3/6/1933 Hollywood Citizen News Elizabeth Yeaman

Maiden Cruise, the big musical picture scheduled at Radio Pictures studio, underwent a change of cast today. Ben Lyon, who was scheduled for the leading male role, will not be seen in the picture. He was loaned by MGM. And Dorothy Jordan, now free-lancing, also is out of the cast.
Helen Mack, little auburn-haired ingenue who was at Fox under contract for a time, has been given the feminine lead. This is the biggest break that she has had since coming to Hollywood. She both dances and sings and these talents are requirements for her role.
Although no one is definitely set for the male lead replacing Ben Lyon, there is talk about signing a young concert singer by the name of Nelson Eddy. Eddy has never made a picture. Mark Sandrich is to direct the picture and Chic Chandler will have the comedy lead. According to the schedule now mapped out, the picture is due to go before the cameras day after tomorrow.

In what is now one of the trendier areas of London, a large flat above an electrical shop at No. 292, Westbourne Grove was my early childhood home in the 1940’s. Even back then, a stone’s throw from Notting Hill Gate and close by the antiques and fruit & veg markets of Portobello Road, it had a lively and eccentric atmosphere.

Streets were gap-toothed from the bombing, the old mews passages behind tall, shabby Victorian terraces were still cobbled and lived in by working people. Opposite us, at No.297, my aunts lived above their hairdresser’s shop; I would go to ‘work’ there aged about six, in a small pink overall (cut down by Mum), sweeping up hair from the floor, handing pins to the stylists, chatting with ladies who were wired up to permanent waving machines like strange hydras.

In their large premises over the road, the Jones family sold antiques or, more accurately, second-hand goods; clever at business, they would go on to make a fortune by being in exactly the right place when the trade took off in the sixties and the sweet times started. Years later, Mr. Jones pulled up by a bus stop where I was queueing and whisked me home in a gleaming Rolls Royce…The walk to school in Chepstow Villas took me past Henekey’s pub where the aforesaid Uncle swore that he had seen my Mother Superior dancing on the table with a pint of Guinness. I half believed him. Sam, another uncle, once told me as a joke that his job entailed knitting barbed wire, this I reported as interesting to my friends and suffered the full fallout. I was a gullible child.

Further up the Grove was the Roxy Cinema, a flea-pit really, where Mum took me to my first film – Nelson Eddy (wearing lipstick) & Jeanette MacDonald in Rose Marie. I couldn’t get over the wonderment of it. More wonderful still was to be my first local and very tentative contact with the theatre.