by Ray Hagen
Between 1974 and ’78, Mercedes was heard on over two dozen hour-long episodes of CBS Mystery Theater, an attempt to recreate the fun and excitement of radio drama’s heyday. She was happily reunited with many of her former cohorts, radio veterans thrilled at the chance to do it all again. Radio legend Himan Brown was producer-director. The series won a 1975 Peabody Award, but it didn’t revive the public’s interest in what was by then a dead-in-the-water art form.
Mercedes was always an outspoken “Irish farmer Democrat” and never cared who knew it. She had no patience with those who think performers should keep their politics to themselves, believing anyone in any profession should proclaim their political views if they felt like it. “I thought that’s what America was all about,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve been misinformed.”
Her autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, was published in 1981. It’s safe to say that in the annals of celebrity autobiographies there’s been nothing quite like it. No mere list of show biz triumphs, it was a stream-of-consciousness rocket ride in no particular sequence, mixing rage, tenderness, torment and exultation. Startled reviewers raved. Christopher Schmering in The Washington Post called it “page for page, the most unusual and ambitious celebrity memoir in years…a weird kind of triumph…inspired nuttiness and bag-lady wisdom.” “It has a convulsive mixture of exhilaration and dread that has no match in American show business literature,” said David Thomson in American Film.
On November 16, 1987, her 45-year-old son John shot and killed his wife Christine, their 13-year-old daughter Amy and their nine-year-old daughter Suzanne. He wrote a two-line note saying he was responsible for the slayings, called his lawyer, aimed two guns to his head and killed himself. Three weeks later William Fifield, John’s father, died of a heart attack brought on by grief and stress.
Since then Mercedes did occasional voiceovers and narrations (one for a Dr. Seuss book) but made few public appearances. She died in La Jolla, California, on March 2, 2004, two weeks short of her eighty-sixth birthday. But she could be justly proud of her legacy of a passionate dedication to her chosen profession and a unique body of work.
When I asked Mercedes if she had some overall approach to crafting a performance, she replied: “Walter Huston told me that acting is looking and listening, that’s all it is. You cannot then make a false move, gesture, reading or interpretation. If you look and if you listen, you must then give a natural reaction. But, like every other truism, it’s simple and therefore most difficult to learn. I surely haven’t mastered it because it means so much more than it says. It embodies concentration, trust, alertness, energy, freshness, dedication, a complete lack of inhibition, honesty—it says everything. Look and listen. I think acting is a lot simpler than most people make it out to be.”
1949: All the King’s Men (Columbia). 1951: The Scarf (UA), Inside Straight (MGM), Lightning Strikes Twice (WB). 1954: Johnny Guitar (Republic). 1956: Giant (WB). 1957: A Farewell to Arms (TCF). 1958: Touch of Evil (Universal). 1959: Suddenly Last Summer (Columbia). 1960: Cimarron (MGM). 1961: Angel Baby (AA). 1965: Run Home Slow (Emerson). 1968: The Counterfeit Killer AKA Crack Shot (Universal), Deadly Sanctuary AKA Justine (Italian). 1969: 99 Women AKA Island of Despair, Isle of Lost Women (Commonwealth). 1972: The Other Side of the Wind (unreleased), Like a Crow on a June Bug AKA The Young Prey, Sixteen (Futurama), Killer by Night AKA The City by Night (CBS-TV), Two for the Money (ABC-TV). 1973: The Exorcist (WB) voice only, The Girls of Huntington House (ABC-TV), The President’s Plane Is Missing (ABC-TV). 1975: Who Is the Black Dahlia? (NBC-TV). 1977: Thieves (Paramount). 1979: The Concorde: Airport ’79 (Universal), The Sacketts (NBC-TV). 1983: Echoes (Continental).
Jane Russell: Body and Soul
by RAY HAGEN
“My favorite thing to do was sing, I enjoyed it more than anything else,” Jane Russell told me in 1999, when we began a lengthy series of conversations about her life and career. Singing isn’t what most people remember about Jane Russell.
In speaking with many of her old friends and musical colleagues, my own impression of Jane was confirmed. I’d detected a remarkably centered attitude about her sometimes rocky life and times, a bawdy and self-deprecating humor, and barely a trace of ego.
Jane became world-famous overnight in her first movie, a stardom based solely on her buxom figure and stunning appearance. It all could have died right there had she not worked hard to earn her stripes, becoming in the process an immensely likable screen presence and a fine singer with a breezy gift for comedy. Her large family and spiritual upbringing kept her level-headed and grounded, allowing her to weather her storms with wry amusement and without going “movie star nuts” when the going got rough.
Jane was not the first actress in her family. Her mother, Geraldine Jacobi, was taken on as an extra by George Arliss when his Disraeli played Boston and he subsequently hired her to tour in Daddy Long Legs. One of their stops was the Army camp in which First Lt. Roy Russell was stationed. They had first met in high school but hadn’t seen each other in six years. Russell proposed, and three days later, on March 22, 1918, they were married in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was 27.
After their firstborn, a son, died at 15 months old, Geraldine decided to return to the stage. But she again became pregnant and returned to her parents’ home in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Jacobis had a summer cottage in Bemidji, Minnesota, and it was there on June 21, 1921, that Jane Russell was born.
For years every bio of Jane has erroneously stated that her real name is Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell. Nuh-uh. Jane explains, “Geraldine was my mother and Ernestine was her sister, my aunt. My name was just Jane Russell. I was never called Ernestine, never was supposed to be.”
After some failed business ventures, Mr. Russell was hired as an office manager in the Los Angeles office of the Andrew Jergens Co. They bought a home in Burbank, and had four more children—Tommy (1924), Kenny (’25), Jamie (’27) and Wally (’29). The family moved to Van Nuys in 1932. Jane grew up as a skinny, gangly, bossy tomboy. She also learned to play piano and, with her brothers, formed a family band. “I always loved music and we all took music lessons of one kind or another,” says Jane. Jazz music was her passion and her idols included Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.
Portrait of Jane Russell, 1950.
Jane played the lead in Van Nuys High’s production of Shirt Sleeves, sang in the glee club, and got to know her soon-to-be husband. “Robert Waterfield was a year older but was two years ahead of me in school,” she recalls. “The first time I sang solo in public was with the high school band, it was “Deep Purple.” I was a senior and he was out of school, but he’d heard I was gonna do it so he came and stood in the back of the auditorium. I guess he was impressed. I was impressed, I’d never sung in public before.” They soon began dating.
“Jane and I met in eighth grade,” says her schoolmate and lifelong friend Jack Singlaub. “We were in the same class. Her high school boyfriend, Bob Waterfield, was one semester ahead of us. We also took a wonderful drama class at Van Nuys High. We’d all been struggling from the impact of the Depression and we didn’t have a great deal, but being in extended families made us really tight and cooperative. Jane had four brothers and was a big tomboy. She’d always be involved in athletics with the guys, touch football, whatever. Jane’s mother was a very practical person, and at one point our Bible teacher. Jane had a good religious background, and that was a great help.”
Jane’s first ambition was to be a dress designer, but her father’s death in 1937, following a gallstone operation, forced her to take a $10-a-week job as a chiropodist’s receptionist. She was soon able to supplement her salary by modeling dresses, coats and hats for photographer Tom Kelley (who later won fame for his calendar shots of Marilyn Monroe). Kelley taught her the basics of poise and presence for the camera and, upon seeing the photos, Jane saw to her surprise that she was no longer a lanky tomboy.
“It was a long time before Jane rea
lized she was a girl,” says Jack Singlaub.
One day in 1940 she stopped at Max Reinhardt’s Theatrical Workshop to see a friend and decided to enroll. After one term there she shifted to Mme. Maria Ouspenskaya’s school for six months.
Tom Kelley arranged for her to take some screen tests. “Kelley sent me to do a test at Fox,” says Jane. “They told him I was un-photogenic. Then I went to Paramount and they said I was too tall. Maybe for Alan Ladd.”
But her modeling paid off. Agent Levis Green saw and swiped one of Kelley’s photos of Jane and took it to a few film studios and eventually to Howard Hughes, who was searching for an unknown team to star in his new Billy the Kid western, The Outlaw. Hughes was then a famous aviator who had dabbled in making independent movies since the late 1920s and had made Jean Harlow a star in his 1930 smash Hell’s Angels. The multi-millionaire bachelor was also well known for romancing the most desirable actresses in Hollywood, and had now decided to create a new Harlow. He liked Jane’s photo and had her tested with Jack Buetel in the haystack fight scene. Almost 200 girls and boys were tested before Hughes announced that his two new stars were Jack Buetel and Jane Russell. She received a seven-year contract and a starting salary of $50 a week.
The Outlaw began shooting on location in Moencopi (near Yuma) Arizona in 1941 under the direction of Howard Hawks, but Hughes’ micromanaging of the production drove the veteran director crazy and he walked off the picture, leaving the inexperienced Hughes to direct. Hughes “didn’t know how to tell you what it was he wanted,” Jane said in 2000 on the TCM documentary, Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies. “It was nothing to have 50 takes of any simple little scene. We took nine months to make that picture and it should have been made in about eight weeks.”
Hughes had hired publicist Russell Birdwell to give Jane Russell “the buildup.” For two years Jane spent every weekday from nine to five posing for publicity stills, usually with the camera aimed down her blouse. Her picture appeared on almost every magazine cover short of Popular Mechanics. Said Jane: “When I was on location for the picture, they started giving me the buildup. I christened boats, I judged baby contests, I reclined in haystacks, I sprawled on beaches, always in a low-cut blouse. They sold me like a can of tomatoes. There were at least 15 photographers out there. They’d say, ‘Come on, Janie, bend over and pick up those two pails,’ and they’re aiming down to my navel. A few days before Hawks left, one of the photographers had gotten loaded and he and the unit director wanted me to jump up and down on a bed in a nightgown. I knew something was wrong so I went to Hawks and I was crying, and he said, ‘Listen, you’re a big girl now and you are responsible for yourself. If you don’t like something, you say no, loud and clear.’ From then on, if I didn’t like what they were doing I’d just say ‘No.’”
A photo session was booked with legendary Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell, who had a few bales of hay delivered to his studio for the occasion. Hurrell found Jane to be a friendly young girl with an experienced model’s ease before the camera. He had her lolling in the hay wearing a short skirt and a tight, scoop-necked blouse and it’s impossible to count how many stills were made that day. She lay back, leaned forward, turned this way and that, chewed on apples and hay stalks, sneered sullenly (even smiled once or twice) and brandished pistols, exuding attitude to burn. “Hurrell wasn’t trying to get just filth,” says Jane, “he was trying for something that fit the picture. He was a very nice guy.” Those stills have become among the most iconic images in film history and are being reproduced to this day.
Obsessed with how Jane’s chest photographed, Hughes designed a special brassiere for her to wear that wouldn’t show any seams under her jersey blouse. He had inadvertently invented the first seamless bra but Jane tried it on once, found it extremely uncomfortable (“It was a contraption!”), ditched it, put some Kleenex over her own bra to mask the seams and never told Hughes.
The Hays office disapproved of Jane’s cleavage, in the ads as well as in the film. Most of the promos used the Hurrell haystack photos, or cartoonish exaggerations of them. Beside her glowering countenance blazed the words “Mean, Moody and Magnificent.” As Jane now explains it, “That glowering expression on my face? I’m thinking, ‘What a bore!’”
One scene from the film showed Jane leaning over Billy’s bed, accidentally revealing way more cleavage than had yet been seen in an American movie. Cinematographer Gregg Toland reshot the scene, but Hughes insisted that the first take be used. That scene was one of the major reasons for the Johnston Office’s objections to the film. Hughes refused to make any of the 108 cuts demanded and fought all attempts to censor The Outlaw, realizing full well the value of publicity. As late as 1949, when the film finally had a nationwide release, Baltimore Judge E. Paul Mason commented: “Miss Russell’s breasts hung like a thunderstorm over a summer landscape.”
It was only when Jane returned to L.A. that she became aware of what had been going on. “That’s when I saw what the photographers had been doing out on location,” she says. “Here were all these magazines with all this crap in them, and I just wanted to puke. I was upset, my mother was upset, my aunt was upset. She even went to see Howard Hughes about it.”
Jane had suddenly, overnight, become an internationally known movie star, a punchline for countless jokes and one of World War II’s most popular pin-ups, without ever having been seen in a movie.
She continued dating Bob Waterfield on and off, and in 1942 found herself pregnant. Waterfield assumed he was the father but Jane wasn’t so sure. This was highly scandalous in 1942, and Jane opted to have an illegal “back alley abortion.” It was a hellish experience, and left her unable to bear children. Waterfield stuck by her, but they again separated and began dating others. Jane had a rather serious affair with actor John Payne, but she and Waterfield soon reconciled.
The Outlaw opened in San Francisco in February 1943, playing for only eight weeks. Despite poor reviews, it coined a mint. Hughes had made some minor concessions and managed to get the all-important Seal of Approval from the Johnston Office. He had Jane doing personal appearances at the theatre between showings to beef up the box office. “We did nine shows a day and I was playing straight for a comedian,” she explains. “All the posters were up and the Catholic Church was saying that if you go to see that picture, you’re out of the church. I didn’t like what was going on, I hated the posters, I hated the whole thing. I said, ‘I’m not going to do this any more,’ and I left and went home.” When Jane bolted, Hughes yanked the film with no public explanation.
Jane and Waterfield promptly eloped to Las Vegas and were married on April 24, 1943. Waterfield was then star quarterback for the UCLA football team (and for some years thereafter the Cleveland and L.A. Rams) and was an even bigger star in his field than Jane was in hers. When he was inducted into the Army, Jane followed him to Fort Benning at Columbus, Georgia. Hughes made her sign an agreement that she wouldn’t work for any other studio or follow her husband if he were sent overseas and put her on suspension (she had been raised to $75 a week). In Columbus, she worked in a beauty parlor and for the local war bond drive under her married name.
“When she did that one movie, it changed everything,” says Jack Singlaub. “I was in a parachute regiment at Fort Benning when Bob was in the infantry school, and I asked her if she’d like to come out and visit our regiment. She did, and that was a major public relations effort for us. Getting pictures with Jane Russell was a really big deal. I was just in the background and it was amusing seeing these senior officers stumbling over themselves being nice to Jane.”
When Waterfield was given a medical discharge in 1945, they returned to California. Jane told Hughes she was ready to return to work and he loaned her to producer Hunt Stromberg for Young Widow, a routine sudser about a mopey war widow in which Jane mostly wore tailored suits. Her performance was reasonably pleasant but despite reams of here-she-is-at-last publicity, the film tanked.