by Ray Hagen
RKO’s Dore Schary offered to buy her MGM contract and upped her salary (then $500) to a weekly $750. In June 1947, she became an RKO-Radio player. Schary was decidedly impressed with her work in Crossfire, but six months later he left RKO.
Her first films under her new RKO contract were Roughshod and A Woman’s Secret, both released in 1949. Roughshod was a trivial Western with Gloria as a been-through-the-mill frontier babe and she was prominently featured glowering sexily in all the ads. In A Woman’s Secret she played an ambitious nightclub singer (dubbed by Kaye Lorraine) taken under the wing of a famous former singer (Maureen O’Hara, not dubbed) who wound up murdering her protégé. It was at this time that her incredible repertoire of mouths began to appear. She enlarged her upper lip to mammoth proportions in A Woman’s Secret, and also began an endless assortment of hair styles. Her director was Nicholas Ray.
Her divorce from Stanley Clements became final on June 2, 1948, and just a few hours later she and Nicholas Ray were married. Ray, like Gloria’s first husband, was also quick-tempered and a heavy drinker. Their son, Timothy Nicholas, was born on November 11. Tongues wagged.
Ray arranged to get Gloria a loanout to Columbia and again directed her as Humphrey Bogart’s leading lady in In a Lonely Place, seen in 1950. (Their marriage had already reached the rocky stage and her contract specified that while on the set Ray would be her undisputed boss in every detail.) It was a moody, unconventional Hollywood melodrama without a happy ending, and was one of the year’s most interesting (if not profitable) pictures. She paired wonderfully with Bogart and her strikingly sincere performance was given wide critical approval, but the public stayed away. Screen Album called her performance one of the year’s finest, “because when she looked, she really looked, and when she listened, she really listened, and her appearance in a scene guaranteed that scene a certain mood value, and vitality. As an actress, she’s well trained, as a woman she has an original quality which sets her apart from a good many of the other young blonde starlets that infest Hollywood. In a melodramatic situation, she quite admirably refuses to be melodramatic, and when she’s in love, you trust her, and when she’s in trouble, you’re worried. A bit player until Lonely Place, Gloria’s shown she’s got more than enough for better things.”
But critics had been calling her exceptionally promising for six years.
In 1950, RKO wasn’t the best studio for her to be tied to. Howard Hughes was then running the place and he wouldn’t release Gloria to even test at other studios for roles that she desperately wanted—Billie Dawn in Columbia’s Born Yesterday (which won Judy Holliday an Oscar), the Shelley Winters role in Paramount’s A Place in the Sun, Eve Harrington in All About Eve at Fox. The latter is especially vexing. Gloria had played a similar role in A Woman’s Secret, an ambitious young performer wanting to replace an older mentor, and she’d have made a far more believable threat to Bette Davis’ Margo Channing than the rather bland Anne Baxter, who was the weakest link in an otherwise perfect cast.
Instead Hughes assigned her to a secondary role as a dice-roller in Macao, a potboiler filmed in 1950 but not released until 1952. It reunited Gloria with Robert Mitchum, her fellow player from Maid in the Ozarks, but she didn’t want to do a subservient role in a Mitchum–Jane Russell vehicle, arguing in vain that after being nominated for an Oscar and co-starring with Humphrey Bogart she deserved something better. Autocratic director Josef von Sternberg was fired in mid-production and the script was heavily rewritten by Mitchum and Gloria’s husband Nicholas Ray, and it was Ray who, uncredited, finished directing the picture.
She was not seen on screen in ’51, but the following year was the most successful of her entire screen career. She appeared in Macao, was Joan Crawford’s scheming but ill-fated nemesis in Sudden Fear (these were her last RKO films), was Angel the Elephant Girl in Cecil B. DeMille’s mammoth The Greatest Show on Earth (replacing a pregnant Lucille Ball), and was Dick Powell’s unfaithful Southern wife in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful. Macao got deservedly short shrift but she won wide acclaim for each of the other films, all of which were grade-A, big-budget, widely attended hits.
She got a barrage of publicity for refusing a double in Greatest Show and allowing an elephant to poise an enormous foot inches above her face in a circus sequence. She more than held her own in an all-star cast and her on-screen rivalry with Betty Hutton for Charlton Heston’s affections (go figure) produced a quintessential Grahame moment. “I’ll take Brad the way he is,” says Gloria. “That is, if you’re his type,” sniffs Hutton, to which Gloria barks, “Who you callin’ a type?”
Many critics thought she stole Sudden Fear from under the top-starred Miss Crawford’s flaring nostrils. She takes a savage delight in helping her adulterous lover (Jack Palance) plan the murder of his wife (Crawford). Instead, he kills Gloria by mistake. The two ladies did not exactly become the closest of friends during shooting since Joan wanted an off-camera fling with Palance but Gloria got there first.
And her chilling study of the flighty, self-willed Southern belle who came to a nasty end in The Bad and the Beautiful topped off her perfect year by winning her the Academy Award as 1952’s Best Supporting Actress. (By the end of ’52 there was absolutely no doubt that Gloria was going to get an Oscar nomination, the only question being for which performance.) She also won Film Daily’s supporting performance award for Sudden Fear in their poll of the nation’s movie critics. Greatest Show’s surprise Oscar win as the year’s Best Picture did her booming stock no harm, either.
This Oscar ceremony was the first one to be televised and Gloria’s win came early in the evening, making her the first actor to win an Oscar on TV. (Anthony Quinn’s Supporting Actor win was announced first but he was on location and couldn’t be there to accept.) Gloria’s nerves got the better of her and her acceptance speech was limited to four breathless words: “Thank you very much.”
Her personal life was less perfect. In August 1952 she and Nick Ray had divorced. They’d been separated for a year after he caught her being more than stepmotherly to his 14-year-old son Tony, though this was hushed up at the time. She appeared in court wearing a startlingly low-cut dress and news photographers had a field day.
Gloria Grahame was now a hot property. She was paid a small fortune to do a five-minute bit (with her Academy trophy) as her TV debut on The Eddie Cantor Colgate Comedy Hour, seen on April 11, 1953.
Grahame was not making herself any too popular with her fellow workers. Her attitude toward such inconsequentials as winning friends and influencing people, including publicity people, was always somewhat cavalier at best, but now she appeared to be developing a disease common to the chosen few, cunningly dubbed “Oscaritis” by the tradefolk.
Columbia had first penciled in Gloria’s name for the role of Alma in their upcoming From Here to Eternity (1953), but the part went to Donna Reed. Instead, that year she appeared in four pictures that were not as successful.
The Glass Wall was a minor though well-intentioned chase thriller with a sympathetic Grahame on the lam with Vittorio Gassman. The ads capitalized on her Oscar.
Elia Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope, filmed in Munich, had Gloria as Fredric March’s discontented, quite unglamourous wife. Her distinctive personal qualities and natural abilities were put to ideal use, but the public wasn’t interested in the trials of a beleaguered circus troupe being stalked through Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. It didn’t make a dime, although the film and Grahame’s performance were critical successes.
She was superb in The Big Heat, the best of her ’53 releases. An exceedingly violent film, directed impeccably by Fritz Lang, it’s a classy and classic thriller in which she played an irresponsible gun moll in an intriguingly casual manner. When cop Glenn Ford is trying to pump her for information on a ganglord’s underworld activities, she flips him off with “When Vince talks business I go out and get my legs waxed.” Midway through the proceedings, her enraged hoodlum boyfriend (Lee Marvin) bruta
lly disfigures her by throwing a potful of scalding coffee in her face, and she spends the remainder of her footage with half her face bandaged. Now on Ford’s side, she tracks down the blackmailing widow of a corrupt cop who’d committed suicide, leaving her with enough incriminating evidence to blow the gang apart, and shoots her dead so that the evidence will now become public. At the finale she gives Marvin the same treatment he gave her, scalding his face and ripping off her gauze to show him what he can expect (and what a zealous makeup man can really do). Then he shoots her. C’est la vie. Classic Gloria Grahame.
Next came as trivial a mess of claptrap pottage as was ever filmed, Prisoners of the Casbah (“Searing Sensations in Technicolor”). She played an Arabian princess in a long brown wig, saying at the time that the chance to play a glamour girl who didn’t come to a bad end was a refreshing relief. But it’s difficult to see why she indulged herself in such nonsense at this point in her career.
The Big Heat (Columbia, 1953) with Adam Williams, Alexander Scourby and Lee Marvin.
Late in ’53 she went to London to make The Good Die Young (released in 1955) at Shepperton Studios. Again she’s a faithless wife, but this time she avoided paying her usual ultimate price as her hubby (John Ireland) merely tosses her, fully clothed, into a full bathtub.
She had started to grow increasingly more careless about her appearance, and her brusque attitude did not endear her to the British press.
She was married for the third time on August 15, 1954. The groom was Cy Howard, the prolific writer-producer-director who created such radio comedy diehards as My Friend Irma and Life with Luigi. They had conducted a long and stormy courtship for over two years. As with her two previous flings at wedded bliss, the marriage was even stormier.
She was in two films in 1954—Human Desire, in which she was Broderick Crawford’s two-timing wife (he strangled her at the finish) and Naked Alibi, where she was a third-rate singer in a booze joint before getting shot by Gene Barry. Jo Ann Greer dubbed Gloria’s vocal of “Ace in the Hole,” but Gloria’s moves were what sold the number. She delivered good performances in both films, but critics and audiences had begun to notice a certain stereotype she had created.
At this time it began to be noised about that she had taken to stuffing bits of Kleenex or cotton wool under her upper lip for that luxuriant look. Between that and the flaring lipstick, she was producing a puffy effect that altered her speech and rendered her lower jaw area practically immobile. She had always been a pouty type, but now began to look half-drugged as well.
By 1955, her appearance on screen as well as off began to dissipate badly. Now with straggly dark brown hair, she was seen in the same sort of role (bored, petulant, bleary-eyed, puffy-lipped and oversexed) in The Good Die Young, The Cobweb and Not As a Stranger. In Stranger she was the other woman who had her way with Robert Mitchum in one of the most hilariously erotic seduction scenes ever filmed, with wild whinnying horses cueing the action. She received uniformly poor notices for the first time in her career. And she looked dreadful.
Always profoundly dissatisfied with her appearance, Gloria had started on a series of plastic surgeries back in the mid–1940s, trying to conform to a standard of perfection known only to her secret self. It had begun with a nip here on her lips, a tuck there on her chin, but had now escalated into major surgeries, one of which all but paralyzed her upper lip. Gloria’s niece, Vicky Mitchum, was quoted by Grahame biographer Vincent Curcio in 1989: “Over the years, she carved herself up, trying to make herself into an image of beauty she felt should exist but didn’t. Others saw her as a beautiful person, but she never did, and crazy things spread from that.”
When she reported for work on MGM’s The Cobweb, this gratuitous carving had reached critical mass. Curcio quoted Cobweb producer John Houseman: “Gloria gave us problems on Cobweb. She became obsessed with a passionate desire to be sexy, and to achieve it through cosmetic surgery, which made her self-conscious and defensive. Everyone, including the cameraman, worried about her looks. She had started with cotton under her lip, and I imagine she thought it so irresistible, she had the effect done surgically. In fact, she showed up for the first day’s shooting with stitches in the lip, which threw people into a minor panic. The airbrushing of scars on the sides of her lip is visible in the publicity shots taken at that time. She thought she could achieve this sexy look by being bee-stung, and so she had her lip surgically disfigured into a bee-stung lip. She looked awful, and it was hard to understand her.”
She regained some lost ground in her last ’55 release, Oklahoma! She was certainly an unlikely choice to play the droll soubrette Ado Annie, but Richard Rodgers insisted on having her. Unexpectedly, she handled her first and only musical-comedy role with fine high spirit. Said William K. Zinsser in his New York Herald-Tribune review: “Gloria Grahame steals the acting honors as Ado Annie, getting great humor by underplaying the role. When she confesses that she has suddenly become alarmingly fond of men, when she sings ‘I Cain’t Say No’ to illustrate this point, there is a look of pure pleasure in her eyes and a small secret smile around her mouth. Her subtle performance is one of the movie’s biggest treats.” Jack Karr of Canada’s Toronto Daily Star thought, to his surprise, that she “has turned out to be remarkably funny, but there is the strangest impression that Miss Grahame has played every scene with a shot of novocain in her upper lip, so immobile is her face.” Her off-key, meter-beating renditions of “I Cain’t Say No” and “All ’Er Nothin’“ were delightful, but non-singer Gloria was the first to admit it was a painstakingly slow process to record the songs practically one phrase at a time, leaving it up to the sound crew to paste all the pieces together.
Oklahoma! with Gene Nelson (Magna, 1955).
In ’55 she went to London to film The Man Who Never Was, released the following year. The picture was based on Ewen Montague’s story about a corpse launched at sea by the British in an effort to mislead German intelligence during World War II. Grahame played an American librarian in love with an RAF pilot. She gave a sensitive, emotional performance in an uncustomarily sincere role, but her facial appearance was ghastly. “Gloria Grahame as the American girl is very good,” said the New York Mirror, “but her makeup is nothing short of horrible. She is seen as an oily-skinned, dark-haired attraction.”
This marked the end of her “movie star” phase. Her personal eccentricities and continued facial alterations finally alienated Hollywood and exhausted the patience of her fan base.
After Gloria completed The Man Who Never Was, the Howards decided to remain in Europe. They moved to Paris, and lurid reports of her escapades, with and without Howard, began to leak back to the U.S. press. Their violent marriage seemed headed for a violent divorce more than once, but in September ’56 she bore a daughter, Mariana Paulette, in France.
Several papers reported that she’d had yet more plastic surgery on her lips and chin. Photographs taken of her upon her return to the States in December ’56, holding her new daughter, showed her smiling happily but looking shockingly mutilated. Her hair, still unkempt, was again blonde.
In March ’57, she announced to the papers that her marriage to Cy Howard was over and done, adding: “I’m going to concentrate on my baby, Mariana, and I’m going to resume my acting career.”
Ride Out for Revenge, a minor 1958 Western, showed her looking quite pretty but decidedly different, and she was not happily cast as an Indian-hating widow. A year later she was back in her old mold in Odds Against Tomorrow, a brief spot as a friendly neighbor with the hots for Robert Ryan. Gone forever, thankfully, were the overpainted lips.
Beginning in 1961 she began doing guest appearances on various TV series (G.E. Theatre, The New Breed, Sam Benedict, Burke’s Law, Name of the Game, The Fugitive, The Outer Limits, etc.). She was no longer the glamourous siren of the 1950s, nor was she trying to be, and she was now digging full-tilt into character roles. Hectic TV shooting schedules no longer allowed for the carefully lit close-ups of her movie p
rime and there were occasional glimpses of her surgery scars.
In January 1962 she revealed that on May 13 of the previous year she’d secretly married her former stepson, Tony Ray, in Tijuana, Mexico. Ray was a sometime actor who played one of the leads in John Cassavetes’’ Shadows (filmed in 1957), and was Nicholas Ray’s son by a marriage previous to Gloria’s. This meant that her ex-husband was now her father-in-law, and that their son Timothy had become both his mother’s brother-in-law and his half-brother’s stepson. And she was now her own sister-in-law. To add to the tangle, Gloria bore her husband two sons, Anthony, Jr. (4/30/63), and James (9/21/65). Her former husband was their grandfather. Where, one wondered, could she go from here? Many were scandalized by this almost-but-not-quite incestuous union and it made for some titillating publicity (to Gloria’s distress), but this marriage lasted for 14 years.
In 1966, after a seven-year absence from films, she had a small role as another cheating wife in another lower-case Western, Ride Beyond Vengeance. It didn’t make a ripple.
Beginning in the early ’60s Gloria had returned to the stage, doing live theater all over America and England. She had always wanted to do great parts in great plays, and for the rest of her life cheerfully abandoned her movie image to do plays by Shakespeare (Mistress Page in Merry Wives of Windsor, Lady M in Macbeth), Chekhov (The Three Sisters), Noël Coward (Amanda in Private Lives), Edward Albee (Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), Alan Ayckbourne (How the Other Half Lives), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie), Arthur Miller (The Price), Somerset Maugham (Rain), Clifford Odets (The Country Girl), George S. Kaufman (The Man Who Came to Dinner), Moss Hart (Light Up the Sky) and William Saroyan (The Time of Your Life). The latter starred Henry Fonda, who later said, “The highlight of my recent tour was the ten-minute scene I played with Gloria Grahame. She’s a most riveting actress.” She also appeared in productions of A Shot in the Dark, Laura, The Marriage-Go-Round, Bell, Book and Candle and a new play called A Tribute to Lili Lamont.