Filmland’s Pretty Boys Have Their Problems

Hollywood –(AP)—Some of us pie-faces are hard to convince, but John Derek insists that good looks can be an awful liability.

Don’t expect Derek to be modest. The town’s new rave among leading men won’t deny he’s handsome. On the contrary, he says:

“The movies always cast the good looking bloke as the leading man, but actually, in real life he isn’t the leading man at all.”

“Why, in school I was positively an introvert!”

Kids, he said, are inclined to stay away from boys with pretty faces. “They think you feel superior, or they think you’re a weakling. It’s a hundred times harder to prove yourself a man.”

That, though, tough enough, is in the past. What irks Derek now is that, as an adult, he says he’s having the same trouble—with women.

“It’s actually hard to get dates,” he complained. “The girls think you’re conceited. They think you can have any girl you want.”

Now working in “Rogues in Sherwood Forest,” Derek said he turned down the Valentino role because he feels it would have branded him a dandy. He hopes he has lined up, for his next two films, the roles of a circus performer and a football player.

Before crying any salty tears over the plight of poor Derek, consider the bankroll his face represents.

“I guess it is my bread and butter,” he concedes, somewhat grudgingly. “But I’d sure like to play a gangster.”

TRAVEL NOTES: Virginia Mayo off to Utah to keep company with her husband, Michael O’Shea, who’s locationing for a western. . .Jane Wyman resting in London after “Stage Fright.” She has to be in Hollywood by October to begin “The Glass Menagerie”… Ann Blyth is planning a trip to Ireland next year, to visit her mother’s birthplace.

John Payne is prepping his first independent movie. But you won’t see him cast with his wife, Gloria De Haven. This oft-separated couple decided recently to pursue individual careers.

A switch on an oldie, but appropriate: The sign on the outskirts of Pioneertown, Cal., read “Live here and live longer,” until Lew Ayres came along. After “Daybreak” locationed a week at the hot desert resort, Lew scribbled beneath the slogan, “It only seems longer.”

What would it take to bring Jack Benny back to the screen? “A tremendous script,” said Jack. He added that he hadn’t run across one. He is, however, mulling the possibility of filming the old Frank Craven stage hit, “That’s Gratitude,” in which he’d want Ronald Colman as co-star.

Bob Hope reports receiving a lot of mail from Texans since he struck oil in the Lone Star State. he says they all want to sell him choice land, with oil deposits almost a certainty. “If some property owner would just say he has a piece of worthless swamp land for sale,” Bob observed sourly, “I’d probably buy it—from sheer surprise.”