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

by Robert J. Wagner

  She proved to be more successful in television than she had in movies, and her work was solid. She did all kinds of shows, including some that were by no means earmarked for female directors, as was common at that time. Ida directed episodes of tough, suspense-oriented series like The Twilight Zone, Thriller, The Fugitive, The Untouchables, and Have Gun, Will Travel, as well as some relationship-based programs.

  The interesting thing was that the shows that were actually run by women—Loretta Young, Donna Reed—didn’t hire Ida. She couldn’t get work that was tagged for female audiences.

  I don’t think she cared, particularly; she just thought it was ironic.

  I always got a subliminal feeling that Ida felt that she had shortchanged her acting career by moving into directing. She directed herself only once, in The Bigamist, and she didn’t like it. She said that it took all her concentration just to direct, and she couldn’t divide her attention between being in front of and behind the camera.

  I spent a fair amount of time with Ida in Hawaii, when she was married to Howard Duff. She was a great deal of fun—outgoing and vivacious. She was a middle-aged woman at the time, twelve years older than I was, but I found her very sexy. Nothing happened, but if we’d both been single I suspect it might have. Both Ida and Howard drank pretty heavily when I knew them, and the bottle became a serious problem later in Ida’s life.

  I worked with Ida on television, in an episode of It Takes a Thief in which she was a guest star. Despite the fact that her career had narrowed considerably by then, she came in prepared and was totally professional. Just like the other actresses of her generation, she was demanding about things like wardrobe and camera. It wasn’t surprising—they knew that presentation was vital; a bad wardrobe could hurt you, and bad lighting could kill you. It was a trait I would also notice in Bette Davis.

  • • •

  As a movie-struck kid, my favorite actresses were Barbara Stanwyck and Paulette Goddard, for entirely different reasons. I loved Paulette’s pictures for Chaplin and DeMille, in which she radiated a healthy sexuality. I was just hitting puberty, and she aroused all sorts of illicit thoughts in my hyperactive teenage mind. But Barbara hit me on the emotional level; when she was acting, she wasn’t selling anything, she was just telling the truth.

  I’ve written about Barbara Stanwyck in great detail in Pieces of My Heart, and I don’t want to repeat myself here. I’ll simply say that the relationship that began during the filming of 1953’s Titanic was one of a handful of transformative experiences in my life. It taught me many things, one of them being how important work was to this generation of actresses. I’ve mentioned how many of them grew up without fathers or had bad relationships with them, which meant that these young girls and women had usually been the sole support of their families. Work was more than their identity—it meant survival, and that was complicated by the fact that leading ladies in that era had shorter careers than leading men.

  That was emphatically the case with Barbara. She loved to work and emotionally she needed to work. She had been very poor as a child and young woman, so money translated into security for her.

  Work always improved her mood. When she was preparing for a part, or actually shooting, she would become noticeably more animated. (I confess to having some of these traits myself.) Barbara worked terribly hard on a script. She would memorize all the dialogue, not just her own lines, and she would mentally build an arc for her character, so that she would make emotional as well as dramatic sense as she moved through her scenes. She was an actress who took a specific approach to her craft.

  Barbara Stanwyck

  Whether it was a movie or TV show didn’t seem to make much difference to her; she just wanted to keep acting. And the fact was that, after a certain point, she was no longer offered films, but still got roles on television, which is where the audience that had grown up with her had migrated. Since she loved Westerns, she was quite happy making The Big Valley, even though a lot of people thought the show was beneath her. But then almost any TV series would have been beneath Barbara—certainly one of the two or three best film actresses of her time.

  Living with someone like Barbara at an early stage in my life made me appreciate the vulnerability of even strong women in a way that would have been impossible had I been associating strictly with younger women.

  When you’re a kid, you’re confident that you’ll never fail, you’ll never die. But loving Barbara, and knowing some of the older actresses I’ve talked about, made me realize that people can be crushed, and time and disappointment can make them become something other than their best selves.

  One of the big might-have-beens in Barbara’s life was losing the female lead in The Fountainhead, a picture she very much wanted to do. She had actually taken the property to Henry Blanke at Warner Bros., for whom she had done My Reputation. Blanke and she had hit it off, so she wanted to work with him again.

  The Fountainhead was set up to star Bogart and Stanwyck until King Vidor was assigned to direct. Vidor had made a lot of great pictures, and Jack Warner gave him a fair amount of authority. Vidor simply didn’t think Barbara was sexy enough to play the part of Dominique. This was brutal and it was also unexpected, as Barbara and Vidor had worked together so magnificently on Stella Dallas a dozen or so years earlier. Of course, Stella Dallas is a character part, not a sexy role. (It has one of the great endings in movie history, as Stella strides proudly away from her daughter’s wedding. With her girl taken care of, Stella’s work is done, and she can go on to the next thing.)

  Bogart eventually drifted away from The Fountainhead and was replaced by Gary Cooper, and on came Patricia Neal to take the female lead. Pat Neal was indeed beautiful, and she was also quite a bit younger than Barbara. Gary and Pat flared up into a huge affair, even though the picture itself wasn’t very good.

  Barbara’s attitude toward all this was philosophical. She didn’t like being rejected, of course, but her attitude was “What are you going to do? You have to take these things in stride.”

  It’s an attitude that became my own and has stayed with me all these years. She was right—if we didn’t take such setbacks in stride, the streets would quickly fill up with the bodies of actors committing suicide. Every actor or actress who ever lived, every great star, has lost parts he or she would have killed to play. It’s the nature of the business.

  Barbara taught me that all you can really ask for is your share of at bats. If you get up to the plate enough times, you’ll get your hits, and if you’re at all lucky, some of them will be home runs. Certainly, that was the case with Barbara; with the possible exception of Kate Hepburn, no actress of her generation is remembered with more affection . . . and respect. I’m no different from anybody else—I have endless respect for her. But I also love her.

  • • •

  How to describe June Allyson to someone who never saw her? She was a little like Meg Ryan in that her appeal was a matter of being young, perky, and approachable. June was really Ella Geisman from the Bronx—another poor kid whose father deserted the family. For emotional sustenance, June went to the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and got a role in her first film in 1937, when she was only twenty years old.

  From there it was on to Broadway, rising in the cast list until she appeared in Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie in 1940, where she understudied Betty Hutton. When Hutton got sick one night. Allyson went on, and George Abbott realized he had a star in the making—June could sing and dance! Abbott put together Best Foot Forward just for June, and that took her to Hollywood.

  She was a hit almost immediately in light comedies and musicals like Good News, although MGM also used her in occasional dramas like Little Women. After that she worked a lot with Jimmy Stewart—The Stratton Story, The Glenn Miller Story. In 1955, she appeared in the box office top ten, but after that roles became sparse for June, because tastes started to change and because there was really room for only one perky blonde, and by then that spot was taken b
y Doris Day.

  In my mind, I always bracketed June with Van Johnson. They both became stars during World War II and they had the same sort of image—cute, happy-go-lucky, the boy and girl next door. That the image had only coincidental resemblance to the people they actually were was irrelevant; happy-go-lucky was what the public was buying during the war, so that’s the way June and Van were sold. But June kept at it, working in TV, dinner theater, whatever the market offered. She always made a living.

  I knew June well; in fact, we used the house she had lived in with her husband Dick Powell as the house Stefanie Powers and I lived in in Hart to Hart. June was fun and, to be honest, rather flirtatious.

  Because Dick was widely liked and respected, nobody seemed interested in seeing if there was any actual intent behind June’s flirtatiousness, but lightning struck when she made The McConnell Story with Alan Ladd. Nobody really knows what goes on in anybody else’s marriage, but June must have had some degree of discontent, and Alan had been unhappy with his wife, Sue Carol, for years.

  Sue had been an actress at the tail end of the silent days, a cute little thing with some of Clara Bow’s irrepressible spirit. But she didn’t like talkies—or talkies didn’t like her—so in 1939 she became an agent. She had a client list that included Peter Lawford, Rory Calhoun, and Sheila Ryan.

  Alan had been happily married to his first wife when Sue heard him on the radio one day. She fell in love with his voice before she fell in love with him. She called the radio station and set up a meeting, and that was that. Alan was gorgeous: blond hair, green eyes, a tight swimmer’s body. Sue was a goner.

  I don’t know that Alan had the same deep feelings for Sue that she had for him, but he went along with her infatuation, probably because he thought she might be able to get him into the movie business in a big way. He divorced his wife and, in 1942, married Sue—and became her fourth husband. That same year, she got him the lead in This Gun for Hire, a film I later remade for television.

  That movie fired the starting gun for Alan’s starring career, which culminated in 1952 and Shane, in which he gives a lovely performance. That movie was something of an accident—Paramount had given him bad scripts for years before that, so he had already decided to leave the studio when he made Shane. He went over to Warners for 10 percent of the gross on all the pictures he made for them, as well as ownership of the negative—probably the richest deal in the business at the time. Later, Natalie made a movie for Alan’s company, a little B called A Cry in the Night, with Edmond O’Brien.

  Alan was at Warner Bros. when he met June Allyson. Their affair became an open secret. Somebody who worked on the picture told me that Sue Carol would barge onto the stage where her husband was filming, bang on Alan’s dressing room door, and yell, “Alan, come on out. I know you’re in there!”

  He fell in love with June, but neither of them was willing to divorce. Alan was already drinking at that point, and the wear and tear was beginning to show in his face. June went back to Dick Powell until Dick died in 1963, while Alan stayed with Sue. And then his drinking really picked up.

  I got to know Sue and Alan before he made The McConnell Story, when I dated Carol Lee, Sue’s daughter from a previous marriage. They both approved of me as a potential match, and Sue, a little round-faced woman, six years older than Alan, couldn’t have been nicer, while I couldn’t have been happier with Carol Lee.

  Alan died from an overdose of pills in 1964, and it was generally felt that he committed suicide, even though his death was officially ruled accidental. (There had been another incident about eighteen months earlier, when Alan had been wounded by a self-inflicted gunshot.)

  He had been terribly self-conscious about almost everything—his talent, his height, the decline in his career. In fact, at five foot six, he wasn’t all that short. There were plenty of actors who were shorter—Chaplin and Cagney, among others—but it didn’t bother them the way it bothered Alan. And I think he might also have been consumed by a terrible guilt over how he treated his first wife, whom I gathered he loved very much.

  When I knew them, Alan and Sue seemed content, if not blissful. Whatever was plaguing her husband, Sue was unable to remedy it. She never remarried.

  As for June, after Dick died, she remarried and kept as busy as she could. In retrospect, I think she was a far more interesting woman than her screen image, or the times, ever allowed her to show. The times were changing, and the girl next door was moving away from the movies and into television. But, for a time, June was America’s ideal young woman.

  INTERMISSION I

  I’d like to pause in this procession of leading ladies to pay a belated but sincere tribute to character actresses. When I was growing up, I was always pleased to see Eve Arden’s name in the cast, because I knew she’d come in and expertly deliver cynical one-liners that would puncture the pretensions of the other characters, if not the entire movie.

  Eve Arden’s characters were always lamenting their inability to attract a man. Actually, Eve was quite attractive, although her husband, the actor Brooks West, was an alcoholic who didn’t work much. They stayed married for more than forty years, although Eve had several long-running affairs. I knew Eve and found her to be a very warm and open person.

  She was probably the best at what she did, but there were others, as well. Before Eve, there were wonderful actresses like Edna May Oliver and Marie Dressler. Their job was to speak for the audience, and deliver some pointed humor at the expense of the other characters and, often, themselves.

  Take Thelma Ritter, for instance. She got off some of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s best one-liners in All About Eve (“Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end”), and backed up Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Thelma didn’t hide her light under a bushel; she got nominated for six Academy Awards.

  Thelma was pretty much what she was typically cast as: a working-class woman from Brooklyn. This may well be one of the reasons she played her parts so well. She had been on the stage, but never in a hit, and became much more successful in the movies. Before her film career took off, her husband made his living by being a contestant on radio and TV game shows. I was lucky enough to work with her in one of my first movies, With a Song in My Heart. I was too green to ask her a lot of questions about style and technique, but I was sufficiently aware to notice that she was a nervous actress—nervous about getting it right.

  A few years later, she was part of the cast of Titanic, with Barbara Stanwyck and me. She was friends with Barbara, and was aware of the relationship that developed between us. Unlike her characters, who tended to blurt out whatever was on their mind, Thelma was very discreet by nature, and never spoke to anyone about the affair. Although Thelma was most often used as a comedienne, she was a terrific dramatic actress; I defy anyone to watch her performances in Pickup on South Street or Birdman of Alcatraz and not be simultaneously moved and impressed.

  Character actresses like Thelma often shone with a brighter light than the supposed stars of the movies. In a sense, that was their job; their screen time was limited, and their dialogue often more pointed than what was written for the leads. They were like pinch hitters in baseball, paid to advance the offense, i.e., the plot or characters.

  I knew Maureen Stapleton before she worked with Natalie, Larry Olivier, and me in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was a thoroughly lovable woman, a devoted fan of old movies. I once gave her autographs of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard that I’d gotten at the golf course at the Bel-Air Country Club. Maureen couldn’t have been any more thrilled if I’d given her a piece of the True Cross.

  Maureen was nervous. About everything. She absolutely refused to fly, so came to England to play Big Mama via ocean liner. We were already rehearsing in Liverpool when Maureen arrived a few days late, and I’m sure she had walked up the stairs because she was frightened to take the elevator.

  Thelma Ritter

  Besides being a superb actress and timid about traveling, Maureen was one of the legendary
show-business alcoholics, although it didn’t seem to lessen the affection that people had for her. What was amazing was that it never interfered with her work. She drank at night and on the weekends, and was Johnny-on-the-spot in the morning. Neil Simon even wrote a semibiographical play about Maureen, called The Gingerbread Lady, that starred . . . Maureen.

  Drunk or sober, Maureen was totally uninhibited. She regaled Larry Olivier and me with a story about a hot and heavy affair she was having with George Abbott—how he was ninety years old but couldn’t keep his hands off her. She paid great and specific tribute to his remarkable standards of sexual performance and staying power. Larry and I would just nod our heads in amazement . . . and envy.

  One night after rehearsal, Larry, Maureen, Natalie, and I went out for a night of drinking. (Larry liked to drink, but never when he was working.) The rest of us got slightly tipsy, but Maureen was totally soused, literally falling-down drunk. Larry and I had to carry her to bed, and just as we got her comfortable, her bladder let loose, and she wet the bed.

  Well, we hadn’t bargained on that, but Larry didn’t take it personally. He took her toes and began the old nursery rhyme in a singsong voice: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home . . .” He ended up by saying, “And this little piggy went wee-wee-wee-wee all over the bed!”