Exploits of Elaine

One glittering night last week. Manhattan's theatregoers offered to pay up to $50 a seat to get into the venerable Belasco Theatre. They went to sit through something Chicago had been howling over for 33 weeks: John Barrymore, the Waning Profile, making a travesty of a play that travestied his own career. In a sense they were disappointed. My Dear Children was definitely not up to the low standard it attained in Chicago (TIME. Nov. 6).

Barrymore's burlesque of himself proved more bumpy than bumptious, his ad libs flabbier than flip. But he did let go a few Royal Family burps, and enough offside lines to indicate that this Jerry Horwin-Catherine Turney farce might yet be "good theatre," with old John really strutting his stuff.

As Barrymore took his curtain call--his first in Manhattan after 17 prodigal years--an unemployed Hamlet from Brooklyn, in long Hamlet pants, leaped to the stage. After he was hustled off, Barrymore returned to report: "The gentleman who just jumped across the footlights is now being sat upon by the fattest electrician in New York.''

Meanwhile a determined young woman hustled out of her third-row seat and trailing her foxy furs, headed backstage. She was, as most of the audience knowingly noted, darkling Elaine Barrie, the lipsticky, 25-year-old tyro-wife whom 57-year-old John had spanked out of My Dear Children's ingenue lead and into the divorce courts last April.

Backstage, Elaine breezed into John's dressing room. Barrymore's (and Poetess Michael Strange's) pretty young daughter, Diana, who had hoped to guard Papa from mischief this trip, was floored. "I can't stand any more . . ." she wailed. "This is the end."

But it was only Scene I. After 35 minutes with John, Elaine said she must be going. "John." purred she, "it might be embarrassing to you and to me, too, if we happened to meet in public. You tell me where you're going after the show, and I'll go somewhere else." John took the whole hook & line.

Sure enough, into Fefe's Monte Carlo, where John sat sipping with Daughter Diana and Stage Daughter Doris Dudley (who succeeded Elaine in the play), swept Elaine. She sat at a table close to John's. Doris and Diana bristled. When Diana got up to dance, Elaine slipped into Diana's chair. The Monte Carlo crowd cocked eyes, cupped ears for Scene II. "All I want is 24 hours with you." Elaine implored. "I don't want you for keeps, John, but I must have you back for a little while. All I want is 24 hours of bliss. Look at me, John." John looked. Elaine the Eyeful was wearing a slinky, low-cut gold mesh gown. John bussed her zestfully. Diana scrammed. Shortly afterwards John and Elaine left. They went to the Hotel Navarro. Fifteen blissful hours later. John emerged. Cocking a baggy but eloquent eye, he confided: "I'm back with my sweetsie now."

Next day Doris and Diana had an indignation luncheon. Elaine was slated to return to My Dear Children in Doris' place within a fortnight. "By God," Doris exploded, "you've got to hand it to her. She's got guts. She'll stop at nothing!" But Doris was able to philosophize about it. Said she, "I am in the peculiar position of trying to fight sex with talent. ... I hope that Miss Barrie is not doing all this for publicity, because it will hurt John. He needs somebody so badly. He's a very lonely old--no. I won't say he's old--he's a very lonely man, and he has a spent mind."

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