by Ray Hagen
Young Widow (1946) started with William Dieterle directing but he was soon replaced by Andre de Toth (who was himself replaced by Edwin L. Marin). While at work on the film, a chance meeting with de Toth’s young secretary, Portia Nelson, turned Jane’s career (as well as Nelson’s) in an entirely different direction. “During breaks I’d go into one of the music studios to doodle around on the piano,” says Jane. “One day Portia heard me and asked me if I knew a certain song. I didn’t, so she sat down and played it, and I said, ‘You can play anything in any key, I oughta slap you into next week!’ That’s how we found out about each other’s singing. I told her she should never work as a secretary again as long as she lived.”
The Outlaw was given a limited release in a few cities in 1946. The ads still emphasized what Jane had become famous for but had a new line of copy, “How’d You Like to Tussle with Russell?” Also quoted was Judge Twain Michelsen’s remark to the San Francisco jury which acquitted the film of the charge of indecency: “We have seen Jane Russell. She is an attractive specimen of American womanhood. God made her what she is. Life is sordid and obscene to those who find it so.” Which sounds like something Russell Birdwell might have written.
Jane went to New York to do some in-person appearances with The Outlaw, and Portia Nelson came along with her. “I took her to the Blue Angel,” says Jane, “and I told the owner, Herbert Jacoby, ‘You’ve gotta hear this girl sing,’ Of course she ended up not only singing there, but she broke all records.”
Portia Nelson was thus launched on a lifelong career as a highly respected cabaret and recording artist. “Jane’s the best friend I ever had,” she told me shortly before her death in 1999. “I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
During the Chicago run of The Outlaw at the Oriental Theatre, Jane was playing straight woman to comedian Jimmy Connally, singing a few bars here and there as he clowned around on the piano. Jane was anxious to do some real singing but Howard Hughes was extremely doubtful that his star could cut it until Portia Nelson convinced him that Jane was indeed a very good singer, and that he had no business letting her be made a fool of by a silly comic. Says Jane, “Hughes was so nervous and scared about it. But the theater manager asked me if I knew some more songs. I said, ‘Sure, I know a lot of them,’ and he said, ‘Well, pick three, because that’s what you’re going to do. Jimmy’s on the train, on his way back to L.A.’ So I started singing. Portia, who was responsible for all this, ran from the wings into the bathroom and threw up afterward because she was so nervous. I wasn’t a bit nervous. I just figured, well, if I make a mistake I’ll just start over.”
Bob Hope and Jane in The Paleface (Paramount, 1948).
It came as a surprise to many when, in 1947, glamazon Jane Russell began appearing weekly as a singer on bandleader Kay Kyser’s popular radio show for about three months. Who knew? Kyser also used her as a vocalist on a couple of his Columbia singles, which led them to offer her a solo album, released as Let’s Put Out the Lights. Jane wanted to sing jazz but for these recordings she instead sang in a soft, romantic, occasionally bouncy pop style “because that’s what the company wanted.”
Still under personal contract with Howard Hughes, Jane got lucky when Paramount asked for her to co-star with Bob Hope in The Paleface (1948), which became Hope’s biggest hit outside of the Road pictures. Unlike many of his leading ladies, Jane’s character, Calamity Jane, actually drove the film’s plot, with Hope serving as her foil. Her strong presence and deadpan comic delivery surprised the public and ideally suited Hope’s style. They got on well together, not only in the film but subsequently in many stage and TV appearances. The Paleface gave some much-needed legitimacy to Jane’s film career, as she freely acknowledges to this day. Hope told a critical friend who dismissed Jane as a mere sexpot: “Don’t let her fool you. Tangle with her and she’ll shingle your attic.”
One of the reasons Jane had such a wonderful time making The Paleface was because it was the first movie she’d made that had just one director from beginning to end. Making movies, she discovered, could actually be fun. “I felt like I’d died and gone to Heaven.”
Also in 1948, Hughes loaned her out to producer Howard Welsch for Montana Belle, a routine Republic Western. Jane starred as an improbable Belle Starr, who robbed banks and ran a saloon. “It was a dreadful picture,” says Jane. “I said to the director, Allan Dwan, ‘What does she do in this saloon, does she sing?,’ and he sez, ‘Well, can you sing? Good, sing a song.’ So I said, ‘Well, I happen to know a song that would be very good for this and I know the gal who wrote it.’ So I dragged Portia Nelson in and had her sing him the song.” Thus Belle Starr became a saloon singer, performing “The Man in the Moon” and Nelson’s “The Gilded Lily.” The latter was a bright number sung very well by Jane, but without the help of a choreographer she looked fairly awkward performing it. She gave her friend’s song an additional boost by recording it as well. Hughes bought the film from Republic and put it on the shelf for four years.
Also in 1948 (by which time Hughes had taken over the troubled RKO studio) Jane did a limp comedy, It’s Only Money, co-starring with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, both then in the midst of their lowest career slumps. Jane played the girlfriend of bumbling bank teller Sinatra. When the film was finally released three years later, Sinatra (whom Hughes disliked) found himself dropped from first to third billing—raising Jane to first—and he was otherwise ignored in the ads, which pictured Groucho ogling Jane’s V-zone. Lest anyone missed the point, Hughes had changed the film’s title to Double Dynamite. Russell and Sinatra sang a duet of “Kisses and Tears,” which they later recorded for Columbia.
Early in 1949 Jane won favorable attention by singing “Buttons and Bows” at the Academy Award ceremonies. It had been sung by Hope in The Paleface and won the Oscar for Best Song of 1948.
She and Hope were a great success in 1950 when they played an in-person engagement at New York City’s Paramount Theatre, and Jane’s voice got almost as much attention as where it came from. In addition to playing the Paramount, she made a personal appearance at the Broadway theater that was showing The Outlaw, then in its first full-scale national release. It was revealed to be an innocuous and rather tacky little affair and received predictably scathing reviews, but, thanks to nine years of non-stop publicity, was a box office bonanza.
Hughes decided to put Jane to work as an RKO star and she filmed three black-and-white, noir-edged adventure yarns in a row. In each she played essentially the same role, a down-on-her-luck saloon singer who’d been around too many blocks too many times, but with a gritty knack for survival. First came His Kind of Woman (released in ’51), a sprawling, humorous action saga in which she was teamed with RKO contract star Robert Mitchum. She was merely, as she says, “the girl in the piece,” but she and Mitchum were a perfect match and their flinty banter proved that Jane could easily hold her own in strong company. Although Hughes saw to it that she was costumed in the tightest and lowest-cut outfits possible, and photographed to maximize the obvious, she never appeared for a moment to take herself or her physique at all seriously. By now, “Hughes was finally convinced I could sing and wasn’t afraid of it any more,” so she had two pleasant songs amid the mayhem, “You’ll Know” and “Five Little Miles from San Berdoo,” performed with professional ease. Mitchum’s on-screen assessment of these musical interludes is a flippant, “I’ve heard better but you sound like you do it for a living.” In 1951 she cut four sides for London Records, including her two songs from His Kind of Woman.
She did more of the same in two 1952 releases. The Las Vegas Story was a dud and Victor Mature was hardly in Mitchum’s laconic league, but Jane was spotlighted nicely singing a pair of appealing Hoagy Carmichael standards, “I Get Along Without You Very Well” and a duet with Carmichael of “My Resistance Is Low.”
Macao, re-teaming her with Mitchum (they became friends for life), contained enough Mitchum-Russell bickering to keep things fairly lively,
but was an unhappy experience for audiences, critics and cast. Jane says that director Josef von Sternberg “came to RKO to divide and conquer. We were all like family at RKO, including the crews. He was very rude to the crew, wouldn’t allow any food or drink on the set, not a Coke, not anything. He’d come to me and say something nasty about Mitch, then go to Mitch and say something about me, like ‘What are we going to do about this stupid girl?’ Finally he was thrown off the picture. Nick Ray was a good buddy of ours, so he and Mitch re-wrote it and Nick directed it. Mitch was a wonderful writer. He and Nick wrote the best parts of that movie. Anything that sounds at all natural is what they wrote.”
Again Jane was given two songs, a bright original number, “You Kill Me,” and the classic “One for My Baby.” For the latter, Hughes had her tightly encased in a highly publicized 26-pound mesh gown which seemed to be sprayed on. Hughes’ obsessive preoccupation with Jane’s anatomy, especially her breasts, was the subject of countless memos, and the results all but obliterated any chances Jane might have had to be seen as anything other than a sullen sexpot. Yet she had by now become quite popular, and reporters couldn’t write enough about her.
In the midst of this turgid trio, Hughes finally released Double Dynamite and Montana Belle. They came and went without a blink.
On June 21, 1951, the Waterfields adopted the first of their three children, a newly born girl they named Tracy. Later that year, Jane and her mother went to England where Jane was presented to the Royal Family. She was at that time looking to adopt an older brother for her new daughter and went to orphanages in five different countries, seeing countless war orphans who would never be adopted. Mrs. Michael Kavanaugh, wife of a struggling carpenter foreman and the mother of three children, offered her one-month-old son Tommy to Jane to bring to the U.S. so he could “get a good home and a fine education.” The British Child Adoption Act forbade the adoption of a British subject by foreigners who are not blood relations, but Jane was allowed to bring the boy home as a visitor and the Kavanaughs were not penalized by the British Courts. The U.S. courts later allowed the Waterfields to adopt Tommy legally. Newspapers here and abroad gave the story relentless coverage.
It was this experience which taught Jane about all the obstacles and red tape hindering adoptions worldwide and led to her founding the Women’s Adoption International Fund (WAIF) to legally allow American couples to adopt foreign orphans, since a sufficient number of American children were not available here for adoption. Later merged with International Social Service, WAIF eventually provided homes for over 51,000 orphans from all parts of the world, and it became what she’s always considered her life’s work. In a 1985 interview for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous she said, “I think if I hadn’t done The Outlaw and those kind of pictures, and had that kind of image, I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful with WAIF. People would come out of sheer curiosity, then hear the story of WAIF and most of them would get hooked.” She tirelessly used her celebrity to raise funds for and lobby Congress on adoption rights for the next 40 years before formally retiring from WAIF. “I really didn’t do it all by myself,” she said. “Somebody had to start it but we had marvelous volunteers that helped put it together while I went knocking on doors.”
Bob Hope once again came to Jane’s professional rescue. Paramount borrowed her for a sequel to The Paleface, Son of Paleface (1952), which proved to be almost as popular as the original. Jane was “The Torch,” once more a bandit queen by day and a saloon singer by night, but this time with an actual choreographer, Josephine Earl, to help out. Her big saloon number, “Wing Ding,” presented her in striped tights, mesh hose, opera-length gloves and a big picture hat and she socked the number over with assurance and humor, looking nothing less than spectacular. “Buttons and Bows,” sung solo by Hope in Paleface, was amusingly reprised here as a trio (Hope, Jane and Roy Rogers), and she had a comic duet with Hope of “Am I in Love?” Again, a happy experience all around and a good career boost after her string of RKO melodramas. Hope and Jane cut duets of “Wing Ding” and “Am I in Love?” as a Capitol single.
That year she also did an unbilled cameo in the latest of the Hope-Crosby-Lamour Road series, Road to Bali, popping up in a fantasy sequence at the end. Just as Lamour rejects Hope and chooses to go off with Crosby, Jane magically appears from out of nowhere in her “Wing Ding” showgirl getup, to Hope’s delight. But Jane takes Crosby’s other arm and he walks off with both babes.
In vivid contrast to her entire 1940s output (three movies in nine years), between 1950 and 1952 Jane was seen in seven films. And the best was right around the bend.
In 1951, Twentieth Century-Fox bought the film rights to Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which had become a hit Broadway musical in 1949. Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck intended it as a vehicle for their ’40s box office queen Betty Grable, but by 1952 Grable was on her way down and there was a new blonde on the lot, one Marilyn Monroe, who was definitely headed upward. Zanuck decided to cast her as Lorelei. Howard Hawks, set to direct, saw this as a way to finally work with Jane. Zanuck had scant faith in Monroe’s musical abilities and wanted some insurance, so he approved Hawks’ suggestion to borrow Jane from Howard Hughes for $200,000. She would play Dorothy Shaw, Lorelei’s best friend. Dorothy had been a fairly minor character up to now, so her role was considerably beefed up and Hughes specified that Jane would have first billing.
Jane, for her part, was overjoyed that she’d finally get to work with Hawks. He’d walked off The Outlaw 11 years earlier before ever getting the chance to direct her, but he’d liked her from the start. Says Jane, “Before he got on his plane and left, he said to Jack Buetel and me, ‘Now, don’t worry, kids, we’ll work together one day.’”
The press eagerly anticipated on-set fireworks between the Blowtorch Blonde and the Haystack Brunette, but they got on famously. Marilyn was then dating Joe DiMaggio and, since Jane was married to a football superstar, Marilyn wanted all kinds of advice from her on what life with a sports hero would be like.
Hawks decided to update the story to the present and went all out to make it the gaudiest and glitziest glamathon possible. Released in ’53, it was a whopping success and Jane, in the traditionally thankless role of “best friend,” all but walked off with it. Russell and Monroe were a dream team, both on- and off-camera, and even critics who thought the play had been unnecessarily vulgarized poured raves on the dazzling duo. Hawks later said that whenever the script hit a dry spot, he’d just film another long tracking shot of the two girls walking.
Jane sings “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” to preoccupied gymnasts in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Fox, 1953).
It was while filming Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that Jane first worked with two men who would have a pivotal influence on her future work: the legendary Broadway dancer-choreographer Jack Cole and musical arranger Hal Schaefer.
The dance numbers were directed entirely by Cole. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was mainly fun because of Howard Hawks and Jack Cole,” says Jane. “I dearly loved Jack, he was just a doll to work with. He beat his dancers, but with Marilyn and me he had the patience of Job, because he knew that neither of us were dancers. He was so patient it was not to be believed.”
“I first met Jane on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” says Hal Schaefer. “I’d been at Fox for about 12 years and was assigned to that movie. I didn’t get screen credit, but those were all my arrangements. Jane loved good pop and jazz music and we had very similar tastes, so we got to be friends. She wanted to be a better singer, so I started coaching her. Before that I’d been working with singers like Peggy Lee and Billy Eckstine. I’d always thought of Jane as a movie star glamour girl, I didn’t know about her singing, but in Gentlemen she showed a lot of talent, especially with that take-off on Marilyn. She surprised and impressed me and we’ve been friends ever since.”
Jane duetted with Monroe on “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” and “When Love Goes Wrong,” soloed on “Bye Bye Baby,
” did a wicked send-up of Marilyn’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and pulled out all the stops with her big number, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” This was set in a ship’s gym with a full chorus of actual Olympic athletes who paid way more attention to their muscles than to the Junoesque brunette trying vainly to catch their attention. The number ends with one of the divers causing Jane to take a header into the ship’s pool. This was an accident and the correct ending was later filmed, but the mistake worked so well they used that take for the final cut.
Jane and Marilyn were accorded the honor of putting their hand and footprints in cement at the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on June 26, 1953. The ceremony was lavishly photographed for the newsreels and showed the co-stars looking gleeful and gorgeous in their light summer dresses. Marilyn told Jane she thought their most famous features should be immortalized, rather than their hands and feet, by Jane leaning over into the cement and Marilyn sitting in it.
But, as always, one step forward, two steps back. When she returned to RKO, Howard Hughes decided to cash in on Jane’s great success in Blondes by giving her her very own shipboard musical. The French Line turned out to be a dreary potpourri of necklines and nonsense shot in 3-D, and as usual Hughes missed no chance to put the focus right back on Jane’s chest at every opportunity. The script even had her best pal (played by Broadway veteran Mary McCarty) address her as “Chesty.” Jane played a Texas millionairess who feared that every man she met would only be interested in her money. Yeah, right.
“Lookin’ for Trouble,” and finding it, in The French Line (RKO, 1953).
Her mediocre songs included “Any Gal from Texas,” a duet with McCarty, “What Is This That I Feel?,” “Well I’ll Be Switched” and a bawdy bump-and-grind routine, “Lookin’ for Trouble.”