(5 of 5)
Only last week did Playwright MacArthur's first wife, a Chicago newspaper woman, drop her alienation of affections suit against Actress Hayes. That legal tangle was merely a fraction of the excitement that ebullient Mr. MacArthur has brought into his wife's life since 1928. A great cutup, he goes in for such japes as spreading strange lingerie around the home in his wife's absence to see what she will do upon her return. Irregularities like these have evoked such effusive sympathy for Miss Hayes that her husband once thought of founding a Poor Helen Club. But the organization seems unnecessary. The MacArthurs' private life in their big white Victorian house at Nyack, N. Y. is probably as serene as the average.
The smallest star (5 ft.) on the U. S. stage has one of the longest tempers, rarely permits herself a more violent expression of dissatisfaction than her characteristic "Pe-ew!" But last week Helen Hayes was feeling particularly good. There were the White Blouse invitations. ("To think, here I was born in Washington and never imagined I could get in the White House back door!") And, with a pair of noteworthy Queens already in her hand, she was reasonably sure of drawing three of a kind on Broadway this week.
Libel! (by Edward Wooll) was in the nature of a shot across Broadway's bows by Producer Gilbert Miller prior to bringing his heavy guns into action this week. Like his Victoria Regina (see above), Libel! is a British importation. Also like Victoria Regina, it is a play of no-great importance but of considerable entertainment value.
Laid entirely in a court room which Designer Raymond Sovey has managed to make look astonishingly solid and permanent, Libel! concerns an action brought by one Sir Mark Loddon (Colin Clive) against a London newspaper which has made so bold as to declare that he "is not a Baronet, nor even a Loddon, and can hardly be accurately described as a Member of Parliament, as he secured his return by practicing on the electorate the same deliberate fraud he practiced on his wife." In theory the plaintiff but in fact the defendant. Lord Loddon is gravely suspected of having exchanged identities with another Briton in a German prison camp during the War. And his explanations look a little more hopeless every time another of his witnesses takes the stand. About five minutes before the last curtain Author Wooll pulls a brand new clue out of an old coat, for which Crime Club members would promptly blackball him.
*Asked how she does this trick, Actress Hayes replied: "That's mamma's secret." *Actor Gillette, aged 80, announced last week one more farewell appearance beginning Jan. 13 in Three Wise Fools.