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But in 1927, when Barbara was only five years old, that frantic, fascinating period of her life came abruptly to an end. Designer Bel Geddes and his wife separated. From the turmoil of the family brownstone, Barbara and her sister were transplanted to the quiet of a house in Millburn, N.J. (pop. 13,400). Partly because of Belle's retiring nature and partly because of their newly straitened circumstances, their life was cloistered even for life in a suburban town.
The Cloister. As she grew up, Barbara's need for a dramatic outlet became more urgent than ever. The pictures father Norman took on his rare, explosive visits show her as a leggy towhead assuming all the languorous and seductive poses common to the movie magazines of the day. When no camera was at hand, Barbara would register her soul-searing emotions before a mirror. Her sister Joan and her mother, who disapproved of the children going to movies, called it "making faces."
When Barbara was 15 her mother died, and she was packed off to Vermont's coeducational Putney School. Putney's faculty remember her as "a bubbly, vivacious, buxom girl, with a talent for mimicry and no academic skill." At Putney, she dreamed through classroom hours, let her eyes rest happily on the strange new world of young men surrounding her, romped on the playing fields, and plunged ecstatically into a production of Synge's Riders to the Sea. After the play was staged, the school drama teacher wrote Bel Geddes that his daughter had displayed no dramatic talent whatsoever.
"Barbara," reported another teacher, "seems completely unaware of how disturbing an influence she is." The perturbation was caused largely among the male student body. One evening during Barbara's second year, Putney's headmistress discovered one of the boys kissing Barbara. She wrote to Norman suggesting that he would do well to send his daughter to another school. Andrebrook, an all-girl establishment as free of temptation as a French convent school, was recommended. Norman agreed, but his daughter persuaded him to let her have a run first in greener pastures.
In June of 1940, Barbara joined Actor-Producer Alexander Kirkland's summer stock at Clinton, Conn, as an apprentice. Between walk-on appearances and rounds of scene painting, she studied the Stanislavsky acting technique with Coach Lee Strasberg. "We'd be teapots, poison ivy and other things, for practice," says Barbara, "and I just loved it." She played bits with Ethel Barrymore, Sinclair Lewis and other visiting stars, and at the end of the season she even got a fat part of her own—Amy in Little Women. Says Barbara: "I got damn good notices, too."
Blonde Apprentice. Barbara had been more favorably noticed as Amy than even she suspected, and before the end of her first semester at Andrebrook, Producer Kirkland offered her a part in a real Broadway show. On Feb. n, 1941 Barbara made her Broadway debut as an amiably nitwitted ingenue in an inconsequential piece called Out of the Frying Pan.