To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie. Ellen Conford

so we might as well not change seats anymore.”

      It was pretty. We passed a lot of farms, all flat and stretching out for miles, but with mountains way beyond in the distance. I even saw some horses and a couple of windmills, which didn’t look anything at all like the pictures of windmills in Holland you always see.

      It all looked so peaceful and quiet, and private, so different from Robin Lane, where rows of houses were practically rubbing up against each other so that when you looked out your bedroom window you looked right into your neighbor’s bedroom window.

      I wondered what it would be like to live on a farm, to live someplace where when you looked out your window you saw cows and horses and mountains and fields like checkerboards, brown dirt, then green, then gold, then brown dirt again. And all that space, all that privacy, to do whatever you wanted without anyone around to watch you, without anyone you had to talk to just because they happened to be in their backyard at the same time you were in your backyard.

      I thought it must be very peaceful.

      I knew Hollywood would certainly not be anything like that, but I thought, maybe if I really made it big, I could afford to buy myself a farm. I know there are plenty of farms in California, plus ranches and orange groves, etc., and maybe I could buy a farm and go there for weekends, or between movies or something. That would be where I could rest and be alone, away from the “hurly-burly” of the movie business, and the pressure of fans always following me around trying to get my autograph.

      Of course, I didn’t think I would find “autograph hounds” too hard to take. I thought it would probably be a long time before I got tired of them. Like William Holden says, “It’s when they stop asking you for your autograph that it should bother you.”

      But being a movie actress is hard work, like getting up at six A.M. or even earlier and working till five or six at night. It really isn’t all glamour and premieres and movie-magazine interviews. I’m not kidding myself about that. So I probably would need a nice, quiet place to “get away from it all,” and a farm might be just the thing.