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Bob progressed rapidly in a school populated mostly by children who had difficulty with the English language. But there came a day when Ruth Meservey decided to switch her boys to another school. "For a while," says she, "they were speaking with an accent. They would say 'My mother, he is in the kitchen, and my father, she is at work.' " When he got to Lincoln High School, Bob caught the acting bug, and it was nourished by a Shakespeare-loving dramatics teacher named E. J. Wenig.
In 1936, with Wenig's encouragement, Preston began working at the Pasadena Playhouse, the West Coast's top acting school (fellow students: Victor Jory, Dana Andrews, Victor Mature). For a time, dedicated Actor Preston studied nights at the Playhouse, worked days as a car parker at Santa Anita Race Track. Then he switched to fulltime acting.
The Discovery. One part—the down-at-heel song-and-dance man in a Playhouse production of Idiot's Delight—caught the eye of a Paramount executive and with the Meservey name chopped out of his professional life, Robert Preston was making "i 8-day wonders," as the B pictures were called. He was a sailor in The King of Alcatraz ("Mercifully," he says, "yet to be released on TV"), a truck driver in Illegal Traffic, a lawyer in Disbarred. A success of sorts, he mar ried a Playhouse actress, pretty, dark-haired Catherine Feltus, settled down in a big Brentwood house that had a swim ming pool in the backyard and nothing but a bed and a card table inside.
Preston's first big movie role was the villain in Union Pacific, a cinemepic produced by Cecil B. DeMille. The DeMille-Preston relationship deteriorated when Preston played in his second DeMille thriller, Northwest Mounted Police. Preston did not like the script and said so, out loud, to DeMille. "What's the matter?" snapped DeMille. "It's the same part you had in Union Pacific, isn't it?"
Fortunately, Preston was able to get professional satisfaction outside the movies. Along with other Pasadena Playhouse veterans and their wives, he was a mem ber of the "18 Actors," who staged serious plays for serious playgoers, kept up the work straight through his movie career. After a three-year hitch with the Army Air Forces (captain, Intelligence, Ninth Air Force), Bob turned out another clutch of movies (The Macomber Affair, Face to Face), but was still dissatisfied. "All the scripts I got," he says, "went first to Fred MacMurray, and if he didn't want them, they went to Ray Milland, and then to me. After me, it was the end of the line."
Preston got off the line and switched to Broadway seven years ago. Most of his eight plays (notable exceptions: revivals of The Male Animal and Twentieth Century) have been financial flops, but Preston himself won good notices from the critics. Nonetheless, he was still relatively unknown in New York until Meredith Willson came along with The Music Man.
White Knight. Willson, all through his years as a professional musician — flutist with John Philip Sousa's band and with Toscanini's orchestra, composer of symphonies and pop songs, orchestra leader on radio shows—was collecting the satchelful of songs, story ideas and folklore about his home town of Mason City, Iowa.