I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses Read online

  Also by Robert J. Wagner

  You Must Remember This (with Scott Eyman)

  Pieces of My Heart (with Scott Eyman)

  VIKING

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  Copyright © 2016 by Robert J. Wagner and Scott Eyman

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  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  Here: Collection of Robert J. Wagner

  Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here: Collection of Scott Eyman

  Here: Film Favorites / Moviepix / Getty Images

  Here, here: Silver Screen Collection / Moviepix / Getty Images

  Here: The Bruce Torrence Hollywood Photograph Collection

  Here: Michael Ochs Archives / Moviepix / Getty Images

  Here, here: ABC via Getty Images

  Here: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

  Here: Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images

  Here: Time & Life Pictures / The Life Picture Collection / Getty Images

  Here: John Downing / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wagner, Robert, 1930– author. | Eyman, Scott, 1951– author.

  Title: I loved her in the movies : memories of Hollywood’s legendary actresses / Robert Wagner with Scott Eyman.

  Description: New York : Viking, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016041551 (print) | LCCN 2016042365 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525429111 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698195868 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wagner, Robert, 1930– | Actors—United States—Biography. | Actresses—United States—Biography. | Actresses—United States—Anecdotes. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.W235 A3 2016 (print) | LCC PN2287.W235 (ebook) |

  DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041551

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For the women I love:

  My daughters Katie, Natasha, and Courtney.

  My sister, Mary.

  And for Jill—my wife, my love, my best friend.

  You have all brought me so much happiness and joy.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Robert J. Wagner

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Thirties

  The Forties

  Intermission I

  The Fifties

  The Sixties

  Intermission II

  Natalie

  Jill

  The Eighties (and On)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  The great choreographer George Balanchine famously said that “Ballet is woman.”

  “It is easier to make dances for men,” he said. “They jump, they turn. A woman is more complicated . . .” Another time he compared women to orchids: “You have to know exactly how much sun, how much water, how much air and then take them inside before they wilt.”

  He was, of course, right, but I’d go further. To my mind, there’s something profoundly feminine not only about ballet but about the movies as well. Not just because sexual attraction is often the magnet that pulls us to one movie star and not another, but because there’s something in the nature of the moviegoing experience itself that approximates the reverie that overtakes you when you’re in love with a beautiful woman. Going to the movies drops you into a neutral dream state, in which you first become receptive, then, hopefully, enchanted.

  Think about it. We step into the darkness, where we let go of whatever it is that’s been bothering us. We relax. The screen comes alive, and we focus on something outside ourselves—the plot, the characters. We become willing prisoners. Unless the filmmakers are inept, we don’t question, we just accept what we see in front of us. As with love, reality has little to do with the experience—things can happen faster than they would in real life, or much, much slower, but we suspend more than our disbelief. We suspend the various negative states we dragged into the theater.

  Despite the expanding shores of television and all the great work being done in that medium, it can’t duplicate the thrill of seeing movies in a theater. When you’re watching TV, you’re sitting in the living room, the lights are on, the kids or grandkids are running around, the dog hears something outside and begins barking, and if you’re not absolutely riveted, you might check your e-mails. TV lacks magic, but movies always contain, at the very least, the possibility of enchantment.

  Just as in dreams, sometimes there’s an erotic component in films that can be startlingly intense. They say that the most important years in defining your tastes in the opposite sex are from about seven to fourteen or fifteen. I have to agree—the sight of Maureen O’Sullivan in her artfully arranged rags in MGM’s Tarzan pictures provided a source of never-ending excitement for this particular adolescent.

  All this is why I’ve written this book about the female movie stars who defined my generation as well as succeeding ones—it’s about what binds Kay Francis to Marilyn Monroe, what connects Bette Davis with Glenn Close . . . as well as what separates them.

  As a young boy growing up in Westwood, I watched many of these women from the remove of a center-row seat at the Fox Theater. As I grew older, my luck increased exponentially—I got to work with many of them, and know many more. I’ve worked with about half of the legendary leading ladies of my lifetime: from Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe and Barbara Stanwyck to Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sophia Loren.

  And Natalie.

  Not to mention Janet Leigh, Joan Collins, Joanne Woodward, Debbie Reynolds, Capucine, Jennifer Jones, Stefanie Powers, Angie Dickinson—and a certain Jill St. John, with whom I not only acted but married.

  Then there were those I knew socially: Gloria Swanson, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, Loretta Young, and dozens of others.

  I may as well admit to at least one basic prejudice: I think women in general have it tougher than men, and I think actresses in particular have it tougher than actors. On the other hand, they’re better equipped to cope than men are because women are more realistic. Not stronger necessarily, but more self-aware. And, in a strange way, less vain. Actors—and I don’t except myself—can walk around in a semiblissful state, their innate masculine vanity preceding them into the room by a good five yards. If they’re successful actors, they can be much worse. Actresses may use a lot more makeup, but that means they have to be cognizant of their weak points and strong points, and how best to disguise that which needs to be disguised.

  I’ve spent more than sixty-five years in show business and I’ve given actresses a lot of attention and a lot of thought. So this is a book about the species “Actre
ss” as I knew it, and the similar and unique characteristics of these remarkable women. I’m going to consider not only what they were like on screen and off, but also why they became stars, and how their specific emotional and dramatic chemistries affected the choices they made as actresses, as well as the choices they made as women. I’ll also discuss the strange alchemy of the camera—how it can transform the attractive into the stunning . . . and vice versa.

  One point I want to make clear up front: There is little badmouthing of the women I write about here. This is not because the movie business is free of difficult people; on the contrary, it’s full of them. (A few will be mentioned, but they won’t be dwelt on.) Producers will shaft you, directors have their own agenda that may or may not agree with yours, and they’ll all do what they need to do to get what they want. And don’t even get me started on the bureaucrats who run movie studios today.

  But I respect the acting profession and most of the people in it. Very few actors will sabotage their colleagues. I can count the number of professionally duplicitous performers I’ve worked with on one hand. For one thing, you need other actors if you’re going to be any good. Acting is really reciprocal self-interest—when it’s good it’s like a competitive tennis match in that the better the people you’re playing with are, the better you’ll be, though it’s better than any tennis match because nobody loses. Which is why an actor will almost never shaft another actor. Not only is it bad karma, but that other actor is often your only friend in the world in that acting moment, as it’s taking place. It’s just the two of you, and nobody knows what happens then quite like another actor.

  I met and worked with these women from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, but for the sake of organization I generally discuss each of the actresses in the decade in which she became famous, which will enable me to compare different generations of talent, and to highlight how acting and standards of beauty have evolved over time.

  This is a book about character and craft, talent and genius, respect and love, and how those qualities united to form some of the most legendary careers in the history of a great art form. At times it may sound like a love letter, and I guess it is—a love letter to actresses.

  THE THIRTIES

  When I was a little boy, I had a treasure chest. The Gospel of St. Matthew says that where your “treasure” is, so is your heart, which completely describes how much the contents of my chest meant to me when I was eight years old.

  It was slightly larger than a shoebox, perhaps five or six inches high and made out of cedar, so it had that great smell that always seems to derive from something finer than mere wood.

  My chest contained the things that meant the most to me. There were the letters and postcards that my mother wrote me when I was at boarding school, a place I loathed as a child and, three quarters of a century later, still do. There were also cap guns, matchbooks, and a picture of Dick Tracy, the comic-strip hero who was the idol of kids everywhere, mostly because he had such wonderful toys—a secret decoder ring, a watch with a two-way radio in it. (Nobody could devise grotesque villains like Chester Gould, and kids love the grotesque.)

  I also had a picture of William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy atop his horse Topper, who I thought was the most beautiful horse in the movies, so much so that I would name my own horse after him. Topper starred in at least fifty movies with Boyd, and though my horse Gray Topper made only one movie, it was a good one: Louisiana Purchase with Bob Hope.

  Years later, it would be one of the thrills of my life to meet Bill Boyd, who turned out to be a terrific man with a gorgeous wife named Grace Bradley, who had fallen in love with him when she was a little girl watching the silent pictures Bill had made for Cecil B. DeMille. A dozen years later, she made her way to Hollywood and started working at Paramount, where she met Bill, married him, and lived happily ever after.

  By all rights, my autographed picture of Norma Shearer should have been in my treasure chest, but it was too big; I kept it in a special folder. Norma Shearer was the first movie star I ever met. The year was 1938, I was eight years old, and I was going to school with her son, Irving Thalberg Jr., at the Hollywood Military Academy on San Vicente Boulevard, where our parents had sent us because . . . well, actually, I’ve never been quite sure why they sent us there.

  Neither Irving nor I could have been considered discipline problems. It’s entirely possible that we were enrolled there because that’s where a good percentage of parents in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air educated their children—groupthink. Perhaps there was some kind of status attached to having a kid at the military school.

  Anyway, I boarded at the school, while Irving went home every day to Santa Monica. On weekends, boarders’ friends would invite them to spend the weekend with their families. Irving was a nice kid who struck me as somewhat shy, although in retrospect it might very well have been anxiety over his father’s death from pneumonia two years earlier.

  Norma Shearer had spent eighteen months after Thalberg’s passing off the screen, working through her grief and bargaining with MGM over her late husband’s stock holdings. She won those negotiations, but Norma had a way of winning. And then it was time to go back to work.

  What made my first meeting with her so curious was that I had never seen Norma in a movie at that point. For that matter, I wasn’t even aware that she was a movie star. All I knew was that she was Irving’s mother.

  Norma Shearer

  The Thalberg-Shearer house was a French-Normandy confection right on the beach. You walked into a courtyard that was filled with flowers, through the front door, and up a set of stairs. The colors tended toward the neutral, which was the style in that era—Irving Jr.’s room was decorated in a sort of rose, blue, and ivory. The only thing that struck me as odd were framed photographs of his parents hanging on his bedroom wall, just in case he ever forgot who they were.

  I was in my school uniform, all polished buttons and shined shoes. A butler took us up to Norma’s room, while I gaped at the surroundings. Irving had told me his mother was making a film called Marie Antoinette, but that was meaningless to me because I didn’t know who Marie Antoinette was. The décor struck me as ornate by the standards of our own Spanish-style home, so I was convinced that I was in Marie Antoinette’s house. This conviction turned out to be very confusing; when I finally saw the film, I expected to see the house I’d been in, but didn’t recognize any of it.

  The butler showed us into her bedroom, which didn’t surprise me, because I had already gotten the distinct feeling from Irving that his mother spent a great deal of time there.

  Norma was sitting up in bed, and couldn’t have been more gracious. She didn’t have the ethereal glow that would strike me when I saw her in the movies, but then William Daniels hadn’t lit her bedroom.

  She asked about my parents and then about the classes I took with Irving Jr. Even though I was just a kid, the atmosphere was swankier and more complicated than just meeting the mother of a classmate; it was more like an audience with a queen.

  The room was a shade of blue that was new to me; it was only years later that I realized it was delft blue, with some chartreuse and white accents. Although the Pacific Ocean was only a hundred feet away, you couldn’t hear a thing—the walls must have been three feet thick.

  Norma sent me away with a still autographed to “To Wagner.” I’m not ashamed to admit that I still have it. I was in her presence for perhaps ten minutes, and I’ve never forgotten that visit.

  I’m sure Norma Shearer wouldn’t have remembered our meeting if I hadn’t gotten to know her fifteen or so years later and reminded her of it. For her, it was just a momentary duty that was a function of her identity as a mother. But for me, it was a mini earthquake.

  I had met Norma Shearer! I hadn’t known she was special before we met, but I knew she was special as soon as I walked into the room, and that impression was only reinforced whenever I told people I had met Irving’s mom. The general response was along t
he lines of “You met Norma Shearer? She’s a movie star!”

  How many other kids at the Hollywood Military Academy could make that claim? For that matter, how many other kids in the world could make that claim? I had learned in the best way possible that movie stars had a dual existence: They appeared on the silver screen, but they also existed offscreen as actual human beings, and millions of people have spent a great deal of their time trying to assimilate the two apparently mutually exclusive halves of that equation.

  At the time of our brief meeting, Norma’s professional judgment was getting a little shaky. Marie Antoinette was wildly expensive; even though it attracted large audiences, it cost too much to show a profit. After that, she made The Women, which was a success. She had vague longings to play Scarlett O’Hara but wasn’t seriously considered for the part, and then she turned down Mrs. Miniver because she didn’t want to play the mother of a grown daughter. Instead, she opted to star in a pair of weak romantic comedies that both flopped.

  So it was that only a few years after we met, Norma Shearer decided to walk away from the movies. She was forty-two years old. It was a strangely subdued exit for a woman who had ruled MGM.

  Norma was born in a Montreal suburb, a determined little girl without a lot of the natural attributes that might have indicated a career in the movies. She played the piano quite well, a skill she demonstrated in several films, and for a time she thought about a musical career. But her father made some bad investments, and the family had to sell the piano, which meant that Norma had to devise a Plan B.

  She did some modeling, worked as an extra, and was getting some work in movies by 1922. Norma had a trim, brisk quality, kept her hair short and chic and her manner cheerful and upbeat. She had a lithe, lovely figure, but she also had a tight, thin mouth, and one eye wasn’t quite plumb with the other. But as I’ve learned in a long career, if you have to choose between talent and determination, go for determination every time.