THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

September 4, 1943

After admitting that he cannot play love scenes, bachelor Monty Woolley struck this pose with starlet Frances Gladwin to prove that, far from fearing women, he can walk right up and leer at them.

# The Beard That Talks Like a Man

By FREDERICK
C. OTMAN

The profit motive, a tabas-
co temper and some whiskers
rescued ex-Yale Professor Monty
Woolley from hunger and stuffed
his pockets with Hollywood gold.

FROM behind the magnificent pinkish-white beard came a noise that sounded suspiciously like a belch. A lady, staring fascinatedly at the man with the whiskers, looked shocked.

"What did you expect, madam?" he demanded.
"Chimes?"

That line appeared in a movie featuring Monty Woolley, the most surprising movie star of them all, a Yale professor who nurtured his beard through the years and in spite of it, or perhaps because of it, became, at the age of fifty-five, one of Hollywood's top-flight actors. Had Woolley been a bearded lady, he wouldn't have had a chance—a thought he meditates upon in moments of thanksgiving.

The only trouble with a line like that, according to Woolley, is that he is expected to insult people off the screen, as well as on. When insults are flying around, he's usually on the receiving end. To hear him tell it, nobody has ever taken such a pushing around and emerged alive, much less with one contract that pays him $3750 for every six days he's before the cameras and another that pays him $1000 each week for thirty minutes on the radio. "It is wonderful,"

An advocate of pure water—for his beard—he
loves to drive in rainstorms with the top down.

says Woolley. "It is indeed. It almost makes up for
the harrowing years that went before."

"Harrowing" is one word for those years. "Hun-
gry" is another. His career as man-about-town, pal of
the mighty and educator de luxe reached a dismal
climax in 1925, when Yale University received a
$1,000,000 bequest for establishment of a dramatic
school. Professor Woolley—Edgar Montillion Wool-
ley—wanted mightily to be head of that school. He
was an assistant in the English department and for
more years than he cared to remember he had been
eating a breakfast of two hard-boiled eggs and a Tom
Collins in a humble restaurant patronized by his
students. But the university fathers by-passed him
and gave the post to a professor with the common-
place name of George Baker. Woolley's students were
incensed. They held meetings and passed resolutions.
The university refused to budge. Woolley resigned.
His mother died. A fortune in railroad shares left him
by his father dried up. And there he was, a middle-
aged man with lots of glossy friends, but very little to
eat. To heighten the irony, Baker's classroom went
ahead to glory and produced a number of leading
playwrights and authors.

Woolley consoled himself for the shattering of his
ambitions by starting to raise his now-fabulous beard.
It came out a weird orange color at first. Growing the
whiskers took four months and loving care, though

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GENE LESTER