Joanne of the Ark

Betty Joanne Benedict, 15, is one of the quietest little country girls ever born and brought up in the unquiet State of California. She has a pretty, sensitive face, cheeks like apples, red hair and a turned-up nose. She also has a knack for knocking out jingles ("All our family," she explains, "has been able to make rhymes for generations"), and a will of her own.

Year and a half ago, during summer vacation, she tripped into the office of the San Jose Mercury. Its editor was soon amazed to find himself sending cool Joanne Benedict (she drops the Betty professionally) out to interview celebrities from the teen-age angle.

Presently a San Jose radio station was surprised to find itself giving little Miss Benedict children's parts in radio plays.

But all this was child's play. Joanne had much bigger things in the back of her head and (partly written) in the back of her bureau drawer. For Joanne's 72-year-old grandmother, Mrs. Eva Snapp, had been telling her stories of the Ohio River floods for years, and busy little Joanne had been jotting them down. Some time shortly after infancy, Joanne had decided to do a scenario based on grandma's flood experiences. Since then, it has been her life work.

Says Joanne: "I've been thinking about it and writing bits of it now and then as long as I can remember." She even enlisted her father and mother and the neighbors to give a hand with dialogue, touch up the grammar. "Sometimes," she says, "I'd find in the back of a bureau drawer an old piece of paper with a couple of paragraphs on it, and I'd say, 'Oh, that!' Then I'd rewrite it and try to fit it into the rest I had."

Strong for verisimilitude, Joanne interviewed the local judge to learn how judges talk, the local grocer to learn the idiom of grocers. By autumn of 1939 she had put all the pieces of paper together, laboriously typed out (by hunt and peck) their 15,000 words.

Result was a scenario "unconsciously written" in the very form Hollywood scripters use for an "original screen treatment." Joanne called her script Joan of the Ark. It tells how an old lady (Aunt Sis) finds a baby afloat in a box during a flood, rescues it and brings it up. Cut to the child, a little girl, age 14, name Joan.

Still aboard the shanty boat, Aunt Sis tells Joan the story of Noah's Ark in terms of the Ohio River. When Aunt Sis dies, Joan stays on the boat, begins collecting two of every kind of animal, stealing, when necessary, from nearby farms. Eventually she has quite a menagerie, imagines she is a modern Noah. Romance comes when Joan is spying on a rich boy at a garden party.

One morning a few months ago, Director Frank Capra had a letter from Joanne. It was written in jingles, explained that nobody appreciated Joanne, wondered if Director Capra thought the jingles showed promise. He did. A few mails later he received Joan of the Ark.

Capra liked the script, but could not use it. He sent it to somebody he thought could--Sam Marx, story editor for Columbia Pictures. Cried a Columbia executive who read it: "This was either written by a genius, a child or a lunatic." In any case, explained Capra, it would cost Columbia Pictures $1,500 if they wanted to buy it. They did. Capra wired Joanne, who wired back: "My Goodness. ..." Columbia executives took one look at the girl and decided to screen-test Joanne for the lead in Joan of the Ark.

Some of the money would go for Joanne's recent appendectomy, some for her first pair of high-heeled shoes (Joanne still wears socks and pumps). But first of all she planned to wave the $1,500 check under her rancher father's nose. He had always wanted a boy to help him with the cows, said, "Hmmmph!" when Joanne was born.

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