Cinema: A Certain Restlessness

Off the screen for more than a year, onetime Wunderkind Deanna Durbin, now crowding a plump, matronly 28, made a public appearance in Los Angeles last week as the latest in a star-studded line of applicants for divorce.

Deanna testified against her second husband, 47-year-old Felix Jackson, who helped to write some of her early hits (Mad About Music, Three Smart Girls Grow Up), and produced her most recent flops (I’ll Be Yours, Because of Him). She told the judge that a year after their marriage in 1945 (his fourth), Jackson “started a series of unhappy moods and a certain restlessness.” She added: “About six months after that, he told me he was unhappy being a married man and preferred being single … He left me, went to New York City, hasn’t been back and I haven’t seen him since.”

The court wrote the standard ending: divorce granted. Deanna would get custody of three-year-old Jessica Louise.