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Divine Service. In recent years world conditions have sobered Gertie's life as they have many another. In 1938, while she was playing Susan and God, a comedy dealing with the Oxford ("Moral Re-Armament") Group, she showed considerable interest in that form of evangelical Christianity. So did numerous other stage people—although stage interest suffered something of a setback when W. C. Fields announced that he didn't need Moral Re-Armament but would take anything in a bottle. Gertie did a scene from Susan and God and preached a sermon at the late Rev. Christian Fichthorne Reisner's Broadway (Methodist-Episcopal) Temple. The New Yorker hailed her entry into the pulpit with the comment: "That, fellows, is our idea of divine service."
Said she: "Religion has come to the Broadway theatre because it is a reflection of what is in people's hearts. I feel that there is a spiritual awakening among people everywhere. ... It is almost a revolt of the masses against the materialistic leadership of the dictators toward the glorious freedom and peace of their spiritual Liberator!"
Mrs. A. Last summer, while she was playing at the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Mass., she married tall, dignified Theatrical Producer Richard Stoddard Aldrich, 38, son of a late Hood Rubber executive' who headed the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1924. A short time after the wedding Gertie got a congratulatory cable from England:
Dear Mrs. A.—hooray, hooray!
At last you are deflowered!
On this as every other day
I love you—Noel Coward.
Gertie cabled back:
Dear Mr. C.—you know me,
My parts I overact 'em.
As jor the flowers, we searched for hours,
My maid she must have packed 'em.
The Aldriches live in a penthouse, filled with Gertie's English accumulations, near Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In former years Gertie was given to poker, backgammon, sewing, knitting, swimming, golf. Suddenly invited into a hole-in-one tournament in San Francisco in 1938, she kicked off her high-heeled slippers' and, stocking-footed, dropped her third shot 5 feet 6 inches from the cup. But today, unless they occur at after-theatre parties,' she has little time for diversions of any sort. When she is not at the theatre or taking her daily afternoon nap (which consists in piling right into bed, even if it is only for ten minutes), she works like a high-spirited horse for British relief.
As a prime mover in the American Theatre Wing of the British War Relief Society she has sewed clothing, organized parties and workshops, made speeches, helped move 54 children to the U. S.' from the British Actors' orphanage, been mistress of ceremonies on recordings made by Broadway stars for the British forces. She is now raising funds for entertainment units to perform for the troops, and arranging for the nationwide sale of Lawrence-approved fashions, the proceeds to go to Britain. She has a contract option for a three-month vacation this summer, expects to spend it playing in theatricals for English soldiers. The life she leads may well explain why she can eat anything she likes without losing her figure.