by Jean Stein
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JACKIE PARK: I grew up in Philadelphia. I don’t know who my father was. My mother used to have different boyfriends and then she abandoned me to the Catholic Charities. I was abused sexually, but I got a good education. We were all given different scripts when we came into the world, and the important thing is to accept that.
When I was sixteen, a nice gentleman took a liking to me, but when he found out my age he got frightened. So he sent me to Hollywood with some money and a letter of introduction to the director Edmund Goulding. My real name is Mary Scarborough, but when I met Edmund he said, “Let’s call you Jacqueline Park, after Park Avenue.” I stayed at a club for actresses called the Hollywood Studio Club. Marilyn Monroe lived there at some point, and so did Kim Novak and a lot of other starlets. I dated Ronald Reagan for three months and he never once took me out, because he was carrying a torch for Jane Wyman. And I went out with Cary Grant for a while. The first time I ever had a date with him, he was dressed up like a woman. He had on a silk blouse, velvet pants, and gold lamé shoes. You had relationships, you know. Then you met somebody else. It was like watching a movie.
When Jack Warner came along, in 1960, I was dating other people and having a good time, and Warner said, “I want you to be only with me.” I told him I’d try it, and he said, “Don’t fuck around with love.” My bills were paid and nothing too much was expected of me. But Jack never wanted me to express myself. When I wanted to go to art class, he said, “That’s a waste of time. Go work for the Red Cross.” He set me up with my own apartment at the Sunset Towers and gave me an allowance of $350 a week. He was so cheap he would always make sure that the bills didn’t stick together when he counted them.
But there was a side of Jack that would come out when he was not threatened by anything. He always wanted to be a singer, and one time we were sitting in a restaurant in the Valley and Stanley Holloway, from My Fair Lady, walked in, and Jack started singing “Get Me to the Church on Time.” He was singing louder and louder, and finally Stanley came over and said, “Jack, you will never make it.” Sometimes his soul would come out, but that wasn’t very often.
I went to the command performance of My Fair Lady in London with him. We didn’t have to go through customs—the FBI took us right through, because Hoover was his buddy. And, because my great-grandfather was from aristocracy, Jack started introducing me as Lady Scarborough. He said, “This is Lady Scarborough, and she has a heart of gold and a snatch to match.” The next day, all the lords and ladies were looking for me to have tea.
Frank Sinatra said to me one day, “If this old geezer gives you a problem, call me.” I put in a couple of calls at some point, but these guys with funny accents answered: “What do you want?” I said, “I have the wrong number.” Then, when Frank Sinatra, Jr., was kidnapped, Jack called Frank and said, “Look, if you need a million dollars, Jackie will drive me to the studio and I’ll get it from the safe.” Then he turned to me and asked, “Is your car big enough to hold a million dollars?” I said, “How big is that?”
The Kennedys used to call Jack, and instead of identifying themselves—in case there was a columnist over—they’d say, “It’s code K.” One night in August ’62, the phone rang, and Jack and I picked it up at the same time. All I heard was, “This is code K, Marilyn is dead.” Then Jack came in and said, “Did you pick up that phone?” I said, “No.” The next day the story made headlines in all the papers.
One time Jack called me and said, “You know, I’m tired of all the restaurants I go to. I want to go where I’m not known.” So I took him to Barney’s Beanery and introduced him as George Anderson. Barney gives me that I-know-who-he-is look. We had dinner and the steaks were horrible. So Jack calls me up the next day and says, “I like Barney’s, but could you buy the steaks and take them there?” So I bought lettuce, tomatoes, and steaks and said, “Barney, all you have to do is cook these.” We went back there all the time, and Jack loved it. He’d say, “Tell Barney we’re coming in.” Barney would say, “Look, this isn’t Chasen’s, you don’t need a reservation.” One time a guy came over to Jack and said, “I know who you are: you’re Jack Warner.” He said, “No, I’m not. I’m George Anderson. I look like Jack Warner, but I wouldn’t want to be that son of a bitch.” That is the joy I shared with him. He knew how to live when his demons weren’t coming out.
But when they did come out he just wanted to humiliate you. I never asked for anything because I knew I wasn’t going to get it. See, Jack Warner could control me, but Mrs. Warner he couldn’t control. I think there was a lot of guilt involved. And he was afraid of losing half of his stake in the studio if he tried to divorce her. The studio was his life—he had no other identity. He would have sold his soul to hold on to it.
When we first became lovers, I found out that he was very beaten down—he needed shots from a doctor to make him virile. So I put him under hypnotic autosuggestion and told him, “You can get it up. You can get it up,” and I did a lot of nurturing. Then eventually we had a great sex life. He told me that he and Mrs. Warner hadn’t had a sexual relationship in thirteen years. In fact she couldn’t stand him. It was marriage in name only, but it worked. She had been his mistress for three years, so she knew what that role was.
He used to call me and say, “I am having dinner downstairs, the old hound dog is upstairs.” But he also carried around pictures of her, and every girl he went out with looked like her. She was a drug for him and he was addicted.
He broke up with me in ’65 or ’66. Then I was in really bad shape. I was drinking, and one night I got a call from Mrs. Warner. “Jack has told me all about you,” she said. “You know we wouldn’t get a divorce over such a silly thing as you being his mistress. But I have to think of my husband’s reputation. If you have anything planned….” So I sent her flowers. I said, “To Mrs. Jack Warner, the most understanding woman I know.” Then Jack sent word that I should leave California. A friend of his said to me, “You don’t want to wind up like Monroe, so you’d better go.” Jack never saw me again. The five thousand dollars he gave me didn’t last long. I lived off the money from hotel to hotel, and then I was homeless twice.
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ANNE TERRAIL: The first time I met my grandmother is when my mother moved back to California, because my grandfather was sick. I must have been fifteen or sixteen, and I was in school in France and dreaming to do theater. I mean, I was in a completely different world, a completely different environment. I was really far, far, far away from all that. And I was very anti-American, wearing a Chinese cap, saying all these things like “China is great!” I had all these big theories of how life should be, of course, at that age. So I went up to my grandparents’ house in a car with my mother. She was probably pretty tense and so was I. I knew that my grandfather was sick and I hadn’t seen him for several years. We drive up. The fountains are on. This door opens, squeaaaak, and there is this woman that I have never seen before standing behind my grandfather, who cannot see me. This is like we are in the movies. She stands behind him. I am just going, Ahh. I say, “Hello, Grandpa,” and he doesn’t see me. I come up to kiss him. Anoushka is behind him, and that is the first time I see her. She was in a flowered dressing gown made of some kind of muslin. It had frills and she had slippers on, and she was made up with blue eye shadow and red lipstick. Oh god! And the smell of her. She always wore this perfume, Princess Marcella Borghese. Actually, I have one bottle at home in Paris. I took one when she died. I remember her once and a while doing spritz, spritz. It was real strong. Oh god! I’m glad I wasn’t their child. So, anyway, that is the first time I saw her. I remember she was looking after him. I remember this power thing mostly that she was controlling everything. Of course, you should say she was a saint. You know, when people have power over another person and people say, “Oh she is so good, she is taking care of him,” it is just killing that person. It is always weird.
My grandfather, I always wondered whether he recognized me. Then, when I remember s
aying hello to him I hardly…I think he recognized me but not right away. I am not sure. I know we went inside the house. I don’t really remember the rest of it, but I remember them opening the door and them standing at the door. Instead of letting people come in the house and make it normal, she made it this big thing so that it would hide what was going on behind.
This was a really foreign world to me: this huge house, this huge door, and my grandmother made a huge Hollywood performance, a spectacle. She was trying to make something out of her life. I see her as someone who didn’t live the life that she would have liked to have lived; she probably imagined it differently. That is what I feel. That is probably all projection. She didn’t tell me that. It is hard to make sense of what she invented, what I heard, what she said, and what I felt. It is a big jumble. Personally, I had very strong encounters with her.
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JEAN HOWARD: The last time I saw Jack and Ann it was Christmas 1973. Jack was completely senile, and he was wheeled in. Ann had him dressed up for Christmas in red pajamas. She said, “This is Jean.” But he didn’t know me from Adam. And he didn’t really know who or where he was. He was friendlier than I’d ever seen him, just waving his arms around. And Ann was very sweet with him. She put her arms around him and gave him a kiss good night when they took him out. He had no idea who she was either.
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JACKIE PARK: Right to the end, Mrs. Warner was a perfect wife. She took care of Jack. I heard that if you went in to see him you had to wear gloves and a mask. His last years were not good years. Once a friend of mine went to see him. Jack held his hand and said, “Help me.”
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LOUIS ROSNER: It was 1973 when I was called in to see Mr. Warner at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I was in private practice as a neurologist in Beverly Hills, but Jack Warner had been to Scripps Clinic, and they hadn’t been able to repair the damage from his stroke. Mainly it involved loss of visual recognition—a condition called cortical blindness, in which the person can see but can’t make sense out of what he’s seeing.
I was greeted by Mrs. Warner at the hospital room. Before a few weeks had passed, she knew every term on the laboratory chart. She absorbed everything you told her. She was the one who smoothed over Jack’s rough edges. When he would curse, she’d say, “Jack, darling, you never talked like that. Don’t talk like that in front of the doctor.” She had a culture and sophistication that complemented his drive.
She became interested in every religion and the approaches they might have to healing Jack. She called me one day and said, “I’ve found our savior.” For a while, I had been the savior, but then when I didn’t cure anything I wasn’t the savior. This one was a Tibetan faith healer. She delved into Buddhism, into Hinduism, and finally I said, “Mrs. Warner, I’ve always wondered, what religion are you? Aren’t you Jewish?” She said, “Darling, I’m anything you want me to be.”
She had these great little sayings. She’d say, “Give your wife a kiss for me.” And I’d say, “Where should I kiss her?” And she’d say, “In all the old familiar places.” My wife, Larraine, would call Mrs. Warner to brag after she’d been out at some affair and say, “Everybody was staring at me. I must have looked really good.” And Mrs. Warner would say, “Darling, people will stare at a snake,” to bring her down to earth.
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LARRAINE ROSNER: I was going through some turmoil with Louis in 1978 and Ann let me stay at the house while she was at the hospital with Jack. She was on the phone with me while he was dying. He was unconscious, and a whole team was trying to revive him, but it was hopeless. She kept saying, “His little foot is going so fast. It’s going so fast.” He was having some type of spasm, and she was standing in the doorway and that was all she could see. Then, when he died, she asked me to tell everybody at the house. So I did, and even though he had been sick for many years, they were all in complete shock.
The day of Jack’s funeral was very painful for Ann. I remember the amount of anxiety it caused her to leave the house after all those years. There was going to be a big crowd, and she would be on public view. Nixon called her twice from San Clemente and said, “You have to do it.” She always said, “He is the one who helped me leave the house.”
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JACK WARNER, JR.: Ann decided to make it a small funeral, with only the nurses and a few others. Then someone must have told her, “If you don’t invite his son, he could very well sue you.” Suddenly the phone rang, and some man from my father’s office said, “Can you be at your father’s funeral the day after tomorrow?” And I said, “Certainly.” I took my wife and my two daughters, and we went to Rabbi Magnin’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple. It was a strange experience. I hadn’t seen Ann since my father’s car accident. She’d put on a tremendous amount of weight. And she wore muumuus, no dresses anymore. She came up the stairs with her two daughters, and people clustered around her. I went right over to her and said, “I’m so sorry, Ann, about what happened.” She didn’t say a word, just looked at me, and I stepped aside and let her go in.
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BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I was always told that Jack Jr. was a terrible person and that he was only after money. Which, unfortunately, poor man, he really wasn’t. He wanted love. My mother thought he would sue after my father passed away, and of course he didn’t. He was left a little money and he accepted that. “Irrational fear” is the only term I can give to her feelings for Jack Jr. All those years she tortured herself with it, and it was sad for both of them. I remember seeing him at my father’s funeral, and we acknowledged each other without talking. My mother had the coffin covered with red carnations—which my father used to love. Every morning on his way to the studio he’d pull out one for his boutonnière from a vase by the front door.
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ANNE TERRAIL: I didn’t go to the funeral because I was back in France. But then my mother moved back to L.A., and I followed her and went to CalArts. Every time I would go and visit my grandmother after that she would be sitting in the same chair, an armchair, in a kind of living room suite upstairs next to her bedroom, where she spent all of her time. I would say, “Oh, hello, Anoushka,” and smell this perfume. She was wearing one of those robes, very overweight. I have a feeling that she wasn’t that huge actually. She was wearing that blue eye shadow and her face had a lot of heavy pancake makeup on it. Oh god, excuse me, Anoushka.
I liked being with her, though, because for me this was like a special thing. I had this grandmother who was very special, who was called Ann, and on top of that she could tell me many things that nobody else was going to tell me—she never told me anything, but I could ask her things. What she did tell me, though, was about her husband, Jack. She said, “When I met him he was just a little Jewish guy and I made him into what he was. I changed his clothes. I changed his way of dressing. Thanks to me…” I tried to get links to my past. I’ve always been interested in family things. It was a great treat for me to go there. It was like this escapade, and maybe for her, too. I remember, she had this friend staying with her, it was a writer, and she wanted to show off in front of him, probably because she had this French granddaughter, and I was in my Jewish period, I mean, I was really looking for my Jewish roots, and she asked me, “Who is your favorite writer?” She probably thought that I would answer with the name of a French writer and I said, “Isaac Bashevis Singer.” She said, “Oh really?”
Actually, my mother only told me I was Jewish when I was around eleven. I was pretty old by then. I remember playing cards with her and she said, “Oh, by the way, since you are Jewish, this and that…” I said, “I am what?” I think she thought I knew. Suddenly, I was very proud. Then I got very scared. I thought, What if Hitler came back? I was a little girl. I don’t remember asking her questions. I had probably heard bad things about the Jews. All the things about being a victim and Hitler. You know, all these things when you are little. At the same time, I thought, This is special. At least my mother is giving me something from her. I thought it was
really neat in that way. I felt that I was a link to her. I think for her it was not very important. I remember that I was proud about it. To be different.
When my grandmother was younger, there was probably a side of her that was sensitive and liked poetry, all that realm of things. Then she probably wanted to make it also, wanted to become a rich woman. Now why, I don’t know. I don’t know how poor she was when she was little. She probably wasn’t that poor. I have that feeling. But with Jack she probably wasn’t happy because he was not poetic at all…Who gives a shit about poetry. His reasons. She probably was not happy and that is why she got into all this mystic stuff—you know, really she always talked about astrology. She did my sign when I was born because my mother gave it to me. It is not very interesting. She didn’t do it herself. She had it done. It is not very accurate actually. The way that she got into astrology was a little…it was like, what next? She tried to invent something for herself. From what I understood, she closed herself up more and more. She hardly went downstairs after she was forty. That is not old. That is pretty strange. She probably wasn’t happy. Sometimes I wonder if she didn’t drink a little just to make herself feel better. She had intuitions. Now, how real, I don’t know. I really asked her to be my grandmother when I saw her. I would ask her questions, you know, “Where did you meet my grandfather?” This and that. She hardly said anything, but I would just look her in the eyes and say, “This is what I want from you.” She liked me because of that, I think. At first, I was kind of exotic because I came from France and she didn’t have to show herself too much. I didn’t ask her for anything. I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. Once I said, “Can I have this little picture of your mother? Oh, I would love a copy of it,” and she said, “Oh, yes.” And I never got it. So, when she was gone, one thing I took was that picture. I have it in Paris. She told me that I looked like her mother. Her mother was called Sarah. She died when my grandmother was twelve. So it seems like her mother could not have taken care of her because she was dead. I was always really trying with her to get some kind of connection with the past in the family beyond the Hollywood image. It was hard to get past that. I never got anything from her. I think she built up barriers to protect herself so she wouldn’t show who she really was, because that was the only way she could move up in the world she chose to move into, marrying my grandfather Jack. She probably wasn’t made for that world, I think, since she didn’t know how to deal with that sensitivity she had and all that fame. She was also a very powerful woman. She wanted to have power, and you can’t have everything. I think she fucked herself over. Sorry to talk like that. She wanted to have power, she got it—on the other hand, at the same time it destroyed something inside of her. It’s sad, this woman. She is someone that I would have liked to know better, as a real person, my grandmother—stop the bullshit, stop saying and inventing stories. I really would have liked to know her because she was really interesting. I know her relationship with my mother must have been really awful. My mother didn’t like her, I think. I don’t think they liked each other. It probably was hard for my mother that I had a relationship with her, I’m sure it was. She would say no, but I’m sure it was. That’s normal. It is often like that, that it goes over generations. I could feel that they did not have that much to say to each other. They probably never had much to say to each other. Also, I felt this, it is a weird thing, I never understood why my mother talked to her so nicely, you know, with these sweet words to this woman that she really didn’t like. I always felt that was strange. I did not understand what the point of it was. But I guess, she was protecting herself because she probably felt very scared of her mother and very menaced by her. Anoushka was very power oriented and she must have been a terrible, terrible mother. It must have been really terrible to be their child. I think with Jack, too. I know my mother had a much better relationship with her father, it seems like it anyway. I just feel that she had no family support at all. He was probably very charming. But who cares if someone is charming if they are not there? I feel he didn’t want trouble. That is what I feel. It went down three generations. Now, I am trying. Someone has to break it; otherwise it can go on for ten generations.
