NEW “RACKET”STARTS

Taranaki Daily News, 22 June 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

NEW “RACKET”STARTS

TRICKSTERS PROVE ELUSIVE. ACTORS RECEIVE STRANGE BILLS. Wouldn’t it give you a queer feeling if you were constantly receiving bills for services and articles you had never purchased? This is the latest “racket” by which Hollywood screen actors are being victimised, and the tricksters have so far proven so elusive that few have been caught. With a constant change of their bases of operation, many of these brazen swindlers continue to go merrily on their nefarious ways.

• “I have never yet made use a double in motion pictures,” says Alan Dinehart ruefully, “but I seem to have a double in real life. Someone who apparently knows a great deal about me has been impersonating me with such success that for a month he has lived in style at fine hotels. I have an account at all the Biltmore hotels, but it so happens that the two I have never stopped at are those at Santa Barbara, California, and at New Orleans.' At all others I have numbers of friends among the staffs. “Recently a man, giving the name of Alan Dinehart, and accompanied by his wife and two children, registered at the hotel at Santa Barbara and lived in style there for several weeks. When leaving the man asked that the bill be sent to him at Hollywood, my correct address.

“Soon after the arrival of this unexpected statement I received a. bill for a new automobile which had been delivered to a man giving my name, and I began to get slightly worried. Apparently he ‘went South’ with the car, so to speak, for a short while later I received a bill from the New Orleans hotel, showing that the ‘Dinehart family’ had stayed there for two weeks —and had then left for parts unknown.”

Cooper Again With Dietrich. Marlene Dietrich will co-star again with Gary Cooper in her next picture. They were, of course, together in “Morocco.” The new film is to be made from a play with the unusual title “A Lovely Day in Aranjuez.”

Exchange of Stars. Margaret Sullavan, when she arrives at Hollywood after her European honeymoon, will leave Universal for one picture and go over to Paramount for “So Red the Rose,” ■ featuring Pauline Lord and Fred Stone. In return for Margaret Sullavan Paramount will lend Carole Lombard to Universal.