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"Norman Bel Geddes' plump and blonde daughter," wrote the Times's Atkinson, "is still in the apprentice stage of histrionics." Apprentice or not, Barbara was on her way. Frying Pan was followed by a U.S.O. tour in Junior Miss, during which Barbara made herself ill removing the anathema of that word "plump." There were three more Broadway plays in which she got glowing personal notices ("I've been a hit in more flops than any actress on Broadway," she cracks), and another fling at summer stock. Gradually, her real talent for the theater became more apparent. But she was still far from being a dedicated actress.
In the summer of 1943, Independent Producer Hunt Stromberg gave her a screen test. Barbara failed to get a contract, but soon afterward she found a proposition even more to her liking, in the person of a handsome young electrical engineer named Carl Schreuer. After a short courtship, Carl and Barbara were married. Barbara was all ready then to quit the stage for good, but Carl himself discouraged the notion. Soon after their baby Susan was born, Barbara was called to read for Deep Are the Roots, to be directed by Elia Kazan. Carl urged her to try it. Barbara got the part.
The Whole Burden. Deep Are the Roots was a problem play about the South, which, like many an argument on the same subject, became entangled in melodrama and the more or less irrelevant question of miscegenation. But in it, Barbara's performance as a Southern girl who determines to marry a Negro, as a sort of general apology for the sins of her people, registered hard with New York's critics. "Miss Bel Geddes," wrote the Herald Tribune's Howard Barnes, "in one of the most exacting roles a young actress ever had to play, is superb." "I can't recall a single one who was her equal," said Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram, "Miss Bel Geddes not only succeeded in giving the role life but she did it so poignantly and realistically as, in effect, to carry the whole burden of the show on her shoulders."
After Roots, the Bel Geddes future seemed assured. Hollywood's ears were pricked like a hunting dog's. "Everybody," says Hollywood Director George Stevens, who was sent to New York to have a look, "had the Bel Geddes fever that year." R.K.O. entered the contest for Barbara with a contract the like of which no untried newcomer to Hollywood had ever seen before. By its terms, Barbara was to do not more than two pictures a year for the studio, at $50,000 each for the first year. She was to get equal billing with such stars as Henry Fonda and Irene Dunne, have the right to do a stage play on each alternate season and two pictures a year for other studios. Above all, she was to get a role which she had tried for and missed on Broadway—the literary daughter in I Remember Mama. "I think," said Barbara Bel Geddes, "that was cute of R.K.O."