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Actors Are Cattle. Director Mann came away convinced she could do just that. "That test was animal-like in its naturalness," says he. "A searing inquiry with no pretense of being sophisticated." Another director who saw the test and agreed was Alfred Hitchcock. He saw it and signed her to play in The Trouble with Harry. Shirley came on Vermont location slightly more sophisticated than when she left Broadway, but "Hitch" finished the picture convinced that Shirley was "unique—which belongs to the making of a star, the rare quality we want." This was high praise from a man who boasts that "I have little personal relationship with actors. All actors are cattle." * Just before making Harry, Shirley eloped with Steve Parker, an unemployed actor with an urge to wheel and deal as a producer. Now Steve is in the Orient doing just that, making TV packages and movie shorts. ("He's a very rich man in yen," Shirley insists to doubting friends. "When he gets rolling, his business will make my operations look sick.") When Shirley made Around the World, she got to Japan herself; when she took time out to have a baby, she named her Stephanie Sachiko, to demonstrate that she shared Steve's love for the Orient. The baby slowed her down not a bit. She made Hot Spell, a good picture but not much of a box-office splash, showed up on the Sheepman set "somewhat trepidatious" for her first western. She was togged in immaculate jeans, spotless cowgirl hat, shiny boots. "I was the only gal in the picture," she says. "Director George Marshall threw a couple of fistfuls of dirt all over my new clothes. In the first minute all of them knocked me down, rolled me in the dirt and said, 'O.K., now you can play a western.' " A few minutes later, Shirley doused her tormentors with a bucket of water. "Wouldn't you like to cool off, Charlie?" she asked. "From then on, they knew I wasn't a prima donna exactly, and whatever they wanted to say, they went right ahead. The language, oh golly!"
Nickels & Dimes. For all her clowning and her casualness. Shirley is as serious about money as the Bank of America. She is sure that Producer Wallis is exploiting her, and the idea is galling. ("I'm a very good business woman and I don't like to be hooked.") When Wallis paid her only $15,000 to play in Running, she almost backed out of the picture, refused to show up on the set until the day before shooting began. As Walk's tells it, he is entitled to a profit for taking a chance on a newcomer; furthermore, he says, Shirley was amply repaid, got bonuses and was treated royally. "I went up to her on the set during the week of her birthday," Wallis recalls, "and asked: 'If I was going to give you a birthday present, what would you like?' Shirley said, kiddingly, 'An MG.' " Next day Wallis handed her the keys. "She broke up and cried and laughed. And that cost more than nickels and dimes."
Shirley remembers it differently, indignantly denies that she was kidding when she asked for the car. "When you're talking to a man with 44 million dollars," snaps Shirley, "you're not joking."