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"Let's see, now," mused Designer Norman Bel Geddes last week, when he was asked about his younger daughter's birth. "Barbs was done the year I did the Palais Royal, my first New York restaurant." Daughter Barbara never turned out to be as glittering a production as the Palais Royal (eventually remodeled into the lavish Latin Quarter). Nor has she learned to match her father's trick of the casually preoccupied phrase. Nonetheless, in her own quieter way, Barbara Bel Geddes was celebrating last week her undisputed rise to fame and glory as an authentic star in her own right.
Her name, shining on the marquee of Manhattan's Henry Miller's Theater, was there neither by producer's whim nor happy fluke. Against the weight of popular legend, she had climbed to her eminence the hard way, through years of professional trial & error, part success and part failure. New York City's critics had watched her rise to stardom in seven Broadway plays, had seen her eclipsed by lesser stars in six Hollywood pictures. But in Playwright F. Hugh Herbert's fresh and frothy comedy, The Moon Is Blue (TIME, March 19), Barbara had returned to Broadway as that rare phenomenon—an ingenue who can act.
The critical raves that greeted her prodigal return from Hollywood rang like a pressagent's dream of the perfect billboard. "Beautiful," sighed the Times's erudite Brooks Atkinson. "Captivating," cooed the Daily News's John Chapman. "Lovely," purred the World-Telegram and Sun's William Hawkins. Columnist Ward Morehouse urged all theatergoers to "hurry over to Henry Miller's and watch a lovely young actress at work."
As Patty O'Neill, Moon's naive and unpredictable ingenue, who surprises a middle-aged lecher into an offer of marriage and an amiable young wolf into a promise of chastity, Barbara Bel Geddes shines and twinkles with an authentic radiance. Her give & take with Co-Stars Donald Cook and Barry Nelson is sharp, sure, and exquisitely timed. Her poise is unshakable. In 1941, when she first appeared on Broadway, critics had called Barbara a "plump" and "promising" ingenue. Now, trimmer, slimmer, and thoroughly resourceful on the stage, she is an accomplished, soundly competent performer.
Well-Scrubbed Schoolgirl. Few Broadway stars have failed so signally to look the part. As Patty, Barbara Bel Geddes (rhymes with wed us) looks and talks more like a Bryn Mawr graduate (which she is not) than the cop's daughter she plays, and more like Barbara Bel Geddes than either. In the navy blue pullover sweater, plain skirt, saddle shoes and white dickey collar which she wears about town almost as a uniform, she could easily be confused with a well-scrubbed Connecticut schoolgirl off to the movies.