Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  She and William Fifield divorced in 1946: “When war was declared he was a conscientious objector. He went away, came back some two or three years later and we were not the same people at all. It was tragic.”

  Mercedes continued in radio between stage flops. It paid the bills, but in 1947 she decided she didn’t like what was going on around her: “Analyst couches, nose-bob jobs and Dexamyl tablets—I thought there must be more than that.” So she sold her phonograph and fur coat, packed all of two suitcases and took off with her pre-school son John on a year-and-a-half adventure, first to St. Croix, Guadeloupe and Martinique, then to London and on to Dublin, Paris, Genoa and Portofino. She wrote an account of this journey, and its liberating effect on them both, in a book titled The Two of Us, published in London in 1960.

  On her return she went back to radio. Especially notable was a superb CBS series, Studio One (1947-48), which featured Mercedes so often it might as well have been titled The Mercedes McCambridge Show. She co-starred with important theater and film names in adaptations of well-known classics and original plays. The series was directed and hosted by Fletcher Markle.

  She did another play on Broadway, The Young and Fair, with Julie Harris and Rita Gam. It opened November 22, 1948, but she left it a few weeks later to begin work on her first film, Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men.

  Rossen and Max Arnow had held open auditions in New York for the role of political hatchet-woman Sadie Burke and Mercedes attended the call with her long time friend, actress Elspeth Eric. She was aghast at the way the hopeful candidates were quickly herded in and out of Rossen’s office like so much cattle, and by the time it was her turn Mercedes was in a raging fury: “I read them the riot act about how they were in the slave business, not the theater, and if they wanted beautiful faces they should have stayed out in California, but they shouldn’t come here and destroy actors’ egos.” Rossen was shocked, and as an enraged Mercedes was halfway out the door he gave her the part then and there. She’d unintentionally given him exactly the Sadie Burke he wanted.

  The movie of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel told of the rise and fall of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), a ruthless politician patterned after Huey Long. The movie was a great hit, and Mercedes’ intense portrayal of Stark’s embittered hench woman (think Mary Matalin on crack) won critical raves and the Academy Award as 1949’s Best Supporting Actress. Her acceptance speech, delivered with excited enthusiasm, has been widely quoted: “I’d like to say to every waiting actor, hang on. Look what can happen!” Crawford was named Best Actor and All the King’s Men won Best Picture. She also won two Golden Globe Awards (Best Supporting Actress and Best Newcomer) and the Look and Associated Press Awards. Mercedes McCambridge’s career was forever transformed.

  Mercedes and Dean Jagger holding their 1949 Oscars, with presenters Ray Milland and Claire Trevor (May 23, 1950).

  A few weeks before she got her Oscar, on February 19, 1950, she married Fletcher Markle, with whom she had worked so often in radio.

  Columbia, although impressed by her performance in All the King’s Men, felt she was too specialized and did not offer her a contract, but she obtained three film roles in rapid succession, all released in 1951. But Lightning Strikes Twice for Warners, The Scarf for United Artists and Inside Straight for MGM were all strictly programmers.

  “Ruth Roman Is All Woman In ‘Lightning Strikes Twice!’”, screamed the ads, which featured some of Roman’s sexiest studio glamour portraits. It was Mercedes’ lot to be vengeful and jealous in mannish shirts and dungarees as she terrorized the top-billed star, and it seemed that she had already become typed as a bitter shrew (and named accordingly—“Sadie Burke” in All the King’s Men, and in this, “Liza McStringer”). But the critic for the N.Y. Herald-Tribune saw beyond all that. “Outstanding among the principals is Mercedes McCambridge,” he wrote. “In her unrequited love she is an extremely feminine artist, whose portrayal rises in intensity to a believable denouement.”

  Mercedes sang professionally for the first time in The Scarf, a mood-piece in which she starred (for once) as a seen-it-all hash-house waitress who sang for her supper. The producers had intended to get a singer to dub her song, “Summer Rains,” but Mercedes wasn’t having any: “I said, ‘Why? She’s not supposed to be a great singer, if she were she wouldn’t be working in a place like this. Let me try it.’ I think that should be done more often.”

  In July of 1951 she made her one and only record, a single for Decca, singing “While You Danced, Danced, Danced” with Gordon Jenkins’ orchestra. Jenkins, a good friend, asked her to do it as a favor and they talked of doing some more records, but nothing came of it.

  She returned to radio, now as the star, playing a lawyer on the NBC series Defense Attorney (1951-52), and as a spinster schoolmarm in Family Skeleton on CBS (1953-54): “I did radio then because I couldn’t do anything else. I was pregnant both times, both sons, but both didn’t make it.” Her friend Marlene Dietrich was to be the godmother of the first boy. The diagnosis for these stillborn births was placenta previa.

  John Ireland and Mercedes in The Scarf (UA, 1951).

  She resumed moviemaking in 1954, delivering a stunning performance as Joan Crawford’s jealous, vengeful, half-insane enemy in Johnny Guitar, a pseudo-psychological Republic Western that has since become a full-blown camp classic. The rivalry was not all in front of the camera, and newspapers of the day gleefully reported on the feud for weeks. Crawford had wanted Claire Trevor for the part and agreed to the younger Mercedes only reluctantly:

  “She didn’t want me in the beginning. But then it was all right until a scene which was shot outside in Arizona, and I had about four pages of dialogue, a monologue. And because of my background, I knew it. We shot it in one take and the crew applauded and Joan was in her trailer not more than about 50 feet away, and that’s what started it. Wow. Now, it sounds as though I’d done something great. I hadn’t, any girl in my speech class in college would have been able to do the same thing. Jayne Mansfield could have done it if she’d studied. It was just the fact that I got through it and the guys knew they’d get home early that night, that was all. But it made Joan mad. And she was the star of the picture. I guess if I were Joan Crawford I’d be mad if some Mamie Glutz horned in on the star territory that way. I’d have probably done the same thing. But when she was on the Academy Awards show a few years later she looked so great, I really thought she was marvelous, so I sent her a wire and said, ‘You stole the evening, you were just wonderful.’ So then she wrote me a nice letter, and now these two childish women have reverted to some kind of normalcy.”

  But Crawford apparently nursed her grudge. In her sugar-coated 1964 autobiography A Portrait of Joan (written “with” Jane Kesner Ardmore), she wouldn’t even name her Johnny Guitar co-star, referring to her only as “an actress who hadn’t worked in ten years, an excellent actress but a rabble-rouser.” It was this anonymous actress, claimed Joan, who caused all the trouble.

  Sterling Hayden, Crawford’s leading man, called the star’s treatment of Mercedes “shameful.”

  Mercedes, in her own 1981 autobiography, took off her gloves: “Poor old rotten-egg Joan. I kept my mouth shut about her for nearly a quarter of a century, but she was a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady. I’m still not going to tell what she did to me. Other people have written some of it, but they don’t know it all, and they never will because I am a very nice person and I don’t like to talk about the dead even if they were rotten eggs.”

  In 1956 the “actress who hadn’t worked in ten years” received her second Academy Award nomination for her brief but riveting performance as Luz Benedict in Giant, directed by George Stevens from Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel. She told Michael Buckley in Theatre Week in 1991, “People say, ‘You were so mean in Giant,’ but I wasn’t. My father had left me the ranch. I send my brother, Rock Hudson, off to Virginia to buy a horse and he comes back with Elizabeth Taylor. What the heck is that? The
re goes my ranch!”

  She admitted, “I would’ve liked to have won the Oscar for Giant.” (Dorothy Malone won for her absurdly overblown Jessica Rabbit turn in Written on the Wind.) But she got another treasured prize, her Giant script autographed by an admiring Edna Ferber in praise of Mercedes’ skill in bringing Luz so effectively to life.

  Mercedes had made her TV debut as a regular cast member on NBC’s One Man’s Family as far back as 1949. She’d continued to appear frequently on TV dramas and talk shows, but didn’t sign on for another series until Wire Service in 1956, a series about newspaper life in which she alternated every third episode with George Brent and Dane Clark. It lasted 39 episodes and was cancelled after only one season.

  In the misbegotten A Farewell to Arms the following year, Mercedes did a bit as a stern head nurse. Critics enjoyed Elaine Stritch and Mercedes in their nice-nurse/nasty-nurse pairing but savaged the movie. An ignominious failure, it was a sad end to producer David O. Selznick’s career.

  A happier experience was Orson Welles’ now-classic Touch of Evil (‘58) in which she did an uncredited cameo as a vicious leather-jacketed Mexican junkie. This was a favor to an old friend: “I did it for Orson. I was swimming one morning. They called me in the house and said that Orson was on the phone and I knew he was shooting out at Universal with Janet Leigh and so I wondered why he would he calling me in the middle of the morning. He said, ‘Could you be out here at 1:30 and do you have a black leather jacket?’ and I said, ‘No, but I think my son has one.’ So I put on some black slacks, a black sweater and John’s black leather jacket, went out, shot the scene, and was back home again by 5:00 that afternoon. But it was for Orson. I’d do anything for Orson, and I think I could do anything for Orson. I could probably walk on water if Orson would say so.”

  In 1959 she was Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in Suddenly, Last Summer—an erratic and peculiarly mannered performance—and the following year was a raw-boned pioneer woman who strikes it rich in the lethargic remake of Cimarron.

  Angel Baby (1961) was one of her favorites. It’s an uneven film, but not easily forgotten. Nor is Mercedes’ performance as the sexually frustrated older wife of a young faith-healing evangelist (George Hamilton). “Angel Baby suffered by being released soon after Elmer Gantry,” said Mercedes. “If Angel Baby had had a tenth of the money that was spent advertising Elmer Gantry it would have been recognized for what it is, a much better picture. I told Burt Lancaster that. Poor little Angel Baby got pushed around because the wonderfully trusting producers mortgaged everything but their wives and children to make it and had nothing left. It’s an honest and true picture, but because there was no money for promotion nobody will ever know about it.”

  Mercedes and Fletcher Markle had divorced in August 1961, and early in ’63 the fates almost vanquished her. Her son John, then 21, was savagely beaten by four muggers and taken to Santa Monica Hospital with a basal skull fracture. He managed to pull through, but no sooner was he out of danger than Mercedes broke a foot and then two fingers while rehearsing for a West Coast stage production of The Little Foxes. The very evening she broke her fingers, John was in an auto accident and his skull was fractured again. This time bone actually pierced his brain and Mercedes was told the surgeons were certain the second fracture would be fatal. She left the hospital in a state of shock and expecting John to die.

  “The medical authorities say it was emotional bankruptcy, that I wrote a check and there were no more emotional funds. The two accidents of my son, breaking my foot rehearsing The Little Foxes and then breaking two fingers while I was still in the cast with the foot, they all happened within an eight-week period. The night before my birthday they released me from the hospital for shock, and my son was still there. I don’t remember going home from the hospital. I functioned, I did all the things people do. I drove a car, don’t remember doing it, wrote checks, dealt with insurance people, don’t remember any of that, and I was very neat and tidy about it. I dressed in my nicest robe, put out all of the vital papers on the table and took every pill in my apartment. Luckily there weren’t that many, but there were enough so that I had no pulse or blood pressure, and I was dying. Now nobody loves life any better than I do, but I wanted, I guess, to be—out—go away, I don’t want any more now, enough! If I’d had a chance to recover from one of the crises before the next one came, that would have been different, but it was like a snowball, it got bigger and bigger, and it knocked me down. I let go of God’s hand, I was swamped.”

  Not only did Mercedes survive but John did too. He had a series of serious operations and resumed his studies at UCLA, working for an MA in international trade and planning to study law.

  That August, Mercedes returned to the New York stage after an absence of 15 years. She replaced Shelley Winters as Jack Warden’s co-star in an off–Broadway production of Lewis John Carlino’s Cages, which consisted of two one-act, two-character plays. In one she was a discontented career woman, in the other a prostitute. Like Angel Baby it was a low-paying project in which she believed. “My complete association with Cages has been less than three weeks,” she said during the run, “and only six of those days were spent in rehearsal. To get ready in six days is pretty phenomenal. The only way I can understand it is that God must be a member of Equity.”

  In January ’63 Mercedes took over from Uta Hagen the role of Martha in the Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and continued in it until it closed. Said Norman Nadel in his New York World-Telegram & Sun review: “Miss McCambridge brings to her role a good range of emotional response, plus a deadly effective way of holding herself in check for a few seconds before triggering her anger. It’s like the good backswing of a golf club.” “Anybody would drop dead to play a part like that,” she told Nora Ephron in a New York Post interview. “I can’t wait to get to the theater. Think of being paid to vent spleen and venom, all your pent-up monstrosities, every night. People pay thousands of dollars to psychoanalysts to let go that way.”

  If radio had been Mercedes’ first love, the stage was a very close second. “Every time I get a chance I run to do anything I can in the theater, wherever it is,” she said. Over the years she starred all over the country in productions of Agnes of God, Macbeth, The Little Foxes, ‘night, Mother, The Child Buyer, Medea, The Time of the Cuckoo, The Show-Off, The Miracle Worker, Candida, The Glass Menagerie, The Subject Was Roses, The Madwoman of Challiot, The Price, Black Eyed Susan and more. Back on Broadway, Mercedes got a Tony nomination for the short-lived Love-Suicide at Schofield Barracks in ’72 and starred in Lost in Yonkers in 1992.

  During her marriage to Fletcher Markle they had been social drinkers living the Good Life, as was everyone around them, until Mercedes’ addiction to drinking turned to full-tilt alcoholism. After a long, horrifying battle, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, she was finally able to reach the stage of recovery. Then, in the summer of 1969, Iowa Senator Harold E. Hughes called Mercedes to ask a favor. He knew of her battle with alcoholism and was himself an openly recovered alcoholic. He asked if she would come to Washington and testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics. He wanted a familiar face to bring attention to the need for altering a criminal code that stigmatized alcoholics but did nothing to help them. Her testimony was passionate, honest and articulate. She was certain that going public cost her much work in films, but nonetheless continued to speak at AA meetings, on TV, and in any public or private forum that could help other alcoholics in their recovery.

  The movies Mercedes made since then were mostly of the low-budget and even exploitation variety, done mostly to subsidize her preferred stage activities. There was one exception, and it was a lulu.

  She dubbed Linda Blair as the voice of Satan in William Friedkin’s mega-smash The Exorcist (1973), but it was a bumpy ride. She relished the opportunity to use her wealth of radio experience and she called it the hardest job she ever had. She reproduced not only the Devil’s obscenity
-laden dialogue but all the keening wails, screams, growls, wheezes—every sound of agony and evil that emanated from Linda Blair’s demon-possessed body. This was done in total secret, and she was promised, and shown, the on-screen credit card that would be used: “AND MERCEDES MCCAMBRIDGE as THE DEMON.” But when she went to the first preview, and the final credits rolled, her name was conspicuously missing. The jeweler’s credit was there, and the furrier’s, but no mention of Mercedes’ contribution to the film or to Blair’s performance. Most likely this was to bolster Blair’s shot at an Oscar. Mercedes’ fury with Friedkin knew no bounds. She would not be silenced, and in a no-holds-barred interview with Charles Higham in The New York Times (January 27, 1974) she blew the lid off. Now that the secret was out, the producers had no choice but to add a credit to the final prints. Not quite the same as she was promised, but now “AND MERCEDES MCCAMBRIDGE” appears at the end of the cast list. As a result, her contribution to The Exorcist is now more widely known than it would have been had they played fair in the first place. This irony amused and satisfied her.

  Mercedes signed on as Artist-in-Residence at numerous universities, and a half-dozen colleges awarded her honorary degrees. Stage and film actress Helen Hedman was an undergraduate at Washington DC’s Catholic University during 1972–73 when Mercedes taught Master Classes at their Speech and Drama Department. “The first time I met her,” Helen recalls, “she looked at me, introduced herself, put out her hand and gave me an incredibly firm handshake. I’ll never forget that handshake, holy mackerel. And that look in her eye! She came in close, and it wasn’t just ‘nice to meet you, blah blah blah,’ it really was nice to meet me, she really made me believe that. She was riveting, you couldn’t turn away once she had you. At first I was a little afraid of her, she was the most vivid person I’d ever met. It was like she saw right through you, but not in a bad way. She wanted to engage you in something she knew about that we didn’t know about. For undergraduate theater students, here was someone who really knew what it took, who’d had such a life. No bones about how tough it was, no bones about how rewarding it was, and how much work it was going to be. She was an in-your-face teacher, so focused on each one of us. She came into one of my oral interp classes and brought in some old radio scripts. Everybody had to get up and do it. She’d help us find a character’s voice, communicate everything with just the voice and totally commit to it. And she taught classes in film technique. We’d do scenes from plays and she’d teach us how to speak lines to someone off-camera. She was right beside the camera, holding your gaze, and it was like you were being hypnotized. You were in her beams, she was on you. She was intimidating only because she was so direct, so right-from-the-heart. She also did three or four lectures, all with cryptic titles. She did one called If Not Now, When? I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a phrase from Rabbi Hillel. Wouldn’t you know she’d know the teachings of Rabbi Hillel? It was about seizing the opportunities placed before you. We thought it was going to be like ‘Here’s some clues to show business I’m gonna pass on to you,’ but it wasn’t about becoming an actor, it was about how to be a person. We were dumbfounded. The students loved her. She was hard on us, even relentless, but not so much as to beat us down, like some teachers who totally break students. It was totally positive reinforcement. She really had that fire and communicated that to everyone. For me as an undergrad, to see that, and to want that, was the greatest thing I got from her. It was great to have her there, we were so excited to have the voice of Satan at Catholic U.”