by Jean Stein
One of the most interesting things Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his books was ghosts. He said that certain people have bodies, bodies that walk around, but they’re not real people. And there was something about Jane like that. When my mother died, there was that point when there was a shift and the body continued but the person I knew was no longer there. She was sort of more and more a little child, but this child had lost its spirit. The person I saw walking through the mall had that same quality. There was just a little tinge of the memory of that former person.
IV
JENNIFER JONES
1400 Tower Grove Road, Beverly Hills
22400 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu
22368 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu
BOB WALKER: I have really lovely memories of my life as a child. In spite of all that went on, I cannot see how it could’ve been any better. That’s me. I know that I am the sum of everything that’s happened over the years, but I don’t dwell on any of that. I feel very blessed. I don’t think about my past very much, and I don’t even think of myself that much, except in the feeling of being something planted and rooted in the earth, and in heaven.
I wish my brother, Michael, were here for you to meet. He was quite an interesting character. He carried enough darkness for the two of us. All through life he carried the dark stuff about Mom, and the only things I’m carrying now about Mom are the beautiful moments of her that I remember. Michael and our half sister, Mary Jennifer, probably had more troubles than I did—their ways of processing troubles were different from mine. It’s just the luck of the draw that I’ve been blessed with the ability to allow my troubles to dissolve. I don’t carry them with me. Have you heard that story about the two monks? Two monks come to the river, and they’ve sworn the highest vow that they won’t touch women, and they aren’t even supposed to look their way or entertain any thoughts about women whatsoever. So they’re absolutely chaste. But they come to a river and this young lady is trying to get across, and she’s got a jug of water, or some kind of burden. Well, one of the monks notices her predicament and picks her up immediately in his arms and puts her on the other side. The other monk is absolutely aghast but finally struggles across the stream and catches up to the other monk, who by now is far along, and says, “Tom,” or whatever, “what happened? You know that we’ve taken these vows never to touch, much less look at a woman and never to speak to one, and what have you done?” And Tom says, “What are you talking about? I left her behind an hour ago—you’re still carrying her. You’re still thinking about her.” Tom knew this person needed help, and he did it without a thought, and he didn’t carry it with him. He kept going, and he was able to carry on with his life. I’m like Tom. So when something bad happens, I never carry it with me. Like water hitting an electric stove, it just instantly turns to steam. I carry blithely on. But as Ram Dass once said, you know, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a weekend with your parents.
One memory I go back to a lot is when I was living up Trancas Canyon in the seventies with Ellie, my wife in those days. We were living in the bushes, on a stream, stark naked, like savages. When I met Ellie in New York she was smoking one Salem after another, wearing furs and high heels, and popping Dexedrine. Boy, I had her living in the woods, eating rattlesnakes and wild rice. I got a tent, but Ellie and my youngest child, Charlie, used to just sleep in the bushes. I had a two-year-old, and an eight- and nine-year-old, David and Michelle. I would bathe the kids in the stream in the morning, then send them off to school looking like they’d been chauffeured in from the Malibu Colony.
I remember my mother, Jennifer Jones, and her third husband, Norton Simon, coming down to check out our campsite and see how we were living. I don’t know how they got down there. It was an hour hike into the canyon on a very rough, almost impassable dirt road, washed out in most places, with fissures. You really needed a four-wheel drive to get down there. And then you had to walk up the creek to get to our campsite. So it took some doing, I must say. Norton was in his best clothes, and Mother had on her perfect little Halston dress, her Hermès scarf, and Gucci shoes. I will never forget this, Mother standing on one of those beautiful rocks, head and shoulders above all of us, sunlight golden on the hills, and the trees are whispering in the wind. Mother looks down and she says to me, “So, Robert, how long will you be living up shit creek?” I said, “Mom, maybe forever. Maybe forever.”
Mom had come a long way from Oklahoma. Her previous husband, David Selznick, changed her name to Jennifer Jones soon after he met her because her real name, Phylis Isley, was not gonna cut it. I think in those days Jennifer wasn’t such a common name, so Jennifer was for the exotic woman of mystery and Jones was for the plain girl that grew up in Tulsa. Jennifer Jones. It’s a pretty good name, actually. But her dad always called her Phylis. Once Mother started to travel in the upper echelons, she became a little embarrassed of her parents, because she thought they were a little common. They were from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for crying out loud. A Southern town then in the sense that it had one of the worst race wars in history soon after Mom was born. Grandpa and Grandma Isley had tent shows. They were folks, just folks. But she loved them.
Her dad, Phil, had a traveling circus at one point early on. He had vaudeville houses, but not exactly vaudeville—stripper shows, burlesque. Later on, her dad had movie theaters here and there and a film exchange in Dallas that bought and sold films to the theaters. He was a self-made man who became an independent theater owner and a promoter of sorts. Grandpa Isley was a hearty kind of fella. When he came out to L.A., he would motor here all the time in these big cars, Packards from the forties, Chryslers, or Cadillacs. But he didn’t drive. Chester Hill was the Isleys’ black chauffeur. He was an all-around guy from back in the early days, 1937 on. He wore a uniform, just a dark suit, and a chauffeur’s cap. He was a big influence in my life. He taught me how to walk in 1941, and I spent most of my time with him. They say I used to shuffle like Chester. I loved Chester. He was one of my mentors. I always felt more at home with the help.
Mother dropped out of college and left Tulsa for New York, where she met my dad, Robert Walker, a youngster from a Mormon family coming out of Ogden, Utah. But it wasn’t a loving family, and he didn’t get along with his mother. Later, I found an interview that he had given to Hedda Hopper in which he admitted to always feeling like an outcast. He was very scrawny as a child and felt ignored by his classmates. One day he couldn’t stand it anymore and he ran amok, not knowing why, and raced screaming through the playground, kicking the other children. He was only six, but the school expelled him. “From childhood,” he told Hedda Hopper, “I found myself up against mental walls. The maladjustments of that age grew and branched out all over the place. I was always trying to make an escape from life.” Dad began running away from school when he was ten. He must have been a handful, full of the devil. I only heard about it in later years.
As soon as he could, he moved to New York, where he met my mother at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and on their wedding day he was so rattled that he forgot to kiss the bride. They must have been eighteen or nineteen. Then they went to Hollywood and both looked for work. Later they moved back to New York, and Mother had me when she was twenty-one while they were living in Jamaica, Long Island. And eleven months later she had my brother, Michael.
I think they call it “Irish twins.” By then, back in 1941, Mom and Dad lived in a little rat-infested apartment in Greenwich Village, with the kitchen sink as our bathtub, having no money at all. They couldn’t make a dime. Dad’s first job in New York was as a script reader. It was done through Grandpa Isley. Dad was very proud and probably would have been hurt if he’d known, so he was led to believe he earned this job on his own. And Grandpa was instrumental in helping Mother also. Since he was a theater owner, he knew lots of people and was always behind the scenes trying to make things happen. He was quite influential. So Mom always had somebody there trying to help her. Dad carried her bags and di
d pretty much everything for her because Mother was helpless out in the world. I don’t think she ever learned how to boil water and turn on the stove. I’m not exaggerating. She had had plenty of help when she was growing up. Her father doted on her. She always made men feel they needed to take care of her.
While they were living in New York, my mother signed with the legendary producer David Selznick. We all moved back to California, straight from a tiny apartment in New York to Bel Air, to this beautiful little house up on Perugia Way, off Bellagio Road. The four of us lived there for a few years. Dad got a series of movies, war pictures and comedies. And then Mother tested for and landed her first starring role in The Song of Bernadette. It was a Fox picture, and David Selznick knew that the movie would launch her career, so he was willing to lend her to the studio. His instinct was on the mark because Mother won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944. By then she was in the midst of acting with Dad in David Selznick’s movie Since You Went Away.
The first day of filming, she told my dad that the marriage was over. And the next day they had to do a love scene, to act as if they were newly in love. I guess the magic had gone out of their marriage, but they were able to pull it off. I believe it was the first love scene that either of them had done in a movie. I don’t think she left Dad for David Selznick. I think she left him, and then Selznick was there. But soon enough, she and David Selznick had fallen in love, although as far as I know she wouldn’t live with him until they were married, which didn’t happen until 1949.
Recognizing talent—that was the one thing David had. And he had it to the nth degree. He would see someone, and he would know right away if they had it. He had all these other women that he could have fallen in love with, you know? Ingrid Bergman, Dorothy McGuire. But it was Jennifer. He had a sort of Pygmalion relationship with her. He was responsible for changing her name and for her getting The Song of Bernadette, Duel in the Sun, Portrait of Jennie, and so many other movies. He orchestrated the whole thing.
MEMO FROM DAVID O. SELZNICK TO KATHARINE BROWN, AUGUST 19, 1941:
To: Miss Katharine Brown
cc: Mr. D. T. O’Shea
…Today I chatted about the matter [the film Claudia] with Phylis Walker—for whom, incidentally, I have a great enthusiasm, in case you don’t already know this….I have told Walker that I wouldn’t want to give her a big opportunity, and make her a star at the expense of the insurance policy that we might have by giving these opportunities to established stars, only to find out that we had difficulty later about her family being back East. She assured me that such would not be the case, and that she is prepared to move out here, her husband is quite prepared to move with the two children and settle permanently because they like California in any case.
Incidentally, what is the husband like? I wish you would interview him. And I wish you and Dan would discuss by mail, with copies by me, whether or not we shouldn’t sign the husband as a measure of protection, either now or at such time as we decide to give her Claudia, if this comes about. It might be better to do it now, if we could make a brief initial deal, so that it doesn’t look as though we are buying him subsequently just because we are giving her Claudia. We ought to preserve his pride. But if he is a good actor—wouldn’t it be wonderful if he turned out to be good himself?
MEMO FROM DAVID O. SELZNICK TO WHITNEY BOLTON, DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING AND PUBLICITY
FOR SELZNICK, SEPTEMBER 10, 1941:
To: Mr. Bolton
I would like to get a new name for Phylis Walker. I had a talk with her and she was not averse to a change. Normally I don’t think names very important, but I do think Phylis Walker a particularly undistinguished name….I don’t want anything too fancy, and I would like to get at least a first name that isn’t carried by a dozen other girls in Hollywood. I would appreciate suggestions.
MEMO FROM DAVID O. SELZNICK TO KATHARINE BROWN AND WHITNEY BOLTON:
To: Miss Brown, Mr. Bolton, January 8, 1942
Where the hell is that new name for Phylis Walker? Personally, I would like to decide on Jennifer and get a one syllable name that has some rhythm to it and that is easy to remember. I think the best synthetic name in pictures that has been recently created is Veronica Lake.
—
BOB WALKER: In her later years, Mother would say to my brother, Michael, and to me, about our dad, “Why in heavens name did I ever leave that fellow?” But David had the keys to the kingdom, one that Dad wasn’t privy to. Mother was new and fresh and looking for other adventures, and to her Dad was probably limited. Neither Mom nor Dad were very worldly. But Selznick lived and breathed Hollywood glamour, and the kings and queens of Hollywood bowed at his feet. After Gone with the Wind, there wasn’t anybody who had more power in Hollywood. And he discovered a lot of glamorous women—or women that he helped make glamorous, or helped convince the public that they were glamorous.
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DANIEL SELZNICK: S. N. Behrman said that every relationship my father had was a Pygmalion relationship. It was that way with Ingrid Bergman and Joan Fontaine and Rhonda Fleming and all the others. All you have to do is look at our home movies and see the shy, trembling, stuttering creature that he married. Each year Jennifer got a little more confidence. Each year she realized she was really naturally beautiful. She began to wear different kinds of clothes. She began to do her hair differently. She began to wear different kinds of jewelry. Slowly, Galatea emerges. But that was not the girl that my father married.
I was on the set of Duel in the Sun for the scene outside the McCanles Ranch at night, filmed on the soundstage at my father’s studio in Culver City, with all these wonderful lanterns hanging outside the façade of the house. Duel in the Sun represents a kind of apotheosis of David’s fantasy of Jennifer. At one point during the filming, he had her go to some place outside of Tucson and crawl across sharp pebbles so that her knees got completely bloodied. In a hundred and ten degree heat. And she was prepared to do whatever was required.
But Jennifer and David’s relationship was very turbulent. Will we ever know how may suicide threats she made? Because if she left suicide notes, they would have been burned by you know who. He was protecting his own ass, if you will excuse the expression. If she killed herself, the headlines would have said she left a suicide note blaming David O. Selznick. Imagine his fears that this woman, whose life he had transformed for better or for worse, might take her own life.
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BOB WALKER: Mom and David moved into the house at 1400 Tower Grove Road when he married Mom in 1949. The house has since been torn down, they’ve put up a monstrosity. It was a Spanish Mediterranean house. It was spectacular, because it wasn’t too crazy, just tastefully done. There was a beautiful view of the valley, with Elizabeth Taylor’s house on Beverly Estates down below to the right. That’s the house Montgomery Clift was leaving the night he had his terrible car accident. John Barrymore had owned the house right down below to the left, but there were no houses built behind us yet. Just this old fairy tale water tower, and that’s why they called it Tower Grove Road. The tower was so old it looked like Rapunzel was going to appear there at any moment and let her hair down.
The trees in our garden were a hundred feet tall. John, the gardener, had planted every one of them on the property. Even though he would refer to himself as “just the old lamplighter,” you’d never seen a more elegant man in a wifebeater in your life. And he smoked a wonderful pipe, and he was always barefoot in the garden, with his pants tied around his ankles. He had been the gardener back in John Gilbert’s days, when Gilbert lived in the house with Greta Garbo. Gilbert must have been quite a guy, because Garbo was no slouch. Our gardener told me how John Gilbert used to stand at the windows naked, overlooking Hollywood, with his arms out like a crucifix, yelling out in a drunken rant, “Hollywood, you have crucified me.” This was after talkies, and Gilbert’s voice was so high-pitched that it shattered his image. He slept with a gun under his pillow, a .38. He was very paranoid; who knows what
kind of drugs he was doing.
The room that Michael and I lived in was the kids’ room initially but eventually it became Mom’s room after they remodeled it. There was an opening in the bottom of the closet. You could open it up and just disappear through there. It was kind of a secret passageway, and I was told that it had been an entrance or exit for Greta Garbo. It went into the cliff, then out and behind the house. It was a cave passageway that was tunneled out to the road. That was where she apparently crawled through, back in the thirties, when she was having a romance with Gilbert and wanted to be more clandestine. They had paparazzi even in those days.
