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209 17 Where Danger Lives John charles Bennett The publisher has questioned why my father made such slight mention of my mother despite their marriage of thirty-seven years. I feel no satisfaction in writing this chapter—hers was a hard-luck story. But as Charles’s memoir deserves its full telling, his omission requires my painting two unfortunate portraits. People have asked, “What was it like growing up in Hollywood? Did you meet Hitchcock?” If I did, I don’t remember it. I was bound to the old English expression “Children should be seen and not heard.” Besides, few industry professionals would visit our house. Mom was the antithesis of my father’s first wife, Maggie, who had been a popular hostess. In fact, soon after my birth in 1947, Mom swore to destroy Dad’s reputation . To his professional detriment, he drastically curtailed his social networking, partygoing, and hosting. This was evident as early as 1948 when, uncharacteristically, Dad failed to accept Lady Astor’s invitation or renew a friendship with Gertrude Lawrence. Betty Jo Riley (1922–84) was born of an American Gothic family. Walter Riley (1883–1968) was a Missouri farm boy who smoked a corncob pipe and worked the giant Ferris wheel at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. His father, Cornelius Riley (1858–1907), had been crushed by a locomotive in the Chicago train yard. Walter married Lena Bertha Smith, a farm girl, sometime before 1911, and sired Betty’s sister in that year. In 1911 Walter was a clerk in the recently incorporated boomtown of Grandfield, Oklahoma. But after Lena’s parents lost the family farm during the Depression, Lena became angry and emotionally abusive. At that time HitcHcock’s Partner in susPense 210 Walter was “bringing home the bacon” as a hospital orderly in St. Joseph, Missouri; and on his meager wages his family ate ham, often day after day. Lena once told Betty Jo that she was an accident born ten years after her sister. And once, when Betty had her hair styled, Lena said, “Why did you waste your nickel? It didn’t improve your appearance.” Betty Jo resented both parents, as much Lena’s caustic attitude as Walter’s lack of ambition and failure to protect her from Lena. In 1951 Betty Jo read aloud to me the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl.” The tale is of a child beaten for not selling matches, who chooses to freeze to death while dreaming of her deceased grandmother . Betty Jo identified with this story to such an extent that she cried while reading it. Like the match girl, she chose a calamitous resignation that brought about a slow and chilling death. Betty Jo specialized in resigned clichés such as “Better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick” and “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” “The world is going to hell in a handbasket” and “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Yet she aspired to higher education and received an associate of arts degree at a junior college in St. Joseph, Missouri. In her early twenties Betty Jo was a reader immersed in the poetry of Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was also an award-winning bowler, and a brunette beauty named Tobacco Princess of Weston, Missouri. But after the death of her World War II pilot boyfriend, and some ugly, unrecounted abuse at the hands of her parents (for which she blamed her father), she boarded a Greyhound bus headed west and settled near Santa Monica, California. At twenty-one, she was working in payroll at Douglas Aircraft. She was married for a brief ten months in 1943, but was divorced on the grounds that she had acted in an extremely cruel and inhuman manner and caused her husband mental and physical suffering. In the fall of 1945 Charles Bennett was writing Ivy, which would be cast with his colony friends Joan Fontaine, Herbert Marshall, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, when he met Betty, working as a secretary in the office of his business manager, a former cavalry trooper. Charles was forty-six, recently divorced, rich, and an internationally recognized bon vivant. Betty was unpretentious, twenty-two, drop-dead gorgeous, and had a great figure. Charles was smitten. Their courtship was Pygmalion staged against the glamour and glitz of Hollywood. He fox-trotted Betty through a world of expatriates, film celebs, and...

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