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

by Robert J. Wagner

  As an actress, Maureen always became the character, became what she had to play. That might have been one of the reasons she drank to such excess—she kept losing herself. A dear woman; everybody who knew Maureen adored her. Especially me.

  Another of my favorite people was Ann Rutherford. Ann had a strong career in the 1930s and 1940s playing Polly Benedict opposite Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy films, and she’s one of Vivien Leigh’s sisters in Gone with the Wind, which ought to be sufficient grounds for immortality for any actress.

  Maureen Stapleton

  Ann never really made the transition to the name above the title. Her last big picture was Adventures of Don Juan opposite Errol Flynn. It was always hard to get any attention if you were making a movie with Flynn, who was much more gorgeous than any of his leading ladies, with the possible exception of Olivia de Havilland.

  But Ann didn’t mind one bit. She knew that the movie business was brutal and was happy just to have survived. As a matter of fact, Ann may have been the most positive person I’ve ever met. She believed in belief.

  Ann was the daughter of a man who once sang at the Metropolitan Opera. She broke into the movies at a low-budget outfit called Mascot when she was only seventeen. She appeared in serials, and she worked opposite Gene Autry, which meant that Gene’s horse got more footage than she did. For a girl who began her career at Mascot, MGM was a plush country club, and Ann enjoyed every minute of it.

  Ann’s first husband was Dave May, the heir to the May Company. That marriage didn’t last, but her second, to William Dozier, was successful. Dozier was one of those movie industry guys who was more interesting for whom he married than for what he achieved. Dozier had previously been married to Joan Fontaine, and today he’s best known for producing the Batman TV series. (My future wife, Jill St. John, was in the pilot!)

  Ann always had her eyes open. She told me that one of the most important moments of her life occurred during the filming of an unimportant picture called Waterfront Lady. She looked up one day and noticed an actor named Jack LaRue playing a small part as a bartender. Only a few years earlier, LaRue had been an up-and-coming star at Paramount as a sort of George Raft in training.

  Ann asked what Jack was doing in such a throwaway part, and they told her that he hadn’t saved his money when he was starring. Now he was broke and took whatever he could get.

  That was it—a light dawned. Ann was a naturally sensible woman, and she became determined to never find herself in Jack LaRue’s shoes. Although she was at MGM, earning MGM money for years—she started at three hundred dollars a week—she took the bus to work. She told me she saved for three years before she went so far as to buy a car. She was glad she did, too, because every six months she would notice how all the contract players would be sweating over whether or not the studio would pick up their options for another six months of employment. Ann saw stark fear on the faces of the girls who’d spent their money on dresses and furs and were suddenly out of work with no savings.

  That’s when the casting couch could come into play, as a sort of insurance policy for starlets who thought they were on the bubble between getting dropped and maintaining their jobs.

  But Ann was like Scarlett O’Hara—she was never going to be hungry.

  While Louis B. Mayer adored Ann because she incarnated thrift, one of his cherished virtues, he did try to take advantage of what he thought were her fears of impoverishment. When her option time would come up, he would call her into his office and tell her the studio wanted to keep her, they had big plans for her and so forth, but they couldn’t afford to give her the raise her contract mandated.

  Now, both of them knew this was pure fantasy; MGM was the only studio in Hollywood that never lost money during the Depression, and the Andy Hardy pictures routinely grossed ten times their cost. Besides the Hardy pictures, Ann was also working regularly in a popular series of films with Red Skelton.

  But Mayer played his sad song for all it was worth, and in response Ann would wave her little bankbook and show Mayer how much money she’d saved out of her salary. Mayer would graciously capitulate and give her the raise. It was a game they both enjoyed playing for years.

  When MGM loaned out Clark Gable to David Selznick and leveraged that into the distribution rights for Gone with the Wind, they threw Ann into the cast as well to play Scarlett’s sister Carreen. It was a minor role, and Ann didn’t really have much to do. She told me that she had already been playing leading parts, and in the back of her mind she thought this one was a comedown. And she would conclude that anecdote by saying “And that, my dear, is why actors have no business deciding what to play or what not to play.”

  MGM was known in the trade as the Tiffany studio, but even Ann was astonished at the extent to which David Selznick lavished time and money on his pet project. She told me that her costumes had layers and layers of petticoats beneath the dresses. She went to Selznick and said he could save a lot of money by not bothering with such elaborate costuming. The audience would never know the difference.

  Ann Rutherford

  “But you’ll know,” he replied, arguing that the wardrobe would help her with the part—that she would be able to play a rich landowner’s daughter with more credibility if her costumes lived up to the standard of living of the O’Haras. What I thought, when she told me the story, was that Selznick’s rationalization might very well hold true for Vivien Leigh, who was in practically every scene of the movie, but that it might not be relevant for Ann, who was in about eight scenes. But it was David Selznick’s movie, and he did almost everything right in making it.

  Ann loved her years at MGM and was always grateful that she hadn’t ended up working for Jack Warner, who thought nothing of purposely casting actors in bad pictures in order to exact revenge for real or imagined slights. Of course, this would also depress their value on the open market when they finally left the studio. Warners did that to Kay Francis, and Bette Davis always thought they did it to her as well. “Jack Warner was always selling people down the river,” Ann would complain.

  Ann finally left MGM around the end of World War II and by 1950 had retired to Beverly Hills. She got out while the getting was good. By then, MGM and the rest of the studios were in free fall and shrinking their contract lists. It would have killed Ann to see the studio she loved deteriorate at such a rapid pace.

  As it was, she returned there in 1972 for a few days’ work in a James Garner picture called They Only Kill Their Masters, and she was appalled. The studio that had been making eighteen pictures simultaneously in 1939 was now down to making only one. All the departments were closed; there was no makeup department, there was no camera department, there were no actors or writers or directors under contract. It was a shell operation.

  For the rest of her long life—she died in 2012—she was a delight, a positive person who was never a Pollyanna, but who just felt lucky to have been a part of the greatest studio at the most prosperous and creative time of its corporate life.

  MGM gave her more than a livelihood; it taught her to appreciate fine things. For instance, the studio prop department often outfitted sets with authentic antiques they’d buy in Europe and ship over to Culver City. On top of the tables they placed porcelain statues, and that triggered a fascination that led to Ann collecting antique porcelain for the rest of her life. In less abstract matters, Ann would talk about making Pride and Prejudice with Larry Olivier, and how she developed a huge crush on him that was unfortunately unrequited.

  By the time Ann died, MGM had ceased to exist as a functioning movie studio. It was a brutal demonstration of the fact that nothing lasts forever.

  But you know what does last? The movies the great studios made. The films that MGM churned out are still around, and still riveting audiences.

  That, at least, is something. Maybe everything.

  THE FIFTIES

  When I arrived at 20th Century Fox in 1949, the first thing I did was crawl all over the lot. I was fascinated b
y how everything was done—how the various shots were edited into what seemed to be a seamless whole; how old costumes from the wardrobe department were revamped to look brand new; how the lighting made rickety flats look like real rooms.

  Like every movie studio, Fox was just awash in physically beautiful women. You would encounter gorgeous every ten feet. It was not an environment for an ascetic personality. I was nineteen when I began there, so it goes without saying that I had great times on and off the lot. No apologies, no regrets.

  One of my publicity dates was with a young Rita Moreno. I say “publicity date” because it was set up by the studio publicity department, and, while Rita was stunning, she was also very involved with Marlon Brando at that time and for a long time afterward. I liked Rita, but I liked Marlon, too, and wasn’t about to poach on his territory. She knew it, and I knew it, but we went out a couple of times, closely accompanied by photographers. It was the way the game was played, because the studio set the rules.

  I started out in shallow water—I made tests. I tested opposite almost every actress that Fox was thinking of signing. I tested opposite superb actresses, I tested opposite women who were the mistresses of powerful executives at the studio, I tested opposite women who should have used quotation marks when they listed their occupation as actress.

  And I tested opposite Marilyn Monroe.

  Marilyn. Everyone always wants to know about Marilyn.

  I have no horror stories to tell. I thought she was a terrific woman and I liked her very much. When I knew her, she was a warm, fun girl. She was obviously nervous about the test we did together, but so was I. In any case, her nervousness didn’t disable her in any way; she performed in a thoroughly professional manner. She behaved the same way in Let’s Make It Legal, the film we later made—nervous, but eager and up to the task.

  Obviously, she was extremely attractive, and she already had that special quality of luscious softness about her. She was completely nonthreatening, unless you were another woman trying to hold onto your man.

  Everyone knew that she was the girlfriend of Johnny Hyde, a powerful agent at William Morris. Whenever I saw them together, Johnny gave every indication of being attentive and loving, so I’m inclined to believe that the relationship was a very positive thing for Marilyn. For Johnny, maybe not. For one thing, he was married; for another, he died young, of a heart attack in 1950.

  Certainly, it was positive professionally; Johnny got Marilyn the part in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle that made everybody sit up and take notice. Given Johnny’s presence in her life, I made sure that my attraction to Marilyn came across as nothing more than professional admiration.

  After we made Let’s Make It Legal, Marilyn went her way, and I went mine. She became the biggest star on the Fox lot, and, along with Elizabeth Taylor, the biggest female star on the planet.

  Years later, Marilyn began dropping by the house where Natalie and I lived. Our connection was through Pat Newcomb, her publicist. I had known Pat since our childhood. She had also worked for me and often accompanied Marilyn to our house. I bought a car from Marilyn—a black Cadillac with black leather interior.

  Marilyn was relaxed and enjoyed herself with us, except for one time when Conroy, a black Lab that Bing Crosby gave me, growled at her. To this day I don’t know what happened. Conroy was a happy dog, but there was something about Marilyn he didn’t like. They say dogs know when an earthquake is coming. Maybe Conroy sensed something profoundly off-center about her.

  I never saw the Marilyn of the nightmare anecdotes—the terribly insecure woman who needed pills and champagne to anesthetize her from life, and who reached a place where she couldn’t get out more than a couple of consecutive sentences in front of a camera.

  When I would talk with other actors, such as Tony Curtis, about their experience of acting with Marilyn, they described it as being like working with a small child or an animal. If the animal manages to do its part right, that’s the take they’re going to use, whether you are any good or not, which is why actors hate to work with them. In Some Like It Hot, Tony and Jack Lemmon had to nail every take, because Billy Wilder had no choice but to use the takes in which Marilyn was good, or even adequate—there was no guarantee she would be able to do a scene more than once.

  Clearly, Marilyn had tremendous problems, and they got worse as she got older. She was prone to depression and was terribly anxious about her level of competence—another actress who was frightened of her own profession. The result was that she projected her insecurity onto everyone who was working with her. Her co-workers lived their lives in a state of terrible nervous tension—Was she going to show up? And if she did, would she be able to get anything done?

  The audience doesn’t care about that kind of thing—all they have to go by are the finished films, and Marilyn was generally excellent in them. But the people who made the movies were all too aware of how difficult it had been to get the movies made, and how much over budget they went because of her. At times, when you talked to people in the industry about Marilyn, you’d sense the same sort of hostility that the guys at Paramount expressed on the subject of Betty Hutton.

  One thing about Marilyn: She needed to be a star, not out of garden-variety professional ambition, but as a means of validating herself, of proving that her father had made a terrible mistake when he abandoned her mother and her. Making it was the only way she had of proving that everybody who had refused to take her seriously, who had taken advantage of her when she was a young actress around town, was wrong. Yet the bigger she got, the more her insecurities increased. The more her insecurities increased, the harder it became for her to deal with the stardom she wanted so badly. A vicious circle.

  Marilyn had an innately luminous quality that she was quite conscious of—she could turn it on or off at will. The problem was that she didn’t really believe that it was enough. My second wife, Marion, knew her quite well; she and Marilyn had modeled together for several years, and were signed by Fox at the same time, where they were known as “The Two M’s.” Marion told stories about how the leading cover girls of that time would show up to audition for modeling jobs. If Marilyn came in to audition, they would all look at each other and shrug. Marilyn was going to get the job, and they all knew it. She had that much connection to the camera.

  I got the feeling that because Marilyn hadn’t had any family to speak of when she was growing up, she always gravitated toward empathy or strength, or supposed strength, which was the basis for most of her relationships. Pat Newcomb was completely dedicated to her; it was a bond that was more familial than professional.

  Men with whom she became romantically involved—Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, even Joe DiMaggio—were all assertive by nature and seemed to have all the answers; people on whom she became emotionally dependent, such as Paula and Lee Strasberg, were even more so. I don’t think there’s any question that Marilyn was deeply disturbed at the end of her life. Part of the reason they pay you in show business is to be there on time, and Marilyn could no longer do that. Schedules and budgets were kindling for her wavering temperament.

  When Marilyn died, Pat Newcomb was utterly devastated; Marilyn had been like a sister to her, a very close sister, and she took her death as a personal failure. Marilyn’s death has to be considered one of show business’s great tragedies. That sweet, nervous girl I knew when we were both starting out became a legend who has transcended the passing of time, transcended her own premature death.

  I wonder if her immortality would give her any sense of satisfaction. Somehow I doubt it.

  • • •

  Marilyn’s story is evenly split between her years of stardom, when the whole world knew who she was and cared passionately, and the years before, when nobody was aware of her and nobody cared. Just before Marilyn met Johnny Hyde and her life changed for the better, just before we tested and made a movie together, Marilyn was living at the Hollywood Studio Club, one of the more fascinating places in Hollywood
history.

  It was nothing more or less than a chaperoned dormitory for young girls, and was in operation from 1916 to 1975.

  The Studio Club came about in this way: Before World War I, the movies hit in a big way, and thousands of young people of both sexes began flooding Hollywood each and every year. If they had saved some money, they could get cheap space at one of the dozens of garden court apartment complexes that dotted southern California.

  And if they didn’t have any money, they could double up, or triple up. And if they really didn’t have any money, girls could stay at the Studio Club, which was built by private subscription. In the early days, actresses such as Mae Busch, ZaSu Pitts, and Janet Gaynor were all boarders. Actually, a lot of its residents became more famous as wives than as actresses. Dorris Bowdon, who played Rosasharn in The Grapes of Wrath, later married Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the script for the film, and had a long and happy life with that excellent writer.

  The idea for the club began when a group of ambitious young women began having meetings at the Hollywood Public Library to read plays and discuss strategies for getting into the movies. One of the librarians began to get concerned about the safety of girls who had to live in cheap hotels, and began soliciting funds to rent an old house for them on Carlos Avenue. Constance DeMille, the wife of Cecil B., was crucial in the financial foundation of the club, as was Mary Pickford.

  In the early 1920s, many of the studios and a lot of businessmen donated money for the construction of a permanent building specifically to house the Studio Club. Their generosity was stimulated partly by altruism, but also by alarm. The three huge scandals of the early 1920s—Fatty Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial, the William Desmond Taylor murder, and Wallace Reid’s death from the effects of drug addiction—scared the entire industry. In order to forestall censorship, they needed to emphasize propriety whenever possible, and the Studio Club was a perfect vehicle to embody the God-fearing nature of Hollywood. Famous Players-Lasky—the forerunner of Paramount—donated $10,000, and MGM and Universal $5,000 each. Norma Talmadge kicked in $5,000.