by Jean Stein
—
FABIENNE GUERIN: There were always people for cocktails, people for dinner at big parties, like Lauren Bacall. I’d always seen her in movies as this beautiful classy woman, but she had a mouth like a truck driver. I was shocked that she used the f word. With a scotch and a cigarette in her mouth, she was not at all the classy, cool lady from the movies. But Jennifer Jones was always classy, dressed impeccably. She was such a beauty. I spent a lot of time with Mary Jennifer over the years. Or Jennifer as she wanted to be known. If you were talking about her, you said Mary Jennifer, but it was Jennifer when you talked to her. So Jennifer Jones became big Jennifer and Mary Jennifer became little Jennifer. Mary Jennifer never felt that she herself was beautiful.
But her mother was a vision. One that didn’t wear panties. That was her thing. I don’t think she ever wore them. Her maids told us that they would wash all her bras, but there were no panties. And she didn’t wear pantyhose either. And she wore dresses. When she’d sit down on a chair, she’d sit like riding sidesaddle. She’d cross her legs, and I always thought, What a weird thing. I don’t remember if Mary Jennifer and I ever talked about it. We just knew that her mother didn’t wear panties.
—
MARIN HOPPER: When I came with my mom to visit Norton and Jennifer’s house in Malibu, I remember seeing Mary Jennifer. I knew her very well from when I was a child. I looked up to her. I’d always admired her just because she was older than me and she seemed cool. Her bedroom was right on the left when you walked into the house. I thought Mary Jennifer was so great and her room was so great, so I wanted to see everything. It was all black lacquer with mirrors and a bathroom with more mirrors. I wanted her to open all the cabinets and she’d show me everything. I was going to say, “Hey, you’re here in your new house, your mom just got married, you know, starting over.” And then I just saw that she was covered in these thorns, and I thought, Wow. When you’re a child, you don’t know why, but you sense disaster. And she was completely unraveled. She was wearing a black cashmere sweater, jeans, and these really divine cashmere socks. It was all black. Her hair matched, the dark hair with the very thickly piled black cashmere turtleneck. It was all very soft, because I gave her a hug, and she gave a feeling that was so soft. I remember touching her feet because I thought her socks looked so fabulously soft. But she had those stickers that you get from a plant, like donkey’s tails, the little buds that get stuck—thorns, I guess. She was covered in them. And I thought, Are you all right? Is everything okay? And she said, “I’ve had this terrible day, I’ve had, oh my god, I’ve had this terrible day. I haven’t been feeling well.” She had gone on a walk in the hills. I said, “Were you walking without your shoes?” and she said, “I went hiking without shoes.” She had taken her shoes off to go hiking in the mountains. I said, “You’ve got this stuff in your socks, and they’re so beautiful, the socks! Why would you want to walk without your shoes and ruin your socks?” And she said, “I’m very angry with my mother.” And I remember not really understanding how anybody could be angry at Jennifer.
Credit 4.8
Mary Jennifer Selznick, approximately eighteen years old.
—
FABIENNE GUERIN: I’d never seen anybody fight with their mother the way they did. I mean, I’d lip off, and my mother would whack me, or I’d get a spanking for being naughty. But Mary Jennifer would disappear into her room with claw marks on her from Jennifer. And big Jennifer often wouldn’t come to dinner because she had battle scars. I mean, they were at each other physically. I never saw it happening, I just saw the aftermath. I’d sit in Mary Jennifer’s room waiting for her to come back from her mother’s room. She’d come back out, and her hair would be all disheveled, and then we wouldn’t see Jennifer that night for dinner. She’d have invited people for dinner, they’d arrive, and she wouldn’t come out. I discovered years later that before little Jennifer was born, David idolized big Jennifer. She was the ultimate, she was everything for him, and he worshipped her, loved her, adored her. Everything was for her. Then Mary Jennifer was born, and the love shifted. He was taking Mary Jennifer to Cannes and to New York, he was bringing her presents back, and big Jennifer was just not around. So I think Jennifer loathed Mary Jennifer, because Mary Jennifer took away her husband.
—
BRODRICK DUNLAP: Mary Jennifer was pretty from what I can remember, kind of thin, sexy. I was ten or twelve and I remember looking at her, going, man, she’s kind of sexy, but she’s weird. She was timid, very quiet, secretive. At their house, they had all these art crates stacked in the back, I’m talking like ten feet high, a bunch of wooden crates. And Mary Jennifer had taken a tarp, like one of those cheap little tapestries, and made a big tent outside, like her own boudoir. She had all this hippie stuff, and I think she liked to smoke pot there. Back then everyone was doing that, but the Simons looked down on that kind of thing. So she had this little tent area that she created, and one day Jim, Simon’s houseman, hired my friend Stuart to help take down all those packing cases, all that tent stuff. Mary Jennifer came home and had an absolute meltdown. She began screaming, yelling, saying they had to reconstruct the thing. She had a boyfriend and she may have been sleeping with him out in this tent thing. It was kind of her romantic hideaway, and when it disappeared it flipped her out. I think Jennifer later on figured that out and there was some brouhaha about it. But Mary Jennifer was crazy, she was weird. But she was strikingly beautiful, very thin, very troubled, drugged.
—
BOB WALKER: I think Mary Jennifer had very high expectations, just like a lot of people, but I think her life just turned into a huge disappointment and frustration. She was, you know, so enamored of her mother, and so in awe of her mother, and wanted to be like her. David and Mother, they both treated her like a princess. She was brought up in that way. I think being out in the world, and seeing what life really was, it probably took its toll on her. Mary Jennifer, like Michael, was filled with envy, greed, jealousy, love, hate, fear. Enormous fear.
I remember one time Norton and Jennifer decided to take a six-week trip to the Far East. Norton said to Mary Jennifer, “I think it’d be wonderful for you to stay at our place and look after the collection for us while we’re away.” Mary Jennifer said, “Well, I don’t know very much about art, Norton, and I don’t know if you should give me this responsibility.” Now from his point of view, that was sort of wonderful, an interesting, challenging thing to do to her, to say, “Okay, live here, take this responsibility for something other than yourself.” She told me about this herself. She said, “I’m going to try and do this.” And then for weeks she was waking up every morning around all that expensive art. And one day she said, “What am I doing here?” It frightened her. She didn’t know how to deal with all these masterpieces. It was too awesome a responsibility. So she swallowed a bottle of aspirin or something. She just couldn’t handle it. Somebody called Norton and Jennifer in Thailand or wherever they were, and they flew back immediately.
She was a very pretty girl, but not movie star pretty. Nowadays, she’d be hired because they hire people that look real. But I think there was some disappointment with it. She magnified it to the point where she got very self-destructive. She couldn’t handle being young and almost beautiful. That was the second time she took a lot of pills. She must have been about twenty or twenty-one. She wasn’t passing out, but she wanted to go to sleep, so we kept her going. My girlfriend and I had to walk her for hours on the beach so she would get this out of her system, lots of coffee. Nowadays you’d call 911.
—
RICHARD WEISMAN: I ran into Mary Jennifer in New York sometime in 1973 or 1974, maybe at Studio 54. She had moved there briefly to take acting classes. I might have said, “If you’re ever around, give me a call. We should get together,” because I remembered her when she was a little girl. Now she was attractive, very much like her mother. Long hair, not too dark, very pretty. She might have been nineteen years old. So one evening, not late, when I h
ad five or six people at my apartment, she just showed up. She rang from downstairs. So I open the door and give her a hug. “Hi, how are you?” And she starts to gasp and completely passes out. In my front hallway. I think she was really wasted, or that’s how it appeared. And now I have like four or five people over, and the two couples said, “You know, maybe we ought to…” You know, they left. And this one friend of mine and I, we kind of got her up and helped her upstairs. I had a duplex with three bedrooms upstairs. And I let her lie down in the middle bedroom. So this guy leaves, I come back to the bedroom, and she’s standing in the doorway. I say, “You feeling better?” “Oh, I’m fine. I just wanted to get rid of those people. So, how about let’s get a little sex going.” I mean, you have to understand we just had laid her down on the bed and she could hardly walk. And now she’s standing up saying, “I just wanted to get rid of ’em. Now, come on, take your clothes off. Let’s go.” I was kind of shocked, A, that she was okay, and B, that she would say this. And her dress was off and her top was off. I’m like, “Mary Jennifer, this is not gonna happen. Okay? This is not gonna happen.” “What do you mean? I don’t turn you on? Is that why it’s not gonna happen? Believe me, I can turn you on. I know how to turn you on. Don’t worry about that.”
But I got her a cab to send her to her apartment. I said, “Please, Mary Jennifer, listen to me. I want to be there for you, but not that way. I’m not going to sleep with you. We’re never gonna have sex. Okay? So you gotta get that through your mind. Okay? And it has nothing to do with how you look because you are a very hot looking girl. But I know your family and your brothers, and besides, your mother is married to my uncle, so it’s just, like, weird. So this is just not gonna happen. So look at it this way: my loss, I lose out here. Okay?” So then she says she’s okay. “But you know something, we could have a great time. No one has to know. No one ever has to know.” And I said, “It’s just not gonna happen.” I mean, just think, what do you do after that? That’s only trouble. I called later to see if she was okay. I said, “Are you okay?” She says, “Yeah, I’m okay. I guess you did the right thing. But I just wanted to stay with you. I wasn’t gonna do anything.” I said, “Mary Jennifer, you gotta take care of yourself.”
—
DR. BEATRIZ FOSTER: Mary Jennifer came to me through Jennifer’s therapist, Milton Wexler. Milton was my friend, although I didn’t agree with his mixing of social and professional life, which I think had a lot to do with the breakup of his marriage. When Mary Jennifer turned out to be very crazy, he sent her to me. I can’t tell you everything because it would be a conflict of patient-client privilege. I am very strict in that sense. I’m the opposite of Milton, I keep things very much inside. I also have reservations talking about somebody who was as close to me as she was. I care about my patients, and I also cared a lot about Jennifer and Norton, and I hated to see what they had to go through.
Mary Jennifer was with me for two and a half years, and she was a real spoiled brat. She got everything she wanted, and she was a very unhappy child. I think she was very bipolar. I never knew whether or not she was going to come for her appointment. If she was close to anybody, it was Jennifer. She and Jennifer came once or twice to the office together. Her relationship with Jennifer was very frail. It’s one thing to want to have a relationship and another thing to be able to have one. Mary Jennifer wanted more than anything to have a relationship with Jennifer, but there was a lot of competitiveness there and that didn’t make it easy. I remember that once, as Mary Jennifer was leaving the office, I said something about her father being a big director. She turned on me and said, “He was no director, he was a producer!” I didn’t even know the difference. I said to her, “So who the hell cares?” She said, “I do, and you should, too.” It was very important to her to remember that he was a producer, not a director. But of course he had died and then Norton came, who was also a powerful person, and that didn’t fit very well.
She had this habit of going to high-rises, even walking on the roof, and together we tried to figure out her obsession with high places. As a psychiatrist, I’ve known a lot of people who go up onto roofs. It’s a way of contemplating the idea of death. I said to Mary Jennifer, “One day the wind is going to be very hard and it will throw you over,” but she said, “I’m a very strong woman.”
Once her brother called me when he thought that she was going to kill herself, to dump herself in the ocean. Jennifer and Norton were away, and this guy didn’t know what to do. So I got into the car and went to Malibu. Mary Jennifer was running along the sand on the beach, and I said to her, “Enough already. I want you to stop this.” I caught her by one arm and said, “You’re coming home with me.” I don’t remember where I put her, but I got her out of the sun and got some sanity in her, because she was all riled up. She said she was going to drown herself. But all it took was for me to grab her by her hand and say, “Listen, this is the end of this, you’re going to sleep.” And she did.
At one point, I had to give a paper in Norway or someplace, and I put her into Cedars-Sinai Hospital before I left. I wanted her in a safe place while I was gone. Everything she did was iffy: you never knew what she was going to do next. I couldn’t leave the country with that on my mind, so I said to Mary Jennifer, “I’m going on a trip, and you’re going to be here. We’re not all going to be nuts, so you’re going to the hospital.” And she agreed. When I came back, I didn’t think it was good for her to live alone. Norton and Jennifer had a life of their own, and Mary Jennifer didn’t fit there at that time. I decided she would be better off living with another family. Somebody referred a family, the Persells, to me, and she did very well with them. She began doing things like cooking and making her bed, which was sort of extraordinary for her. She spent a lot of time with them as a family. She used to bring me a rose, and raspberries and tarts that she’d baked. She learned from the Persells. These tarts were the first things she’d baked in her life. She brought this big package one day, and I said, “You’re giving one to me, and you’re taking one to your parents.” She was not supposed to be in touch with Jennifer much during that period, but they did see each other occasionally. So off she went to Malibu with the tarts, and Norton and Jennifer looked at her as if she’d climbed out of a tree. But they ate the tarts and enjoyed them. I was glad about that.
—
THE RIGHT REVEREND WILLIAM PERSELL: I was rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church on West Adams Boulevard by USC, a beautiful Italian church. We had parishioners who were in a program which assigned people to live with them through the mental health organization. The parishioners knew we had lots of room in our house in Pasadena, and so they suggested the idea to us, and we said we would do it. Mary Jennifer was the first and only person we ever took in through this program, although we always had lots of people living with us. We have six children, most of whom spent time as exchange students overseas, so we always had exchange students living with us for various periods of time.
We called her Jennifer, which she’d asked us to do. She was taking one or two courses at Occidental College, just to sort of have something to do. Once she was panicked about a course she was taking. She would not get out of bed and go to school, and I went up and said, “You’ve got to get up, and you’ve got to go to school.” And she got an A in the class. But we just sort of pushed her to go to school. There were some days that were pretty hairy, actually, when she would then be totally uncooperative. You just had to be insistent. “No, you’re not gonna do that. You’re doing this.” And so that was hard. She had her own car and she smoked a lot. Our second to youngest daughter, Lisa, said that Jennifer was like a big sister to her, even making comments to Lisa like, “Look at your boobs. You have such big boobs, and you’re only thirteen. And I’m twenty-one, and look at my flat chest.”
Some days she was attractive and normal, happy and talkative. And other days, you could really see the trouble in her eyes and face. But she didn’t talk about her problems much. She was seeing he
r therapist every day, so I didn’t see that as our role. Our role was just to create a home and environment where she could interact with normal people. She would sit down and talk to me about anything, theology or the church politics. But I didn’t talk with her much about her family, and she was not supposed to have contact with them through this period, according to her therapist. I don’t think she got letters from her family. It’s hard for us to tell if she missed her mother and any of them at all. Before she came to us, she got pregnant while she was living in New York, and she rushed to David Selznick’s first wife, Irene, who lived there. I don’t know when this was, but she was pregnant at one point and had an abortion. And she got in touch with Irene, not with Jennifer.
Mary Jennifer liked our church, the racial diversity of it. She felt it was a good thing. She came to church on occasion, certainly on Easter. She was with us for Christmas as well. She told us she was not Jewish, and I don’t know what she really was.
The day Mary Jennifer was picked up by the police in Beverly Hills for walking around on rooftops, we were all tied up at the church. Our daughter Karen went over and picked her up and drove her back. Once she told my wife, Nancy, that she wanted to kill herself. She threatened suicide a couple times, but she didn’t do anything in our home to act on that. I think she thought of Nancy more as her mother than she did me as her father. Once she gave Nancy a T-shirt that said “World’s Best Mom.” She killed herself two days before what would have been David Selznick’s seventy-fourth birthday.