The studio insists she diet and take off weight. She obtains bit parts in some films and studies with a drama coach. Hyde secures for her a $100-a-week stock contract at MGM, where she is immediately cast in Broadway Serenade. Ross introduces her to Johnny Hyde of the William Morris Agency, a power in Hollywood. She and her mother go to see Ross, about whom she will later say, "Whatever success I’ve had, he’s responsible for." It’s a Hollywood come-on." When she emerges from the theatre, a man who says his name is Wally Ross approaches her and asks, "How’d you like to be in the movies?" She does not reply, but when she gets home she tells her mother about it, and grandmother Lucas ferrets out the fact that Ross actually is an actors’ agent.
Mary beth movie movie#
Some years later she will tell a New York Daily News interviewer that as Carroll dismissed the girls he rejected, he warned them not to fall for offers of movie work "by men in front of the theatre waiting for you to come out. Carroll tells her that she is overweight and needs showgirl experience. She does so, and six months of unsuccessful attempts to obtain movie work follow.ĭecember nearly broke, she and her mother are about to return to Washington when she answers an advertisement for chorus girls for the theatre Earl Carroll will soon open on Sunset Boulevard. Grandmother Lucas, who is living in Los Angeles, urges Mrs. Graduates from high school and returns to Clifford Brooks’ repertory company and plays a variety of roles until the summer of 1938 in the autumn to continue her high school education at Holy Cross Academy. A Gaumont-British Studios talent scout is taken with her beauty and poise and offers her a film contract-until he learns that she has to return to Washington, D.C. Louis Municipal Opera, gives her work as a dancer. A family acquaintance, Adolf Bolm of the St. He subsequently gives her good parts in his productions of Daddy Long Legs and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hughes and Grandmother Lucas, he admits Mary Beth to his repertory company and gives her the title role in a production of Alice in Wonderland, which tours throughout the U.S. Her participation in a school play is brought to the attention of Clifford Brooks, who, in addition to being connected with Washington’s National Theatre, has a repertory company of his own. The Depression obliges her mother to take a clerical position with the federal government in Washington, D.C. She beguiles the child with glamorizations of stage life and fills her after-school hours with vocal and ballet lessons. Her grandmother sees in her beautiful grandchild a possibility of the family attaining the fame and fortune that she and her two daughters did not achieve. Lucas, and two aunts were stage actresses (under the names of Flora Fosdick, Flora Conrad, and Alicinda Madison). Louis family of some prominence (an uncle, Roy Frank Britton, had been an Attorney General of Missouri). Her mother, Mary Frances (Lucas) Hughes, is from a St. Born in Alton, Illinois, the only child of parents who separate during her infancy.