Items For Theatre-Goers DO TOUGH GUYS MAKE BETTER TROUPERS THAN GENTLER ACTORS?

Wanganui Chronicle, 6 January 1949, Page 7

Items For Theatre-Goers DO TOUGH GUYS MAKE BETTER TROUPERS THAN GENTLER ACTORS?

Do tough guys make better troupers than their gentler brothers? Betty Delmont seems to think so. Belly is a hairdresser at Warner Bros. As such she’s fixed tresses for cinematic notables having all kinds of temperaments.

Diplomacy, and/or wisdom, prevents Betty from naming those stars whose hair she'd just as son not fix; but about her favourites she has lots to say. She is practically ecstatic, for instance, when discussing Humphrey Bogart, her latest charge. “Mr. Bogart (Betty is very correct; she never calls her people by their first names) is a dream to work with and for,” said Betty. “He was supposed to be oh, so tough, in ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre,’ but actually he was the most considerate man I ever worked with.

‘And I should know, too, because,” she continued. “I spent two months in his company in Mexico on location for the picture* plus another two

weeks in the mountains near Kernville, California. I think that a person’s true nature comes out on location, when things aren’t always as convenient and pleasant as at the studio. But I never heard him complain, and I never saw him jump ahead of anyone in the lines we had to form for food, passports and so forth. I never saw him start a meal until he knew that everyone else in the troupe had been served.”

As for being tough guy, Betty thinks Bogart reserves all that for his characterisations. Out of camera range, according to her, he's just an old softie, live times as gallant as some great lovers she could (but wouldn’t) name.