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

  When Joan went over to Warners in 1945, she made Mildred Pierce—the sort of movie that sums up not merely a career, but an entire studio, and beyond that, an entire genre: film noir.

  Her main antagonist at Warners was, of course, Bette Davis, who had reigned unchallenged as the queen of the lot for over a decade. She now had competition, and Bette didn’t like anything about Joan, whom she once snarlingly referred to as “that mannequin from Metro”—as if the studio’s couturier Adrian had been responsible for her career. When a publicist brought the great portrait photographer George Hurrell to the studio to see if he could work his magic on Bette just as he had on Joan at MGM, Bette snapped, “I don’t want to look like a piece of shiny wax fruit.” When she arrived at the portrait studio, Bette instructed Hurrell to “Go easy on the glamour. I’m not the type.”

  For Bette, the goal was always to be an actress; if stardom was the result, fine. For Joan, the goal was stardom, and acting was the vehicle. If Joan heard the stories about Bette slagging her she never let on. She preferred to project a gracious noblesse oblige that she felt was becoming to a woman on the verge of middle age.

  Even when she was playing a good wife, there was no question that Joan had a backbone of the strongest steel. Not only wouldn’t she break, she wouldn’t even bend very much—it was very hard for any actor playing opposite her to hold his own in their scenes together.

  But look at how beautifully she worked with John Barrymore in Grand Hotel, or with John Garfield in Humoresque, two powerful but otherwise completely different types of actor. In both roles you believe Joan when she makes the transition from indifference or hostility to gradually opening up to her leading man. That was Joan’s strength, and it made her abandoning herself to love in her films a moving experience.

  I always had a lot of respect for Joan, because of where she’d started and because of her best work, which I would classify as some of her late silent pictures and a lot of her films in the 1930s on through Mildred Pierce. That’s almost twenty years at the top of the game. And I had to respect the amount of effort she’d expended to get to where she was, and where she expected to stay.

  Barbara Stanwyck could have played a lot of the parts Joan played, and that’s a tribute to Joan’s level of talent. But while Joan had a core of fatalism that I found interesting, there were also touches of self-pity in some of her performances. Barbara would reveal the anger and occasional bitterness that her impoverished early life had given her, but self-pity was alien to her.

  Still, people dismiss Joan Crawford at their peril. She deserves far more respect than she gets.

  • • •

  There were a few actresses of this period that I never met, but whom I feel I knew nonetheless. Jean Harlow was all sunshine, very few shadows. Harlow was open and free. She wasn’t particularly beautiful—her face had a pushed-in quality, like a Pekinese—but she had a spectacular body and she wasn’t shy about displaying it. In her earliest films, she’s amateurish, but she worked at it and got better fast. In Dinner at Eight, she holds her own with a bellowing Wallace Beery, the biggest ham in the business, and George Cukor gets a hilarious comic performance out of her. Victor Fleming wasn’t in Cukor’s class, but he did good work in Red Dust. In that performance it wasn’t the director pulling her strings, but the essential Harlow coming through.

  I think it was the warmth of Harlow’s personality that made all the difference, that made the audience stick with her in the early years when she was learning how to act, how to react, how to read a line. She was so human. Harlow was the waitress at the diner, the good-hearted dame who would give her last dollar to a panhandler.

  Harlow was like Mae West in that she made sex safe for the middle class because she was so unself-conscious about her display. You couldn’t begin to fathom what sex with Garbo or Norma Shearer would be like—they were too remote. But sex with Harlow could be easily imagined, and undoubtedly was. Sex was something she obviously enjoyed, so the audience relaxed and enjoyed her.

  Jean Harlow’s early death at the age of twenty-six has to be regarded as a terrible loss, every bit as much as Marilyn Monroe’s. In both cases, I think their best work was ahead of them, and it’s fascinating to speculate on what parts Harlow would have played had she lived, and whether she would have been able to transition to other types of roles as she matured.

  Mae West was entirely a creature of the 1930s, specifically the early 1930s, because after 1934, when the Production Code began to be heavily enforced, her screen character had to be bowdlerized. Until then she was a howl—a little, middle-aged pouter pigeon of a woman who wasn’t particularly attractive but clearly thought she was, so everybody else played along. She was sexual and pleased about it, and intended to make the men in her life happy about it, too.

  Nobody had ever seen an apparition like Mae West before her movie debut in 1932, and nobody’s seen one like her since. She didn’t play the courtship game, didn’t pretend to be interested in matrimony as much as she was interested in a good roll in the hay. In any case, the latter was dead certain to precede the former.

  Mae West had a long life and a long career, but her best work is contained in just two or three movies made before the censorship hammer came down.

  Another of the gleefully irresponsible stars of the 1930s was Kay Francis. Tall, slender, and with a body made for the satin gowns of Travis Banton, Kay was not that old when she became a star, but her career was basically over within only ten years. While she could play the devoted wife and mother, as every actress had to at one time or another, she really came to life playing a glamorous, slinky, slightly footloose creature who did as she pleased, which reflected who she was as a woman.

  Kay was invariably soigné, very classy and very sexy, in spite of a slight speech impediment that led her to pronounce “R” as “W.” Her best work is probably Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, although commercially she hit her peak at Warners, with movies like One Way Passage, which once seen are never forgotten, at least partially because of Kay’s unique quality of elegance shaded with resignation. Years later, I optioned One Way Passage for a remake. Roddy McDowall was going to produce, and Elizabeth Taylor was going to star in it with me. But the money wouldn’t come; the studios regarded the story as archaic.

  Kay Francis

  In talking about Kay Francis with people who knew her, it becomes clear that she didn’t care all that much about acting—it was a way of establishing and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle that she enjoyed. When she got too old to headline movies at Warners, she produced a few pictures at Monogram, then simply retired. Kay had a life of great color and good times. Husbands came and went, as did lovers. She also had a good head on her shoulders—when she died in 1968, she left an estate of a cool million dollars to the ASPCA.

  A woman after my own heart.

  • • •

  Cary Grant once told me that of all the women he worked with, Irene Dunne had the best timing. That took me aback—I had always thought Rosalind Russell was his best match when it came to comedy—but Cary was an absolute perfectionist in his work, and comedy is universally recognized as the hardest thing for actors to perform, so I have to defer to his judgment. (I would defer to any judgment of Cary Grant’s.)

  Irene’s initial ambition was to be an opera singer, but her voice didn’t have the necessary heft, so she downshifted to musicals. She was a leading lady for the Shuberts for years, then was cast in the 1929 touring company of Show Boat, which was her ticket to Hollywood.

  She could play heavy drama, and she could also play screwball comedy. She did it not by playing the comedy as farce—Irene wasn’t Carole Lombard, whose energy and willingness to be silly made her stand out. She could play farcical situations, but she acted them more as situation comedies—she played it as straight as possible. What gave it away was the twinkle in her eye.

  Irene was probably always too mature to be considered overwhelmingly sexy. She was born in 1898, so she was either
pushing hard on forty or past it when she had her biggest hits. She couldn’t help but be conscious of this, so she was always very appreciative of a cameraman who made her look younger than she was.

  Irene Dunne

  She had a muscle in her chin that would tense up and cause a little line to appear, which in turn could create a small shadow on her chin in close-ups. There was a sweetheart of a cameraman named George Folsey, who photographed my first film. (George went into the MGM cutting room and got some frames of my scene in The Happy Years and gave them to me. “This is your first close-up,” he said. “There will be many more.”)

  George noticed her problem and decided to do something about it. He took a small spotlight, mounted it on a swivel, and put a dimmer switch on it. Whenever Irene was doing a close-up, Folsey would be sitting there very intently watching her, and when he saw the muscles in her chin start to tense up, he’d carefully turn on the dimmer switch, and the tiny amount of light shining on her chin would make the shadow disappear.

  When Irene saw the rushes, she actually started to cry and thanked Folsey for getting rid of that little dark spot. That story indicates so much about the kind of pressure that the actresses of that time worked under, pressures that the public never knew anything about.

  Irene was a serious Catholic, and there was never any doubt about her rectitude either personally or on-screen. She married Dr. Frank Griffin, a dentist, in 1928 and stayed married. She didn’t do a lot of publicity, and she and her husband kept mostly to themselves, although they had a few friends who were likewise classy and dignified—Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and his wife, for example.

  Irene had a lightness of spirit that, with the impeccable timing Cary Grant noted, made her a superb foil for him in both comedy (The Awful Truth) and drama (Penny Serenade). Cary’s specific gift was that he made everybody who worked with him a little better than they were with anybody else. Other actors seemed a little sharper, a little more on point when they were teamed with him, but Irene might have come the closest to matching him moment for moment. And she had a quality of impish teasing that matched his own sense of fun.

  In movies like The Awful Truth, Cary plays scenes condescendingly, as if Irene’s character is a little dim. Not a good idea. Dunne had sincerity, but she also had irony, and she could put a man in his place subtly—just by raising an eyebrow. She once said an interesting thing about comedy: “The best way to be funny is to be cold-blooded and purely mental about it. It demands more timing, pace, shading, and subtlety of emphasis . . .” In other words, a raised eyebrow is better than running around slamming doors.

  Today, Cary is revered, while Irene is . . . appreciated. I think the difference derives from the fact that Cary was so handsome, hence sexy, while Irene was never viewed as beautiful so much as attractive. You could imagine Irene as a friend or member of the family—your aunt or mother, hence her success as the title character in I Remember Mama. But Cary glistened; you could never imagine him as part of your life, which is why even other movie stars would do double takes when they saw him and get a little tongue tied.

  If you look at Irene’s career objectively, she had far greater range than most of her peers. She played in musicals and excelled, she played in comedy and excelled, and she played in dramas and excelled.

  She worked so very hard to be natural; you never caught her acting, or even trying to be wacky in comic roles. And what I particularly appreciated was that she didn’t do Oscar-bait parts—extreme characters, alcoholics or addicts, or stunt castings with heavy doses of makeup. (Well, she did do the latter, but only once, in The Mudlark, where she played Queen Victoria with a lot of rubber on her face.)

  She played characters in the middle range, middle-class or upper-middle-class women with domestic problems, which meant that they were easy for the audience to relate to. People went to Bette Davis movies for a show—a dramatic rendering of highly dramatic characters in highly dramatic situations, very few of which would ever be experienced by the average woman on the street. People went to Irene Dunne’s pictures to see their own emotional lives reflected back at them—quietly but firmly, and with impeccable taste.

  Because of this sense of propriety, Irene got nominated for Academy Awards, five of them, but she never won. She should have, but that’s the way of the world.

  Although she may not have received the recognition she deserved, Irene took great care over the caliber of the films she made—she had director approval in her contracts and was very discerning about whom she would and would not work with. As a result, her batting average was quite high, and she knew it. She was loath to take parts that were second rate, or films for directors that were beneath the level of George Stevens or Leo McCarey. Other actresses would have hated her but for her own sense of modesty and proportion.

  She segued to middle age so subtly that you didn’t even notice it. A Guy Named Joe begat Anna and the King of Siam begat Life with Father which begat I Remember Mama. She made a few more films, then began scaling back, and did some work in TV. She turned down roles in notable films like The Swan and Gigi and seems to have quietly arrived at the decision that she had simply done enough acting. Irene lived modestly and held on to her money, so she didn’t have to work.

  Her career ended when she was in her midfifties by her own intent. She had no interest in trying to captivate younger audiences the way go-for-broke talents such as Bette Davis or Joan Crawford did, because she thought the thrillers and horror films they made at the tail end of their careers were unseemly.

  What made her stand out for me was her quality as a woman. Irene was the sort of religious person who doesn’t talk about her beliefs so much as live them, and it is that which has helped keep her name alive down to the present day. She was one of the major figures to support St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, having personally raised over $20 million for it. Today the Irene Dunne Garden perpetuates her memory, as does the Irene Dunne Guild, a group of volunteers who provide assistance to patients.

  Irene was so persuasive she could even get non-Catholics interested in the workings of the hospital. Jimmy Stewart was a Presbyterian from Pennsylvania, but Irene asked him to be on the St. John’s board, and he complied with great enthusiasm. She managed to get MGM to donate a portion of the profits from the epic Western How the West Was Won to it, and the huge roster of guest stars in the film worked for very little money and no percentages so as to maximize those profits.

  Years later, Jimmy asked me to become a member of the Board of St. John’s. I’m still on the board today, and happily so. Irene herself remained involved in recruiting sponsors and money for St. John’s until very near the end of her own life in 1990, when she was ninety-two.

  Irene and I had several conversations. I once asked her what her favorite film was, and she hemmed and hawed a bit before answering, “Oh, Love Affair, I suppose.” I told her that she had surprised me; I would have thought she would have preferred The Awful Truth or Show Boat. She replied that she didn’t like the movie version of Show Boat—she thought the play was better.

  Another time she evinced a quiet pride in what she had accomplished. “Everything I did had a purpose,” she said. “It wasn’t just a superficial acting job for the moment. It was important to me. I always knew that acting was not everything there was.”

  Even the casual acquaintance I had with her revealed that Irene was the embodiment of a lady. Not a stuffy clubwoman, but a vibrant woman with humor and an interest in life. She was always very attentive to other people and their problems. For instance: There was a young publicist at Columbia named Bob Board who didn’t like his job and was looking around for something else. He had a hobby of painting caricatures of movie stars on eggshells. Irene saw them and asked him to make some for her daughter, who lived across the street from me in Brentwood. Irene wrote Board a letter to thank him, and told him that if she could ever do anything for him, just let her know.

  A few years passed, and Board was doing puppet shows for chil
dren. He wrote Irene to tell her about his new career, and she remembered him—her daughter still had the eggs with his caricatures on them. She called all her friends in Los Angeles, and for the next ten years, Bob Board made a good living doing puppet shows for the birthday parties of stars’ children, not to mention the industrialists and non-show-business types who Irene tended to socialize with.

  Bob Board always idolized Marian Davies, but Irene Dunne wasn’t far behind, and you can see why. Even in old age, there was an elegance about her. She was one of those people who quietly set goals for themselves and then go about first meeting and then exceeding them. Her accomplishments in the world of show business were remarkable, but they pale next to her accomplishments as a human being.

  • • •

  The great Myrna Loy became known as “the perfect wife,” a label that couldn’t have thrilled her, as it implied a demon housekeeper who always has dinner on the table at 6 P.M. sharp. In fact, Myrna wed four times, so her marriage skills could reasonably be said to have ended at the studio gate. But on-screen, she worked seamlessly with actors as varied as Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Fredric March, Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, and Clifton Webb. Think about the different styles and varying rhythms of that group of actors, and think about the skill set it must have taken for Loy to mesh with each of them.

  In her early days in silent films, Myrna was cast as sloe-eyed temptresses, but her voice and natural vivacity pushed her in a different direction once sound came in. In 1934, she appeared opposite William Powell in The Thin Man, and she was off on a hot streak, specializing in playing sassy women who expected to be in on whatever excitement the male lead was having.

  Myrna and Bill Powell made marriage look like fun. Theirs was a completely modern relationship, and by “modern” I mean twenty-first century—a union of absolute equals. Powell’s Nick Charles might have been a little too soused to project much sexual charge, but you believed that he and Myrna’s Nora Charles really liked each other, so you believed in the marriage. While Nick drank, Nora sparkled and supported him. Nick might flirt with another woman, but only incidentally—only a fool would dump Myrna Loy.