Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  In addition to TV and her scattered screen roles, she played in stock (Can-Can, Bells Are Ringing). In the late ’60s she even headlined a Queens, New York, burlesque show where she stripped. About this strange career choice, she simply told the press, “The point of it all was that it was satirical and funny, and I got a good response from the audience.” What she failed to mention was that probably, with a child to support, she needed the money.

  Her best performance in a long time came in Stage to Thunder Rock (1964). She’s an ex-prostitute who returns home to her family, finding nothing but disillusionment. She has endured life’s hard knocks, urging her sister not to make the same mistakes. It was a rich, rewarding role in a movie that did nothing to jump-start her lagging film career.

  Arizona Bushwhackers (1968) gave Marilyn a fun role as a saloon girl who “knows where all the bodies are buried,” as confidant to her boss, bad guy Scott Brady. Howard Keel shows up in town to become sheriff, amid spy activities, and becomes immediately attracted to the sassy, smart siren.

  She worked steadily into the early ’70s, especially on TV: The Debbie Reynolds Show, O’Hara, U.S. Treasury, and Men at Law. Her last role was Wild Women (1970), a telefilm about five female convicts. The Hollywood Reporter singled out Marilyn’s role, that of a “blowsy, overweight, brassy ex-madam,” as “stealing the show,” adding, “Miss Maxwell, in particular, has probably been dying to play a part like this for years, and she makes every minute count.”

  Wild Women co-star Marie Windsor replaced Marilyn in Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), possibly due to illness. Marie later said, “She had been on the picture about a week, and they had shot a couple of her scenes, but apparently, she wasn’t able to be feisty or bawdy enough, especially with Joan Blondell.” In a 1999 interview with writer Jim Meyer, Windsor raved, “She was real, full of fun, really a regular gal … absolutely no phoniness!” She and Windsor were great friends going back to their MGM days.

  Despite losing Gunfighter, things were looking up for Max. She was preparing another nightclub act in Chicago and two projects were being offered her: the movie Mama’s Boy and a recurring role on the soap opera Return to Peyton Place.

  Then, on March 20, 1972, the startling news came out over the UPI wire: “Marilyn Maxwell, who starred in numerous song-and-dance movies in the 1940s and later on television comedy shows, died today at her home at the age of 49. Miss Maxwell, who had been under treatment for high blood pressure and a pulmonary ailment, was found in the bathroom by her son, Matthew, 15 years old, when he returned home from school in the afternoon, the police said.”

  Hollywood was stunned. Her funeral, arranged by friend Rock Hudson, was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church and was packed with her show business friends. Bob Hope, fighting back tears, delivered her eulogy: “If all her friends were here today we’d have to use the Colosseum. Marilyn had an inner warmth and love for people … and the thousands of servicemen she entertained over the years felt this. Who would have thought that this little girl from Clarinda, Iowa, would do this much and go as far as she did?

  “Who knows why some of us are called earlier than others? Maybe God needed a lovely gal to sing and cheer Him up, and so He called her … I must say it was a great job of casting.”

  Bob Hope’s heartfelt words were shared by all who knew and worked with Marilyn. “I’d like my career to be like Ginger Rogers’,” she told Louella Parsons in 1946. “Straight dramatic roles alternating with musical-comedy ones. I’m willing to work very hard to attain that.” Maybe it didn’t work out just that way, maybe she was never a big star, but she became well-liked with both fans and Hollywood professionals. The Hollywood Reporter said at her passing: “A fitting epitaph for Marilyn Maxwell: She was humble when her career was riding high, never beefed when things got rocky, and if she had an enemy in this world, she never mentioned it.”

  As Marvel Maxwell: 1942: This Is No Laughing Matter (Soundie), Tea on the Terrace (Soundie), Dreamsville, Ohio (Soundie), Goodbye, Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama) (Soundie), Havin’ a Time in Havana (Soundie). As Marilyn Maxwell: 1943: Stand By for Action (MGM), Best Foot Forward (MGM), Pilot #5 (MGM), DuBarry Was a Lady (MGM), Presenting Lily Mars (MGM), Salute to the Marines (MGM), Thousands Cheer (MGM), Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case (MGM), Swing Fever (MGM). 1944: Three Men in White (MGM), Lost in a Harem (MGM). 1945: Between Two Women (MGM). 1946: The Show-Off (MGM). 1947: High Barbaree (MGM). 1948: Summer Holiday (MGM), Race Street (RKO). 1949: Champion (UA). 1950: Meet the Winners (Columbia short), Key to the City (MGM), Outside the Wall (Universal), Hollywood Goes to Bat (short). 1951: The Lemon Drop Kid (Paramount), New Mexico (UA). 1953: Off Limits (Paramount), Paris Model (Columbia), East of Sumatra (Universal). 1955: New York Confidential (WB). 1956: Forever, Darling (MGM). 1958: Rock-a-Bye Baby (Paramount). 1963: Critic’s Choice (WB). 1964: The Lively Set (Universal), Stage to Thunder Rock (Paramount). 1968: Arizona Bushwhackers (Paramount). 1969: From Nashville with Music (Bradford). 1970: The Phynx (WB), Wild Women (ABC-TV).

  Mercedes McCambridge: Inner Fire

  by RAY HAGEN

  In her first movie, All the King’s Men, Mercedes McCambridge got slapped in the kisser and won an Academy Award. That slap may have been the reason. Men had slapped women around in movies for generations and the ladies react in standard movie fashion; they gasp in wide-eyed shock, they whimper, they burst into tears, they fall down, they get lovely weepy close ups. Not this time. When John Ireland hauled off and slugged Mercedes, she cried “Oww!” She always believed that “Oww!” won her the Oscar. Maybe so, but whenever she’s on screen, just try looking elsewhere.

  I first encountered Mercedes McCambridge as a star-struck teenage fan in 1951, again in 1963 as an interviewer for Films in Review magazine, and finally in 1983 while she was starring in Agnes of God at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. (All her quotes here, unless otherwise specified, are from my taped conversations with her.) At first I was unsettled by her refusal to behave like a movie star granting an audience. Instead I’d be whisked along on a roller coaster ride of unexpected warmth, scalding intensity and ice-cool drollery as she assumed, on my callow part, an equal interest in and knowledge of life beyond movies. I kept up as best I could, mesmerized by every twist of that electric voice I’d grown up listening to on the radio.

  That low, vibrant, one-in-a-billion voice, always her most distinctive asset, was central to her career from the very beginning. It was during the now-fabled “golden age of radio” that her unique name and voice first became familiar to audiences on hundreds of radio dramas and soap operas for over a dozen years. But it was that 1949 movie, All the King’s Men, that firmly established her as a “name” player, if not a top-line superstar. She was a most attractive, slim-figured woman who bore little resemblance to the brittle, bitter, granite-featured neurotics she usually played on film, and she became one of the few character players capable of achieving a multi-media star image throughout her career.

  Carlotta Mercedes Agnes McCambridge (she took Agnes as her Confirmation name) was born on a farm near Joliet, Illinois, on St. Patrick Day, March 17, 1918. Her parents, Marie and John Patrick McCambridge, were mid–Illinois farm people, as were their people before them dating back over a hundred years. Her father’s ancestry was Irish and her mother’s Spanish. (“God, what a Medea she could have played,” Mercedes later wrote.) She had two younger brothers. One was injured in a plane during World War II, the younger became a marriage counselor in Los Angeles.

  Mercedes emerged from childhood during the Depression. “We never were wealthy people,” she said. “There were times when we were very poor, like any farmer who went through the 1930s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the reason my mother and father didn’t go broke and the reason probably that my brothers and I were able to be brought up fairly comfortably. Not always comfortably, there were some bad times when we had to take in roomers, things like that, but that’s all right, who’s knocking it?”

  It was Cardin
al Mundelein, of the archdiocese of Chicago, who gave her destiny its major turn. He attended a performance of The Taming of the Shrew by the St. Thomas Apostle High School in Joliet and noticed 16-year-old Mercedes in a small part. He had her brought to him after the performance and inquired about her plans. Mercedes recalled, “I was frightened at meeting him, and he asked me what I was going to do for college. I told him I likely wouldn’t go because there wasn’t any money, and I fully expected to go to work. He asked me if I would enter the scholarship contest at his school, Mundelein College. I did, and I won it, and I got through college for the magnificent sum of $30 for four years.” She won by reciting Joyce Kilmer’s Blue Valentine, a four-and-a-half-minute semi-religious poem she’d learned in her speech class.

  Portrait of Mercedes McCambridge, 1955.

  The head of the drama department at Mundelein was Sister Mary Leola, and she became Mercedes’ inspiration, as well as her teacher. “She invented me,” said Mercedes. “She is everything I know about my work. A brilliant actress, a wonderful director, a hard task-master and disciplinarian with a wildly inventive mind and a dedication to the theater. A great lady.”

  At Mundelein, a girls’ college, Mercedes often played men’s parts, since they were traditionally done by the girls with the heavier voices, “and I guess mine was the heaviest, always has been. I loved playing Petrucio in Taming of the Shrew because he was so flamboyant and wild. I had a mustache and everything.” She also played Viola in Twelfth Night and belonged to Sister Mary Leola’s Speaking Choir. “That was Sister’s innovation at school. Eight ‘darker’ voices, as she called them, and eight ‘lighter’ voices, and I was the soloist in the choir. We would read poetry in concert. A vice-president from NBC, Sid Strotz, had to come and see us because one of the girls was a relative of his or something. He was very impressed and the next day he asked us down to NBC. We went in, none of us ever having been in a radio studio, and Sister rolled up her full outer sleeves and conducted us as a conductor would an orchestra. A half hour later the choir, en masse, had signed a one-year contract with the NBC Chicago Symphony Hour, and I had a five-year contract as an NBC actress. It happened that quickly.

  “I was a sophomore, 17½, and I really didn’t take it very seriously. I didn’t know that I should be at their disposal. I’d go off for weekends, and then NBC would call and wonder where I was. But they weren’t paying me unless I worked so I didn’t see why I had to tell them where I was every minute. I did many, many programs while I was in school. We lived on the far South Side of Chicago, and I would go to Mundelein and have two classes, then go to NBC, go back for more classes, and then go home. I traveled 144 miles a day by train and bus. All the train men got to know me and respect my need to study and they’d often ask somebody not to sit in the seat next to me so I’d have room for my notebooks.

  “That was necessary because I had to maintain a B-plus average. I had to take a double major for the scholarship, English and Drama, but if the marks went down the scholarship would have been lost. And while I was making money at NBC and was in no dire need of it, as I had been for the first year, still I felt that if I was given the scholarship in the first place, I ought to maintain it. And I did, but I was in an awful shape when I graduated, dreadfully tired. The doctor told me to go away for a while ’cause I needed a rest, so I went down to the travel bureau and asked the lady where I could go for $1,100 and she said Guatemala, which meant little or nothing to me. She said I could go for three weeks and have a wonderful time, so I gave her the $1,100 and I went to Guatemala. And it was glorious, I’m so glad that I did it.”

  18-year-old NBC radio actress Mercedes McCambridge, 1936.

  She graduated on June 7, 1937, with a Bachelor of Arts and the drama school’s honor award, the Golden Rose. For the next few years she was a steadily working radio actress in Chicago, then the production center for radio’s daytime soap operas. She was a regular on such NBC soaps as Betty and Bob, The Guiding Light, Midstream and This Is Judy Jones. At night she was heard on countless NBC dramas.

  She met and quickly married writer William Fifield, then a CBS announcer: “Bill and I were married in 1940. We only knew each other for three weeks. I think it was a reaching out to anything that looked like permanence. I guess he believed that anyone with 16 years of a convent education should be pretty permanent, and I thought any son of a minister must surely be permanent and steadfast.”

  The Fifields moved to California where she continued her radio career. Their son, John Lawrence Fifield, was born there on Christmas Day, 1941.

  Soon after, she received some strong advice from John Barrymore, who thought she might become a great stage actress: “We worked together on The Rudy Vallee Sealtest Hour. Poor John. I was there the night they carried him out, and two days later he was dead. But he kept telling me, ‘This is ridiculous, why are you here, why aren’t you in New York?’ So I told him, ‘Well, it’s necessary for me to make a life for my child, and what would I do in New York?’ And of course it was necessary for him to make a life for what was left of John Barrymore. We were both doing The Rudy Vallee Sealtest Hour to eat.”

  Mercedes made it to New York with her son John in June ’42 to do Abie’s Irish Rose on radio. Throughout the 1940s she was probably radio’s most steadily employed actress. She had regular roles in such staple soaps as Big Sister, This Is Nora Drake, Stella Dallas, The Second Mrs. Burton and Helen Trent and appeared regularly in virtually all of radio’s dramatic series (I Love a Mystery, Grand Central Station, Inner Sanctum, Suspense, Murder at Midnight, Everything for the Boys, Gangbusters, Bulldog Drummond, Cavalcade of America, etc.). She frequently played multiple roles—sisters, triplets, even whole families (both genders). Writer Arch Oboler used her many times on his classic CBS series Lights Out, saying, “She has an inner fire of a sort I’ve seen in only two other actresses, Nazimova and Elisabeth Bergner.”

  Orson Welles, on whose radio programs she frequently appeared, called her “the greatest living radio actress.” “That’s pretty funny, isn’t it?”, she later said. “What would a dead radio actress be? But I worked with Orson a long time. Orson’s daughter Beatrice is my god child, and I’m very grateful to Mr. Welles.”

  She always recalled her years on radio with great affection: “I had such freedom. They’d let me do just about anything I wanted.”

  In 1944, John Huston arranged a screen test for her at MGM. She laughed as she recalled, “He thought I could play Jo in Little Women, but they said that I had ‘flaring nostrils,’ like a wild beast, I guess. They didn’t like my nostrils so they made some for me. They poured things on my face and left me in total oblivion for 15 or 20 ghastly minutes, and then took it off and extracted from it some wax flaps which they attached to the extremity of my nose. I looked more like Bob Hope. Anyhow, they didn’t like what they saw. Nor did I.” (Five years later, MGM made Little Women with June Allyson as Jo.)

  Nor were her stage attempts successful. Her first Broadway job was in 1945 as Sister Margaret in The Hasty Heart, but “nine days into rehearsal the director, Bretaigne Windust, fired me because he said I was pregnant with warmth, and until I gave birth to that quality I was as ugly to watch on stage as a woman large with child. Unquote. I never got to know Windy well enough to ask him what he meant. But I can remember walking down 44th Street after he’d fired me. It was raining, and New York seemed pretty cruel then. Later I was with one of my fancy writer friends, Sidney Sheldon, who took me to the Stork Club to forget the sorrow of Hasty Heart and this nice, portly gentleman across the way sent over a note saying he was Marc Connolly and could I come to the Ambassador Hotel the next day and read for him for Hope for the Best. I got the part. I was ecstatic. I replaced Dina Merrill. Dina had begun in it and they didn’t like her, so she got what I got in The Hasty Heart, and I thought how ironic it was that out of somebody else’s misfortune I now had the part. I went on in that lovely, euphoric way until New Year’s Eve in Washington DC when we opened. The notices in Washi
ngton were the finest notices I’ve ever received. The next day, New Year’s Day, there was a phone call. I expected it might be the president at least, after such a glorious opening—and they gave me my notice. I was through at the end of the week because they didn’t feel I was strong enough to come into New York, not having a name, and they got Jane Wyatt to replace me. So I got to be about the most replaced person going there for a while.”

  John Ireland and Mercedes in All the King’s Men (Columbia, 1949).

  She did make it to Broadway, but there were more disappointments. Elliott Nugent’s A Place of Our Own opened April 2, 1945, and closed five days later. (Robert Garland in his New York Journal-American review said: “There’s a likely looking newcomer called Mercedes McCambridge, who reached the Royale by way of amateur theatricals and radio.” Rowland Field, Newark Evening News: “Mercedes McCambridge, who has been curiously in-and-out of several plays before they reached Broadway this season, is finally on hand in person to show herself to be a particularly winning young actress.”) Twilight Bar opened in Baltimore March 12, 1946 and closed in Philadelphia on March 23. A month later Sam and Bella Spewack’s Woman Bites Dog managed to last four days. (George Freedley, New York Morning Telegraph: “Mercedes McCambridge has authority and humor, rather in the Shirley Booth line, as a reporter.” Lewis Nichols, New York Times: “Mercedes McCambridge, attractive and from radio, is half the love interest; Kirk Douglas supplies the rest.”) Mercedes later recalled Douglas borrowing her eyelash curler.