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

by Robert J. Wagner

  When he got to New York, he sent a telegram to Cary Grant, who was a friend from his days in England. Cary responded by inviting Freddie to Hollywood and told him that he would be happy to introduce Freddie to Miss Russell, with whom he just happened to be costarring in His Girl Friday.

  Freddie got to Hollywood, and went to Chasen’s at a prearranged time. Cary showed up with Roz, but she didn’t understand what was happening—she thought she was on a date with Cary. Freddie persisted and got her phone number anyway, then pursued her for weeks before it finally dawned on her that Cary wasn’t interested, but that Freddie was.

  When they got married in 1941, Cary was best man, and when Roz died in 1976, Cary was a pallbearer.

  True story.

  By this point you might be noticing the emergence of a theme here—strong women marrying weak or inappropriate men. There were dozens of examples of this in the Hollywood I grew up in, and I’m sure there are dozens more in modern Hollywood. Sometimes you can figure out what impels a woman to choose one man over another; other times it’s a complete mystery.

  Laraine Day had a solid career in the late 1930s and 1940s, starting out in the Dr. Kildare series at MGM and graduating to name-above-the-title status in movies like Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, The Locket, and Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant. Laraine was regarded as a very pleasant woman, so everybody was stunned when she married Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, and the man who voiced the phrase “Nice guys finish last.”

  I knew Leo quite well—too well. Leo loved the nightlife, loved to gamble, and he loved women, whether he was married to them or not. The strange thing about their marriage was that Laraine was a Mormon, and if you were going to choose a group of characteristics least likely to appeal to a Mormon, every one of them would have been embodied by Leo.

  One day Leo asked me to lend him $10,000. I didn’t ask him what it was for, but I imagine it was for a gambling debt he didn’t want Laraine to know about. I gave him the money.

  Six months later, I was still waiting for my money. A few months after that I went to Frank Sinatra, who had a lot more experience in loaning large amounts than I did.

  I told Frank my tale of woe and was met with a shrug. “When you hand a man that kind of money,” Frank told me, “be prepared to kiss it good-bye. That’s the way it is.”

  I appreciated his point, but $10,000 meant a lot more to me than it did to Frank. I had to put quite a lot of pressure on Leo, and for quite a long time, but he did eventually repay me.

  I can’t say I was surprised when Leo and Laraine divorced. I learned a lesson, and I imagine Laraine did as well.

  But back to Roz.

  Buoyant, smart, the life of every party, she maintained her joie de vivre in spite of professional dry spells and, later, bad health. When her movie career began to decline in the early 1950s, she took a part in the national tour of John Van Druten’s play Bell, Book and Candle. Movie stars might do a play in New York, but with the exception of Henry Fonda, they didn’t tour with them. But Roz got great reviews, which led to her being cast in the Leonard Bernstein show Wonderful Town, which in turn led to her creating the role of Auntie Mame in 1956, which was followed by the movie.

  Roz was up for anything, and I loved that about her. She was interested in politics—Roz was a moderate Republican, a fan of Eisenhower’s—was a great baseball fan, following the Dodgers religiously, first when they were in Brooklyn, more so after they moved to Los Angeles. She even had season tickets.

  She excelled at playing madcap characters, even though she was actually a deeply sensible person. At Christmas, she would have a group of friends over for a big Scandinavian meal—a gesture to Freddie. Each guest would be given a paper bag filled with costume jewelry, ribbons, and some straight pins. The lights would be turned off, some candles would be lit, and everyone would have the task of making some kind of hat out of the items in their bag.

  When the lights were turned on, there would be Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper wearing a goofy creation on his head.

  Roz got cancer in the early 1960s and had a mastectomy. After that came a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. The steroids she took to alleviate the discomfort caused her to puff up. It affected her looks but also seemed to slow her down emotionally. She made her last picture in 1971, a not very good movie called Mrs. Pollifax–Spy that she wrote herself. Roz died five years later, and I served along with Cary Grant as a pallbearer. It was something I was happy to do for one of the brightest lights of Hollywood, as well as one of the great ladies of show business.

  • • •

  One of the prime differences between the actresses of that generation and the modern variety was their sense of the grand manner—they lived high and they lived large. They developed entourages that were every bit the equal of those of their male counterparts, but with a subtle difference. The chums of male stars were drinking buddies or pals they could blow off steam with. Errol Flynn was an Aussie—well, technically he was Tasmanian, but close enough—and his pals tended not to be actors or studio people, but stuntmen and various hangers-on. But the people female stars counted on were usually connected with them professionally in some way. I’ve mentioned, for example, how Barbara Stanwyck depended on Helen Ferguson, her publicist.

  Then there were people like Sydney Guilaroff. He was the leading hairdresser to the stars, and he had a clientele that numbered dozens of major actresses as well as professional hostesses. A star’s personal hairdresser took precedence over whoever was in charge of that kind of thing at any studio, because they usually brought their core group of support professionals with them—hairdresser, makeup person, and so forth. For the stars, it was a kind of security blanket—they knew that their team had only their best interests at heart and weren’t prone to studio politics. Their loyalty was to one person and one person only.

  Actresses told Sydney everything. About everybody. Women told him about their husbands, their lovers, because they knew he would never break a confidence. And he never did. Even when he wrote a memoir at the end of his life, he was circumspect; if Sydney had wanted to tell the truth, he could have burned the town down.

  • • •

  I got to know Jennifer Jones in the 1970s, when we did The Towering Inferno together. It was her last picture, and I would classify her as . . . interesting. Personally, Jennifer liked me; I had worked with her son, Robert Walker Jr., and we got along very well. Jennifer appreciated that.

  I think she spent her career in terror of her profession. Jennifer’s real name was Phylis Isley, and she was the daughter of a prominent movie exhibitor in Oklahoma and Texas. He showed a lot of pictures made by Republic, the B-movie studio where John Wayne spent more than fifteen years. Jennifer wanted to be an actress, and since Republic wanted to keep Phil Isley happy, they were happy to give his daughter a beginner’s acting contract for seventy-five dollars a week.

  She made a serial, and a couple of Westerns, and before you know it she was picked up by Selznick and Fox, where she made The Song of Bernadette. Suddenly this little girl from the Southwest was swimming in very turbulent waters. It wasn’t easy for her.

  Jennifer had a trusting, childlike quality. I was told that the great director King Vidor figured out that to get her in the proper place for the work on Duel in the Sun, he had to begin each morning by telling her the story of the movie right up to the scenes they were going to shoot that day. Each day’s shooting was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and Jennifer needed to know precisely which piece of the puzzle she was doing. At that stage in her life, her self-image was not that of a professional actress but of a little girl who was in far over her head. Being invited to Jennifer’s was like going to a hospital ward. For one thing, she would be late for her own dinner. Not ten minutes, but an hour or an hour and a half. She was into Reichian therapy at that point.

  I don’t honestly know if she ever got over her fears. Years before I got to know Jennifer, I had watched her perform a scen
e from Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing at the Fox studio. I noticed that the hem of her dress was fluttering because her knees were shaking so badly. Off to the side of the set, you could see her then-husband, David Selznick, hovering, watching his wife protectively. Bill Holden, her costar, was fond of her, but he couldn’t help but be aware of her anxiety.

  She was very much the star, and at the same time she had an intense need for emotional security. Selznick’s death in 1965 left her unmoored for a long time. Contrary to the general opinion that Selznick smothered her, I think David gave her the protection that was absolutely necessary if she was to function at anything approaching a high level.

  Jennifer Jones

  David had an exaggerated personality; Elia Kazan told me a story that illustrates just how exaggerated. Gadge (Kazan’s nickname) once went to Selznick’s home on Tower Road to talk about a project. The setting couldn’t have been more impressive; the house was stunning, the servants both officious and obsequious.

  After Kazan was ushered into the house, the head butler turned to one of the lesser minions and said, “Mr. Kazan to see Mr. Selznick.” (Who else would Mr. Kazan have been there to see?) The minion went away to announce Gadge to Selznick. From behind a door, Kazan heard Selznick order, “Turn on the fountain!” Kazan entered, and there was David, with the fountain pumping splendidly in the background. The picture was now complete.

  You get that sense of theatrical pomp in most of David’s movies, splendid as they were and are. But David’s personality, which was directly replicated in his films, belonged to an earlier time in Hollywood; his ornate style couldn’t really adapt itself to an environment attuned to acting that was less than grand, or values that were more down market than Gone with the Wind or Since You Went Away. The great movies of the 1950s—I’m thinking of High Noon, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, Marty, The Sweet Smell of Success, The Searchers—couldn’t have been made by David if you’d held a gun to his head. He might have appreciated them, but he would never have wanted to spend a year or two of his life making them.

  So David and Jennifer were gradually marooned on an island of their own choosing, of the grand and glorious old Hollywood.

  • • •

  Another of the women of this era I knew and grew fond of was Ida Lupino. Ida was actually English, and came from a notable performing family. Her uncle, Lupino Lane, was a very successful comedian in the music halls and West End, as was her dad, Stanley Lupino. Ida’s godfather was Ivor Novello, the composer and matinee idol who wrote “Keep the Home Fires Burning” during World War I.

  Ida came to Hollywood in the 1930s, but didn’t spend all that much time with the British colony. She grew close to David Niven, but then everybody did, because that’s the kind of person David was.

  She made a big impression in Bill Wellman’s The Light That Failed. Wellman and star Ronald Colman disliked each other from the first day of production—Colman had wanted a different actress to play opposite him, and when Wellman got his way in casting Ida, Colman made his displeasure known. Ida was left pretty much alone, and responded by sculpting a very dynamic portrayal.

  Soon afterward, she went to Warner Bros., where she started off with a big hit: They Drive by Night, a tough Raoul Walsh movie about truck drivers, followed by High Sierra with Bogart. Ida had the right temperament for that studio—she was a scrapper—but the timing of her arrival was off. Bette Davis was then the unquestioned reigning leading lady, and Ida had to make do with a lot of scripts that Bette turned down. After Joan Crawford came to the lot, the situation got even worse for Ida.

  Ida told me that there was never any open warfare between her and Warners’ top actresses. She said that Bette had asked her to play the part of the nasty girl in The Corn Is Green, the one who tries to keep the boy in his miserable little town in Wales, but Ida had already been cast in another picture. Ida had a lot of respect for Bette, and would have liked to work with her, but I don’t know—the part in The Corn Is Green would have been the heavy, opposite Bette’s noble schoolteacher. Bette would have wanted a strong actress in the role, so long as there was no question of who was going to be vanquished at the end. Also, Ida might have been too old for the part.

  Ida Lupino

  Nevertheless, Ida did get some good roles at Warners—there was The Sea Wolf, and she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for The Hard Way, a film she hated making and that not enough people know about even today.

  But eventually Ida got tired of always being low woman on the totem pole, so she decided to leave Warners. Jack Warner wanted to sign her up for another seven years, but she wanted out.

  “Seven years and no options, Ida. Fifty-two weeks a year,” Jack said.

  “No,” said Ida.

  Jack immediately slipped into his aggressive mode. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. You’ll never act at this studio again.” And she never did.

  Years later, when Ida directed a couple of TV shows at Warners, she reminded Jack of his vow. “That’s directing, not acting,” he replied. It was clear that he didn’t care about television at all except insofar as it made money for the studio.

  After leaving Warners, Ida went over to Fox, where she made Road House. She didn’t stay there long and she always regretted it; she believed that the great mistake of her acting career was departing Fox at the end of the 1940s. She would go on and on about how much she respected Darryl Zanuck and was in awe of his ability to read every draft of every script, and look not only at the rushes of all the pictures in production, but even at wardrobe tests. People usually say that if they had their life to live over again, they wouldn’t change a thing. Not Ida—she always wished she’d stayed with Zanuck.

  Ida’s prerequisite for a role was that the character she played had to have guts. Straight female leads, girl parts, where the character hovered around waiting for the leading man to do something, she hated. She either refused them or did them badly. Like Bette Davis, she was constitutionally incapable of gazing adoringly at the leading man unless he earned it. Since there are occasions when every actress has to do just that, it was a real limitation on her career. From the things Ida told me, she was well aware of that restraint but wasn’t bitter about it.

  Instead, she began directing. She would always insist that moving into that role wasn’t intentional on her part. She had cowritten a movie with her husband, and it had just started production when the director they had hired had a heart attack. They had to get a substitute and fast, so Ida stepped up. The original director, a gent from the silent days named Elmer Clifton, remained on the set guiding her to keep her from making any mistakes with her setups, so Ida and her husband felt he was entitled to his credit. The picture finished on time, and the reviews were good, so Ida kept directing.

  If you look at her movies today, you can see that she was influenced by some of the tough old pros she had worked for, guys like Wellman and Walsh. Ida had already been thinking about directing when she made High Sierra for Walsh. She would constantly question him about technical issues—over-the-shoulder shots and eyeline matches, things that Walsh had been doing for so long that it was as automatic as rolling his own cigarette, which I saw him do with one hand.

  Ida directed only six pictures, but none of them was bad, and one of them—The Hitch-Hiker—was excellent, an unsettling, nasty movie about a psycho on the loose. Ida was very conscious of the fact that she was the only woman director in Hollywood at this time. It was a tenuous position, and she adopted a canny would-you-please-help-me-out attitude toward her all-male crews. I’m not sure this was entirely sincere on Ida’s part. She was in all other respects a ballsy woman, not a shrinking violet in any way, but she probably felt it was necessary for her continued survival. The crew is particularly important on a low-budget picture—if they slow down even a little bit, you won’t finish on time, and that can be a disaster.

  All of Ida’s pictures were similar to the movies Darryl Zanuck had been mak
ing in the early 1930s at Warners—stories spun off from current events and social problems. Not Wanted was about unmarried mothers, Outrage dealt with a rape, The Bigamist was the story of, well, a bigamist. The spice of the subject matter helped make up for the low budgets.

  If The Hitch-Hiker had Anthony Mann’s or John Sturges’s name on it as director, it would have given their careers a big boost, but it didn’t really do much for Ida. All of her pictures were low-budget B’s, and she couldn’t manage to climb out of that particular ghetto.

  Ida had the same problem that a lot of independent producers had—the system was set up by the studios for the studios, not the independents. Howard Hughes liked Ida’s films and gave her financing and distribution through RKO, but she and her husband had to give up 50 percent of the profits in return. Since Ida’s pictures were made for about $150,000 apiece, she couldn’t afford big stars, which in turn meant that they got limited playing time, usually in double features. There was a ceiling on the money they could earn. Ida made enough money to keep going, but that was about all.

  Except for the fact that her pictures weren’t particularly commercial, I’ve always thought Ida would have been good at running a studio. She was smart and savvy—not the same things, by the way—and had a solid, realistic big-picture sense of the movie industry.

  She also had an eye for scripts and an eye for talent; in 1952, she hired an art director named Harry Horner to direct a little movie for RKO. Horner had worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe and done beautiful work on pictures like The Heiress, for which he won an Oscar. Beware, My Lovely, the movie he did for Ida, was quite good. (Horner was the father of James Horner, the late composer who wrote so many great movie scores, including the Oscar-winning score for James Cameron’s Titanic.)

  I’m sure there was some entrenched prejudice against her as a woman director, not because she was a woman per se, but because she was trying to break into the boys’ club. And there was another factor. When Ida started directing, Hollywood was being buffeted by a rapidly diminishing audience. Television was siphoning off a lot of the public, and the low-budget pictures Ida was directing couldn’t break through in any large way. The studios began making fewer and fewer B movies, and the ones they were releasing veered toward exploitation pictures from producers like American International. Ida didn’t want to do that kind of work. Her company, Filmmakers, tried to distribute its own pictures in order to make more money, but the plan failed and they went out of business. Ida, like a lot of male directors, had to go into TV in order to keep working.