Word: bel
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...welter of productive activity that characterized the Bel Geddes establishment, Barbara was, comparatively, pretty small potatoes. Like Joan, her elder (by six years) sister, and a short-lived "little" magazine called Inwhich, she was the product of Norman's collaboration with his first wife, Helen Belle Sneider.* She was no match for such stupendous enterprises as Norman's transformation of New York's Century Theater into a Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle...
...when Barbara was only five years old, that frantic, fascinating period of her life came abruptly to an end. Designer Bel Geddes and his wife separated. From the turmoil of the family brownstone, Barbara and her sister were transplanted to the quiet of a house in Millburn, N.J. (pop. 13,400). Partly because of Belle's retiring nature and partly because of their newly straitened circumstances, their life was cloistered even for life in a suburban town...
...dreamed through classroom hours, let her eyes rest happily on the strange new world of young men surrounding her, romped on the playing fields, and plunged ecstatically into a production of Synge's Riders to the Sea. After the play was staged, the school drama teacher wrote Bel Geddes that his daughter had displayed no dramatic talent whatsoever...
...Hell." Director Kazan and many another of Barbara's friends in New York urged her to stay away from pictures. "She was not a commodity, a can of peas," says Kazan. "She was an actress." But Actress Bel Geddes had at last been granted a wish completely on her own terms. She was not to be turned off. "I wanted desperately to be a movie star," she admits today. She went to the coast determined, often quite touchily (as in the matter of dressing rooms), to be treated like a movie star. The one thing she could...
...Something Important." Some critics argue that Actress Bel Geddes was a downright flop in pictures. The fact is that she was neither a success nor a failure. As the daughter in Mama, Barbara did well enough to be nominated for an Oscar.† She was distinctive in none of her pictures, but in none was she disastrous. Like a diamond in the wrong setting, she seemed simply to have lost the special radiance that marked her on the stage. In the proper setting, the radiance was quick to return...