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

by Robert J. Wagner

  Joan had been born in a trunk—literally. Her parents were vaudeville troupers, and she told me she spent most of her childhood working in the family act while traveling around America, Europe, China, and Australia. The Blondells played both the Pantages and Orpheum circuits, so you would have to rank them as successful, although Joan never claimed that they played the Palace—the vaudeville equivalent of a command performance before the Royal Family. Suffice it to say that there was no aspect of the business she wouldn’t eventually experience and, more important, understand.

  Joan had some formal education, but not much; it was snatched a week or a month at a time when the family was on tour, or during brief downtimes. Like a lot of the women in this book, that nominal schooling didn’t stop her from being very well read. Toward the end of her life, she even wrote a novel called Center Door Fancy, which was more or less about her childhood in vaudeville, and it’s something she should justifiably have been proud of—it’s a good book. Joan was savvy, with huge street smarts.

  The question arises as to whether the lack of formal education was a deterrent for some of these women, not so much in their careers—they could hire accountants to handle their money, and agents to help make career decisions—but in life. I feel qualified to offer an opinion about this because I only graduated from high school myself, after which I immediately began my assault on the fortress of show business.

  Joan Blondell

  Honestly, I don’t think it matters. In show business you are exposed to people, places, and situations that you could never dream of encountering in college, and in fact never would encounter in a conventional career. Some of those people and places and situations are good, and some are far from good, but show business has always seemed to me to be the equivalent not just of college, but of an exhaustively demanding graduate school.

  Speaking for myself, I believe that I got far more out of 20th Century Fox than I ever would have gotten out of USC. What really matters is the desire to learn. If that’s present, and you have some personal initiative, you’ll do just fine in show business and, I suspect, in life.

  Joan was one of those actresses whose essential nature came through the lens. She quickly became very popular in movies like Public Enemy (Cagney again), Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (Cagney again). She typically played a streetwise sweetheart of a girl, almost always working class, a waitress or a chorus girl who was maybe a little brassy, but with a big heart. Audiences liked her, and Jack Warner liked her, too—Joan worked in as many as ten pictures a year.

  Being employed by Warners was like finding yourself in the middle of a large, contentious family operation whose members had a tendency toward loud squabbling. I remember her once telling me that because they routinely worked very long days—to get a picture finished on schedule could mean an eighteen- or twenty-hour shift on the last day or two of a shoot—the relationships on set became like being with your parents and uncles and aunts. The flow of work was so long and the Warners stock company so unchanging that sometimes they wouldn’t even say hello or good-bye in the morning or at night. The crews became family, and some of the actors did, too.

  If you asked her about those great Warners musicals, she’d respond by talking about how much effort they involved—much more than the straight comedies or dramas. There were no unions in the early 1930s, which meant that you’d have to be at the studio by six in the morning to go into makeup, and you might not break for lunch until three in the afternoon, which meant that you wouldn’t get out of there until midnight or close to it.

  “You’d be ready to collapse,” Joan recalled.

  On Saturday, you’d work all night, sometimes till the sun came up on Sunday. Even though everybody was young, it was still exhausting. And of course, such rampant abuse just hastened the arrival of unions in a couple of years.

  “Time off?” she told me. “We didn’t have time off. Jack got his money’s worth. If you weren’t acting, you were rehearsing a number, or you were doing a photo layout. When I got pregnant, they kept me working until I was seven months pregnant. They’d put a chair or a desk in front of me to block out my stomach. That was just the way it was.

  “I made quite a few pictures that I never even saw because I was too busy working. And decades later I’d see one on TV and I honestly wouldn’t remember making it, even though the evidence was right there in front of me.”

  I have no doubt Joan was telling the truth. She would laugh when I asked her about the nightlife, because how could you possibly work those hours and go out at night? By the time Busby Berkeley was through shooting a musical number, the nightclubs were about to close!

  The primary difference between Joan as a performer and Joan as a woman was that she was actually very domestic, and preferred being at home to being out in public. She was devoted to acting, but when she wasn’t performing, the last thing she wanted to do was go out on the town or pose for publicity photos. She would explain that when she was in vaudeville, the itinerant nature of her family’s profession meant that there was no such thing as a home life. The reason she played shopgirls or waitresses so well is that the vaudeville life was the show-business equivalent: You made a living, but it was a precarious one. Because Joan had traveled incessantly for the first twenty years or so of her life, as an adult she valued the nest as much as any woman I’ve ever known.

  Her big dramatic break was probably Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which came after she left Warners, in which she gives a beautiful performance as Aunt Sissy. (It’s a very good movie; if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor.) Joan also did great character work in the classic noir Nightmare Alley, opposite Tyrone Power. In my experience, Aunt Sissy was Joan to a T, except Joan was more maternal than brassy; in the vernacular of the 1930s, she was a great broad.

  I had seen many of Joan’s movies, loved them and her, and she didn’t disappoint me when we worked together. On the set, she was a very accomplished actress, with a terrific, humorous style that was all her own. She was fun and vivacious, and would often share little flashes, moments that stood out from the blur of making so many movies and making them so quickly. She once told me about working in Public Enemy, the movie that made Cagney a huge star. Jean Harlow also appeared in the picture in a scene or two, and everyone was very impressed because she was on loan from MGM, and people from MGM barely deigned to speak to people at Warners, let alone work with them.

  Anyway, Harlow never wore a bra, and one day she bounced past Cagney, who gave her his wolfish grin and asked, “How do you hold those things up?”

  “I ice ’em,” she said.

  Over the years, Joan was married to some very interesting guys: George Barnes—an excellent cameraman who worked with everybody from Valentino to DeMille. Barnes was followed by Dick Powell, then Mike Todd.

  She may have been bruised by the marriages, and I know she was damaged by Todd, who gambled away a lot of her money. She didn’t marry again after she and Todd split in 1950, although she was always a very attractive woman. But I don’t think there was any bitterness in Joan—it wasn’t in her character.

  Dick Powell directed a movie I was in called The Hunters, so he naturally came up in my conversations with Joan. She said he was a nice guy—very true—but cheap about everything, up to and including lightbulbs and toilet paper. It got to her, and she decided to check out from the marriage in 1945. She spoke of him with humorous exasperation, not anger.

  By the time I came to know her, Joan was very easy about her career and where she had arrived professionally. That was unusual, because it can be difficult for an actress who has been a big star to gradually settle for character parts. Sylvia Sidney, who was almost an exact contemporary of Joan’s, was well known as an irascible pain in the ass both on and off the set in her later years, which is probably one reason why she didn’t work a lot.

  But Joan loved the atmosphere of a set, loved actors, loved the process of acting, and considered herself lucky to be in sh
ow business, which is probably why she continued working right up to her death.

  Long after actresses who had been even bigger stars than she were relegated to menial parts in some pretty grim movies, you could see Joan in quality films like The Cincinnati Kid, with her old Warners’ pal Edward G. Robinson, or on TV in Here Come the Brides, an adaptation of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

  The year before she died she did a movie for John Cassavetes called Opening Night, and even though Cassavetes’s world was far removed from Joan’s, she acquitted herself nobly.

  Joan got nominated for an Oscar, as well as several Emmys, but never won. No matter. I honor her in my memory, and she continues to flourish for all those who see her in reruns of her great movies. She was a doll, and a very underrated performer.

  • • •

  Claire Trevor became a star a few years after Joan and a dear friend of mine long before she appeared in The Mountain opposite Spencer Tracy and me. She was later welcomed as a member of our inner circle when she played Natalie’s mother in Marjorie Morningstar.

  I had gone to school with the children of Milton Bren, who was Claire’s third husband. Milton had custody of his sons from his first marriage, and he and Claire raised them together. Claire became part of my adolescence through her stepsons.

  She was another of the actresses who had to go to work as a child. She was a Brooklyn girl, born in Bensonhurst, and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began making shorts for Warner Bros. at their studio in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and then went to Hollywood.

  Claire was warm about almost everything, funny about almost everything. She was particularly merciless about her own pretensions as a young actress, when, she said, she would much rather go to a party than study her part. “I really didn’t work very hard,” she admitted.

  She got parts in some Broadway shows, but it didn’t wise her up. She could be hilarious about her lack of foresight. “I got offers from three different studios,” she said, “and I turned them all down. The movies were beneath me. Can you imagine being that stupid?”

  Then things went cold in New York, and Claire had a very bad period that lasted about six months. No work, no money, no nothing. At that point Fox came back and again offered her a contract, and this time she jumped at it.

  The first picture that earned her any notice was Dead End, on loan to Sam Goldwyn and William Wyler. She played a hard-up hooker and got an Oscar nomination. You would think that kind of notice would have changed things for her, but she went back to Fox and B pictures, where she was typically cast as a newspaperwoman or a girl detective—playing parts that had previously been given to Glenda Farrell.

  But Dead End might have been the movie that got her Stagecoach for John Ford—again in the role of a prostitute, but one with a sweetness and good heart beneath her tough shell. It was a great performance for a great director, and to the end of her life she would say that it was the best movie she ever made. “The script was excellent,” she told me, “the director was the best in the business, the score was good, the camerawork was superb, and the cast couldn’t have been improved. Everything jelled, everybody jelled.

  Claire Trevor

  “It hardly ever happens that way—you always have to make allowances for something in almost every movie. The script isn’t quite good enough, or there’s an actor who isn’t quite right, or something. But Stagecoach was one of those rare pictures where everybody was at the top of their game. The pieces all fit.”

  Claire tried to avoid watching her own movies—she rarely liked her own performance and usually found something lacking in the film itself. But when she watched Stagecoach, she fell into the movie just like a member of the audience; she almost forgot she was in it.

  She was particularly disappointed with The High and the Mighty, because some flashbacks she appeared in were cut—the movie was running long, and something had to go. She felt that losing those scenes meant that her character didn’t make much sense, because the audience never saw what had happened to her before she got on the endangered plane that is the center of the film’s plot. (All actors have stories about a movie that could have been much better, at least regarding their character or their performance. I think it relates to their basic lack of control in the movie business.)

  The same thing happened when she made Honky Tonk at MGM, when a couple of her scenes with Clark Gable were cut because the studio wanted to throw the weight of the movie behind Lana Turner. Lana was under contract to MGM, whereas Claire was freelancing, so the studio had no investment in her success. She would talk about how distraught she got over that—she really believed it would damage her career.

  She needn’t have worried; she would later receive an Academy Award for her turn as the alcoholic mistress of Eddie Robinson’s thug in Key Largo, and she worked into the 1980s.

  What Claire really wanted were those juicy melodramas that Bette Davis did at Warners, but those didn’t come her way. She felt she usually had to try to breathe life into parts that basically didn’t have much depth. “I’d never met anyone like the women I usually played,” she told me. “I had to imagine what they’d be like.”

  But imagination was one of Claire’s strong points as an actress. If the script didn’t offer her any help, she’d construct an imaginary biography for the role she was playing—where she was born, how her parents raised her—and then she would project herself into that person with that background and those experiences. That helped her give a sense of someone with a deeper character than the scriptwriter had provided.

  Milton Bren’s primary business was real estate development, and he became extremely wealthy. He owned The Pursuit, a beautiful racing sailboat that won all sorts of races and that he docked at Newport Beach. Milton and Claire and Natalie and I would regularly go to Catalina on Milton’s boat. He was a great sailor and became a good producer.

  Claire had a sense of inquisitiveness, and of wonder. To her dying day, she was interested in every aspect of life. She always had her painting—she did a portrait of Natalie and me that my daughter Katie now has—her travel, her reading, her friends. Claire was a man’s woman. Duke Wayne was crazy about her and valued her highly, and she was also close to Bogart.

  Like everyone else, Claire had her ration of grief; Milton died in 1979, just about the same time Duke Wayne did. But the great tragedy came before that: the loss of her son, Charles, who was killed in an airplane crash. It was a terrible blow, but Claire decided that she could sit around and be depressed or get out and enjoy the rest of her life. She bought an apartment at the Pierre in New York and attended every Broadway and museum opening with her close friend Arlene Francis.

  I saw Claire for the last time just before she died, and she was still clearheaded, still a woman of absolute honesty and warmth—a straight-up woman, the very best kind.

  When she died, Claire left $5,000 each to several dozen friends. I was one of them; her will said to “consider this a hug and a kiss.” Whenever I’m in Paris, I still go to the caviar bar she took me to. Then I drink a toast to Claire’s memory and do it all over again. It’s been on my tab for a long time, but I will always be in debt to this extraordinary actress, this woman who helped teach me how to live an affirmative life.

  Looking back, I can see that Claire became a valued mentor for me because of my admiration for her talent as an actress and her warmth as a human being. She was an Earth Mother: bountiful, loving, always supportive. Show business gave her the leverage and the wherewithal to educate herself, and she and Barbara Stanwyck both stressed the importance of using it as a vehicle to build a life outside of the movie business.

  I miss her every day.

  • • •

  Jack Warner wouldn’t have had a clue about how to showcase Greer Garson or Greta Garbo. Because he was a rough-and-tumble mug himself, he filled his studio with people of a similar persuasion—Cagney, Davis, Flynn, George Raft, Eddie Robinson, people who loved to treat Jack with the compl
ete lack of respect he craved.

  Over at 20th Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck made a great deal of money off Betty Grable, but left to his own devices, he preferred sexy brunettes: Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell, Jean Peters.

  As for Paramount, they managed to luck out for years by what amounted to a lack of definition. If you can discern any pattern at all in Paramount’s leading ladies, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.

  For a long time, Marlene Dietrich was the studio’s signature actress. She was hired as a Garbo competitor and proved to be more adaptable and far hardier in the bargain; for one thing, she had a more approachable brand of sexuality; for another, she had genuine humor.

  Paramount’s major discovery in the last half of the 1930s was Dorothy Lamour; their big star during World War II besides Betty Hutton was Veronica Lake, who didn’t last long, for reasons that had little to do with talent. Lake was very difficult, had problems with alcohol, and was given to anti-Semitic outbursts. Otherwise, she was a sweetheart.

  RKO and Columbia, the studios that stood near the bottom of the list of majors, were rarely able to gather enough top talent to have a particular style or approach to actresses. RKO had Ginger Rogers for a number of years, and they did very well for each other, while Columbia had Jean Arthur, and ditto. But there was never a sense of actorly identity at those studios, largely, I believe, because neither was run by people with a bent for long-term thinking, which was quite the reverse at MGM and Warners, which consciously built their operations to last.

  Ginger started out as a gum-cracking chorus girl, but revealed her inner swan when she was paired with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. They made nine more movies together. Forests have been felled trying to explain their particular chemistry. Simply put, they looked—and danced—as if they belonged together, as if they hadn’t been matched up by a movie studio, but by God. When Astaire and Rogers were in motion, they had the easy camaraderie of a couple that had met in grade school and had had an understanding ever since.