The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • 112

Ik WOWED HOLLYWOOD fMf SONG i Certrude Niesen achieved stardom on the radio, went west for a rest, and now is headed toward movie fame. Gertrude Niesen, who looks like a "femme fatale" but is just a grown-up tomboy, sang one night at the Trocadero and before she got out had seven movie contracts thrust at her. Now she is headed for stardom Jcannette Median By HOLLYWOOD 00!" said that famous male star looking up at the picture jn the wall. "I wouldn't mind playing Antony to her Cleo wffl- M1 1 Mm I she gave her imitation of Miss Roberti. "Wonderful," breathed her friends, "but wonderful! You must go on the stage." Miss Niesen, being very young, thought so too.

But she didn't have what are known as "valuable connections." She knew none of the people who are "nice people to know" when one wants to get by the secretarial Jf XJ i 4 guards of sacred inner sanctums. So the young lady got out the telephone book, made a list of theatrical agencies and started out. Of course you know what hap -10 night clubs and as a radio singer. She excelled in torch songs. She was guest starring at a popular Hollywood cafe when she signed her Universal contract.

Besides English, she spoke Russian, Italian, French and German. The night of the big party celebrating the new management of Universal, she sang "Take My Heart" with such passion and fire that her distinguished audience at once placed her as a "femme fatale" of the screen. Two days later I sat across the luncheon table from Gertrude Niesen and now I believe in the Little Brown Bear. The laugh, if on anyone, was on Hollywood. No, you're wrong.

She looked exactly like her picture. It was her personality that was different. All of us hereabouts had been so sure that Miss Niesen was the kind of girl who read novels like "Flaming Youth," who liked incense and myrrh and scarlet wallpaper and across from me sat a girl whose mouth turned up at the corners in honest laughter; whose nose wrinkled when she giggled, whose eyes well, darn it, they twinkled. They twinkled the whole time she talked of herself from the time she was born to OF Russian and Swedish descent, Gertrude Niesen was born on the high seas aboard a passenger ship bound for America. (She has been a good sailor ever since.) Her family was returning home to New York from a trip abroad.

In spite of her sex, up until the time she entered the Brooklyn Heights Seminary she was "Junior," because her father taught her to throw a ball better than any boy, to handle a hat, to manipulate a rod and reel. So she pitched and batted and played and studied her way into her early 'teens without a worry in the world. She says any questions about her childhood ambitions always embarrass her because she didn't have any. It happened in her first year in the seminary. She found a medium that struck a smypathetic note in her being music.

She couldn't get enough. She studied voice and piano and harmony and harmony and piano and voice. She came out with a voice, all right but she'd rather you didn't mention the piano. Not over half a dozen years ago Miss Niesen attended a Broadway show in which Lyda Roberti appeared. When the vital little Polish star sang "Sweet and Hot," Gertrude Niesen became her most ardent admirer.

She betook herself home and imitated Lyda before her mirror. A few weeks later, at a lemonade-and-fancy-cookie party for young people in her own home, patra." Whereupon his two male companions reined themselves in and looked too. They didn't say anything. They just looked. Then they walked on.

An errand boy hurried through with an inter-office communication, but as he passed the third picture from the left, he winked. "How doe? it feel to be so beautiful?" he murmured. And as he passed through the gate he muttered audibly, "Whatta dame, whatta dame, whatta And that sort of thing had been going on all morning. It seemed like a rather ordinary place for anything strange to happen, but something HAD happened, there in the long white hall of the administration building on the Universal lot. There is nothing very interesting about the hallway, except, perhaps, the elegant portraits of the studio's pet properties that line its walls.

They're familiar objects, and the girls and boys around the lot pay scant attention to them. But this morning a new picture took its place among the other faces that appear in Universal pictures. It hung directly over the second potted palm on the left, and it seemed to be causing a small riot. TN the short space of an hour 20-odd pairs of A eyes had appraised that picture admiringly, and supremely unaware of their drawing the slumbrous, matchless eyes of Gertrude Niesen gazed complacently back at them. No wonder her employers regarded her contract with smug satisfaction as though it were a pat flush in a pokei game I What was it about that picture that was so arresting? It wasn't a beautiful face.

Beauty contest judges would say that the cheek bones were too -high, the mouth too wide, and the forehead too broad. But who cares about beauty where there's a distinction that startles you into comparisons? The girl in the picture looked sensuous. Her enormous eyes were wide and frank, but they suggested a "past." To look at her portrait is to think rather wistfully of those emotionally frank and somewhat torrid pictures in the days of Gloria Swanson, Nita Naldi and Barbara LaMarr before the era of the Ladies' Aid and censors when an affair was an affair and not "just a friendship. Hollywood knew just little enough about Gertrude Niesen to further these impressions. They'd gleaned a few bare facts a girl who to fame as an entertainer in New York's Five or six years ago, Miss Niesen heard Lyda Roberti (above) sing in a Broadway show.

It was her great admiration for Miss Roberti, and her effort to give an imitation of her at a party that began her career. pened. In most cases she didn't get past the office boy. Others took her name and address and said they'd call and then didn't. PUT Gertrude stuck with it until oh, glori-ous day she was offered two jobs, one as an entertainer at the Three Hundred Club, the other a part in a vaudeville act.

Unable to make up her mind between them, she accepted both, and her first pay check, in even round numbers, was $185 a week. From that time on her life has been a fairy tale come true. She went from one engagement to another and found audiences most receptive to her voice, her striking personality and her clever imitations. In a few whirlwind years she appeared in such shows as "Sonny," Ziegfeld's "Follies," "The Vagabond King," "The Party." She became the toast of Broadway. To Gertrude those years were cataclysmic.

Before that first $185 pay check she had been getting nine hours of sleep at night. Now there were rehearsals and radio broadcasts and shows and night club engagements. Not being used to the strenuous life of a celebrity, she began to suffer nervous exhaustion. She was just plain "pooped." One day she was talking to Joseph Schenck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox and an old friend. He suggested California for a rest.

So the little girl went west with Mama and Papa Niesen. A few days later she was among Mr. Schenck's dinner guests at Hollywood's famous Trocadero Cafe. When the owner of that exclusive nitery stopped for a few moments' conversation with the executive, Mr. Schenck pointed suddenly to Gertrude and said, "By the way, Bill, there's your guest star for next Sunday night." Miss Niesen smiled sweetly at this, but no sooner was the gentleman's back turned (Copyright, by Every Vrek Magazine) only as a beautiful place to live a place where the major portion of the population seems to be concerned with a fascinating industry.

But she isn't looking to the top ol the ladder. She now laughs at herself for coming to Hollywood for a rest, because the radio broadcasts and the guest-starring and the studying have continued. Besides that there are clothes to be fitted and scripts to be read and tests to be made wardrobe tests, make-up tests One wonders about those make-up tests. Her features are as God made them. Her hair has been dressed in the same fashion ever since she was a child.

It lacks that tiresome "set" look, and its color is frankly its own reddish-brown. With her striking features and her sense of humor, she is the most definitely "new" personality to appear on the Hollywood horizon in a long time. If the studio puts her through the factory routine and turns her out in a can stamped "typical Hollywood blond" -well, a shooting squad is too good for 'em. than she frowned sternly upon her host and said, "Now see here, that's not fair. I'm supposed 'to be here for a rest.

And anyway, I'm not sure that I'm good enough." Not good enough! Haw! following Sunday night she sang to an enthralled audience and before she had a chance to leave the Trocadero exactly seven different contracts from as many different sources awaited her good graces. She signed with Universal. (Not good enough!) When Gertrude Niesen sings, clad as she always is in a trailing evening gown of some sheer material in a pastel shade, she gives you an impression of extreme height. Actually she's only 5 feet 4 Yi inches tall, and pleasantly on the plumpish side. In spite of the fact that she's an excellent deep-sea angler, a good tennis player and a skilled horsewoman, and weekly poundings not withstanding, her pounds refuse to melt away.

Gertrude says she's conscious of Hollywood.