Josh continues:
“And I really think that’s the first time I saw Margaret Sullavan. She was darling and she had this kind of husky, breathy, Southern voice.… I met her afterwards; Charlie [Leatherbee] took me aside; he’d invited her to be a member of the company that summer—that meant bringing her down to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to be in the University Players—as our ingénue. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ he asked, and I said, ‘She seems wonderful, but are you sure she can do all the big jobs like that?’
“The next time I saw Peggy, as we called her, and as I called her to the very end, was when we were building our new theatre at Old Silver Beach and rehearsing the opening production, a play called The Devil in the Cheese. She and Hank were the main characters. About four days before opening, Bretaigne Windust, who was directing the play—and always had a handkerchief tied around his forehead for some reason—said, ‘No more rehearsals until the theatre’s finished.’ I said, ‘We haven’t learned our lines yet.’ He said, ‘We can’t put on a play without a theatre. Go on, help work on it, we’ve got to get it finished.’ So suddenly the whole company was nailing away, building scenery, installing seats: Fonda and I were way up on the grid for 72 hours putting in the counterweight system, Fonda face down most of that time, stretched out over the beams on his stomach, while I swung below him in a boatswain’s gear with a mouthful of nails trying to thread the ropes through the sheaves; Windust was everywhere, still running around with a handkerchief around his head.
“It was a very complicated show, The Devil in the Cheese, one of the silliest and most difficult, and we had to have a lot of props. Just to give you an idea: the first act takes place in an old monastery on a Greek mountaintop and the only way to enter is to be hoisted up in a net from the earth below. Goldina Quigley, the part that Peggy played, is brought there by her mother and father on the pretext they are looking for Greek relics. The real reason is to get her away from Jimmy Chard, the boy she’s fallen in love with (who eventually arrives by airplane and makes a spectacular crash landing), played by Henry Fonda. One of the monks gives Mr. Quigley an old amphora and a piece of cheese: ‘Eat this cheese and know youth,’ says the monk, so Mr. Quigley bites into the cheese, and suddenly there’s a great green flash and out of the amphora leaps the Little God Min (some ancient Egyptian deity), who offers to take Mr. Quigley on a trip through his daughter’s head. The second act takes place in Goldina’s brain and consists of all her daydreams, enacted by Peggy and Hank: first they’re on a sailboat, and while she washes dishes and drys them in a net strung out the cabin porthole, he catches a flying fish and pops it in the kettle for dinner; then they get wrecked on a desert island where they play the same scene, only this time he’s found a turtle which she pops in the supposed dinner pot, and he brings her a monkey which they train—here there’s a little time lapse and the monkey grows up into a gorilla—to take care of their baby. And so on.
“Well, you can imagine the props we had to round up. We never had any kind of dress rehearsal. Nobody had had any sleep for four days. The audience arrived for the opening; the curtain was six feet off the ground, so people could see us desperately trying to cover these white-pine steps that were supposed to be old rocks on the side of the Greek monastery. When we finally dropped the curtain, the audience applauded. I said, ‘Windust, please go out and make a speech. Explain to them that we’re not ready; maybe they ought to go home.’ He said, ‘No, no, I’ll make a speech, but we’re going to do this show come hell or high water. I’ve brought my full-dress suit and I will not make a speech without it.’ He had to go downstairs; it took five or six minutes at least to put on a full-dress suit and white tie; when he walked out to make the speech, he still had that bloody handkerchief around his head. He made quite a speech, but the pounding of the nails was so loud the audience never heard what he said. There was such confusion, such hysteria; we were all in terror that this was going to be a failure, this, the beginning of all of our lives. Windust put on a monk’s outfit over his full-dress suit (he had to be a monk along with me), we were ready to pull the curtain up, and he said, ‘Wait a minute! We’ve got to get those lights out of the way. They’ll cover everybody.’ So the whole company came and pulled on the ropes but the ropes were twisted and the lights wouldn’t budge. So Windy said, ‘Put the lights on the floor.’ Crash! When those lights hit, they made the biggest noise you ever heard. And the audience howled and applauded. The curtain went up.
“Unfortunately we’d never tested the apparatus for bringing up people from the cellar; Kent Smith, who played Mr. Quigley’s butler, was supposed to be hauled up first, but the winches kept sticking and the basket that contained him started whirling at a dervish speed; it took ten minutes longer than we’d gauged to get poor Kent up high enough to be seen, so we all sang Greek chants until he finally appeared. And again the audience applauded. Now three people, the Quigley family, had to be brought up. A very old lady named Lily Jones was playing Goldina’s mother; as the basket rose from the cellar below the stage, it whirled five times as fast as before, because it was so much heavier, and Lily Jones started screaming with the highest, most bloodcurdling scream that has ever been known, like a person being throttled to death. Finally the basket, still whirling, hove into view; two or three monks grabbed it, pulled it towards the stage for a landing, and out clumped the three Quigleys.
“This was Margaret Sullavan’s début on the professional stage. And to my dying day, I will remember the first words out of her mouth. Just as though she were in the most successful play that had ever been written and she had the most wonderful lines to say, with the most aplomb I had ever seen, she said, ‘Now don’t get hysterical, Mother, we’re here.’ And I just thought, She must be the greatest actress who ever lived, because by rights she shouldn’t be able to say anything at all. But she went right through the play, improvising with the same calm security, with everything around her going wrong, and that was just the beginning. It went wrong and went wrong [“Particularly the monkey,” Mother used to tell us, “who, in the South Sea love scene between Hank and me, peed all over my very skimpy flowered bra.” “She was absolutely magnificent,” said Hank, “nothing fazed her”]. Finally the curtain went down. I should say, from then on we lived happily ever after, because although it was a disastrous night, the people who were there formed a kind of club, the audience that had seen the opening night of The Devil in the Cheese.
“After that, we began to put on really great shows. And Peggy became, within an instant, an accomplished actress. She went through thirty, forty, fifty shows with us over the years, playing every kind of part, every age, mostly leading ladies or ingénues, but the extraordinary thing was she’d never really had a great deal of training. If there was ever a natural, she was it. She had, from the beginning, that magic, that indescribable quality that is just extremely rare and immediately makes a star of a person. She was a true star. She was a true original. And we were very, very lucky to have her, because in a sense she, more than anyone else, put us all on the map. The audiences in Falmouth fell madly in love with her, as later they did again in Baltimore.…”
Mother, who always thought of that period of her life as its happiest, was beginning to fall madly in love with Hank Fonda.
Hank remembers:
“My first meeting with her in Cambridge and then playing with her in The Devil in the Cheese added up to a kind of nightmare. But slowly through the summer it became a romance. Look, everybody loved her. She was fun-loving, fun on the beach playing games. If she found a water pistol, she was the one who squirted water on everybody. And very early it became obvious she was a brilliant actress. I don’t know what kind of experience she’d had; I don’t think any. She had presence, which is something you’re born with, you don’t acquire. You don’t learn it. People just noticed her whether she was walking in a market or on the beach or on the stage. And soon it was clear she was the talent; she played all the good parts, but the one I remember most was as T
essa in The Constant Nymph. She was unforgettable in that.…”
Josh continues:
“And several years later, when we did The Constant Nymph in Baltimore, she and Hank Fonda had to sing a little duet which was a very complicated bit of harmonizing. Peggy, who was always terrified of singing—although I don’t believe that she was as unmusical as she always pretended to be—had to sing the melody while he sang the harmony, but she would always drift into the harmony the minute she heard him and then he would dominate it. Now, Fonda had a true musical ear, except he had the strangest voice when he sang, the same voice he has when he laughs. It was kind of like a strangled sob, as though he were weeping at the top of his voice. It was a terrible sound. Anyway, the song was called ‘Ah, Sigh Not So,’ and even with the bad singing, the two of them were so enchanting, so romantic, that everyone was moved. Through that little melody the characters they were playing were supposed to fall in love. And shortly after that, Peggy and Hank announced that they were going to be married.”
When the season in Baltimore was over, the Fondas moved up to New York. Mother was under contract to the Shuberts. She claimed that they put her in seven consecutive flops. A contemporary account of her initial meeting with Lee Shubert went like this:
A Shubert scout saw her [as understudy for Elizabeth Love in Strictly Dishonorable] and she was eventually haled into the presence of the great Lee Shubert himself. At the moment she was suffering so greatly from a heavy cold that she really cared very little whether she saw the great Lee Shubert or not.
“Who are you, and what sorts of parts do you want, and all that sort of thing?” asked the great man.
She told him.
“You’re hired,” said the great Mr. Shubert, getting up and reaching for his derby.
“What do you mean—hired? You haven’t even heard me read a part.”
“You have a voice like Helen Morgan, a voice like Ethel Barrymore,” said the great Mr. Shubert.
“What I have is a bad case of laryngitis,” said Miss Sullavan.
“Laryngitis or no laryngitis,” replied the great Mr. Shubert, “you have a voice like Ethel Barrymore and you’re hired. Report on Wednesday to Elmer Harris.”
Which is how Mother had come to star in her first show on Broadway, A Modern Virgin. (She used to tell us, half jokingly, that after that interview with Mr. Shubert she coddled her laryngitis into a permanent hoarseness by standing in every available draft.)
Dinner at Eight was Mother’s first real success. Suddenly Universal wanted her for a movie, Only Yesterday. Even then she was hard to get. In 1931, she’d signed up with the American Play Company. She was quoted at the time as saying, “I didn’t want a manager, but I signed up with a fellow just so I could tell the others I had somebody.” The fellow who talked her into signing the agency contract was Father. By the time Universal was interested in her, she had already directed him to turn down offers from Paramount and Columbia for five-year contracts. It took all of Father’s skills to negotiate, on behalf of his recalcitrant client, a deal satisfactory to both her and the studio.
She wrote her brother, Sonny, whose college education in Virginia she was proudly financing with her various short-lived theatre salaries:
Dearest Son:
Here’s a secret—for God’s sake treat it as such—I think I’m really going to Hollywood. It means discarding what might be termed youthful ideals about Art—but when ideals get tangled around your feet they’re not much good. Would you like a Stutz Bear Cat Roadster, model 1925?? If so, we left one in Baltimore, two-toned blue, lots of chromium, and very ritzy—probably has to have a new battery, but swell tires. Write me immediately.…
And, leaving behind her youthful ideals, her car, and her marriage to Hank, she arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933—her twenty-fourth birthday.
The Universal make-up department and Mother went to war immediately. Make-up wanted to remove a wart and to extract a snaggletooth; also, in line with prevailing fashion, to thin her eyebrows and bleach her hair. Make-up won on the eyebrows and wart, Mother on the tooth and hair. The studio heads conceded that a girl with brown hair might be a novelty. They took test after test, all of them disappointing. They changed the lights and took some more. The strain wilted the subject and frustrated the experts. They ran off the film with its monotonous close-ups of Mother’s face.
Suddenly John Stahl, the top director at Universal, in whose hands the movie rested, called out, “That’s it! Stop the projector! That’s the way we want her!”
It was a profile. For that split second she looked marvelous. Eight different cameramen tried to recapture that second and failed. The ninth got it.
Mother wrote of the incident:
It seems that the trouble was my shallow chin. It wasn’t long enough, and threw my face out of balance. The ninth cameraman set lights higher than my head and put others down low, directed at my chin, and there I was at last, a beautiful girl with a nice long chin, so the experts said.
“You’ll be a star when this picture is over,” predicted John Stahl one day, after shooting sixty-seven takes of a tiny scene.
“Stop kidding me,” replied Mother.
But he was right. “THIS GIRL’S NAME will be as famous as any star’s on the screen when she makes her debut in JOHN M. STAHL’S ‘ONLY YESTERDAY,’ ” blurbed a full-page advertisement. “A NEW STAR WILL ARRIVE!” proclaimed another. “BOW—GAYNOR—DIETRICH—GARBO—HEPBURN—NOW IT’S MARGARET SULLAVAN.”
Much more interesting to Bridget and me were some of the magazine articles.
Colliers, March 17, 1934:
What will eventually drive the press department of the Universal Film Corporation of Universal City, California, entirely insane is the news that Margaret Sullavan, on the eve of the opening of her new Super-Super-Super Special, has been discovered acting the lead in a stock company [with Henry Fonda, as it happened] playing the American Legion Hall at South Amboy, New Jersey. Upon the opening of her first picture, Only Yesterday, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, an honor of some importance in the amusement world, she was home trying to finish a jig-saw puzzle. She won’t make personal appearances, she won’t show up on opening nights when the flashlights are booming, and when she is in New York, she spends most of her evenings barging up and down on a Third Avenue streetcar, dressed in something which looks as if it had been discarded by the Salvation Army.… Just now she is back in Hollywood acting in Little Man, What Now? …
Radie Harris:
ORIGINAL! One-word description of the new screen sensation, Margaret Sullavan. Here’s the only interview she has granted since her smash hit in Only Yesterday.… I had already been warned that this littlest rebel hated Hollywood … “They call this picture Only Yesterday, but it’s insane!” she exclaimed. “We’ve been on it for almost four months now and I’ve had exactly one day’s vacation—and that I spent in jail for smoking a cigarette in a forest region.” As she sat opposite me in a pair of blue slacks, looking for all the world like Huck Finn’s younger sister, it was hard to realize that this pert infant was a brilliant actress, who in her very first screen effort was being “supported” by such luminaries as John Boles and Billie Burke. Orchidaceous. Glamorous. Sextacular. None of the usual Hollywood labels catalogue her. In a land of carbons, she is as original as the “a” in the spelling of her last name.…
Her second film was Little Man, What Now? The third, The Good Fairy, was the setting for that short-lived marriage with Willie Wyler. Next Time We Love, with Jimmy Stewart (“HOLLYWOOD’S NEW LEADING MAN”), was next. It was the first of their four films together.
According to a movie magazine of the time:
When there was trouble finding a leading man to cast opposite her in Next Time We Love, Peggy went to the casting director and said, “Why not test Jimmy Stewart?”
“Jimmy Stewart?” He scratched his head. “Who’s he?”
Peggy (that’s what Jimmy calls her) became quite indignant. “Haven’t
you seen Jimmy Stewart in pictures yet?” she exclaimed incredulously. “Well, he’s a great actor from the New York stage. He’s had years of experience and he recently came out to Hollywood, where they’ve been trying him out in small parts first. Did you see Rose Marie?” Somehow Peggy made that bit in Rose Marie sound quite wonderful.…
After making the picture, Mother returned to Broadway to appear in Edna Ferber’s Stage Door. I particularly liked the idea that, on my account, the run of the play was imperiled.
Louella Parsons:
STAGE STAR REPORTED “EXPECTING”—MARGARET SULLAVAN’S HUSBAND DROPS HINT ON COAST
Margaret Sullavan is going to have a baby! At least we hear a strong rumor that says so. Her husband, Leland Hayward, has just been in town and the proud father-to-be just couldn’t keep from dropping a hint. Margaret will leave the Stage Door company in a short time to prepare for the blessed event. The baby will cause a lot of upsets in plans, for Universal would like Margaret to have made another Universal picture, and soon.
Following my birth, Mother made three films, the first of which, So Red the Rose, was a Civil War drama that presaged Gone With the Wind. King Vidor directed. Recently he told me:
“I was just thrilled with her. I think I would have done any picture if she was going to be in it; I wouldn’t have even read the script.…
“She’d taken up motorcycle riding while she was married to Willie Wyler, and she rode her motorcycle to work every day. Blue jeans were not the ‘in’ thing then, but that’s what she usually wore. She was playing a Southern belle, and of course all the dresses of the period had full skirts and petticoats; so when she had close-ups, she’d come onto the set with her hair all done and her blue jeans on. It was hilarious.”
About Hollywood rumors that she was difficult and willful, E. B. Griffiths, who had been her director on Next Time We Love, had another perspective:
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