October 1954 Radio TV Mirror
world she wanted to do, but when it came to marriage...There, all her longing for the comfortable, secure home she still remembered influenced her emotions, and a European perspective clarified her plan.
"I want an American," she would specify, and she would brush aside all the other girls' mention of romantic Latins and Frenchmen who could turn a graceful compliment. "That's all very well," she would state, "but Americans make the best husbands of all."
Susan's mind was made up, and Susan, being the kind of girl who plans and then make those plans come true, fully expected that, when the time came for serious romance, everything would work out exactly according to the script she prepared in her own mind day by day. The doctor or the lawyer - the American of substantial profession, understanding heart and great consideration - was bound to turn up right on cue.
There was just one thing Susan overlooked.
Drawing as she did on age-old feminine wisdom when making her plans, Susan should also have recalled that, by tradition, Cupid is the most capricious of creatures and notoriously an erratic marksman when he shoots his darts.
Susan, of course, fell in love with the exact opposite of the man she pictured.
It happened in Toronto, where the Canadian division of United Artists was making the picture, Forbidden Journey." Susan, having just made "Lost Boundaries" for United Artists in Hollywood, was one of the two non-Canadians in the cast.
The other non-Canadian was Jan Rubes (pronounced "roobesh",) a tall, broad-shouldered young man chosen for the role of a Czechoslovakian stowaway. It was more than a mere play part for him, Susan soon discovered. He, too, had been born in her own native country and had come to Canada in 1950.
Instantly, there was the appeal of memories shared, the sound of songs long unheard.
Jan, Susan learned, had been Czechoslovakia's junior tennis champion in the carefree days before the war. He also had been cross-country ski champion. His mother was still in Czechoslovakia and so was Susan's father.
But the songs were more important than the memories, for Jan, a lyric basso, had already achieved a program over CBC Trans-Canada titled Songs Of My People. Directed particularly toward recent immigrants, each week it featured the folk songs of a different national group. Jan, who speaks five languages and sings in twelve, was writer and narrator as well as the singing star. Through his songs and his stories, he sought both to ease the immigrant's nostalgia and to help him adjust to his new home.
Susan was charmed with Jan and Jan was charmed was Susan. So charmed that, during the first month after she returned to New York, he ran up a phone bill of ninety-six dollars, and hers totaled seventy-eight.
Susan's dream of a native-born American husband diminished. It vanished entirely when even their tenuous telephone communication was interrupted by a concert tour which took Jan out of the country for six months.
In the loneliness of awaiting his return, she realized that the labels she had so blithely decided upon held little meaning. Jan might have been born in Czechoslovakia, but he, too, could apply for naturalization. The important thing was that he had absorbed the American idea that marriage is a partnership. He might be in show business, but he shared her desire for a secure, comfortable home.
They were married in New York on September 27, 1951. Says Jan, "It was sort of a hasty wedding. After we got our tests and things out of the way, there were just three hours left before my visitor's visa expired."
Their honeymoon was a trip to Toronto, where Jan returned to his program.
Then began the period in which Jan staked a claim to being the champion long-distance commuter. On Thursday nights, he took a plane from New York to Toronto, did his show on Fridays and returned Friday night.
Under such circumstances, setting up an apartment held difficulties. Says Susan, "That's when I discovered that Jan and I had reacted in opposite ways to the upsets which war had brought in childhood. I'm a great planner. I have to try to work things out in advance. Jan, on the other hand, is a spur-of-the-moment person..."
The mark of Susan, the planner, is on their choice of locations. The building, on 72nd Street, i s conveniently close to Central Park. "It will be easy to get out in the sun," she said - but she now admits that she added to herself, "or take a baby out for an airing."
The extra bedroom drew the same kind of consideration. "We'll make it a study and guest room," she decided - then silently hoped, "or a nursery, a little later on."
To Susan, the color scheme was obvious. "Let's do it in blue," she said.
Jan, reading her mind, teased her, "Hadn't it better be pink? Our first is bound to be a girl."
Susan, summoning courage, said it out loud. "I want a boy. I want an American son."
They compromised on aqua and moved in desks, daybed and piano. Furnishing of the rest of the apartment went along in modern style with a Charles Eames dining table, rush-seated black chairs, a comfortable sofa in a black and white print, a marble-topped coffee table, and occasional chairs in pinkish-orange to match the drapes. For their bedroom, they chose yellow and gray.
Susan was her own decorator. "And what a job!" she exclaims. "It seemed as though every time I found something I wanted, Jan was in Toronto or out on a concert tour. If I asked whether he liked the idea of orange drapes he'd ask, 'What shade of orange?' And I'd be stuck for trying to describe it."
For all his stated refusal to look ahead, it turned out to be Jan who did the most serious planning of all, and he assumes an understandably self-satisfied air as he takes up the story:
"I was in Chicago to sing at the Grant Park concerts last summer, so I thought that would be a good time to go see Irna Phillips."
Irna Phillips, author of Susan's CBS serial, The Guiding Light, is a woman wise in the ways of young couples who obviously are much in love. It's altogether likely that she anticipated Jan's deepest purpose in meeting her and made it easy for him to introduce the subject.
He says, "We got along so well that just before I was leaving I mentioned that we'd like to have a family...."
Miss Phillips knew that practical considerations momentarily overshadowed their deep hope. Considerably, she commented that Jan's move from Canada to the United States had been expensive and that his airplane commuting continued to nip deeply into the family budget. "Are you concerned about Susan staying on the show?" she asked.
Recalling what happened next, his serious face breaks into a wide smile: "Irna said we should go right ahead."
She was the first one they called when, in September, they knew the baby was on the way. Under the circumstances, they had anticipated that Susan would stay on the show only until January. Says Susan, "I didn't know what else Irna could do about it, for she couldn't very well write a baby into the script. On the air, as Kathy, I had just left my husband and she wouldn't have time to get us back together again."
But Miss Phillips and the producer and the director proved resourceful. Camera shots and action were planned to keep Susan's real-life condition a secret on the air. She remained on the show until two weeks before her baby was born. Then Miss Phillips took care of Kathy's absence via a nervous breakdown which was quite in keeping with the plot.
Meanwhile, Susan and Jan were experiencing a personal drama as engrossing as any which could ever be unfolded before cameras and microphones.
Says Susan, "It's the most wonder-filled moment, when you first realize that you have another person to plan for."
That person had to be a boy, Susan announced. Others thought differently. Says Jan, "I believe it was good psychology on the doctor's part to try to convince her the baby would be a girl. That way, she couldn't be disappointed."
Sensible Susan admitted - out loud, at least - that the girl-boy matter was out of her control. She'd settle for a Baby.
But another matter was definitely within the range of her own planning. "Whichever it was to be," she says, "I wanted the baby to have the best possible start in the world. Also, I wanted to know every minute exactly what was happening."
With that attitude she asked her doctor about natural childbirth - the method by which the mother is taught to cooperate with the processes of nature, rather than fighting them, and thus make unnecessary the use of drugs or anesthetics. Susan recalls with satisfaction: "The doctor advised me to take the classes. I had nothing to lose by doing so. Even if I changed my mind later and wanted anesthesia, I'd just be that much better prepared. He realized I didn't like surprises."
One surprise, however, was much to her liking - the baby shower. She says, "I'd never even seen any kind of a shower. Once I had heard some of the girls talking about one and had thought that was such a nice custom I'd like to go to one sometime. It never even occurred to me that I might have one. Charita Bauer, who plays Bert, and Ellen Demming, who is my stepmother on the show, had to trick me into coming over to Charita's house."
When she did arrive, the party delighted her. She says, "They had the place all decorated with pink and blue balloons. All the women on the show and the wives of the staff were there."
For all her careful preparation in the hospital classes, Susan continued to have one worry. To her doctor, she said, "You'll just have to do something to make sure the baby doesn't arrive on a Friday. It will be just awful if it's born when Jan's in Canada."
Jan, too, was concerned. Part of the natural childbirth method is to coach the father as well as the mother in what to anticipate.
The doctor could offer her little aid. "That's up to you," he said. "You'll just have to determine it can't happen."
He was even less reassuring about the time and only when Susan went to see him on Monday, May 24. "Another week or ten days," he predicted. Susan now admits, "I was certain then that it was bound to happen on a Friday - and bound to be a girl. I felt awful."
Then she brightens. "Jan and I were watching the baseball game. That is, Jan was watching. I think the only thing I could see was a mental picture of a plane taking off for Toronto. Until all of a sudden, I got a pain."
To hear her tell it, that particular pain was the most blissful sensation in the world. She continues, "Jan got his stopwatch - the one he uses to time his radio programs - and we waited for the next contraction."
Because of their training in the natural childbirth classes, they knew what to expect and how far the process of birth had advanced. "We didn't even call the doctor until seven o'clock the next morning," Jan beams. "He told us to come over."
Susan chimes in. "They put a mask, a cap and a gown on Jan and he was right with me, timing the contractions, until the last twenty minutes. I appreciated it, because it took quite a long time."
The "quite a long time" was from 8:00 A.M. until 5:30 P.M. but Susan says she was never afraid. "By the stopwatch, I learned that the pains lasted forty-five seconds each and were five minutes apart."
A shot of a sedative gave her the impression of a two-hour sleep during the middle of the afternoon. "But even then," says Jan, "she'd signal me with a long, slow wink whenever a pain started, so I could click the stopwatch."
At 5:30 P.M., May 25, 1954, Christopher Jan Rubes made his entrance into the world. He weighed seven pounds, thirteen ounces, and was twenty-one inches long. "He'll be tall, like his father," Susan says proudly.
What the baby already means to Susan and Jan is indicated by what happened on their vacation. In July, Susan joined Jan on one of his Toronto trips, leaving the baby with the nurse who has cared for him ever since he came from the hospital. They attended the Shakespeare festival at nearby Stratford and then had a few carefree days of water skiing at Lake Simcoe.
"We had planned to stay until Sunday night," says Susan, "but on Friday we went to visit some friends whose baby had been born ten days earlier than ours." Like all proud young parents, the friends boasted how fast their child had grown, insisted he now could follow them with his eyes, that he knew their voices.
Says Susan, "Then the same thought hit both Jan and me at the same time - what if our baby had forgotten us while we were gone, what if he thought the nurse was his mother!"
They hurried back to their hotel and called the airlines. Could they have accommodations the next morning, they inquired. The planes were crowded but the reservation clerk sensed their concern and asked, "Is this urgent?"
"Urgent!" Jan exclaimed. "It sure is. We have to get home to our baby."
Says Susan, "That's the quickest way to say it. He's the one we have to come home to. With him, our roots are down. We have a home. A home which centers around a new human being. We have an American son."
And the future?
There, long-planning Susan and spur-of-the-moment Jan have come to a meeting of the minds. "We'll not make any definite plans<" says Susan. "Both of us have seen too many long-range plans made for us and then upset by things beyond our control. We'll just go on, doing the best we can every day. And, the Lord willing, we're going to have three more children to join our American son."
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DRW50 ·
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