In 1942 I left Hollywood and enlisted in the Marine Corps. During my induction in San Diego, Calif., I was interviewed by a psychiatrist.

"Do you have a fear of heights?" he asked. "I'm not fond of them," I said. "Are you afraid of crowds?" "If they're a preview audience-very." I admitted. "And how do you get along with women?" he wanted to know next. "Doctor, the scare me to death!" I exclaimed. "The Marines are the place for you," he said. "Next man!"

It's been some time since I served my 3 1/2 years in the Corps, but women still scare me. They always have, and I guess they always will. some people think this is peculiar, because they mistake me for an authority on the female sex. "On the screen you've made love to most of the leading glamour girls," a friend said recently. "You must know all about how to handle women."

Nothing could be farther from the truth. I admit I've worked with women most of my life, in motion pictures an don the stage. I've been involved like every man in the real-life battle of the sexes, and I've passed the age of 40, when a man has learned how to solve most problems. but most women go on terrifying and baffling me to this day.

I think the modern female scares most men, but she doesn't realize it. Someone ought to tell the girls what they're doing to us, so I may as well stick my neck out. At least I'll give wives and husbands something new to argue about!

If you want to know the various kinds of mid-20th-century women I fear most, here's the list:

Career Girls, Actresses-they are the type I know best. The male who must compete with them had better keep feeling his back for dagger wounds.

Beautiful Dolls-they think the world owes them a living because they were born with a face and figure. I get away fast.

Gossips-some people say they're worse in Hollywood, but I've found them everywhere.

Romantic Dreamers-these girls live in a crazy world they've made up all by themselves. It's not for me.

Those are four types that make me run for cover, and I'll probably think of more as I warm up.

In one of my early pictures I played opposite an actress who was a perfect example of today's competitive me-first career girl. When she spoke of "My Career" you could tell she spelled it with a capital C. I soon found out that a love scene with her was a military maneuver-a jealous battle for the position in front of the camera. She threw passionate arms around my neck and, with the love light shining in her eyes, pulled my head around so that only my left ear remained visible to the camera.

Later I learned to defend myself in this kind of battle. I let the lady upstage me and deliberately turned my back to the camera. then lone of two things happened. the director sometimes stopped the action and moved us around so we shared the camera, or he let her play most of the scene her way, then moved the camera around and gave me a close-up. It was passive resistance on my part--but few leading men in Hollywood are foolhardy enough to tangle with this breed of female.

I discussed the subject recently with a friend in the publishing business. "If you think actresses are hard to handle," he told me, "try dealing with women writers!" another man I know is married to a woman executive. "What she'll do to get ahead is scary," he said. A really determined career woman is a fearsome creature wherever you find her.

The beautiful-doll type, who makes me had for the hills, is dangerously attractive at first sight and can trap a man before he realizes what he's let himself in for.

Some time ago I worked with a starlet who had a perfect figure and a peach-blossom complexion-a living, walking dream. I thought she might be nice company for a quiet evening. but when we started on the picture I found not only that she couldn't act, but that she wasn't even smart enough to know she couldn't.

"I've been assured I have the natural attributes for stardom," she told me. In other words, she expected to get ahead with her figure and her big blue eyes. Or maybe they were brown. I don't remember, because I kept as far out of range of her charms as I possibly could.

One reason I fear such vain and lovely beings is that one of them is the wife of a friend of mine. He and the lady recently came to my small penthouse in New York City, where live when not traveling or making a picture. I like the place because it's small and cozy and obviously designed for single occupancy. after two marriages which lasted a total of 16 years, I have reverted to bachelor status--more wary of women than ever before.

My friend, Fred, and his beautiful wife, Brenda, inspected my 10 by 12 living room, the bedroom and kitchen, and the little glassed-in terrace where I have dinner on a card table and watch the glitter of the Manhattan skyline at night.

"Brother, you've got it made," Fred said. "This is all a man needs."

Brenda looked suspicious. "So you'd like this, would you? she asked-"single blessedness again!" The truth is that Brenda has never bothers much with homemaking. She's too busy visiting dressmakers and beauty salons, preserving her status as a beautiful doll.

Soon after I went to Hollywood in 1936, I got acquainted with the kind of female I call the romantic dreamer. This one can throw a real fright into a man.

I've acted many romantic scenes in which desirable women fall madly in live with me, and I with them. But I wasn't prepared at first to have women in the audience mistake this illusion for reality, and fall for a celluloid lover who doesn't exist. It shook me. One woman offered a studio telephone operator $500 for my unlisted number. another wrote and threatened to throw herself in front of my car unless I made a date with her. I didn't, and she didn't.

Other male stars have had even wilder experiences. I've never found a strange woman under the bed or had my clothes torn off by frantic females in the street. but I still wonder why some women can't live in the real world, which is a pretty nice place after all.

"Our life together could be one long blissful dream," a girl wrote to another handsomer actor I know.

"Blissful dream, my eye!" he said. "I want a wife who'll get up and change the baby's diapers when he hollers at 4 in the morning."

Fortunatley, not all women frighten me. There are and have been a few exceptions-hard working successful women who are warm-hearted, gracious and generous.

Take my mother, Patia Power, for example. she was an actress who played Shakespeare, taught dramatics, and at the same time made a fine home for me and my younger sister, Anne. She didn't believe in letting children behave as they pleased. Anne and I were responsible for making our beds and keeping or rooms neat. In company we were seen and not heard, and we didn't et up from the dinner table until we'd been excused.

The neighborhood theater in Cincinnati was my childhood playhouse, where I went after school to watch mother teach and rehearse. Every evening she read us poetry, novels, and the best dramatic literature. But she never once suggested that I ought to make acting my career. She wasn't the kind of "stage mother" I run from whenever I see one coming. Too often such women only want the tot on the stage to satisfy their own ambition. I believe youngsters should choose their won work, just as I made my own decision to carry on the family theatrical tradition.

At 17 I was graduated from Purcell high school in Cincinnati, and the day after commencement I announced that I was leaving home to go on the stage. I headed for Chicago, where I landed a job as a spear-carrying extra in the Civic Theater's Shakespeare Company.

All I knew about girls at this time was that they alarmed me and made me vaguely uncomfortable. In grade school I had been in poor health and very shy. while in high school I was busy working behind a soda fountain during vacations and ushering in theaters at night. I had no time for dates. Then in Chicago I met another exceptional woman who didn't scare me. Her name was Lucretia.

It was a queer romance. Lucretia was a waitress in a restaurant where I dropped one night for a sandwich. Soon I was stopping by two or three nights a week after the theater. When there weren't many customers, we talked. Or rather, I talked-about my ambition to become an actor, my hope to get to New York or Hollywood. She let me rave about my problems and future, and although I must have been an awful bore she never let it show.

We found something in common: we both had unusual first names that we'd been teased about as children.

Lucretia played a role that every man admires--she was a good listener. she didn't ask where I went when I didn't come to see her, or suggest we go places I couldn't afford. In fact, I never took her out and never her outside the restaurant. Lucretia was not beautiful, or ambitious, or foolishly romantic, or brilliant, but I kept going back to see her. She was one of the few women I've met who didn't frighten me a bit!

two other notable exceptions were actresses-Alice Faye and Katharine Cornell-both of whom helped me immeasurably.

After several seasons in Chicago I moved on to New York, still broke but determined to crash Broadway. I had with me a letter of introduction to Miss Cornell, one of the great actresses of our time. I went to see her with fear and trembling, and found her warm, friendly, and completely disarming. She took me on a $30-a week understudy, and in 1935 and '36 I played with her in "Romeo and Juliet" and in her magnificent production of Shaw's "Saint Joan".

I discovered by this time that some important actresses refuse to work with supporting players of outstanding talent, for fear of competition. I know leading ladies who don't allow younger or prettier actresses on the stage with them. Miss Cornell, on the contrary, insisted on getting the best player possible for every part.

My experience with Katharine Cornell landed me my first film contract. I arrived in Hollywood as a green youngster of 22. My first picture assignment was a musical called "Sing, Baby, Sing," which I played a newspaper reporter opposite Alice Faye. In the cast were veterans like Ted Healy, the Ritz Brothers, Patsy Kelly and Adolph Menjou. when the camera stared turning these old hands threw the script out the window, ad-libbed dialogue, and cut capers all over the set. I stood there not knowing what to do or say. finally the director took me aside and suggested I'd better sit this one out and wait for another picture to come along.

I walked off disgusted, mad at myself and at Hollywood. I intended to forget about motion pictures and go back to Broadway. Alice found me sulking over a cup of coffee in the studio commissary and asked me to have supper with her that night.

She gave me a real pep talk. "You're not a quitter," she said. "You've got what it takes to go places in pictures."

I argued that I wasn't cut out for musicals. "I think you are," she said. "Just stick around and I'll prove it to you."

Not long afterward Alice asked to have me play opposite her in "Rose of Washington Square" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band." They were two of my earliest box-office hits, and they were both musicals. It all happened because Alice Faye is a good guy, the kind who gives the other fellow a break instead of a knock. there's nothing about her to give a man the jitters.

One of my closest friends is an international airline pilot named Bob Buck, who lives in Westfield, N.J. with his wife Jean, and their two kids. bob is away a lot and when he comes home he's often tired. Jean doesn't bother him with questions and problems when he walks in the door. she just gets a tasty pot roast out of the oven.

I visit the Bucks often, and their home is a place any man would fly the ocean to come back to, because Jean is doing her job right. She's pretty, intelligent, but she doesn't spend time worrying about her own beauty, or her career, or proving how smart she is. She hasn't time for romantic dreams or gossip because she's too busy being a good wife. She doesn't scare me at all, and Bob, I might add, is one friend who doesn't look enviously at my bachelor penthouse.

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