The Daily Monitor Leader

This business of celebrating Mother's Day 365 days a year is a little too much, Rosemary De Camp said today. Not that she isn't proud of her screen sons, Jimmy Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Ronald Reagan in "This Is the Army," Sabu, a couple of unnamed youngsters and now Robert Alda as George Gershwin in "Rhapsody in Blue."

It's just that she is tired of gray wigs, padding, rubber chins, wrinkles, soggy handkerchiefs, menthol tears in her eyes and people wanting to help her across the street.

For a beautiful young lady—"my press agent says I'm 27 but I'm really 30"—Rosemary De Camp has grounds for complaints. Hollywood has typed her as "a sweet old lady." Every time she steps in front of a camera she's 50 or even 70 years old.

FAME'S PRICE

Now it is not that sweet old ladies are not well paid in Hollywood but being typed in Hollywood as an old lady is bad business for a beautiful young lady.

"They'll finally get tired of my wrinkles and rubber chins," Rosemary explains, "and someone else will get the mother roles. My agent will try to get me roles as somebody's sister or maybe a gal who breaks up somebody's home and the casting director will say, 'Rosemary De Camp? Ye gods, no. All she can play is mothers.'"

"I'd like to play a menace," she says, "or steal somebody's husband, or play a low, sneaking woman." Just to prove she's the type to be herself, she recently went to a photographer and had a glamor sitting.

Except for one scene as a 1917 chorus girl in "This Is the Army," Rosemary De Camp has never appeared on the screen as her glamorous self. That one scene has started Hollywood to thinking that maybe she can play something besides mothers.

Producer Jesse Lasky called her and her agent to his office at Warner Bros studio the other day to discuss a role in the film biography of George Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue." They were not told what kind of a role Lasky had in mind.

HOPES AWRY

"I was hoping he wanted me to lean against a cocktail bar in the Parisian sequence. So I put on a red dress, a floppy hat and went to Mr. Lasky's office."

Miss De Camp said. Jesse didn't want Rosemary to lean against any bars, however he wanted her to play the mother of George Gershwin and he had the contract all written out.

Rosemary De Camp, daughter of a Prescott, Ariz., mining engineer, arrived in Hollywood four years ago via Mills College plays, summer stock in Connecticut and radio soap operas.

Martha Scott helped her win a role for "Miss Bishop."

Two years ago she became the wife of Municipal Judge John Shidler of Torrance, Calif., who is now a corporal in the Army.

Eight months ago they became the parents of a daughter.