for the theatre at
all. There he saw Mary Griffiths, a woman who had been married
twice but who had announced to everyone and even to the Press that
she did not intend to marry, she chose freedom.
She was an attractive blonde woman, her stage personality
formed in the 'fifti es to the formula of that time - casual, loud–
mouthed, frank - and, as she insisted, as common as dirt. She took
pains to conceal her middleclass origin - a handicap when she first
started to act. She took care to play parts suited to this formula –
for the most part sad dishevelled girls doomed to disharmony. "A lost
ugly duckling with moments of swan," as one critic put it. A
jalie [aide
said another, thus enabling Mary to describe herself as more laid
than jolly, and to reap double benefit, when people protested the
joke was not new, by claiming: "Well, I've never had an educa–
tion - I've never pretended I did - have I then?"
