Between Us Girls (Universal) is chiefly notable because it provides the rattletrap tumbril on which John Barrymore's 21-year-old daughter Diana is supposed to ride to stardom. That she survives a solid hour and a half of such a journey is a tribute to her staying powers.
Starlet Barrymore plays the daughter of Star Kay Francis. The plot requires Diana to don a middy blouse and pretend she is twelve in order to keep from her mother's suitor (John Boles) the fact that Mother Francis is fortyish. In the complicated course of this deception, Diana also fools a charming young man (Robert Cummings), who buys her roller skates and ice-cream sodas, tries to teach her to skate before his normal eyesight asserts itself and he realizes she is old enough to be his wife.
One evening when Diana Barrymore was 19, and the youngest, most submerged guest at a sedate dinner, she was suddenly observed to be eating her soup from a standing position. It wasn't a stunt; it was a natural and innocent way of bringing the gathering into proper focus. Father John Barrymore and Mother Michael Strange were divorced when Diana was seven. From seven to twelve she was entombed in a Parisian convent school. She subsequently attended the Garrison-Forest School near Baltimore, which nearly went out of business once when Father John paid her a call. She also had a go at Manhattan's Brearley and a string of other seminaries.
A year at the Dalton School was the most successful; the Dalton feeling is that one should express oneself. Diana did.
Year after that her mother, born a Newport Oelrichs, saw Diana smolderingly through a slam-bang debut at Manhattan's River Club. It was Brenda Frazier's season. The late Cholly Knickerbocker ticketed Diana as Personality Deb of the Year, swore she could have outstripped blazing Brenda as Glamor Girl if she had half tried. Diana palled around with Brenda a little, was reported engaged to Anthony Duke, Francis Kellogg, Harry Ellerbee (whom she called Poopsie), Sir William Wrixon-Becher, and a convoy of others, including Actor Bramwell Fletcher. Last summer, yes—she married him.
Diana wanted to act. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She got a part in the road production of Outward Bound. Diana first hit Broadway in The Romantic Mr. Dickens, moving the Times's Brooks Atkinson to declare that she was the one bit of meat which made that turkey worth sitting down to.
On tour in Outward Bound, she first really made her father's acquaintance. The story that he made a pass at her before he knew she was his own daughter is apocryphal. They met at the train, and it was not until he had known her several minutes that he proudly declared that he was in love with her. Said John Barrymore to the press: "Isn't she lovely! I worked like hell on Hamlet and Richard III but she was the best thing I ever produced!"