Helen Hayes

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Vanity Fair,November 1933

elen Hayes felt too homely for Hollywood—when Dietrich told her to break a leg, she thought she meant it. But, for sixty-five years, she entranced Broadway audiences with her demurely dogged women. "She seemed to glow out loud," said Marc Connelly. "She makes Pollyanna seem like a painted hussy," said Robert Benchley. Still, she coaxed Charles (The Front Page) Mac Arthur away from the Algonquin vixens. He offered her a bag of peanuts and said he wished they were emeralds. Later, from wartime India, he sent her emeralds, joking that he wished they were peanuts. A two-time Oscar winner with two successive Broadway theaters named for her, Miss Hayes, eighty-seven, has now co-authored her first novel, Where the Truth Lies (William Morrow). She deserves bags more emeralds.