Ish again

A surprisingly large number of elevator boys and messengers were still at their jobs despite the draft. A writer told me how Victor Saville had reprimanded him for writing a scene in which a man runs in and takes his hat and coat from a bedroom chair. My dear fellow said Saville, surely you know that the only place a man leaves his coat on the back of a chair is in a whorehouse?

We discussed the almost pathological mania which nearly ever Hollywood producer has for 'virility'. Dore Schary told Samuels that a scene was 'faggoty' merely because it showed an older man talking to some youths of college age.



With John van Druten to have tea with the Beesleys- Dodie Smith the playwright and her husband Alec.  They live in Beverly Hills, on Palm Drive. Johnny has often talked to me about them-they used to live up in Carmel and have only moved down here lately: Dodie, it seems, is wildly neurotic about ants and bathroom taps. She lies awake fearing that the ants will be killed or the taps left running. Also, she and Alec have two extremely nervous dalmatian dogs, who run the house and are waited on hand and foot, Dodie reminds me a great deal of Forster. She has his nervous, touching eagerness to communicate with you, to be friendly, to understand what you mean. She isn’t tense, like Peggy. And if she’s: bit crazy, at least it’s about something demonstrably silly, which is a great advantage. Craziness is only sinister when it’s concerned with something apparently reasonable. Better ants than America, any day.