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ANN SOTHERN:
A Gal
Troubles
Can't Beat
Illnesses, unhappy marriages,
career problems she has
faced them all and learned
a lesson: the worst enemy one
can have is self-pity
By PEER J. OPPENHEIMER
Ann's lovely leen-age daughter, Patricia Ann
(Tish) made her acting debut in an appearance with
Mom on TV episode of "The Ann Sothern Show."
A nn Sotiiern is a paradox in courage. Women
admire her and hate her. Men like her but
don't love her. She's a lazy woman who does the
work of three executives.
Site's a person who loves people and parties but
lives a lonely life in a mansion valued at $250,000
while figuring out how to pay the U.S. nearly $1
million it claims she owes in back taxes.
She's a woman who wants nothing more than
to be married, but at 49, with two divorces, she
has given up hope of ever finding another husband.
She's a woman who has had more heartbreaks,
more ups nnd downs, more misfortunes than almost
any other actress in Hollywood yet has found
the courage to fight back. Each time she has been
hit by trouble, she has bounced back smiling.
Take a spring day in Minneapolis, when she was
Harriet Lake and eight years old. She saw a little
boy dash across the street and into the path of an
oncoming car. Impulsively, she rushed after him
and shoved him away from the screeching wheels
in time to save him but not herself. The car ran
over her, and she lost consciousness.
"When I woke up in the hospital," Ann recalls,
"I heard my father call me 'Dear' and 'Darling.'
It was wonderful. It was the first time he had ever
shown such affection to me."
In spite of her injuries, Ann appreciated this
warmth from a man who had never been able to
show much affection, who had hoped for a son
but fathered nothing but daughters, whom he
raised like sons until he divorced their mother and
remarried only to have more daughters!
Ann isn't bitter. "He taught me to be a good
businesswoman," she says proudly. Today, they
are partners raising black angus cattle in Idaho.
With Ann there has always been a new vitality,
a new aim, a will to bounce back when things went
wrong. And they never went more wrong than the
day she collapsed in Sun Valley, Idaho.
It was January, 1950, and Ann was skiing when
suddenly she was overcome by a deep feeling of
fatigue. Minutes later, two members of the ski
patrol were carrying her downhill on a stretcher.
Ann was too tired to care. Shf. was convinced it
was only exhaustion.
But it wasn't exhaustion. Ann had been stricken
by infectious hepatitis. The illness eventually led
to the necessity for a thyroidectomy.
Four years passed before Ann could return to
work. For three of these years, she was in and
out of the hospital undergoing treatment, including
two serious operations. Most of the time, she was
flat on her back, unable to move, caring little
whether she lived or died.
Next came cancellation of her movie contract
with MGM. Ann insists they parted by mutual
agreement. A close friend disagrees. "She was fired
after making a big fortune for them with her won-
)
Family Wwklv. Mnrfh 5, 1961