Helen Ormsbee interviewed 21-year old actress Susan Douglas, who was appearing in her Broadway debut as a circus bareback rider in the Tyrone Guthrie-directed revival of the Russian play “He Who Gets Slapped.”
Ormsbee wrote that Douglas was five-feet tall and resembled Alice in Wonderful with long, straight brown hair. She had arrived alone in New York as Zuzka Zenta, a 15-year old Czech refugee, in 1940. She attended George Washington High School and spoke unaccented English but until she had changed her professional name she found it impossible to get radio jobs.
She had been having her birthday party on the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Her father was a former colonel in the Czech army who had retired to a horse farm. The family escaped to Paris where he joined the Czech government-in-exile. As the war spread, he sent her to New York to live with friends. After a few months, the friends moved to California. Douglas stayed behind, living on money her father had given her.
Thanks to the housing shortage, she was still living at the Rehearsal Club with 46 other aspiring actresses. She had moved there two years earlier while working as an $18 a week page girl at the MGM offices. Since then she had done well in radio, including two roles on "The Screen Guild of the Air," but had been unable to find an apartment.
Douglas won the Donaldson Award as Best Supporting Actress in 1946. She had a ten-year stint on “Guiding Light” in the Fifties. She and her actor husband, Jan Rubes, who was also from Czechoslovakia, later moved to Toronto where both were active in stage, motion pictures and television.