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At 28, Barbara stands 5 ft. 3 in. tall, weighs a mere 113 Ibs., tosses her burnished, straw-colored hair in a girlish bob, and gazes at the world through clear hazel eyes. In a medium where pose and posture are the standards, she is almosl startlingly forthright. Painfully self-conscious under scrutiny, uninhibited among close friends, Barbara can cuss like a longshoreman and make it sound as offhand as a schoolgirl's "Jeepers." The effect of such artlessness on the stage is to make practically anything Barbara does seem credible and convincing. One mark of her real talent lies in the fact that she can be herself and still translate the flick of an eyelash or the sting of a tear across 15 rows of seats into the darkest corner of the theater.
Actress Bel Geddes still falls prey to many an uncertainty about her chosen career. Before Moon opened, she worried over whether she was too old for Patty. Now she is worried over whether she is not too immature for other parts. Actually, she has already resolved both doubts to the satisfaction of most critics. As the simple, unaffected Southern belle of Deep Are the Roots (1945), she had shown her capacity for serious drama; now she has shown her mastery of the peculiar demands of airy farce. Cornell, Bankhead, Hayes and Lawrence will not have to give way to Barbara for a while yet. But the quiet radiance and well-trained competence that Barbara had brought to Broadway was enough to give the fabulous invalid plenty of hope for the day when her elders might retire. "Barbara has a terrific future in the theater," says Moon's Director Otto Preminger. "She has a brusque honesty and an instinct for the stage that is very rare."
Three-Ringed Brownstone. Barbara's joint fear of and attraction to the limelight is a legitimate inheritance. For a generation before she entered the theater, her father Norman had rumbled and roared like an earthquake in the foundations of show business, making plans, productions, money, noise, friends and enemies on a gargantuan scale. The example of his unbridled imagination and breezy pressagentry taught Barbara early in life that the theater could be both sheen and shoddy.
A Michigander of Scottish-German ancestry, Norman Bel Geddes has been, among other things, actor, producer, director, stage designer and author. The big brownstone house on Manhattan's East 37th Street in which Barbara spent her early childhood saw an endless stream of visitors from many worlds. It was Norman's studio as well as his home, and on the upper floors busy draftsmen and artisans were always hard at work, assembling stage models, cutting out rubber animals for a Macy parade, drawing up plans for a restaurant, or laying out production schedules for some new show.
In the welter of productive activity that characterized the Bel Geddes establishment, Barbara was, comparatively, pretty small potatoes. Like Joan, her elder (by six years) sister, and a short-lived "little" magazine called Inwhich, she was the product of Norman's collaboration with his first wife, Helen Belle Sneider.* She was no match for such stupendous enterprises as Norman's transformation of New York's Century Theater into a Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle.