Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “Today all the fun is gone in making movies. In the old days, we had time to be individuals. You don’t even get to know the men on the crews any more and I always knew my crews. How do you think I got all those great camera angles? I was right there behind the camera lining up the shots! In Anniversary I was the only American on the set, so when the Fourth of July came I had a jacket of stars and stripes and a top hat made out of the American flag for a big joke and I remember feeling guilty because I was afraid I was taking up 15 minutes of everyone’s valuable time. In the old days at Warners we were like a football team—everyone felt important but we still had fun and some of that came through on film. We all had a style. I’ve tried to answer to myself many times how things changed. I think it’s more gimmicky now. If you make a film in Budapest, for God’s sake let’s see Budapest. Performances used to count for more, films were photographed more in detail. Nobody traveled. I never went on a location in my life except once or twice for a day or two at a time. Everything was created right there on the set and there was a dedication among performers to sell their product. Now those films like Dark Victory are considered old-fashioned, but they are still the ones audiences love because they got to know the people onscreen. Today they cast films, they don’t write films. They never say, ‘We’ll write this for Suzy Glutz,’ they buy it and then ask Suzy Glutz if she’ll be in it.

  “Scripts were developed for stars in my time. Bogey and I made our first one together—an awful little thing called Bad Sister—I played the good sister, my dear. (Enormous roar.) I always wanted to do a real film with him but in those days one star really had to carry it alone and they were not eager to waste us on each other’s properties. So I never worked with Cooper, Gable, Grant—any of the real kings of the screen. They had their films and I had mine. Sometimes we were treated badly and then we’d walk out. Do you know they never recorded ‘They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,’ which I introduced in Thank Your Lucky Stars? And I put that song on the top of the Hit Parade. The damn fools. Once I walked out on suspension for nine months and I remember in the last conversation I had with Jack Warner he said, ‘Please don’t go, Bette, we’ve got this new book for you called Gone with the Wind and I turned around, leaned across his desk, and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll just bet it’s a pip!’ I had lunch one day recently in the old Warner’s commissary with Olivia de Havilland and I said, ‘Oh Livvie, what ghosts there are in this room!’ and she said, ‘Yeah, and wouldn’t you just know we’d outlive them all?’”

  I had already missed the early train, so she phoned the market and sat cross-legged on the floor, cooking lamb chops in the open fireplace while her two Oscars frowned down, remembering swankier evenings. “You asked me about mistakes. If I had to do it all over again the only thing I’d change is that I would never get married. But then I wouldn’t have my kids and without them I would die. But my biggest problem all my life was men. I never met one yet who could compete with the image the public made out of Bette Davis. You think being a well-bred Yankee girl brought up with a moral sense of right and wrong, it doesn’t kill me to admit I was married five times? I am a woman meant for a man. I get very lonely sometimes at night in this big house—there’s nothing glamorous about that. But I never found a man who could compete. I sat here two nights ago in my living room all alone and watched a film I made with Gary Merrill while we were married. Same billing, everything. At the end the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been watching Phone Call from a Stranger starring Bette Davis, Shelley Winters and Gary Davis!! So help me God. And that’s what men had to put up with. And I don’t blame the men. I was a good wife. But I don’t know any other lady in my category who kept a husband either, unless she married for money or married a secretary-manager type where there was no competition. That’s a price I’ve paid for success, and I’ve had a lot of it.

  “What am I going to do next? I’m going to get into my Mustang and drive to Yale and ask them if they’ll hire me as a teacher, because I’m bored and that’s the only thing I haven’t done yet, and if they will, I’m going to teach those kids how to act without all this Actors Studio crap and all this self-indulgence actors have today. I’ll be rough as a cat, but they’ll learn discipline, because that’s the only way to survive. I survived because I was tougher than everybody else. Joe Mankiewicz always told me, ‘Bette, when you die they oughta put only one sentence on your tombstone—She did it the hard way! And he was right. And you know something else? It’s the only way.”

  She waved goodbye in the farmhouse door and I could see her silhouette in the moonlight, like the end of Now Voyager, lit by the stars and the torch on the tip of her inextinguishable cigarette. Seconds later, on the way to the station in the taxi, the world seemed duller already.

  Ruth Gordon

  There are a lot of fabulous people in show business, and then there is Ruth Gordon, who is all of them put together. Although it is not possible to write seriously about her in less than 50,000 words (half to describe her properly, half to quote her accurately, and if there’s anything left over she’ll write it herself), it is as much fun as an old Marx Brothers movie to try. They were trying back in 1915, when she made her stage debut with Maude Adams in Peter Pan at the Empire and they’ve been trying ever since. Whole Ruth Gordon cults were formed by men like Charles Laughton, Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott long before anyone ever heard of jitterbugs or cellophane or dial phones or Adolf Hitler, and today, after 50 years as one of the most fascinating actresses in the English-speaking language, new generations of kids are culting all over again after seeing her play a swinging jet-age witch in Rosemary’s Baby. “It’s a mean, stinkin’ thing to say—but all you have to do to become a hit in show business is just hang on, just outlast the others!” Her words, not mine. She ought to know.

  Nothing about Ruth Gordon is ordinary. Even her suite at the Algonquin looks like something out of an old Ina Claire movie, crammed with steamer trunks, bulletin boards full of invitations to every major A-list party and opening night in town, typewriters (She’s also, in case anyone needs reminding, one of the best writers around), coffee pots and freshly washed cups, the smell of lilacs and fresh rain pouring on the double windows (which are wide open in spite of the air-conditioner, which is turned on full blast and whirring away to beat the band). Flowers abound in every corner as though she tried to bring Santa Monica to Manhattan: peonies, sweet william, two dozen roses, creeping ivy and ten pots of geraniums. And sprinting through the petals and confusion is the lady herself. She’ll be 73 in October, 1969. Hell, she doesn’t even look 39. Five feet, 103 pounds of laser beam, she cuts through the room like she cuts through her plays and movies. You can’t take your eyes off her. She bolts, she darts, she shuffles like they do on the Mississippi levee, in a dainty little-girl Chanel suit with a pleated skirt, white stockings, Mary Jane shoes, a black velvet bow ribbon in her hair, and around her neck some Indian sandalwood hippie beads Mia Farrow brought her from visiting the Maharishi. 73? “Liss-en,” she says in that legendary voice that sounds like ten baby mouths eating Crackerjacks, “I wanna be in Hair. Didja see it? It’s terrr-if-ic! I was right in there swingin’. Nobody’s asked me to be in Hair but I bet I could do somethin’ if I got in there. The theatre is as different today from the way it was when I arrived on the train from Wollaston, Massachusetts, in 1914, as American theatre is from Chinese theatre, but my greatest triumph is that I’m still part of the scene. Whether I have a dollar or whether I’m in debt up to here, you’ll never get me in no old-folks home!”

  She runs around with the cool Ferrari crowd, has a membership at The Factory and does all the hip new rock dances to electric guitar music, and the world of Ruth Gordon's legendary Broadway blends like angel-food icing with the world of Ruth Gordon’s swinging Hollywood. After 25 years of being away from the cameras (She was once Mary Todd in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Greta Garbo’s secretary in Two-Faced Woman) Lotus Land has rediscovered her genius for lighting up mo
vie screens as well as Broadway stages. “Liss-en,” she says, waddling her bantam rooster walk with one hand on her hip and the other going in and out like a treadmill, “I been an actress, see, since 1915, and damn it, I never got a Tony. What does it mean, I say—what does this mean, what does that mean—but the fact remains I guess I’d like to have one. I remember once Armina Marshall called me and asked me to give a Tony to Tyrone Guthrie for directing me in The Matchmaker and I said, ‘Liss-en, go screw yourself!’ I did that play for 68 weeks and if those damn Tonys are any good at all, I shoulda had one! So now maybe I’ll win an Oscar, who knows? Edith Evans never won anything either, so I told her, ‘Liss-en, OK. Maybe I don’t feel so bad after all.’ I never made it in the movies. I dunno, a cog went wrong someplace. You gotta have talent, but you also gotta have talent for having talent. Orson Welles never won an Oscar either. Can you believe that? Talent is such a terrific thing—like an octopus grabbin’ ya—ya gotta be a spring breeze at four o’clock and a hurricane at five. I don’t know which is worse. Failure dims ya down and success kills ya. You’d like to open the door with your drawers on and say thank you, don’t bother me, butcha never can.”

  She thinks Rosemary’s Baby is the best film she’s ever made. “I was in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet in 1940. You weren’t even born then. Then after 25 years, I did Inside Daisy Clover and Lord Love a Duck. They didn’t work out right. But now this one! I wanted to meet Roman Polanski anyway, because he was young and with it, so when Paramount called, I went to his office and he said, ‘Have you heard the Beatles’ “Lonely Hearts Club Band” and I said yes and he said, ‘Let’s listen.’ I said, ‘But I own it,’ and he put it on anyway. Well, we had not even met or shook hands, we’re sittin’ there, see, listenin’ to Sergeant Culpepper and I’m thinkin’, ‘Well, Ruth, here you are out this time with a real crazy buncha nuts!’ Then I thought, ‘Aha! He wants to see how good I liss-en!’ so I lissened real good and then Bill Castle, the producer, took us to lunch and Roman, he is very impatient, see, so he turns to Castle and says, ‘Well, we gonna hire her or aren’t we?’ and Castle clears his throat and says, ‘Now, Miss Gordon, did you follow that with The Three Sisters or Nora in Doll’s House?’ Roman had never heard of me and at the next table were Gene Saks and Walter Matthau and they kept coming over and throwing their arms around me and hugging me and I could see Roman had never heard of them, either, but he and I hit if off right away. There was somethin’ there, boy. The name Ruth Gordon meant nothing to him, but he kept saying, ‘Well, we gonna hire her or aren’t we?’ So I took him aside and I said, ‘Now look, Roman, you and I obviously love each other, but you don’t know me and you’re in a tough spot. You should see the other people for this part and then make a fair decision and let me know later.’ So three or four weeks passed and I got the job. What a picture. Usually the Hollywood slogan is ‘I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday.’ Not on this one. Every time I looked around someone was shooting over my ear. Roman wanted total realism. He even brought us to New York for three days after the film was over to get Tiffany’s window in the snow. They rebuilt a whole replica of the Dakota on an entire sound stage at Paramount. It brought back memories. The first time I went there Pauline Heifetz was going with George Gershwin and there was old Mr. Heifetz and old Mama Heifetz and Jascha and all that and we all had dinner and it was like a museum, where all the Heifetzes lived. The next time I went to a tea party at Mrs. Somerset Maugham’s. I was getting $75 a week then and living across the street from the Booth on 45th Street in Martin’s theatrical boardinghouse and every night after dinner everybody sat on the steps and watched folks arrive at the theatre. I always sat on the top step because on the bottom step whenever a star would arrive you’d get kicked to death in the stampede.”

  She had arrived in New York against her father’s protests, with his New England sea spyglass, which she hocked for $40. That, plus the nickels she swiped from the hairpin trays of the other girls in the boarding house, kept her going on a budget of ten cents a day for food. By 1918, she was a star, playing Lola Pratt in Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen. In 1921, she had her bow legs broken by a Chicago doctor to straighten them and make her more of a leading lady, but she’s been an ingenue ever since. Mia Farrow calls her “my only real hippie friend.” “Look at my charm bracelet. Mia gave it to me.” It was a gold baby devil with two ruby eyes, a forked tail and horns. Rosemary’s baby born at Tiffany’s. “Sayyy, you didn’t ask me about Mia. Liss-en, I betcha a year from now she’ll be the biggest star there is. Mia’s 19 going on 90. Deep, really deep. Garson and I took her to this very chic luncheon in Hollywood and after it was over she asked us if we wanted to see her secret oasis. We all changed to sneakers and then drove out to the desert and got lost and finally Mia found the dirt turnoff and we came to this old house with a dirt floor and walls made out of totem poles and this little old man played the piano with every other key missing, but Mia said it was all right, we’d hear the missing notes anyway, and we did. It was really some experience, and when we left we got lost again in the middle of the desert and I wondered were we lost at the fashionable luncheon earlier in the day or were we lost in the peaceful reality of the country? Mia started me thinking about things. I’m getting a button that says ‘Stamp Out Reality.’ Mia is like Garbo. They are both individuals. People laugh at Garbo, but she’s a unique person and there’s nothing you can do about it. Cecil Beaton brought her to dinner a year ago and I said to him on the phone, ‘Bring her on Thursday’ and he called back and said, ‘She said how do I know on Monday what I’ll want to do on Thursday?’ I understood that, so I just said, ‘OK, if she comes, we’ll just throw on an extra potato.’ So on Thursday the door opened and there she was. She looked dazzling and spent most of the evening in the kitchen having a long chat with the cook. Hell, I never heard of French pastry till I got to upper Broadway. My mother used to read all the society columns in Wollaston. The other day Gloria Vanderbilt told me she thought I was a real lady. If my mother ever heard one of the Vanderbilts callin’ Ruth Gordon Jones a lady, she’d die.”

  In Hollywood, Ruth and her husband, director-writer Garson Kanin, live in a cluster of citrus groves and marble statues and sculptured lawns better known to the Beverly Hills social set that can’t get past the iron gate as “Merle Oberon’s estate.” Forget everything else you ever read in Town and Country. The most sophisticatedly swinging “in” dinner parties in California take place at the Kanins, where on any given night Ruth’s cook might be serving hot boysenberry pie to Kate Hepburn, George Cukor, the Jack Lemmons, the Billy Wilders, Vincente and Denise Minnelli, Natalie Wood, Gregory Peck, Bill and Edie Goetz and Jean Renoir. When they are in New York, they usually hold court at the Algonquin because their own lovely home in Turtle Bay is rented. “We were in California so much and the staff was just sittin’ there eating its head off, so we rented it for three years and now we have to live in hotels when we come to town. I love the Algonquin, though. I was here before the famous Round Table got famous. In 1921, I was married to a darling actor named Gregory Kelly and we lived in one room in the back of the hotel so people would see our address and think we were doin’ all right. I never had tea with any of that Round Table bunch. I had other fish to fry than sitting around with Wolcott Gibbs and Dorothy Parker. They were people I could see any time. Kate Hepburn talked us into buying our house with her Connecticut Yankee smartness. We were going to buy somewhere else and she said, ‘You can’t afford it,’ and I said, ‘How the hell do you know what we can afford?’ She talked her next-door neighbors into selling out and we moved in. She was right, the property value has gone sky-high since we moved in. But I really wanted to live right in the middle of Times Square. It was so elegant when I was young, and look at it now. I remember everything and never throw anything away.”

  She produced a batch of yellowed letters a friend had just sent her from her home town—letters she had written home from 1912 to 1917—“the most awful lies, written during 39 week
s of one-night stands trying to impress everyone”—letters written in parlor cars and hotel rooms in places like Wabash and Osage. Her handwriting hadn’t changed a bit in all the intervening years. “Liss-en, I went on the stage to meet a lotta swell people and make money. The first swingin’ show I ever sneaked off to in Boston was The Pink Lady with Hazel Dawn as a wicked siren from Paris with spangles on and pink Bird of Paradise feathers in her hair. All I wanted out of a career was to look like Hazel Dawn and wear pink feathers. Somewhere along the route, I learned that doing the work was more important than the money. When you learn the performance is the party, and not the party after, that’s when you make the first major step toward becoming an actress. Sayy, liss-en, I gotta go somewhere, so if there’s anything else, you gotta ask it now!” Hand on hip, bantam rooster walk, edging toward door.

  “I just wanted to ask one thing—why, at your age, are you still so passionately career-conscious?”