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Show she had them all, yet never could escape the fears Beauty, talent, success TT INE-YEAR-O- LD Deborah's frantic screams jLh pierced the night. Her mother rushed into her room to find her daughter cowering-jundeher blankets "The tree," she screamed. "The tree it's going to crush me to death 1" The mother cradled the girTs headiniher arms and talked to her soothingly. What happened was nothing new. Deborah-ha- d r. been-frighten- ed again and again by the gnarled old elm tree outside her window, which spread a terrifying shadow across her bed. "I always feared the tree would crash through the house and bury me beneath its weight," Deborah Kerr, now a mature and internationally acclaimed movie actress, confessed to me a short while ago. "Yet the tree was only a symbol of the insecurity that has haunted me through most of my life." Deborah Kerr's insecurity can be traced to an invalid father, a persecution complex in school, an unsuccessful marriage, and: the fact that, feminine as she is, for a long while she had to play the role of decision maker, "man of the house." Her only refuge had been her work, on which she concentrated with such fanaticism that a long-tim- e acquaintance, actress Lois Maxwell, once remarked: "Nothing will ever stop this girl from getting what she wants' A.tJastDeborahhas got What she wants but not the way Lois pictured it. After many laurels as an actress in "From Here to Eter-- nity," "The King and I," "Tea and Sym- pathy," "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison," and Deborah's interest in hei career has suddenly limited itself to an occasional "irresistible" role such as "The Innocents,", which she recently completed for Fox, I learned, the reason for this "change during the three days I spent with her and her new husband, writer Peter Viertel, in their mountain hideaway near Klosters, Switzerland. She welcomed me in front of her split-leve-l' house as I approached on a path which : 20th-centu- ry winds between two ponds used for swimming in summer and skating in winter. Outwardly. I coukLsee no change in Deb-- X orah. She looked radiantly beautiful with her 7 red hair, pale freckled complexion, and clas- sic features. JFIerwarnv friendly-handshak- epromised the kind of welcome that has made Deborah the most popular of all actresses among her coworkers. I sensed, though, that only the surface was the same. This was a "new" Deborah Kerr, of- jlaxed the change intentionally or otherwise has been brought about by her new husband. Pen ter Viertel is the strong, forceful, try" type of husband who has given her a "old-cou- direction she" has "never had before. childhood terrors, which in Deborah's ways she carried into adult life had their beginnings in her early family life in Scotland. It was a close-kni- t, happy family, but Deborah's beloved father, a civil engineer, was slowly wasting away with tuber-culos- is contracted durin$.WorldWar I in . the Dardanelles where he also lost a leg. At nine, Deborah was sent to a boarding school to relieve the burden on her mother ; these days were possibly the unhappiest of and bully ings Jieciifea series from the older girls there who saw in . |