 One good thing about growing up in a small town, you usually knew just about everybody and everybody’s business, too. The other side of the coin was, they usually knew every thing there was to know about you. Except, in my case, I was just a kid. I didn’t even know everybody in town. But I could take my dog for a walk and point to every house on the block and tell you who lived there. Particularly, the house where Mrs. Darnell lived, next door to a lighted clay tennis court. In my little town, let me tell you, that was a REAL big deal.
Even the Dallas City Park Department didn’t have lighted outdoor tennis courts then, much less a clay court. The tennis court and the huge Vickery Park outdoor swimming pool, where Jayne Mansfield and Jock Mahoney (Tarzan) liked to lay around in the sun, to the delight of all the local yokels, kinda put my little town of Vickery on the map.
Vickery was a suburb of Dallas, then. We weren’t annexed into the city and didn’t get local bus service, phone service and city water until much later. As I remember, growing up, one house on my block had a television set. It was black and white, of course, and about the only thing you could watch were the wrestling matches. Or, maybe, an occasional football game.
There wasn’t much to do in Vickery, except go swimming, or picnic at Vickery Park, or watch the tennis matches at the big clay court located on the property where the Humberts lived. Mr. Humbert worked for the Texas Highway Department, and was the community’s Boy Scout master. His son grew up to be a big fellow (like his dad). I played football with him in high school. When we were young kids, we sat on the ground near the sideline of the tennis court, leaned back against the chain link fence and yelled “ball out” real loud whenever somebody hit a tennis ball out of bounds. We thought we were pretty hot stuff.
The tennis court had tall screens on either end, in case a player swatted that little ball over the net with way too much gusto. That was so the balls wouldn’t fly over the chain link fence and break out the windows at Mrs. Darnell’s house.
I don’t recall ever meeting Mrs. Darnell, until the day she caught me climbing over the chain link fence at the tennis court and gave me a little lecture. But, I had heard folks at the Baptist church tell stories about this sweet little lady who raised chickens in her back yard and had roosters that woke up the whole damn neighborhood every morning.
Just when I thought I was about to get into a whole lot of trouble, Mrs. Darnell invited me in for a glass of lemonade. She said she wanted me to meet her grand daughter, Monetta Eloyse, who was spending her summer vacation with her. Back in those days, I was a little shy around girls, especially around girls who were a lot older than me.
 Lordy, but she was pretty. She was about the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Not only that, but, I could tell, despite the fact that she wore sweaters and blue jeans, that she had a very good figure, too. (Yes, I knew about those things at that tender young age, though maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I think I got addicted when I first saw pictures of Hollywood movie stars in Life magazine while I was sitting in the barbershop waiting my turn to get a hair cut).
Well, anyway, as it turned out, Mrs. Darnell’s grand daughter and I sorta hit it off, even though she was a young teenager, and I was just a kid. I used to walk down the road to Mrs. Darnell’s house almost every afternoon (supposedly, enroute to the tennis court), to see her. To heck with sitting on the sideline at the tennis matches and having a Coke with the Humbert kid. I had moved up in the world.
One day Mrs. Darnell’s grand daughter came to the door with tears in her eyes. I asked her what was wrong. She said Mrs. Darnell wanted her to go out to the hen house in the back yard and collect the eggs, and she was afraid of the roosters. She wanted to know if I would do the deed for her.
Truthfully, I was a little frightened by the roosters myself. Despite my “country upbringing,” I had never been around too many chickens, and certainly not any roosters. But, probably because I was younger than her, I wanted to make an impression, so I said I’d go into the hen house and collect the eggs.
I was, frankly, scared to death, but I didn’t want her to know that. When I came out of the hen house with the eggs in a brown paper sack, she was very excited. She said Mrs. Darnell told her that, if we cleaned the eggs up a little bit, we could go down to the “red light” on Greenville Ave. and sell them to the man who ran the community grocery store. She also told her that we could keep the money and go to the ice cream store and buy ice cream cones.
Wow, what a treat! Little did I know then, that many years later, I would sit in a movie theater, or in someone’s home, watching Mrs. Darnell’s beautiful grand daughter on TV in a real honest to gosh Hollywood movie.
 Monetta Eloyse Darnell was born in Dallas. She was one of six children of a post office worker and his wife. The Texas beauty, who would later became famous as Linda Darnell, attended Sunset High School, where she won local talent contests. Her mother encouraged her to perform. She already knew that her daughter was “special” because of her rare good looks.
Soon, she was modeling clothes for an area department store. Officials often thought she was 15 or 16 because she really didn't look her age. Neither Monetta nor her mother discouraged their thinking.
By the time she was 13, Monetta was appearing on stage with local theater companies and her talent was already becoming apparent. There was no doubt that she had a rare gift for someone so young.
As a teenager, she modeled for Southwestern Style Shows, was a “Texanita” during the Texas Centennial and won the regional Gateway to Hollywood contest.
 When Hollywood moguls sent talent scouts to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, her mother thought it would be a good idea to get Monetta an audition. The talent scouts took one look at Monetta and her acting abilities and immediately arranged for a screen test. That led to an eventual contract with 20th Century-Fox studio in Hollywood.
Monetta eventually made the trek to Hollywood, but when her true age was discovered, she was sent back home, and told by studio officials to come see them when she was older.
 After two years, and more local theater appearances, she returned to California and her career was soon off and running. She became known in Hollywood film circles as Linda Darnell and made her movie debut in the role of Marcia Bromley in “A Hotel For Women.” She was all of 16 at the time and became the youngest leading lady in Hollywood history.
Linda Darnell was touted by Hollywood press agents as “the girl with the perfect face,” and for once the description fit. Her cameo-cut china doll face was enough to ensure stardom in glamour-obsessed 40s Hollywood; surely Darnell could easily fit into the top ten most beautiful women the screen has ever known. And, as she matured, her voice deepened into a “torchy throb” that added more intensity to the eventual siren image.
 Darnell became a star as a teenager at Fox, where she was a contract player for 14 years. For a while, she coasted on her looks alone, playing sweet young things (David O. Selznick chose her to embody the Virgin Mary in 1943’s “Song of Bernadette”), before her career took a more interesting turn.
In 1944, Look magazine selected Linda Darnell as one of the four most beautiful women in Hollywood. After reshaping her celluloid image from that of a sweet young thing into that of a sultry vixen, she reached international stature in the title role of the screen spectacle “Forever Amber” (1947).
Darnell was hampered by being under contract to Fox, which specialized in escapist fare, and “wasted her” for seven unremarkable years. On loan-out to United Artists, she appeared in “Summer Storm” in 1944, but the resulting publicity - with Darnell lolling about a la Jane Russell, combined with that face, launched a transformation beyond pin-up to apprentice love goddess.
 The rest of the decade found her often in interesting roles that displayed her as “willful, sometimes smoldering trouble.” Memorable portraits in the Darnell catalog include the strangled (and left to burn) music-hall trollop in “Hangover Square” (1945), the floozy waitress of “Fallen Angel” (also 1945, in which she acted circles around reigning studio queen Alice Faye), the ill-fated concubine in “Anna and the King of Siam” (1946, in which Darnell died prophetically by fire) and “A Letter to Three Wives” (1948, in which she hilariously stole the show from Jeanne Crain and Ann Sothern).
Darnell's big bid for super stardom went awry: taking over the starring role in Kathleen Windsor's bodice-ripper “Forever Amber” (1947) when Daryl Zanuck bounced Peggy Cummins. The movie received monumental publicity but censorship and the heavy hand of Otto Preminger produced dull results. Her scenes during The Great Fire of London produced a paranoia that caused her director to literally drag her before the cameras.
 Fire was becoming a lifelong fear. After “Letter,” the parts Darnell was ready for weren’t offered to her. She received good notices for “No Way Out” (1950), a race relations drama ahead of its time, but, as happened with Rita Hayworth, Hollywood tended to treat mature beauties in non glamorous roles as if they were finished commercially in the business.
During her colorful Hollywood career, Linda made a total of 46 movies. Unfortunately, the combination of a stormy personal life and alcohol dependence dogged her as she sped through the predictable downward spiral of summer stock, television and cabaret.
In 1965, Darnell was visiting a former secretary in a suburb of Chicago and fell asleep with a lit cigarette after watching a late show of “Star Dust” (1940), in which she played a young Hollywood hopeful. Her hostess and her daughter escaped the blaze, but Darnell suffered burns over 80 percent of her body.
 Some accounts had her escaping the fire only to re-enter the house, thinking her friend’s daughter had not escaped; others alleged she went back to retrieve her mink coat - the last vestige remaining from her glory days.
Linda Darnell died two days later, (at the age of 41). She rallied into consciousness only once, when her adopted daughter, Lola, visited her.
The actress left behind an estate of only $10,000, which went to her
16-year-old girl.
In addition to her many screen roles, she worked for numerous charities, including the National Kidney Foundation, and helped raise funds to preserve the battleship Texas as a public shrine.
No matter what people say about her today, or write about her, or how stunningly beautiful her image is on the movie theater or television screen, it cannot erase those childhood memories in my mind when I first saw her standing at Mrs. Darnell’s door with tears in her eyes. When I heard about her tragic death, I couldn’t help but recall the time we sold the eggs from her grandmother’s hen house and rewarded ourselves with the ice cream cones.
Today, Linda Darnell, the woman called “almost too beautiful,” is not remembered as well as many of her less- talented contemporaries, but an examination of her career reveals a gifted beauty whose steamy “noir persona” made her a tragic, unforgettable entry in Hollywood history.
Well, that’s show biz, baby.
“Unlike in Marilyn Monroe’s heyday in Hollywood, a starlet today doesn’t have to worry about becoming ‘a thing.’ She rather worries about being ‘a thing of the past.’”
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