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

  Gloria was . . . incisive. There was never any doubt regarding what she thought about any subject. If you didn’t ask her, she’d tell you anyway. She was always busy, always industrious. She had no bitterness about her faded stardom, about the lost fortune. She was not one to blame other people; I remember her telling us, “The acting life is difficult and if you don’t have the stomach for it, do something else.” Gloria gave me the impression that she had always expected to work for a living and that those expectations had been met. When I knew her, she was designing women’s clothes and thoroughly enjoying herself. In my memory, Gloria is always en route from one place to another, one commitment to another. She had loved being a huge movie star, but she wasn’t confined by it as so many great stars are; she had done it, she had processed its meaning, and she had moved on.

  Because she had been in the movies since she was a teenager, and a very big star from about the age of twenty, she hadn’t had a conventional progress into maturity. She had little formal education—she once told me that she hadn’t even graduated from high school—but she was naturally inquisitive, always hungry for knowledge. There were always dozens of books strewn around her house.

  The flip side to her natural curiosity was that she was prone to fads, some of which were more meaningful than others. When I knew her, she was already on the health kick that would occupy her for the rest of her life. Our modern interest in free-range food and vegetables that haven’t been sprayed with chemicals would have brought an approving nod from Gloria, as well as a smug “I told you so!”

  Gloria had the aura of a true star, which didn’t mean she didn’t have a sense of humor. She was tiny, barely five feet, and usually called attention to her size immediately, to defuse any disappointment on the part of the people who had just met her.

  Although the character of Norma Desmond drew on some aspects of her personality—Gloria could certainly be imperious—others were inventions of the screenwriters. Like Norma, she adored Cecil B. DeMille, who had made her a star in a series of extremely entertaining marital comedies in the period after World War I. While she was giving Michelle and me direction in our scenes, she would keep up a steady stream of suggestions and reminiscences, just like a director in the silent days. She would talk about how the hardest thing to do in show business is comedy, unless it was playing a nominal character in a straight drama. “Anybody can be a character actress,” she would say, “because there’s usually something to seize on and play. A perfectly normal woman is the hardest—you have no props, you have only a thin character.”

  She went on to explain that Norma Desmond was far from a normal woman, that she had a dozen fascinating eccentricities and cowed nearly everyone she knew. A woman like that, she would say, is easy to play. The role was all pretense and mannerisms, so there was very little of the real Gloria Swanson to be found in it, and she seemed to like it that way. If an acting part came along, or even a part playing herself, she’d do it and be happy to do it, but she wasn’t always scanning the horizon for the next acting job. She found the present every bit as interesting as the past, although she did think that the movies had deteriorated. She would also allow as to how it might just seem that way because the great days of discovery in the art of film—the time when everybody was figuring out how to photograph scenes to the best effect, how to act for the camera as opposed to the stage—were now firmly in the past. The innovations that had taken place since then were primarily cosmetic—first sound, then color, then widescreen—but the stories hadn’t really changed all that much.

  Now, of course, the stories are quite different, but I somehow think Gloria wouldn’t be terribly impressed by them, either. She was very concerned with quality, and interested in scripts about human beings and emotional interactions, and there aren’t a lot of those around these days.

  The upshot of my time with Michelle and her mother: Gloria kept going, wrote a juicy memoir, and died at the age of eighty-six with her sixth husband in tow. Growing up with Gloria Swanson as your mother couldn’t have been easy, and Michelle didn’t become an actress but opted for a more conventional life. I cherish our time together, for it enabled me to get to know her mother—Glorious Gloria, who more than lived up to her name.

  • • •

  It seems to me now that if you were interested in women, the 1930s and 1940s were the richest time for movies in our history. The female stars came in all shapes and sizes and every imaginable emotional frequency.

  To take just the top of the list: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Kay Francis, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, and Jean Harlow.

  I could go on, but you get the idea. I didn’t know them all, but I knew most of them. These were women with different personalities, different strengths and weaknesses, even different body types. In varying degrees, they are all remembered today.

  Then there were actresses whose fame was more fleeting, like Deanna Durbin or Jean Arthur. You’ve got to be a pretty dyed-in-the-wool fan of old movies to have much of an image of them.

  In both cases, the reason was that the women either couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with Hollywood any longer. They both simply walked away from the movie business at early ages.

  Jean Arthur was a particular loss. She was an attractive but not knockout blonde with a gorgeous scratchy voice. She made some great movies with high-end talent: Cameo Kirby and The Whole Town’s Talking for John Ford; Only Angels Have Wings for Howard Hawks; The Plainsman for DeMille; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for Frank Capra; A Foreign Affair for Billy Wilder; and The Talk of the Town and The More the Merrier for George Stevens.

  Stevens cast her in her last film, Shane, in a part that offered her nothing special. But Stevens understood that a strong actress can elevate an ordinary part, not to mention an entire movie.

  Using only her voice, Arthur brought shadings that weren’t in the script—a sense of regret and loss. This woman knows that Shane loves her; if the circumstances were different, she would allow herself to feel the same way.

  Arthur worked for the best directors in the American film industry, and they all loved her. But Jean Arthur didn’t share their enthusiasm for Jean Arthur. She had a terrible shyness and a sort of congenital unhappiness that got worse as she aged and grew more sensitive about that aging. Hedda Hopper called her “the least popular woman in Hollywood.” In print. Today she’d probably be diagnosed as clinically depressed. She was simply insecure about her place in the world of the movies, and the fact that she was working in a business that subsisted on the most stunning women in the world could only have increased her sense of herself as a Plain Jane.

  Jean Arthur

  She left Hollywood in 1945 to play Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday, but left the play before it came to New York. She made it to opening night in the title role of Peter Pan, a part she had wanted to play for most of her life, but began missing performances and eventually left the show.

  The rest of her life was a stop-and-start series of parts undertaken then dropped, and missed opportunities. She became a recluse in Carmel and concentrated on her animals. (Animals are a convenient object of affection for people who have been terribly disappointed by human beings. People break your heart all the time; animals only do it once—when they die.)

  There was room in Hollywood for one-off actresses like Jean Arthur, because the movie industry catered to a wide audience and as a result made a lot of movies. Each studio turned out between thirty to fifty a year, plus various live-action shorts and cartoons, so they were hungry for talent, all kinds of talent. No possibility was overlooked.

  Ray Bolger, the dancing genius who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, was bigger on the stage than he was on film, and he made only a handful of movies. Because of Oz, though, people still know who Ray Bolger was. “The thing that astounded me,” he once said, “was that th
ey bought people. It was like you would go into a grocery store and say, ‘Give me four comics and three toe dancers, and I want five girls and five male singers. I want nineteen character actors and I want some unique personalities.’”

  If you made a cheesecake appearance on a calendar, if you could sing a little or did a radio show in Duluth, if you appeared on Broadway or on tour, if you won a beauty contest, chances are you’d get an appraisal from a movie talent scout. With any luck at all, you might even get a train ticket to Hollywood, with a screen test to follow.

  The crucial thing to understand is that what Hollywood sold was not really the individual movie. The actual product being marketed was the star—the movie was merely the packaging. The vast majority of the people who were signed by the studios failed, not because they didn’t have any talent, but because they didn’t come across, didn’t photograph effectively, didn’t pop through the lens of the camera to imprint themselves on the frontal lobe of the viewer’s brain.

  Whether somebody photographs well is something you can never judge until they’re actually before a camera. We all know people who close up in the presence of a lens, and we all know people who love to be in its gaze. I think it would be safe to say that the vast majority of the female stars were not only comfortable with the camera, they embraced it as if it were a new lover, which, in many cases, it was.

  After the initial screen test, which captured more or less what a woman looked like when she walked through the studio door, the experts took over, deciding what had to be changed. What they were trying to do was, as Johnny Mercer used to sing, “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

  Teeth would be capped, noses sculpted, hairlines changed, eyebrows shaped, a flat chest outfitted with curves. If a face lacked definition, a loss of ten pounds was sure to bring out the cheekbones. If a name was full of unpronounceable consonants, a new name would be ordered up—the only people who were allowed to keep ethnic names were supporting players: Maria Ouspenskaya, Joseph Calleia, Joseph Schildkraut, or Akim Tamiroff. And if a potential prospect seemed to have a requisite sparkle but was woeful at delivering dialogue, he or she would be handed to a drama coach.

  When this process, which could easily take a year or more, was finally completed, young contract players were shoved in front of the cameras to sink or swim. If they seemed to have something, they were worked like rented mules, learning the trade the hard way: by doing it. To take just one example, Cary Grant made twenty-four movies between 1932 and 1936. When he started, he was a handsome but awkward young man. With time, he became the splendid construct known as Cary Grant. The studios learned how to showcase him, and he learned how to project his personality.

  This process was especially fine-tuned for actresses, who often began their careers by being cast in small parts opposite leading men who were already successful. MGM’s Andy Hardy series provided breakthrough exposure for young starlets as varied as Judy Garland, Donna Reed, Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Rutherford, and Esther Williams.

  Since the vast majority of young talent was signed for short money, they were low-risk investments; the huge successes more than made up for the dozens who washed out. Not everyone was emotionally equipped for what amounted to the commodification of human beings on an industrial scale.

  The upside was that because the studios made a wide variety of movies, from dramas to comedies to musicals to costume epics, actresses had access to a lot in the way of parts, which in turn meant that women in the audience had a lot more in the way of role models than the movies offer today.

  Now, the window for female stardom has narrowed to a sliver, because the industry caters mostly to teenage boys, and men with the souls of teenage boys. Female leads are mostly Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock, followed by a passel of twentysomethings who all aspire to be the next Angelina or Sandra.

  Superficially, the industry of earlier eras demarcated actresses by their sex appeal, or by their willingness to play suffering, but it went deeper than that. If the 1950s were the time of the teenager—and they were—the 1930s were the time of the adult.

  Think about actresses like Myrna Loy or Irene Dunne, both of whom became hugely popular in the 1930s. They were movie stars, but they were also women you could relate to on a human level. Unlike Garbo, you didn’t watch them from a distance.

  Some studios were better at buying already-developed talent and showcasing it than they were at breaking out new personalities. When it came to developing stars, nobody did it better than MGM.

  Take the case of a little girl named Lucille LeSueur, who was signed by the studio in 1924. She was eighteen, more or less, five foot three, a natural redhead, uneducated, and relatively inexperienced. She didn’t have a lot, but then they weren’t paying her a lot: seventy-five dollars a week to start.

  But she had enough—mainly, an infectious personality and a huge drive to escape the poverty into which she had been born. That drive made her an actress who could be mightily convincing . . . if she was correctly cast.

  Lucille was a tiny fish in what was already a large pond, so she did what she had to do to gain some leverage: She attached herself to a powerful older man named Harry Rapf, a producer at the studio. The story I heard was that she and Harry were in a restaurant, and she accidentally on purpose spilled a drink in his lap, and then helped him clean it up with great vigor and thoroughness.

  The relationship with Rapf bought her enough time to learn how to project her personality on the studio’s dime. She began to get small parts, then bigger parts, then starring parts. By then, she was not known as Lucille LeSueur, but as Joan Crawford.

  And then she upped the ante by marrying Douglas Fairbanks Jr., a Hollywood crown prince. They weren’t married long—four years—but by the time they divorced, Joan was set up, as both a star and a woman who could have any man she wanted.

  By the time I started making movies, Doug Fairbanks Jr. was living in England, so we only met a few times. But he was always touchingly loyal to Joan and what they had shared. I asked him about her once, and he replied that she had been a very ambitious girl, but never mean spirited. “I only saw the agreeable side of her,” he said.

  Joan Crawford

  Joan had drive. She also had a quality of directness I’ve always liked. She was never a particularly nuanced actress, but she was open to the camera in a very touching way. Men came and went with Joan, but her devotion to the camera never waned, because the camera was her true love. At her best, she had a great capacity for truth—when Joan was properly cast, she didn’t seem to be acting, especially in her films of the 1930s. She excelled at playing working-class women who were determined to get ahead, which is exactly what she was.

  Like Stanwyck or Harlow, Joan was well suited to the audiences of the Depression. They all played women who didn’t have anything going for them other than their looks and drive, but were determined to make their looks and drive sufficient. The alternative was unacceptable.

  Joan and I had a brief, ships-in-the-night fling when I was a young man in Hollywood, and we saw each other occasionally at industry events after that. She was always gracious, in a grande dame sort of way. At the premiere of Prince Valiant, Joan came over to congratulate me. I was kneeling down to talk to her and the photographers were gathering to take our picture. “Stand up,” she said under her breath. “I never look down at anybody!”

  I loved Joan—she was always Joan.

  As with Davis, as with Stanwyck, as with most of these women, work was their life, and when the work started to dry up, it became very difficult for them. They took the decline in their careers personally, and why shouldn’t they? Once upon a time, they had been hired because they were young and vibrant and beautiful and talented, and now they weren’t getting hired because they were no longer young or vibrant, and their beauty had transitioned to something else—with age came authority. The talent remained, but their brand wasn’t in demand anymore.

  For her part, Joan took what wa
s available, which tended to be low-end suspense and horror pictures. She was quite good in The Best of Everything for Jerry Wald, but the film isn’t well remembered. Her big late-life hit was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a good picture with power and no small amount of compassion. Most of the pictures Joan made at the end of her career, though, were beneath her. Not that she cared—the fact that she was able to work was more important to her than the quality.

  Although an actress like Bette Davis (or an actor like Vincent Price) could always launch themselves into the stratosphere and lend a touch of intentional camp humor to these kinds of movies, humor was never Joan’s strong point—that would have been her drive, her need for respect, her earnestness. I think it was Scott Fitzgerald who said that if a scene called for Crawford to tell a lie, she’d give an approximation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.

  New York intellectuals never had much use for Joan, even when she married Franchot Tone, who was one of them. It was, I think, a class issue. MGM wanted her to play lower-middle-class girls—the milieu she had practically killed herself to get out of. She took those parts until she grew to hate them. She wanted to be more than that; she wanted to play genteel, as she had willed herself to become off-screen.

  Joan would always insist that it wasn’t MGM that had made her a star but the public, and she was right. Irving Thalberg arranged for Norma Shearer to get adaptations of successful novels and plays that would be sure to get attention and respectful reviews. Joan never got that kind of treatment from the studio—the scripts for her films were comparatively minor. They derived their importance from the fact that she was in them, and because the audience took Joan as one of their own. She was the embodiment of their own dreams of success. Joan mattered to her fans, as they did to her.

  She felt she owed her fans everything. If you wrote Joan Crawford a letter, you’d get a letter back, and not one written by a secretary, but one handwritten by her. Think about the dozens of hours every week she had to devote to answering fan mail. It explains so much about her, and it also explains why the audience felt such loyalty toward her.