Word: barbara
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...Michigander of Scottish-German ancestry, Norman Bel Geddes has been, among other things, actor, producer, director, stage designer and author. The big brownstone house on Manhattan's East 37th Street in which Barbara spent her early childhood saw an endless stream of visitors from many worlds. It was Norman's studio as well as his home, and on the upper floors busy draftsmen and artisans were always hard at work, assembling stage models, cutting out rubber animals for a Macy parade, drawing up plans for a restaurant, or laying out production schedules for some new show...
...welter of productive activity that characterized the Bel Geddes establishment, Barbara was, comparatively, pretty small potatoes. Like Joan, her elder (by six years) sister, and a short-lived "little" magazine called Inwhich, she was the product of Norman's collaboration with his first wife, Helen Belle Sneider.* She was no match for such stupendous enterprises as Norman's transformation of New York's Century Theater into a Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle...
...when Barbara was only five years old, that frantic, fascinating period of her life came abruptly to an end. Designer Bel Geddes and his wife separated. From the turmoil of the family brownstone, Barbara and her sister were transplanted to the quiet of a house in Millburn, N.J. (pop. 13,400). Partly because of Belle's retiring nature and partly because of their newly straitened circumstances, their life was cloistered even for life in a suburban town...
...Cloister. As she grew up, Barbara's need for a dramatic outlet became more urgent than ever. The pictures father Norman took on his rare, explosive visits show her as a leggy towhead assuming all the languorous and seductive poses common to the movie magazines of the day. When no camera was at hand, Barbara would register her soul-searing emotions before a mirror. Her sister Joan and her mother, who disapproved of the children going to movies, called it "making faces...
...When Barbara was 15 her mother died, and she was packed off to Vermont's coeducational Putney School. Putney's faculty remember her as "a bubbly, vivacious, buxom girl, with a talent for mimicry and no academic skill." At Putney, she dreamed through classroom hours, let her eyes rest happily on the strange new world of young men surrounding her, romped on the playing fields, and plunged ecstatically into a production of Synge's Riders to the Sea. After the play was staged, the school drama teacher wrote Bel Geddes that his daughter had displayed no dramatic...