Copyright © 1969 by Rex Reed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
The first edition of this book was published by The World
Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio.
The ebook edition of this book is published by
Devault-Graves Digital Editions, Memphis, Tennessee.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 78-88593. Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-9882322-7-3
“Bette Davis,” “Ruth Gordon,” “Jane Wyman,” “Myrna Loy,” “Uta Hagen,” “Simone Signoret,” “Patricia Neal,” “Zoe Caldwell,” “Stars Fell on Alabama—Again,” “Oskar Werner,” “Colleen Dewhurst,” “Irene Papas,” “Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward,” “Albert Finney,” “Jean Seberg,” “Mart Crowley,” “Burt Bacharach,” “George Sanders,” “James Earl Jones,” “Tennessee Williams Took His Name Off It,” “Oliver Reed,” “Jon Voight,” “Offering the Moon to a Guy in Jeans,” “Carol White,” “Patty Duke”: © 1968/1969 1967/1966 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
“Ingrid Bergman”: Reprinted from Playbill magazine, Metromedia Inc., January 1968.
The articles listed below, reprinted by permission of Fairchild Publications, Inc., first appeared
in Women’s Wear Daily: “The Academy Awards”—4/12/68; “The Golden Globe Awards”—
2/16/68; “Miss USA”—5/24/68; “Mickey Mouse’s Birthday Party”—1/3/69; “Paint Your
Wagon”—8/2/68.
“Joseph Losey”: Reprinted by permission of Status magazine.
“Omar Sharif,” “Leslie Caron”: Reprinted from This Week magazine. Copyrighted © 1968 by
United Newspapers Magazine Corporation.
“China Machado”: Reprinted from Cosmopolitan magazine. Copyrighted © 1968
by The Hearst Corporation.
“Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey”: © 1968 by The Hearst Corporation. All rights reserved.
Reprinted from the July 1968 issue of Eye magazine.
“Malibu”: Reprinted by permission of Holiday, © 1969 Perfect Publishing Co.
Other Devault-Graves Editions
Ebooks by Rex Reed
Do You Sleep In The Nude?
People Are Crazy Here
Valentines & Vitriol
For
Floy Dean,
who knows why
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the editors of The New York Times, Holiday, Women’s Wear Daily, Cosmopolitan, Playbill, and This Week for permission to reprint most of the material in this book the way it was originally written instead of, in some cases, the way it was later published.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Bette Davis
Ruth Gordon
Jane Wyman
Ingrid Bergman
Myrna Loy
The Academy Awards
Uta Hagen
Simone Signoret
Patricia Neal
Zoe Caldwell
Stars Fell on Alabama—Again
The Golden Globe Awards
Oskar Werner
Colleen Dewhurst
Irene Papas
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
Joseph Losey
Omar Sharif
Miss U.S.A.
Albert Finney
Jean Seberg
Mart Crowley
Leslie Caron
Burt Bacharach
George Sanders
Paint Your Wagon
James Earl Jones
China Machado
Tennessee Williams Took His Name Off It
Oliver Reed
Mickey Mouse's Birthday Party
Jon Voight
Offering the Moon to a Guy in Jeans
Carol White
Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet)
Patty Duke
Malibu
Bette Davis
“HELLO!”
On an Arctic iceberg or in the middle of Macy’s, the voice on the phone could have belonged to only one person. Part Fanny Skeffington and part Margo Channing, but all Bette Davis.
“Come on Tuesday. I should have the papers signed by then. What? You’re not calling about the mortgage? Oh, the interview! Well, I’m a basket case before noon. For years I had to be on the set at dawn, now when I don’t work my greatest luxury is sleeping late. So come for lunch. My dear, I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were from the bank. My address—now don’t laugh—is One Crooked Mile. Just ask anybody. They all know the house.”
They did, too. One Westport resident told me it is impossible to go for Sunday drives without seeing the cars lined up to get a peek at her behind the curtains. And I don’t blame them. There never has been—and never will be—anyone quite like her. In a business where stars are killed off as fast as Indian extras, she is one of the few genuine legends still left to the imagination. To people like my father, who never go to movies (“Why go, when you can see Bogart and Davis on the late show?”) she is one of the only names left on a marquee that doesn’t have to be explained. And to legions of kids, discovering the magic of her films all over again, she is zero cool. The whole banana. They go away raving (At her best, she is devastating) or they go away laughing (At her worst, she is merely the best Bette Davis caricature out of all the other stars who’ve built careers doing Bette Davis caricatures), but they never go away bored. Because Davis is an original in an industry full of stand-ins. Froggy-eyed, lipstick-slashed or glowing like a Tiffany lamp, she is exciting enough, even when photographed through gauze, to make the nubile youth cultists about as interesting as a withered logarithm.
There she stands, in the door of her Connecticut farmhouse, waving her by-now practically petrified cigarette, saying, “Call me Bette or we’ll never be friends.” Swamp fevers, gunshot wounds, bubonic plague, the deaths of countless lovers, the brain tumor to end all brain tumors, car accidents, shipwrecks, beatings at the hands of the syndicate and suicide on the Chicago train tracks—she has survived them all and, most amazing, the wear doesn’t show. “Nobody knows what I look like because I never looked the same way twice.” Today, it can be said with all immodesty, she looks sensational. She was wearing tight black-and-white checked wool slacks, loafers, a boy’s button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a little gold doggie pinned to her lapel. Her hair is finally back to its natural soft walnut color after Tennessee Williams made her dye it Popsicle orange a few years ago for her Broadway appearance in Night of the Iguana, and she wears it exactly as she did when she played twins in A Stolen Life. Unlike most star ladies her age, she has never had a face lift, yet she looks younger than any of them. “I could’ve been lying in bed with maribou feathers, but I decided what the hell, might as well see me exactly as I am. I’ll be 61 years old the first week in April of ’69—but don’t send flowers—I’ll be in bed all day. I only look as old as I feel, and I’m having a ball.”
Lunch was ready. Yankee stew with grits, artichokes (and a lecture on how to cook them), fresh fruit with kirsch and cornbread sticks “courtesy of Aunt Jemima—everything else I cooked myself.” We ate from old pewter plates on a big wooden country kitchen table with a revolving lazy susan filled with spices and flowers and the two things that are never far from wherever she happens to be, her ashtrays and cigarettes (“If there is any truth to that cancer rumor, my dear, I’ve got it already!”). She talked a blue streak about her children (B.D., 21, who lives with her husband in nearby Weston; Margo, 18, a retarded daughter who has been in a special school in Geneva, New York, since she was three; and Michael, 17, in his senior year at Loomis, near Hartford), Hollywood (“I was always a Yankee girl at heart—it was never a cozy town anyway, unless you did the social thing, which I never did—even at the height of my career, I always came back East between pictures.”) and, most important, her latest film for Twentieth Century Fox, The Anniversary, made in London, in which she makes a real Davis entrance from the top of a staircase with a scarlet patch over one eye to the tune of “Anniversary Waltz,” celebrates her husband’s death with firecrackers, blackmails one son, exposes the second as a transvestite, drives the third son’s girl into hysterics by placing a glass eye under her pillow, and threatens the life of her daughter-in-law by paying her off each time she has a baby, knowing secretly she has a heart condition. If you think she’s something with both eyes, wait until you see that one Davis eye doing the work for two.
“Well,” says Bette, “it may not be the greatest movie ever made, but it’s a good old-fashioned Bette Davis movie and I do get the best of everybody in the end. And it was a challenge. She’s a completely non-sequitur woman who never listens to anything anyone says, like playing a prosecuting attorney. The eye patch was absolute torture. I couldn’t get my balance for a month. Then I got all the light in one eye. The only time I took the damn thing off was at lunch and it blistered the skin around my eye. But it is most definitely not a horror film. I waited two years for a part like this. Let’s face it. Nobody is writing scripts for older women. Everything is youth-oriented now. When I was 15 or 20 years younger, I got all of Miss Bankhead’s or Miss Barrymore’s parts from the stage, but if you want to stay with your profession, you have to stay up with the times. This is the age of horror films. The world is pretty horrible. So I did four or five stinking pieces of crap in a row, like that thing where I played Susan Hayward’s mother. I don’t even remember the name, but it paid for my daughter’s wedding. And I did some Westerns on TV, even though I can’t stand all the shooting, but I kept up with the times, which is more than I can say for most of the other dames—and let’s face it, there weren’t many in our class to begin with. I never did care terribly about my appearance. If my career was different from the other ladies, that had a lot to do with it from the beginning. I could always make myself look different. It was expected of me, and that’s why I was offered a lot of smashing parts, because they knew I could do them. Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism. Even in The Catered Affair, one of the best films I ever made, I made myself look blown-up and flabby by thinking fat and covering my arms with white powder. It takes courage to do that in our industry. That’s why I went on a p.a. tour after Baby Jane—people were so amazed to see I wasn’t falling down. I used to hate my face when I was young, but now I’m glad. It’s been a blessing. But I never kidded myself into thinking the crap I made was really art in disguise. And I’ve never seen any of those films. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was a challenge and fun. Anniversary was fun. Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte was fun up to a point, then it became ridiculous. But I always hated the crap, and I was always right. Every now and then it turns up on TV to remind me I didn’t fight hard enough. But all that is over now. I’m not rich, but I don’t need money as much now as I used to, so I no longer need to make crap. I could’ve made literally half a million in the last six months just doing vignettes. I won’t play vignettes for small salaries. I tried that and they ended up putting my name above the marquee anyway, so I learned my lesson. You want to know what’s ruined this business? Actors. They’ll walk across the screen for anything, but I’m the only one of those dames who kept her price. My price for putting my name on that marquee is $200,000 and ten percent of the gross and I won’t even talk to anybody for anything less because when they see me on the screen they’re seeing 37 years of sweat. They pay for my experience and if that loses its importance I might as well get lost. I was offered the lead in Oh Dad, Poor Dad and I said if Bette Davis goes Off-Broadway that means the value of everyone else my age goes down. I was offered the mother in Cool Hand Luke. Another vignette. Jo Van Fleet played both of those parts, but I wouldn’t. I was offered the touring company of Killing of Sister George, but I would’ve been stuck with somebody else’s interpretation and staging with no time to make it mine. I was offered the madam in Everything in the Garden. Did you see it? If Edward Albee’s name hadn’t been on it, I wouldn’t have believed he had anything to do with it. The biggest disappointment was not getting the film of Virginia Woolf or my part in the film of Iguana. Those heartbreaks nearly killed me. And I don’t really like the stage. The actors you have to work with. Don’t get me started on the Actors Studio. There was one actor in Iguana who took an entire day to figure out the motivation for taking off his shoe. I finally stood up onstage and yelled, ‘Why don’t you just take the goddam shoe off? It’s just a shoe!’ So. I do roles that are star roles in films I can still do for my price, and to do that I have to sometimes do crap, but I’ll tell you one thing—I still know the crap when I see it. I’ve fought like a bull deer to keep that image flying.”
Anyone going to a Bette Davis interview expecting a shocking fan-magazine revelation of the true-life behind-the-scenes scandals during the days when Hollywood movies were the Great American Pastime will be disappointed. She is tough, but she is too much of a lady to be a tattletale. Later, after a few Scotches, she may tear loose with a few unprintable sizzlers about everyone from Susan Hayward to Alec Guinness, but she never rats on her friends for publication. “That was the biggest problem writing my book, The Lonely Life. It was absolute torture, like going to an analyst. But I wrote it. I disapprove of autobiographies—they mustn’t be too modest, mustn’t be too conceited, and then there are lots of other people involved too, and you have to know when to name names and when to protect people’s reputations. Oh, the things I could’ve printed about Errol Flynn! But I’ve always believed in looking ahead, not back, so there were many incidents in my life I had forgotten and I had to haul them out again. But I felt obligated to tell people things they didn’t know, not just put together a lot of newspaper and magazine clippings written by someone else, and I felt another obligation to tell people today what it’s like going into the fame area. Also, I didn’t want to tell so much that my children would have to go into class and have all the other kids say, ‘So that’s what your mother did!’ But I must admit I came off worse in that book than anyone else.
“I care more about what my children think than anyone else, and I’ve always done my best to shield them from being Bette Davis’ children. I never had any problems with B.D. She was always much taller and more mature than the other children her age. But Margo, who was a perfectly beautiful, normal baby until she was three, developed a brain defect and I had to place her in an institution. If you don’t think I don’t sit around here in this house crying my eyes out night after night about the fact that my child is a vegetable, you are out of your mind. The worst part of it is that she is only half a vegetable. She looks beautiful and acts like a young lady, but then suddenly something will happen and she will digress back into the world of a child again. On her last birthday I took her to New York and really pulled out the stops—nightclubs, the works—and everybody wanted my autograph everywhere we went, and then in the car going home she turned to me and said, ‘Mama, can I have your autograph too?’ And you have to laugh and cry at the same time. That play Joe Egg was right. You laugh or you won’t survive the tears in life. She wants a baby and she talks about nothing but getting married, and it will never happen. You think that doesn’t tear a mother’s heart out? And now the thing that is eating me up inside is what I’m going to do when I die to protect my children from taking on that responsibility. I’ll never do it to them. So don’t go around thinking Bette Davis lives the life of a glamorous movie star. My life is anything but roses.”
She refilled her glass and led the way through rooms with fireplaces and antiques and friendly flowers nodding happily in pots and vases, walls of books, plaques, citations and awards, lighting her cigarettes by striking big kitchen matches under the tables and chairs of whatever room she’s in with enough gusto to start another Chicago Fire. She’s not a scrapbook collector (“They only gather dust”), but there were her two Oscars, primly guarding the mantel, sharing the smell of nutmeg and cloves with an orange tree, a Volpi cup sent by her biggest fan, Mussolini, the first magazine silver cup ever awarded to a Hollywood movie star (“What does it say? Oh yes, Redbook—oh God, what they started!”), her Emmy award, citations from the Mexican government for her work in the illiteracy campaign, a silver cigarette case from Frank Sinatra, some John F. Kennedy buttons, stuffed ladybugs the child next door rides on, golf clubs (“I played for years until I broke my back”), lamps made out of old milk cans, Sarah Bernhardt ashtrays, a plaque from the Hollywood Canteen (“Not many things I’m proud of in my life—that was one of them”).
We curled up in overstuffed easy chairs in front of the fire in a glass room overlooking the snow melting in the Saugatuck River, and she talked some more. “You asked me about success. There’s a theatre in Greenwich Village where every time they show All About Eve you can’t hear one word I say because of this cult that says all my dialogue aloud from memory. Edward Albee told me that. Isn’t that spooky? I’d like to go the next time and see that. But that’s not success. I wouldn’t faint if all the best tables at Sardi’s were taken when I got there and I had to take the worst. This was never one of my goals in getting there. Success is something you don’t think about until it happens. I was fresh from the stage and I just wanted to work. It took many years of work and sweat to get the other. But during all the getting-there years there was a challenge which young people today don’t seem to have. I had to eat, earn a living. That was a reason. I had a five-year plan. I was all prepared to become the best secretary in the world if Hollywood didn’t work out in five years. I learned there is no short cut to anything. Now I know my favorite years have been as a mother, and I’m still learning. You should hear them on politics—it’s fascinating. At 16, I never knew such a thing existed. I raised my children to condition themselves to accepting my career as part of them. They visited all my sets, knew it was hard work. My home was never an actress’ home, I never considered myself special. And now neither of them has any desire to act and I could not be more grateful. B.D. was in Payment on Demand as a child and she had a small part in Baby Jane because I thought it would be fun for her. She got it out of her system. Any woman is most fortunate if she isn’t driven by something she has to prove. To some, it’ll be a shock to discover Bette Davis is no longer driven, that she likes living in the country. Puccini! I went to his farm outside Pisa. It was a funny, simple little house. That’s the way most of us want to live.
“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 movie 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 weeks 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?”
The eyes looked bathed in the glow of a thousand Christmas mornings. “Well liss-en, why dintcha ask that three hours ago, ’cause it’s gonna take three days to answer that one, I mean, liss-en, you hafta come back again some time. Sayyy, I didn’t even offer you a drink or anything. You want a beer or anything? I mean I gave a lecture at the American Academy to the graduating class and I don’t have a lotta pictures of me in frames around the house, but here’s the picture they took. The text of the sermon was ‘Don’t give up!’ and Garson said, ‘That’s silly, you’re talking to kids who are not even started yet and you’re telling them don’t give up,’ and I said, ‘Sure, that’s when they do give up, when they’re just getting started.’ I had a lotta success and everything’s swingin’ and look at me in the picture, I look just like I did when I was in school. You can see I’m doin’ OK ’cause all the other people in the picture are standing up and clapping for me. So liss-en, I’m determined to have a film career and I’m gonna do a Broadway musical—Hal Prince offered me the Lotte Lenya role in Cabaret but I told him I’d rather play the Joel Grey role and I still think I was right—and right now I’m the valet to Garson Kanin and I’m finishing the screenplay to Thornton Wilder’s book Heaven’s My Destination which is gonna be the greatest thing ever hit the movies and”. . . the door was closing on the smell of lilacs and the sound of rain. . . “I haven’t even started yet. . .”
It was the last thing I got squeezed into the notebook before the pencil point broke.
Jane Wyman
Joan Crawford sells Pepsi, Veronica Lake waits on tables, June Allyson married a barber, Merle Oberon moved to Mexico, and when last heard from, Hedy Lamarr was still trying to get a new Diner’s Club card. In Hollywood, the only thing you hear more than “Let’s have lunch someday” is “Whatever happened to. . . ?” New faces and short memories is what it’s all about. For the star ladies over 40, it can be rough. The smart ones save their money, the lucky ones end up on TV battling out the ratings with the new faces, and the ones who are desperate either make horror movies or play the new faces’ mothers. Well, don’t worry about Jane Wyman.
At 55, the gal who started out as Sarah Jane Fulks from St. Joseph, Missouri, is smart (“She’s loaded,” says a friend who knew her when and still knows her now), lucky (Along with Loretta Young, she pioneered the movement into TV, starred in her own TV series which ran for three years at a time when most of the declining glamour queens were still being photographed through gauze), and she’s never been desperate. “I dropped out for a while because all they offered me was ax-murderers and Lesbians. I won’t play Lesbians, honey, not this kid.”
Now she’s back, starring in her first movie in six years, looking keen and peachy in her old Jane Wyman bangs (it’s a wig), and giving the Paramount lot a run for its money. She sits in the commissary, full of ginger and jazz, behind a big Paramount menu that reads “Keep the Ten Commandments Says Cecil B. DeMille” and says, “OK, C.B., I’ll begin by declining the Dorothy Lamour salad. What in the hell is a Dorothy Lamour salad, anyway?” It’s fresh pineapple, sliced bananas and strawberries with cream cheese and bar-le-duc. No thanks. She decides instead on a steak with french fries, a package of Kents, which she chain-smokes with the energy of a lady riveter, and a slice of watermelon. “This is where it all started, honey,” she says, spitting out watermelon seeds. “I came out here from Missouri and became one of the Leroy Prinz dancers. They made a test of me at Universal for a Carole Lombard movie, then I got cut out of that and signed a contract at Warners in 1936 and became the Torchy Blaine of the B’s, following right along in Glenda Farrell’s footsteps. I thought I was the greatest thing since Seven-Up. I even remember my first line. Bill Powell played a producer and I was in the chorus line. ‘What is your name?’ he asked. And my line was, ‘My name is Bessie Fuffnik; I swim, ride, dive, imitate wild birds and play the trombone.’” She hoots so loud she nearly falls into the watermelon juice. “It was one of the Golddiggers, honey, but I forgot the year. Years later, on the night I won the Oscar for Johnny Belinda, I got this wire from Ray Heindorf: ‘Dear Bessie Fuffnik—I swim, ride, dive, imitate wild birds, play the trombone, and win Academy Awards.’ I’ve never forgotten it. Anyway, for ten years I was the wisecracking lady reporter who stormed the city desk snapping, ‘Stop the presses, I’ve got a story that will break this town wide open!”’ Another hoot. “But you know, honey, I was one brassy blonde who tried to learn something about both the camera and my craft. The turning point came in a big dramatic scene in a Chinese restaurant in Princess O’Rourke. I went to New York to do some publicity and while I was there this book called The Lost Weekend came out and it was all anybody talked about. I got a call saying come home, Billy Wilder wants you for the girl opposite Ray Milland. He’d seen O’Rourke and wanted me for this serious role and I got it and we made it right here at Paramount and it changed my whole professional life. Now I’m back.”
The new film is called How to Commit Marriage. It’s her 74th (count ’em) film and she’s teamed with Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason. Plot: Jane and Bob are getting a divorce but decide to wait until after their daughter’s wedding to break the news. Gleason, the groom’s father, is the president of a rock ’n roll company who is anti-marriage, anti-Establishment, anti-anti. When he meets the in-laws he recognizes Bob as a realtor who once sold him a house that got demolished in a mud slide. Everybody fights. At the wedding, Gleason announces the divorce plans and the disillusioned kids end up unmarried hippies expecting a baby. Bob and Jane get remarried, Bob dresses up like the Maharishi to reunite the kids, and everything ends happily in a rock ’n roll theme song. The End. OK, so it’s not Johnny Belinda, but if it gets Jane Wyman back on the screen, nobody’s asking questions, least of all the lady herself.
“The studios are afraid to hire the old stars because they’re afraid we might bomb. Then they bring in people who bomb anyway because they have no experience. This way, they figure the combination of three old pros like us plus the kids and the music of today gives them something to sell. I haven’t worked in so many years and I just wanted to get back in front of the cameras and see if I could do it. It’s not a return. What do you call it? A re-entrance? Anyway, it’s a lot of fun, and comedy is harder to play than drama. I was going to do a nightclub act with Donald O’Connor in Tahoe. I had the white furs and the Spanish guitars and I was going to make a very glamorous movie-star entrance on a white staircase, but I got peritonitis of the pancreas and nearly died, so that was off. This is the first movie I’ve been offered that I figured I could have a good time with, and working with Bob and Gleason is a ball. I’m not complaining.”
We saunter over to the sound stage where Bob Hope is shooting. Everyone lights up like the Accutron sign on Times Square when they see her coming. Hope blows her a kiss from across the set. “I’m not in this scene, so let’s go over to my dressing room. I don’t like to stand in Bob’s line of vision when he’s working. It throws him off.” We cross the lot where Alan Ladd rode the Orient Express with Veronica Lake and it stirs memories. “We used to have such a ball on the set,” she reminisces. “Over at Warners we were like a family. Every room had a bar and we used to yell at each other from one room to another. Even when we weren’t working, we’d have lunch together every day in the studio commissary. We turned out 52 pictures a year from one studio alone, so we had to get along. I remember when Bette Davis went back to New York—she always hated Hollywood—she had the biggest trailer this town has ever seen and she said, ‘I want Janie to have it.’ I tried to bring it to Paramount and it was so big we couldn’t get it through the DeMille gate. I finally had to give it away and now some real estate man uses it for an office out in the San Fernando Valley. We all got along and we helped each other. We were trained by pros. Kay Francis helped me the most when I got started. And we weren’t afraid to get out there and get our feet wet. These kids now can’t learn. There’s nobody around to help them. It’s like baking a cake for the first time. You gotta get the oven right. There’s TV, but you turn out a show in three days, the writers keep changing and the directors don’t know what they’re doing. They’re learning on the job, too. It’s ticker-tape entertainment. TV hasn’t got its diapers wet yet.”
There’s no bitterness in the dialogue. She has somehow managed to survive the toughness and the harshness that happens to most women who have made 74 pictures. “What happened to me was part of a cycle. We had the gangster cycle with Jimmy Cagney and Bogart, then the war cycle, then the John Wayne movies where all the men got the best parts, then the Ben Hurs and the Charlton Heston spectaculars, then the ‘method’ came in and they lost me right there. Somewhere along the line the kind of pictures I used to make—Belinda, So Big, Blue Veil, Magnificent Obsession—the women’s pictures—went out of style. The year I won the Oscar for Belinda I was up against Irene Dunne for I Remember Mama, Olivia de Havilland in Snake Pit, Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number and Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc. Now they’re old-fashioned and were going back to musicals. There’s not much imagination around. The screen is not building women for women’s pictures. TV has ruined everything. People talk and eat while everything’s going on on the screen. It’s taken a big bite out of the industry. Also, after the war the studios lost their theatres and the double bills went out, so they stopped making A and B pictures. Everyone went independent. I made two pictures, but I had bad luck because they both came at the end of cycles. Stage Fright, which I did for Hitchcock, came at the end of the suspense drama movies. We had to re-dub everything because Michael Wilding mumbled all the way through it and you couldn’t understand a word he said. By the time it came out, that kind of movie was dead. Then I did Miracle in the Rain. I hate to bring up my own work, honey, but what a wonderful movie! But by the time we got that one out, Van Johnson and I weren’t so big and Warners was already spending all its money promoting Giant, so it never got any attention.”
The conversation was interrupted by three Belgian priests visiting the lot. They passed up Richard Harris and Sean Connery. The only person they wanted to meet was Jane Wyman. “Isn’t that sweet? They remembered The Yearling. You can’t fault that one; it’s a classic. Spencer Tracy and Anne Revere had started it and the deer got too big and they had to shelve it and Gregory Peck and I came in late on it. I always did what I wanted to do, so I don’t have a favorite. The Blue Veil was the hardest, but Belinda