Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  Or maybe too independent. Ida was a woman in charge when that was unheard of. She was ahead of her time, the only female in her heyday to have complete control. What she lacked in popularity or awards, she earned back with respect and hard work from the people who worked with her.

  Ida Lupino: fierce, loyal, determined, versatile, introspective. She triumphed over adversity and Bette Davis at Warner Bros., reinventing herself as a strong, intelligent creative force. “I like the strong characters,” she told Patrick McGilligan. “I don’t mean women who have masculine qualities about them, but something that has some intestinal fortitude, some guts to it. Just a straight role drives me up the wall. Playing a nice woman who just sits there, that’s my greatest limitation.”

  Actress: 1931: The Love Race. 1932: Her First Affaire (Sterling Film Co). 1933: Money for Speed (Hall Mark Films/UA), High Finance (First National-British), The Ghost Camera (Twickenham Films), I Lived with You (Gaumont-British), Prince of Arcadia (Gaumont-British). 1934: Search for Beauty (Paramount), Come On Marines! (Paramount), Ready for Love (Paramount). 1935: Paris in Spring (Paramount), Smart Girl (Paramount), Peter Ibbetson (Paramount), La Fiesta de Santa Barbara (MGM short). 1936: Anything Goes (Paramount), One Rainy Afternoon (UA), Yours for the Asking (Paramount), The Gay Desperado (UA). 1937: Sea Devils (RKO), Let’s Get Married (Columbia), Artists and Models (Paramount), Fight for Your Lady (RKO). 1939: The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (Columbia), The Lady and the Mob (Columbia), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (TCF), The Light that Failed (Paramount). 1940: They Drive By Night (WB). 1941: High Sierra (WB), The Sea Wolf (WB), Out of the Fog (WB), Ladies in Retirement (Columbia). 1942: Moontide (TCF), The Hard Way (WB), Life Begins at 8:30 (TCF). 1943: Forever and a Day (RKO), Thank Your Lucky Stars (WB). 1944: Hollywood Canteen (WB), In Our Time (WB). 1945: Pillow to Post (WB). 1946: Devotion (WB), The Man I Love (WB). 1947: Escape Me Never (WB), Deep Valley (WB). 1948: Road House (TCF). 1949: Lust for Gold (Columbia), Woman in Hiding (Universal). 1951: Hard, Fast and Beautiful (RKO/Filmakers), On Dangerous Ground (RKO). 1952: Beware, My Lovely (RKO/Filmakers). 1953: Jennifer (AA), The Bigamist (Filmakers). 1954: Private Hell 36 (Filmakers). 1955: Women’s Prison (Columbia), The Big Knife (UA). 1956: While the City Sleeps (RKO), Strange Intruder (AA). 1969: Backtrack (MCA-TV/Universal). 1972: Deadhead Miles (Paramount), Women in Chains (Paramount TV/ABC), Junior Bonner (Cinerama), The Strangers in 7A (Carliner/CBS-TV). 1973: Female Artillery (Universal TV/ABC), I Love a Mystery (NBC-TV), The Letters (ABC-TV). 1975: The Devil’s Rain (Bryanston). 1976: Food of the Gods (AIP). 1978: My Boys Are Good Boys (Lone Star). Director: 1949: Not Wanted (Film Classics, uncredited), Never Fear (Eagle-Lion/Filmakers). 1950: Outrage (RKO/Filmakers). 1951: Hard, Fast and Beautiful (RKO/Filmakers). 1953: The Hitch-Hiker (RKO/Filmakers), The Bigamist (Filmakers). 1966: The Trouble With Angels (Columbia). Co-Screenwriter: 1949: Not Wanted (Film Classics), Never Fear (Eagle-Lion/Filmakers). 1950: Outrage (RKO/Filmakers). 1953: The Hitch-Hiker (RKO/Filmakers). 1954: Private Hell 36 (Filmakers).

  Marilyn Maxwell: The Other Marilyn

  by LAURA WAGNER

  The two Hollywood Marilyns were a lot alike. Both blondes were used and abused by men, both were never taken seriously as actresses and both lives were cut tragically short—Monroe at 36, Maxwell at 49.

  For all their similarities, however, gulfs set them apart. Maxwell was breezier, more unaffected and likable. She was tougher than Monroe, never seeming as emotionally fragile despite her hard life. Yet, Monroe was a star and has become an icon.

  Maxwell never fell neatly into the “dumb blonde” image. She gave more the impression of being a cool, sometimes calculating beauty. She could sing, dance and move easily within comedy and drama, a voluptuous blonde with—is this possible?—a down-to-earth personality.

  Marilyn was like that other Marilyn in that her private life garnered publicity, but didn’t really help her career. Her ex-agent George Ward confirms this, claiming she “picked the wrong men, always. She brought on her own problems.” Frequent co-star Bob Hope was one of those “wrong men”; he took a strong interest in her personally and professionally, but instead of helping her build a solid list of credits, he took up her time with camp shows, TV, radio and routine film roles. So close were they, she became known on the Paramount lot as “Mrs. Bob Hope.” The association might have cost her a career, although certainly MGM was also at fault, mishandling Marilyn at a crucial period in her professional life.

  Her stage struck mother, readying her newborn daughter’s entrance into show business, bestowed upon her a marquee-worthy name: Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, born August 3, 1922, in Clarinda, Iowa. She was the second child (brother Lelland preceded her) of Hal, an insurance agent, and Anne Maxwell, piano accompanist for dancer Ruth St. Denis. Marilyn would remark that her mother “tried to fulfill her ambitions through me,” while author Sally Presley, who went to Central High in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with Marilyn, noticed “she had a very pushy mother, one of those stage mothers like you read about.”

  The family (minus father; the Maxwells were divorced when she was just a baby) traveled a great deal with St. Denis’ act. Marvel’s upbringing consisted of dancing lessons and vocal studies. Her first public performance was at age three doing a butterfly dance at the Brandeis Theater in Omaha, Nebraska. Her singing was later developed with a local band made up of classmates. Instead of a normal, healthy, stable childhood, Marvel was usually found performing at local Elks and Kiwanis Clubs, and traveling with her mother.

  By the age of 15, Marvel was settled in Fort Wayne, attending regular school and singing at a radio station her brother managed. Amos Ostot, small-time regional bandleader, heard Marvel on the air and promptly hired her to sing with his band for $35 a week, prompting Marvel to quit school before her junior year. It wasn’t long before actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who fronted his own dance band, stole her away from Ostot, and a year-long Midwestern tour followed.

  Portrait of Marilyn Maxwell, 1944.

  Some report that, after the tour with Rogers, Marvel spent some time with the Bob Crosby band before returning home. She got a job singing in an Indianapolis nightclub. She was again “discovered.”

  Marvel joined Ted Weems’ band around 1939. Her stint with the band gained her regular exposure on tour and radio’s To Beat the Band. She would record only one song with the band, the novelty “Monstro the Whale,” with Red Foley sharing the vocal.

  It was Weems who persuaded her to try for a Hollywood career. Marilyn later told Motion Picture that Weems “suggested that I go to the Pasadena Community Playhouse, and he’d finance me and pay my salary for a full year. It would be an investment for him. Then, when I was signed by a studio—as he was so sure I would be—I could pay it all back.”

  During her tenure at the Playhouse, Marvel kept herself busy on radio’s Best of the Week, Look Who’s Here and The Camel Caravan Show, as well as singing in Soundies. A Paramount test in early 1942 failed and she left the Pasadena Playhouse discouraged after six months to go on a camp show tour. But as she was entertaining the troops, MGM was entertaining hopes of signing her after viewing her failed test.

  When she returned home, a surprised Maxwell found a contract from the biggest studio in Hollywood awaiting her. They also went to work fixing her teeth, eliminating Marvel from her professional name (ironically the name her mother thought would make her a star), put her on a diet and dyed her hair red, then a more becoming blonde—in short, giving her the glamour treatment.

  MGM started her off in numerous bit parts, where she usually stood out (she was 5'6"). Marilyn’s first featured role came in Salute to the Marines (1943), but it wasn’t until Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case (1943), playing doctor Van Johnson’s flirtatiously bold love interest, that she gave audiences cause to take notice.

  Criminal Case was the first of her three appearances in the popular series. Van is Dr. Randall “Red” Adams, assistant to Dr. Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore), chased by the amorous Maxwell. The movie establishes Van as a
minor wolf, offering to give nurse Donna Reed a “complete examination,” which she (wisely) rebuffs. Marilyn, on the other hand, is very much the aggressor, to Van’s delight and fright. “Are you available?” she asks the smitten, but cautious, Johnson. He is eager at first, but her provocative remarks leave him flustered. After she puts on “lipstick that doesn’t come off,” Van is totally hooked, but still reluctant, fearing marriage in his future.

  Van and Marilyn made an attractive couple, but although they would team in four MGM films, the studio didn’t promote them—they weren’t the same dewy-eyed, lush romantics the popular duo of Van and June Allyson were. Marilyn obviously had been around.

  Swing Fever (1943) billed her as “Introducing Marilyn Maxwell.” It was a nice showcase, but hardly the kind of movie in which a young actress wants to be introduced, especially at MGM when your romantic leading man isn’t Gable, Taylor, Lawford or even James Craig, but the homely bandleader Kay Kyser. The film did give her a chance to sing, and her infectious vocalizing is well served on “One Girl and Two Boys,” “Mississippi Dream Boat,” “I Planted a Rose” and “I Never Knew.”

  Next up: Three Men in White (1944), again in the Gillespie series with Johnson. The relationship between the reluctant doctor and the all-too-willing socialite was advanced, just barely. “How do I know whether or not I want to get married?” whines the tormented Van. “Come around tonight and I’ll show you,” Marilyn quickly coos back, leaving Van, as usual, speechless. Gun-shy, Van refuses to kiss her for fear he’ll “hear the birdies sing” and wake up married. The aggressive Marilyn is asked to behave, but without blinking, quips, “Not if I can help it.”

  Three Men in White concentrates on newcomer Ava Gardner (soon to be a Maxwell nemesis) and her invalid mother, but it’s Marilyn who steals the show with her racy dialogue: “It doesn’t wrinkle easily,” she tells a panicking Van of her new dress, prompting him to run away. Even with the repetition of Marilyn pursuing and peppering Van with innuendo (“I need a doctor and you’re the doctor”), her delivery, not really what she said, was too playful not to be totally fun; it helped a series that was so deadly serious, what with melodramatic illnesses and personal problems. Marilyn Maxwell and her “one-track mind” brightened the Gillespie films.

  Abbott and Costello were not at their best in Lost in a Harem (1944), but for a few inspired moments. The boys, a couple of prop men in a traveling show featuring singing thrush Hazel Moon (Marilyn), get stranded in the desert. They become hypnotized pawns of evil Sultan Douglass Dumbrille, but are recruited by Prince John Conte to restore order in his kingdom. The Sultan soon falls for Marilyn, wanting her to become wife #38, but her heart belongs to the young, very attractive prince. When one of his many wives bitterly consoles the Sultan that “Blondes are fickle,” Dumbrille deadpans: “Blondes are scarce!”

  The only song she would sing in Lost in a Harem, “What Does It Take to Get You?,” contained the prophetic line: “I can even get as far as second base with Frank Sinatra too.” Marilyn would later start a famously serious romance with Sinatra.

  Marilyn met first husband John Conte (right) while working on Abbott and Costello’s Lost in a Harem (MGM, 1944). They were married from 1944 to 1946. Bandleader Jimmy Dorsey is at the left.

  Marilyn may have been connected with Sinatra and several other actors around Hollywood, but darkly attractive co-star John Conte won her heart off-screen. Conte, sometime actor, announcer, singer and later owner of a TV station, became engaged to Marilyn. “I was on Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall at the time,” singer Lina Romay remembers. “She was in Los Angeles with us, and he was in New York [via hookup]. They became engaged on the radio.” Lina adds wryly, “It was interesting, I’ll tell you.” Conte and Marilyn were wed shortly after Lost in a Harem wrapped in 1944. They divorced in 1946.

  After her divorce, handsome heartthrobs Peter Lawford, Turhan Bey, Tony Martin and Michael North soon beat a path to the lucky girl’s door, and it was around this time that Sinatra reentered her life. Insiders claim the relationship was so hot and heavy he contemplated divorcing wife Nancy for her, and that it took a gang of advisers to talk him out of it. They appeared on radio together and were discreetly photographed in the fan magazines as “just friends,” but everyone knew better. Frank’s buddy Nick Sevano would later recall, “She was gorgeous—simply gorgeous, and nice too. She spent hours showing me around Hollywood when I first came out because she knew that I had once been associated with Frank, and they were crazy about each other.”

  An incident, later reenacted for 1992’s Sinatra: The Mini-Series (MM was played by Carol Barbee), ended the affair for good. Nancy had accidentally discovered a diamond bracelet she thought Frank meant to surprise her with. When Marilyn unwisely came to the couple’s New Year’s Eve party, she was seen by an incensed Nancy wearing said bracelet, and thrown out. Needless to say, after a huge argument, Sinatra cooled off seeing Marilyn.

  The end of the story on her and Sinatra didn’t come until 1952. At the time, Frank was married to Ava Gardner, a relationship his advisers couldn’t control. Ava saw old flame Maxwell in the nightclub audience one night where Frank was performing, convincing herself he was flirting and singing to Marilyn from the stage. When the tempestuous couple got home, it became a major issue in another fight; later in her autobiography, Ava admitted to overreacting to the innocent episode.

  Back at MGM, they didn’t seem to need her; Lana Turner got priority on all the top roles Marilyn could have handled, and, in the musical area, well, MGM’s warehouse was bursting with talent. She was assigned two production numbers in the all-star Ziegfeld Follies (1946), made mostly in 1944; she recorded “Glorifying the American Girl” with Lucille Ball and Lucille Bremer and “A Trip to Hollywood” with Ball and Jimmy Durante. Neither were filmed.

  Instead Marilyn became a regular (February to July 1944) with Bing Crosby on The Kraft Music Hall, excellent exposure for a young singer. She was also doing her bit for the war effort by way of the USO. She devoted much of her time entertaining the troops, traveling extensively.

  She had been featured on-screen for two years and 1945 saw Marilyn place just ninth on the Quigley “Stars of Tomorrow” poll. This delayed “recognition” (ninth is, well, ninth) did nothing to change her status at MGM—she made only one 1945 appearance, her last Gillespie, the delightful Between Two Women, with Gloria DeHaven as the second gal of the title. When Van becomes interested in nightclub singer DeHaven, who’s coping with psychosomatic starvation, Marilyn becomes jealous. “I admit that girl isn’t exactly repulsive, but anything she’s good at I can do better, quicker and cheaper!” Whoa, girl.

  Van’s still, inexplicably, afraid to kiss her, but it finally happens when Marilyn buys $100,000 worth of war bonds for the “privilege.” Presumably headed for the altar, the doctor is signed, sealed and delivered to the very patient (and very understanding) Marilyn Maxwell at the end of her third hospital drama.

  A nice opportunity arose, or so she thought, in late ’45 when she was tapped to play the globe-trotting female reporter in Nellie Bly, a play headed for Broadway. The cast was strong, featuring the popular team (Of Thee I Sing) of William Gaxton and Victor Moore, with music by Johnny Burke and James Van Heusen, and co-produced by Eddie Cantor. Sensing failure, MGM pulled Marilyn out of the show when it landed in Philadelphia, after only two months on the road. They were right. When the show reached New York on January 21, 1946, with Joy Hodges spelling, it tanked, receiving scathing reviews. It lasted only 16 performances.

  She would finish up her MGM contract in 1946. George Kelly’s popular play The Show-Off was filmed at least three times previously, this fourth version a tailor-made vehicle for Red Skelton. Red is a braggart, Marilyn his wife who adores him, despite his shortcomings. The pair dueted on Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the film’s one highlight.

  Marilyn, seen here with Van Johnson and Gloria DeHaven in Between Two Women (MGM, 1945), had her best comedy moments through he
r three appearances in MGM’s “Dr. Gillespie” series.

  What might have helped secure future, important roles at MGM was her small but overwhelming part as Belle in Summer Holiday. Made in the summer of ’46, it was considered a hard sell, sitting on the studio’s shelf until 1948, by which time, Marilyn was gone. It was a musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness, set at the turn of the century, centering on the Miller family, headed by father Walter Huston, and including newly graduated son Mickey Rooney. He’s in love with neighbor Gloria DeHaven, but when she is forbidden to see him, he travels to the seedy part of town and meets up with Maxwell.

  As Belle, sixth-billed Marilyn has just 13 minutes (eight days to shoot) to make an impact, and her “pictorial and sensuous” (The New York Times) performance demands attention. It was her best acting opportunity in her four years at MGM, and her first “bad girl.” “That was my real introduction to acting,” she would say later. “For although I’d been in pictures before I played the role of Belle, I certainly hadn’t been an actress. I’d been Marilyn Maxwell, going through some necessary motions for the camera and luckily getting by.”

  Assisting her was director Rouben Mamoulian’s use of color to suggest Rooney’s attitude. Mamoulian’s approach to this striking sequence is described by author Hugh Fordin in his volume about the Freed Unit at MGM, The World of Entertainment: “Eager to face life in the raw, the adolescent boy visits a bar and finds himself mesmerized by a pretty, vulgar barmaid, who plies him with liquor to loosen his inhibitions. Mamoulian wanted to show visually the transformation from a cheap hussy into a beautiful dream girl as seen through the boy’s eyes.”