Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  The vocal credits for Singin’ in the Rain are interesting, and rather confusing. In the film, Debbie Reynolds has been hired to re-dub Jean’s dialogue and songs in the latter’s first talking picture. We see the process being done in a shot of Reynolds, back to camera, matching her dialogue to Jean’s and synchronizing it while watching the sequence on film. But the voice that is used to replace Jean’s dialogue is not Reynolds’, but Jean’s own quite lovely natural voice. Director Stanley Donen explained, in Hugh Fordin’s The World of Entertainment: “We used Jean Hagen dubbing Debbie dubbing Jean. Jean’s voice is quite remarkable and it was supposed to be cultured speech, and Debbie had that terrible western noise.” To further confuse matters, the voice we hear as Jean sings “Would You?,” also supposedly supplied by Reynolds, is that of yet a third girl, unbilled studio singer Betty Noyes.

  Gene Kelly trying to silence Jean in Singin’ in the Rain (MGM, 1952).

  When I met Jean in 1975 (about which more later), I asked her how, after she’d played so many drudges, MGM thought to even consider her for this splashy part. She told me, “L. B. Mayer’s wife, of all people, had the idea from seeing me in No Questions Asked, one of my lesser efforts. How she ever got the idea of me for Lina from that, I’ll never know. I discovered later that they’d tested loads of actresses before they decided on me. But I was very pleased that during the filming they were working so hard on the dance numbers, and with Debbie, that they left me pretty much on my own.” (Among the other MGM actresses considered were Nina Foch, Arlene Dahl and Jane Greer.)

  In a recent interview on the Turner Classic Movies channel, co-star Donald O’Connor paid Jean a sincere tribute: “She was a consummate actress. She was the sweetest gal in the world but she was on the quiet side, not like Lina Lamont at all with that high-pitched voice. No, she was a straight, legit actress. They didn’t get a ditzy blonde to play the part, they got a great actress to play the ditzy blonde. That’s why that part is so dynamic and so wonderful.”

  And shortly before her death in 2002, in an interview for Singin’ in the Rain’s 50th anniversary DVD release, actress Kathleen Freeman (Lina’s frustrated vocal coach) said, “Jean Hagen was never appreciated for her capabilities. If you see her in this and you see her in The Asphalt Jungle, most people didn’t know it was the same person. That’s pretty good work. She was extraordinary, and a good friend. And beautiful—good Lord almighty, she was a pretty thing.”

  Despite the extremely favorable reaction to Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain, MGM neither publicized her nor gave her roles half as worthwhile. In Carbine Williams (1952), an A picture but a dull one, she was the gently understanding wife of James Stewart, who played the beleaguered inventor of the carbine rifle. According to Mimi Tellis, “Jean never wanted to be typed as hard-boiled, she got very tired of those roles in movies. She loved those insipid roles like Jimmy Stewart’s sweet wife. She liked straight roles better than character parts.”

  She played the outdoorsy hometown girlfriend of shell-shocked war veteran Ralph Meeker in Shadow in the Sky (’52), but had to withdraw from the role of the vixenish farm wife in Letter from the President when she became pregnant. (Claire Trevor replaced her, and the film was released as My Man and I.) Her son, Aric Philip, was born on August 19, 1952. (They named him Aric because, he says, “my parents wanted something that would look good on a marquee.”) He was the Seidels’ second child; their first, Christine Patricia, named for Patricia Neal, was born August 26, 1950.

  Jean was seen in three more minor Metro pictures in 1953: Latin Lovers, stooging again for Lana Turner; Arena, a mopey role in a dreary 3-D rodeo Western; and opposite Red Skelton in the witless Half a Hero. It was Skelton’s swan song at MGM, and Jean’s as well.

  When I showed Jean a list of her films she said, “I’d almost forgotten some of these. I guess on purpose.” Noticing Latin Lovers on the list, she said, “Every time Mr. Mayer would get mad at me, he’d punish me by putting me in a Lana Turner movie.” But she greatly enjoyed watching Lana’s utterly futile off-camera efforts at wooing her notoriously scandal-free, mated-for-life leading man, Ricardo Montalban.

  In June 1953, Jean’s MGM contract expired, but the previous month she began a three-year stint as Danny Thomas’ wife in his weekly ABC-TV comedy series, then called Make Room for Daddy. The show was a hit, and brought her more popular recognition than she had gotten from her four years at MGM. (She was nominated for an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress in a Series in 1955, and the next year was nominated for two Emmys, as Best Actress and as Best Supporting Actress, both for the Thomas show. Three losses in two years.) She played a strong, hip brand of comedy on the show, but felt that a housewife by any other name was still second fiddle, so she took the opportunity to appear in the film version of Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife (1955) as Connie Bliss, a feral nympho tramp on the make for Jack Palance. The film was uneven but Jean was decidedly on-heat. (“That hurts, boyfriend. I’m a naughty girl, I wish I could say I didn’t like it.”) Being cast back in the same mold she had once been stuck in was now a change of pace.

  According to Danny Thomas, in his 1991 autobiography Make Room for Danny, he and Jean were less than soulmates. He objected to her preference for sloppy clothes and jeans on rehearsal days, at one point admonishing her to “for God’s sake, put on high heels, put on a little lipstick,” when network exec Robert Kintner was about to visit the set. Kintner had insisted on Jean for the role and “considered her the pivotal character in the series,” which rankled Thomas. He found Jean aloof, though granting that she worked as hard as anyone else. He was a bit daunted by her Broadway and Hollywood resume, and Jean did indeed feel straitjacketed in her sitcom wife-and-mom role. Her husband (who had quit acting and was now an actors’ agent) was wreaking havoc by staging some bitter arguments with the producers, which didn’t help matters. According to Mimi Tellis, “Tom was hard on Jean, he drove her to do work she didn’t want to do. She hated doing that Danny Thomas show for so many years. There was terrible tension, and the pressure finally got to her.”

  Ill feelings and the professional confines of the series, plus a genuine desire to spend more time with her children, prompted her decision to leave the Thomas show in 1956 after completing its third season. (Thomas returned the following season as a widower and eventually “married” Marjorie Lord, in whose hands the part became more that of a bland straight woman than when Jean played it.)

  Jean now mostly stayed home, raising her family. Her son Aric says, “Her family was her passion. If she was upset about not getting work, I never knew it.”

  Some feel that Jean was fired from the Thomas show because of Seidel’s interference, and that she had already started drinking heavily, but her daughter Christine Burton says, “She quit Make Room for Daddy because she wanted to spend time with my brother and me. But by then we were in school, so she didn’t have anything to do all day. She didn’t play bridge, she didn’t do the PTA or the Brownies or the Girl Scouts. She’d worked all her life, and now all of a sudden she’s got nothing to do. That’s when she started drinking. She didn’t drink in front of us, ever. She was a closet drinker. I didn’t even know about it until I found a bottle of Scotch in a drawer in my bedroom, and I confronted her about it.”

  During these years she got a variety of TV jobs, but not many movies. She had a “best friend” role in Spring Reunion (1957), a dreary attempt to introduce a dramatic Betty Hutton to an audience that no longer cared about any Betty Hutton, and was back doing housework in Disney’s The Shaggy Dog (1959). That year she returned to the stage, co-starring with Keefe Brasselle in Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? at the Dayton, Ohio, Theatre Festival. She had a thankless part as Missy LeHand, Roosevelt’s loyal secretary, in Sunrise at Campobello (1960); was Ray Milland’s troubled wife in a nuclear holocaust low-budgeter called Panic in Year Zero! (1962); and had a small part as a shallow, matronly social butterfly in Bette Davis’ Dead Ringer (1964).

  By this time Jean had been dri
nking quite heavily and her marriage to Tom Seidel was unraveling. As Patricia Neal recently explained it, “Tom was a big drinker, and Jean kept up. It’s terrible how much they drank. She became an alcoholic but I don’t think Tommy did. You know the story of Days of Wine and Roses? That was Jean. He drank and she drank, but she suffered and he really didn’t. It was just so sad.”

  Jean pawing Jack Palance in The Big Knife (UA, 1955).

  Seidel sued her for divorce in 1965, winning custody of the children. “I remember my father’s explanation of why he divorced my mother,” says Aric Seidel. “He said he hoped to shock her out of drinking by way of the divorce. I know he felt very badly about it and he spent a couple of years ‘on the couch’ trying to come to grips with the guilt.”

  Jean’s Northwestern chum Nathalie Brown (now Nathalie Thompson) said, “Tom was a very difficult guy. I remember when they split up. He dumped her and set her up in a small apartment. She lost custody of the children and ended up in the hospital after a friend found her passed out unconscious in her apartment.”

  Jean’s daughter Christine says of this period, “Our parents never argued in front of us. We were so protected that we didn’t have a clue until they separated. He never drank during the day, only at night. He wasn’t an alcoholic, not addicted to alcohol like she was. She stopped drinking after she went into a coma, this was around 1968. She was in the UCLA Hospital and they told me she’d be dead in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t a shock to me because she’d been in and out of rehab hospitals before. She’d dry out, stay with my aunt LaVerne at her New Hampshire farm for a couple of weeks, come back and start all over again. One day I went to visit her in UCLA and all of a sudden she came out of the coma and sat up—‘What day is it? Where’s a newspaper?’—and she never touched another drop of liquor ever again.”

  Says Mimi Tellis, “Jean took a lot of comfort in LaVerne and she loved going back to that farm. It was very healing for her.”

  “It’s something I don’t like to talk about,” says LaVerne about those visits. “It was emotionally hard to see her like that. Her husband put her on a plane and sent her here. She could barely stand but every day we walked, a little bit farther every day, and eventually to the center of town four miles away. She loved walking through the woods, we’d have such a good time. She built up her strength and seemed in good health and good spirits, but apparently it didn’t last because she came back two or three more times. Once she came in a wheelchair. Each time I sent her home she was strong again. She was very resilient. She tried so hard.”

  In her 1988 autobiography, As I Am, Patricia Neal wrote: “Jean had started out with a bang at MGM, but Hollywood had left her nursing hopes of fulfillment, and when the teat dried up, she started on the bottle. Eventually Tom left her. My dear friend did finally quit drinking, but there were many heartbreaks to come before she made it.”

  They lost touch with each other for awhile but reunited in 1974. “Jean wasn’t drinking now,” wrote Neal, “and looked the best I had seen her in years. Unfortunately, she had another problem. My beloved Jean had throat cancer and was going to Germany for laetrile, a supposed cure unavailable in the States. But she was bubbly and bright and so much the way I remembered her from the old days.”

  She had by now dropped completely off the map professionally. Then, late in 1974, the fifth volume of Richard Lamparski’s Whatever Became Of …? series included an interview with Jean, then a resident of the Motion Picture Country Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. It noted that she’d been ill for some time, and I was moved to write her a letter telling of my admiration for her work. To my delight she answered, and we began a lengthy correspondence by mail and spoke often on the phone. It was during this period that she was operated on for a malignant tumor on her upper soft palate. Two weeks after the surgery, she wrote: “Please excuse the writing as I’m lying flat on my back at the Motion Picture Hospital. Well, into every life some rain must fall, but I swear, too much is falling on me! One always feels that cancer somehow happens to other people, not yourself. But despite having to be fed through a tube I really feel quite good.”

  Three months later, in August ’75, she felt strong enough to visit New York, staying at the Fifth Avenue apartment of her old Northwestern friend Nancy Hoadley (now Salisbury), and we arranged to meet there one morning. To my surprise and relief, Jean looked and sounded surprisingly healthy, heavier than in her movie days, and we settled down to having a fine old chin wag, but since it was such a beautiful day she wanted to get outside and walk about. I was a bit concerned about her stamina but we continued chatting merrily as we walked, and walked, and walked—all though Central Park, down Fifth Avenue, a long stroll through the Museum of Modern Art, then over to the West 40s theatre district. Her old MGM pal Rita Moreno was currently on Broadway in The Ritz and Jean decided she’d like to see if we could get last-minute tickets for a matinee. They were sold out, so instead she made a call to another actress friend, Kay Medford, and we walked over to Medford’s apartment for a delightful visit until early evening, the two old pros exchanging ribald war stories and I happily drinking them in. Finally I walked her back home, Jean still feeling cheerful and energetic and seemingly indestructible. She’d talked frequently of her desire to get back into harness, of how much she loved and missed acting, and now seemed to me quite capable of doing just that.

  She returned to California. Helen Thomson flew in from her home in London and visited Jean in the Motion Picture Hospital: “I invited Jean to come see me in London. So she came over, stayed three weeks and she was an absolute delight, so funny, and my children adored her. Never went near a drink. She mostly forgot to take all the pills they’d been stuffing into her, and she was fine. She’d been in that Motion Picture Hospital for I think about five years. She wanted to see how she’d do on her own, so she found an inexpensive hotel, stayed there for a few nights, went to see a few shows—and she was recognized! Oh, she was so thrilled. The whole trip turned her around because she realized she didn’t have to be in that hospital. She went back to California, got a flat, and was taking tap-dancing lessons! Karl Malden offered her a part in Streets of San Francisco, and she got more offers.”

  After being out of commission for a dozen years, she now rallied enough to appear on the Malden series, plus episodes of Good Heavens and Starsky and Hutch. All were seen in 1976, and Jean seemed to me as sharp and sturdy as she had when I last saw her.

  But by 1977 the cancer had clearly taken its toll. When her sister LaVerne visited Jean in the Motion Picture Hospital, “she was very ill. I’d been in contact with her doctor during that time. My brother, my daughter and I went to see her and I knew she didn’t have long to live. The large cancerous growth on her neck was very obvious, and she couldn’t swallow. We wheeled her around the hospital and she was in good spirits despite the pain, greeting all the patients she knew. Very brave, so brave. She was always that way, even as a child. When I was leaving, she said, ‘Please don’t come back, I want you to remember me the best you can.’ I knew there was no hope. She was dying.”

  Nathalie Thompson, along with her 17-year-old daughter Kristin, also visited her. Kristin had become as close to Jean as her mother had always been, but neither were prepared for this visit. “She’d had the operation on her throat and had a scarf covering her scar,” Nathalie says. “She’d lost weight, she was a wraith. She looked like she was dying. Kristin took one look at her and was just terrified. She couldn’t handle it. Jean was a completely different looking person. It was upsetting to me, to Jean and to Kristin.”

  After her throat operation, Jean did a small role as a vicious landlady in a TV movie, Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn. In it she appeared ravaged, and that beautiful, mellow voice was now a hoarse rasp, but she was stubbornly determined to go down fighting. It was her final performance.

  “I visited her a couple of times in the Motion Picture Home,” says Mimi Tellis. “The last time, I went down there to kind of rescue her. She
was playing poker with one of the Three Stooges, who was her pal. I walked past her several times before I recognized her. In her drinking days she had a weight problem but now she was quite wasted away, very thin. I took her out to dinner and to visit some friends and she had the most wonderful time. I don’t think anybody was paying a whole lot of attention to her, she was just sort of buried at the Home. When I left her she said, ‘It’s amazing to see you and know that there’s still some life out there. We’re not finished, Mimi.’ Of course I didn’t have any idea of being finished. She’d forgotten there was a world out there, which was so sad to me. Later I was talking to her one night on the phone when she had this tumor in her throat, and she was all excited about a doctor who’d invented a laser tool that could go in and zap it. She was on a long waiting list, but she’d just gained one or two pounds and I thought, ‘Oh, she’s on the mend, she’s going to make a comeback.’ Nathalie called me the next morning and said, ‘Did you hear about Jean?,’ and I said ‘Yes, isn’t it great, she’s gained weight.’ And she said, ‘No, she died last night.’ It was such a shock.”

  Jean Hagen died of throat cancer on August 29, 1977. She’d just turned 54. The month before, Gene Kelly and some friends gave her a birthday party in the San Fernando Valley. They knew how seriously ill Jean had become and weren’t sure she’d make it to her actual birthday (August 3), so they held it for her in July.