Ever since I played charades and silly things like that as a child, I adored acting. When I went to school in Santa Barbara I worked on all the amateur plays, Milne, Barrie, the usual Little Theatre stuff. I always had in mind acting as a profession.

[on showmanship] Look at my father [Cecil B. DeMille]. When he had a man follow him all over the set with a chair so that he could sit without warning, he did it as a publicity gag. It hit every newspaper in the country. When he received people in a Gothic domed office, with atmosphere laid on a foot thick, he did it for effect. He's really a very shrewd man, a very clever man. He's no artificial poseur. He's a business man. And when he puts an elaborate bathroom scene in a picture he knows it will cause twice as much comment as anybody else's bathroom scene would cause. So he does it. That's showmanship.

It is only natural that I should have turned to pictures. Raised in a family that revolves around the picture business, and where, when reading newspapers, each member invariably jumps on the most dramatic incidents and reads them aloud, well, what else could I do?