Grandma Writes a Book

The U. S. theatre honors two First Ladies--Katharine Cornell and Helen Hayes. The two are very unlike in appeal.

Yearning, slightly throaty Cornell, with her great eyes and grand manner, is chiefly a personality; Helen Hayes, deft and versatile, is every inch an actress. Cornell, in a sense, never seemed young; Helen Hayes rose to fame in girlish and flapper parts, came of age as Maggie Wylie in a revival of What Every Woman Knows, slowly gained enough poise and stature to triumph thrice as queen--as Cleopatra, Mary of Scotland, Victoria.

Last year Actress Cornell--slightly the older of the two--told her life story; this week appears Actress Hayes's. It is told, not by 39-year-old Helen herself, but in a series of letters from her 63-year-old mother to her ten-year-old daughter.* For the reader who can grit his teeth against all Grandma's "Mary darlings" and "Mary sweets," and survive all her gushing over Helen, the method has its points. It saves Helen from having to blow her own horn, and it makes for a fairly frank, highly chatty tone.

Helen Hayes went on the stage at five. From child parts to Little Lord Fauntleroy to Pollyanna to the flapper in Clarence, on to the big roles of her mature years, Helen moved steadily forward--and her mother with her. Whenever Helen signed a contract, her mother leaned over her shoulder. Whenever Helen was on stage, her mother stood in the wings. Mother was even privy to the "snares" Helen laid to catch her husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur.

Though the book is all Helen, it lacks the cautious, great-lady air that chilled Katharine Cornell's I Wanted to Be an Actress. Mother shows Helen blowing up at Jed Harris when he did backward somersaults over how she should say the one word "Hello" in Coquette. "I didn't know this was Euripides," Helen screamed. "I won't go on until you get out of here!" (He got out.) Mother exposes Helen's tendency to misuse words, quotes her famed "Any one who wants my piano is willing to it," to which George S. Kaufman replied, "That is very seldom of you, Helen."

*LETTERS TO MARY: The Story of Helen Hayes --Catherine Hayes Brown--Random House ($3).

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