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

by Robert J. Wagner

  If you wrote the story of Betty Hutton’s life as a novel, nobody would believe it, and it would be so depressing that nobody would want to read it. But for one magical movie, she and Preston Sturges united to make a stunningly original comedy that said something serious about the country and where it would be headed.

  • • •

  I can’t say that I knew Gene Tierney particularly well—I never worked with her, although she was at Fox at the same time I was, and we would chat then and afterward.

  Gene was very slender and slightly built; she looked as if a stiff wind could pick her up and deposit her in the next county. But I remember how beautifully she moved—like a dancer, as if invisible wires running through her shoulders carried the weight of her body. She was angelically beautiful.

  On-screen, Gene had a serenity that rarely cracked. Even when she played a psychopath in Leave Her to Heaven, she conveyed the complete assurance of someone who was used to having her plans work out. Which was pretty much Gene in her personal life as well. She was born into money and was educated at private schools in Connecticut and Europe. When she told her father that she was interested in becoming an actress, he formed a family-owned corporation to promote her.

  She appeared in a couple of Broadway plays and was signed for the movies by Darryl Zanuck by the time she was twenty-one. Gene photographed like a sleek Siamese cat, but didn’t give that impression in person, where her fragility was more apparent. As a person, I found her deliberate to the point of lethargy.

  Gene’s great tragedy occurred during World War II. She was on a bond-selling tour when she contracted German measles from a woman who got out of a sickbed to meet her favorite actress. Unfortunately, Gene was pregnant at the time, and her child was born severely retarded. Gene’s husband, Oleg Cassini, did all the right things, supporting his wife and paying for the child’s care, but the marriage broke up.

  The birth of Gene’s daughter precipitated a series of mental collapses; she had had at least one breakdown before I arrived at the studio. At one point, she was institutionalized for a year and a half. Scuttlebutt around the studio said that she was at the Menninger Clinic, and the general attitude around Fox was that she was damaged. It was my first experience with an unofficial attitude of surveillance—it was as if the entire studio were watching Gene out of the corner of its collective eye to see if she was going to shatter into a million pieces.

  Gene Tierney

  At that time, mental illness was not discussed, and stars were kept at a safe remove from media scrutiny. Now, of course, we know that a stint in rehab or even a breakdown can be finessed into a story of personal triumph, a way to reboot a career. But in those days, it was thought that the truth about various issues that were every bit as frequent then as they are now would cause the public’s affection for a given star to disappear overnight.

  Darryl Zanuck was caught in a bind. On the one hand, he was an emotional man who would always be supportive when one of his employees was having a problem. On the other, he had to move thirty pictures a year off the Fox stages and into theaters, so his sympathy had something of a clock on it. If you were going to work with troubled people—an apt description of a lot of the inhabitants of show business—you had to walk a fine line.

  Gene segued out of the movie business in the mid-1950s, married an oilman, and, except for a few guest appearances, lived the rest of her life in Texas. Everybody who knew her hoped she achieved some measure of peace.

  Linda Darnell was another woman who had a sad end. I knew Linda quite well. Obviously, she was strikingly beautiful, but as I got to know her I also discovered her kindness and consideration for other people. My impression of Linda was that she was deeply ambivalent about a career in the movies. The child of a stage mother, she had been entered in beauty contests since she was twelve. Linda looked older than she was, and was playing ingénue roles in the movies by the time she was sixteen or so.

  There was a placidity about Linda, but Darryl Zanuck figured out a way to make it work on-screen. She ultimately became a big star because Darryl cast her in huge films that were almost guaranteed to be hits, like Forever Amber. But she also fronted ordinary programmers and sold them with her sincerity and beauty, as well as the occasional project that was actually of high quality, like A Letter to Three Wives and My Darling Clementine.

  But by the end of the 1940s, Linda had begun to put on some weight, and she either couldn’t or wouldn’t take it off—the added pounds might have been her passive-aggressive tactic for getting out of a business she never wanted to be in. Darryl dropped her, and her career began a rapid descent. Just as she had seemed to be in her twenties when she was still a teenager, now she seemed to be in her forties while still in her early thirties.

  Linda went on to work in occasional TV shows and dinner theater until she died in a house fire in 1965. She deserved better from the movies, and from life.

  Just as Betty Grable had been hired by Zanuck as a possible replacement for Alice Faye, so June Haver was hired as a possible replacement for Betty Grable. I got to know June even before I got to Fox, and the story of our meeting gives some indication of her quality as a human being.

  When I arrived at Fox, bumptious kid that I was, I asked her if she would come to a party at my high school. She said yes! I danced with her, and nobody took their eyes off us for the entire night. She was a great, classy lady, a terrific person. She was also talented, but her films never had the commercial impact of Grable’s. June was a midwestern girl who had been working on stage since she was six years old. By the time she made her first movie in 1943, she was an all-around talent—she could sing, dance, act, you name it.

  Linda Darnell

  Her first feature was The Gang’s All Here, the legendary Busby Berkeley movie with Carmen Miranda, the giant bananas, and Alice Faye moaning “No Love, No Nothin’.” Darryl slotted June into a succession of musicals and rural comedies, most of which were quite popular.

  But June was unhappy. In 1953, she announced she was retiring from films to become a nun. A short while later, she left the convent and married Fred MacMurray, whose first wife had committed suicide. June and Fred adopted a couple of kids and spent the rest of their lives together. Today their daughter Kate runs an excellent winery that she built on land Fred owned.

  Fred and June were extremely happy together. Fred was a great guy with one personality quirk—he was one of the tightest people with a buck I’ve ever met. Watching him leave twenty-five-cent tips constituted one of Hollywood’s most harrowing experiences. Not surprisingly, he became extremely wealthy, but the comfort his money provided was paltry compared to the satisfaction he took in his good marriage. Years after June went with me to the school dance, we worked up a soft-shoe routine for a benefit for St. John’s Hospital. She could still dance.

  • • •

  During the 1930s and 1940s each studio had a specific physical look to its films. You watch thirty seconds of a movie and know immediately whether it was made by MGM (creamy white light, few shadows) or Paramount (heavy diffusion, more grays than blacks or whites), or Warner Bros. (hardly any whites, mostly grays, fairly realistic).

  Similarly, the studios employed different types of actresses, a choice that was usually a function of executive preference combined with audience taste. Louis B. Mayer liked his actresses to represent a certain class and dignity, as exemplified by Garbo, Shearer, Loy, MacDonald, and Garson. There were a few exceptions—most notably Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler, token representatives of the working class. In the 1940s, Lana Turner embodied some of Harlow’s working-class sensuality.

  It’s safe to say that Bette Davis wouldn’t have lasted three weeks at MGM; her career would have been up for grabs the first time she sailed into Mayer’s office in a state of high dudgeon and upbraided him for his terrible taste in scripts.

  Greer Garson, in contrast, was deferential to the studio, and MGM responded by casting her in a string of lavish showcases that proved to be
huge hits: Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Random Harvest, Madame Curie, and Mrs. Parkington. Eight of her films paired her with Walter Pidgeon, and they were the most reassuring of screen teams, if a trifle elderly. During World War II, audiences were comforted by their solidity. These films made amazing amounts of money, and Garson was one of the key box office stars of the war years.

  Her days of huge hits ended soon afterward, however—the social changes wrought by World War II made her screen character seem insufferably noble, and she was unable or unwilling to add much earthiness to the mixture. By 1947 or so, she began to seem starchy.

  But Mayer had given Garson a cast-iron contract, so she kept making expensive but money-losing pictures for MGM well into the 1950s. Greer Garson isn’t spoken of much today, but if you want to understand America just before and during World War II, you need to understand her and the appeal of her genteel goodness.

  I met Greer when I was just a boy working at the Bel-Air Stables. She lived right across the street from the stables, and she and Richard Ney, her husband at the time, came over frequently to ride. Because it was wartime, all the grooms were working at airplane factories, so twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids got jobs that would ordinarily have gone to adults. After riding, Greer and Richard would both have tea.

  Their marriage raised eyebrows—Ney had played Greer’s son in Mrs. Miniver and was about ten years younger than she was. Richard was a smart and interesting man, but an indistinct actor; with the exception of a couple of for-old-times’-sake appearances for friends, he left the movie business around 1950 to become a successful Wall Street investor.

  Years later, I got to know Greer all over again, by which time she was married to a Texas oilman named Buddy Fogelson and was living in Palm Springs near the Eldorado Country Club, which Buddy helped found. After playing Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, Greer dialed back to enjoy life with Buddy and to attend to various philanthropies in and around Texas, which became her adopted home.

  Greer Garson

  I loved Greer and always thought it curious that the roles she typically played were so far removed from who she actually was as a person. She was at all times very English, with a passion for French poodles and a quite lively, sometimes bawdy sense of humor. Laurence Olivier had discovered her and told me he thought she was very talented. Errol Flynn worked with her in a good MGM movie called That Forsyte Woman and remembered her in surprising terms: “Greer Garson was the first actress I worked with who was fun.” (Take that, Olivia and Bette!)

  Offscreen, Greer enjoyed a good time. Like the vast majority of the women I got to know in the movie business, she had innate drive—Hollywood is no place for shrinking violets. When she decided on a course of action, she totally committed to it and found a way to accomplish her goals.

  Besides Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, MGM’s other great screen team of this period was Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn. They made nine movies together, six of which cast them as a married couple, five of which characterized those marriages as troubled. This was smart filmmaking, because it echoed their very real differences as people—Kate was a bossy New England Yankee, Spence was a phlegmatic midwesterner.

  I first met Kate through Spencer Tracy, with whom I became quite close after we made two pictures together (Broken Lance and The Mountain). She was great company, of course, and we became good friends. I asked her to be godmother to my eldest daughter, whom I named Kate in her honor.

  Like many actors, Kate enjoyed talking about her flops at least as much as she did the great successes. The key ingredient is having overcome the flops; actors who have been damaged by a catastrophic movie or play don’t enjoy talking about it any more than old soldiers enjoy talking about losing a leg.

  When Kate was in a reminiscent mood, a failure like Sylvia Scarlett would get as much time as The Philadelphia Story. As with most huge flops, the former film came to have something of a cult following in later years, which didn’t cut much mustard with Kate. Her attitude was “Where were they when I needed them?” She told me that Pandro Berman, who was running RKO at the time, was so distraught over the resounding flop of Sylvia Scarlett that he told her he never wanted to make another movie with her as long as he lived. He did later, when they were both at MGM, but an actor doesn’t forget moments like that.

  Kate was somewhat insulated from the vagaries of show business by the fact that her family was well off. She didn’t need the movie business the way most of the other actresses I’m talking about did: as a means of financial security. But she was an actress through and through—she loved being adored, she expected to be adored, and she was adored.

  The self-possession that radiates from Hepburn on-screen was an authentic part of her personality. She didn’t hesitate, she didn’t prevaricate, she didn’t doubt. She generally got what she wanted, at least partially because of her radiant self-confidence. I always found Kate interesting in that she never thought of herself as being beautiful, not at all; she was quite modest about her looks, and it was a genuine modesty, not a calculated affectation intended to provoke reassurance.

  What she knew she did have, and what she had absolute self-confidence in, was her personality. She was well aware that there was nobody else remotely like her, at least not in Hollywood, and that her singularity would carry her through even if her talent failed her. You might not like her as an actress, but you could not disregard her as a woman. She counted on that.

  Katharine Hepburn

  On-screen, Spence and Kate reversed the common explanation about the success of the union of Astaire and Rogers: Spence’s earthiness gave Kate sex, and she gave him class. That they were an offscreen couple from their first movie together in 1942 was irrelevant; Spence was a married man, and the relationship with Kate was occasionally tense.

  The two spent a fair amount of time apart, although I don’t believe either of them ever thought of leaving the relationship. On the cellular level, both understood that, despite all the temporary chafings, life for them was unthinkable without the other. The relationship between Kate and Spence was like the relationship between John Wayne and John Ford. With the world at large, Duke Wayne set the agenda; with Ford, he listened to what Ford wanted, then said, “Yes, sir.”

  Kate was used to getting her way, either through demands or subtler persuasion. But if Spence thought she was talking absolute balls, he’d snap, “Shut up, Kate,” and she’d shut up. I was always amazed by her deference, because I knew damn well that as far as Kate Hepburn was concerned, deference was just a word in a dictionary, and not one whose meaning she had much interest in learning. Spence was her romantic ideal, but he also had the aura of a father figure to her, someone for whom she had immense respect.

  I think the basis of that respect was his unassuming ability as a professional. She thought, as so many of us did, that he was one of the very few great actors in the movie business. She would grumble that George Cukor always gave her notes on her performances, but he hardly ever gave Spence any serious direction. He didn’t need to; when Cukor looked at the rushes, everything he wanted to see in Tracy’s performance was already there.

  It wasn’t just that you never caught Spence acting; it’s that his acting doesn’t date. Acting has styles, just as fashion does; what seems revelatory at the time can seem awfully mannered only a few decades later. But a Tracy performance is as consonant with 2016 as it was with 1945, and there are very few actors of whom that can be said. Only one, actually.

  Theirs was an utterly adorable relationship, because the dynamic was completely that of an old married couple, even though they never married. They had that easy back-and-forth rhythm that old married couples have, as well as a sense of genuinely liking each other. The sexual attraction had been joined by a deep friendship, which is the best kind of romantic combination because it will sustain a relationship even if the sex burns out.

  They worked well together because they balanced each other. Spence could be solitary and grumpy, an
d prefer to be left alone. Kate was always a woman who said yes to the next thing, especially if it was something she had never done before. Yes to a movie if it seemed interesting; yes to a Broadway musical, if for no other reason than she had never done a Broadway musical; yes to speaking for the left-wing presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948.

  Yes to all that life has to offer.

  This was the most valuable thing Kate gave me: She was always outward bound—an object lesson in how to live your life.

  • • •

  I worked with Joan Blondell on both It Takes a Thief and Switch, and her demeanor was very much that of a working actress, a total pro, without any airs. But to me she was show-business royalty—I was thrilled to meet her, let alone act with her.

  She came to the movies in 1930, just about eighteen months after it became clear that sound wasn’t a fad after all. She had been in a Broadway play with Jimmy Cagney called Penny Arcade, and she and Cagney did a screen test for Warner Bros. and headed west immediately thereafter.

  Jimmy Cagney told me later about his and Joan’s screen test—they knew the scene, because it was from Penny Arcade, and they knew each other well because they’d worked together for months at that point. The test crackled with energy and authenticity. Al Jolson had bought the movie rights to the play, and he turned around and sold it to Warners, where he was regarded as practically family because of The Jazz Singer and what came after. Of course, when Jolson’s box office began to fall off in the early 1930s, he became just another employee, albeit a rich one. With Jack Warner, relationships had a way of being temporary.

  Anyway, Jim and Joan were off to Warner Bros. almost immediately on a one-picture contract. Their first movie turned out to be an adaptation of Penny Arcade under what Jack Warner believed to be the more commercial title of Sinners’ Holiday. Joan told me that Jack Warner signed her and Cagney to long-term contracts the day after they started shooting the picture—the rushes were that good.