Hollywood Bound

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST--Kathleen Norris--Doubleday Doran ($2.00).

The Scenario. Janey Davenport, fabulously an heiress, famously a beauty, jaunts over to Italy in her own yacht. Fortunately for the love interest, her entourage includes two clean-limbed Anglo-Saxons, and the scion of a noble French family. At twenty-six Janey has experienced everything but true love. Disillusioned therefore regarding the tender passion, she rejects her three seagoing suitors, and resolves to barter her wealth and her person for some prince in reduced circumstances.

Ave Sicily! Here the dagger flash is a little swifter, the blood a little hotter. At Palermo, Janey finds her olive-skinned prince. He invites her to a house-party at his ancient castle far up in the hills, whereupon Janey promptly despatches her male escorts on a cruise, and sets off for the hills with a guileless chaperon and two flappers. Arrived at the ramshackle castle, the prince mysteriously disappears. A servant explains that the most famous brigand in Sicily is in the district seeking that prince's blood. Janey interviews the bold bad bandit, arranges for the safe return of the rest of her party, and, not without a thrill, allows herself to be held as hostage.

Her captor, di Bari, produces an airplane, and flies his beautiful prey to a great stone cave in the mountains, where Janey expects crude camp fare, but finds instead all the comforts of home--roaring fires, fine books, kindly serving maids. At dinner appears the snivelling prince, captive too, to be tortured with the display of beauty that might have been his, but is now allotted to the bandit's delectation. Except by way of torturing the prince, di Bari's intentions are, however, honorable.

But poor Janey has found in him a worthy object of long delayed grande passion, and after a week of endearing herself to his tribe she persuades her handsome bandit that he too cares terribly, terribly much. But marriage?--ah, he cannot allow her to share the dangers of his hunted existence.

Janey's insistence is cut short by the arrival of her Anglo-Saxon swains, who defy all manner of peril and whisk her off in the very plane that brought her. Her ingratitude for their bravery displays itself in scenes and sorrowings, until her hero appears in the night, tracked to her very window by posses of police.

Clasped in his arms, Janey rallies her swooning senses with ingenuity worthy of true American girlhood. She snatches her bandit by the hand, slips the guard, and makes for the sea, casting off garments by the way. Easily they swim to her yacht, and soon are steaming down the coast to safety. The last hours of the night they spend in chaste though earnest conversation on deck, and at dawn he leaves her.

A month later in Paris the bandit's servant presents Janey with a ring of "three great pinky globes of pearls"--souvenir d'amour. But a year later she tells her devoted Anglo-Saxon that what she had felt for di Bari had not been the real thing: she had only thought she was in love. But now. . . . So she gives the American her "glowing beauty . . . the liquid eyes, the satin red cheeks, the cap of loose curls," and a portly income.

The Significance. Replete with bromidic sentiments, glittering with luxuries and unlikely incident, Beauty and the Beast is extremely likely cinema material.

The Author. Author Norris,* unerring caterer to the adolescent mind, has written 26 other novels, most of them successful, most of them sentimental, one or two of them distinguished.

*Her husband, Charles G. Norris, is a writer of note (Bread, Salt, etc.). Last week her son, 16-year-old Frank Norris, 2nd, namesake of Author-uncle Frank Norris (McTeague), student at Tamalpais School, San Rafael, Calif., won first prize in a special essay contest conducted by the Brooks-Bright Foundation. The subject of Son Norris's essay: The effect of the growth of population and diminishing food supply on future relations between the U. S. and Great Britain and their relations to other nations. The contest he won was among schools not members of the Foundation.