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by Ray Hagen


  Jane’s costume for the latter was a one-piece black satin affair with three big panels cut out of the midriff with spangles added to what was left. This bizarre outfit was a compromise, Jane having refused to wear the teeny-weenie bikini first handed her. But thanks to the way the song was presented, the Motion Picture Association refused its Production Code seal to the film. Just as Jane was beginning to shake off her old Outlaw image, a whole new censorship brouhaha erupted.

  No longer afraid to speak up, Jane herself loudly and publicly agreed that cuts should be made. “I don’t object to the dance scene itself,” she was quoted as saying, “but some of the camera angles are in horrible taste. I had an awful time with some of the things they wanted me to wear—hardly anything at all. I fought and beefed and argued over several scenes. I don’t like the accent on sex and never have.” The press ate it up.

  The French Line opened late in 1953 without a seal and was promptly withdrawn. In the original version, which I saw on its opening day, the camerawork for “Lookin’ for Trouble” was tightly and closely focused almost entirely on Jane’s bouncing, overflowing and under-covered breasts, and in 3-D yet. A somewhat edited version played the country in 1954 and was unanimously panned. “Lookin’ for Trouble” was now shown entirely in long shot, and that’s the version that plays on TV today. Without the mammary distractions, it can now be seen as a silly but very well-performed number, Jane’s moves and steps now those of an experienced musical professional.

  The ads blatantly capitalized on all the publicity: “That dance you’ve heard so much about!” and “J.R. in 3-D … it’ll knock both your eyes out!”

  By this time, what with the French Line censorship wars, magazines and newspapers were going positively bonkers over the contrast between the dazzling on-screen Censorship Queen and the off-screen Jane Russell Waterfield. No born-again Christian, her spiritual foundation had been solidly in place since childhood. Jane and her brothers had built the non-denominational Chapel in the Valley in Los Angeles for their mother, who was its pastor. She had helped found the Hollywood Christian Group. She was still married to her high school sweetheart and was the mother of two children. She had founded WAIF and was its chief mover and fund-raiser. But now that sort of public attention would soar into unprecedented overdrive.

  In 1954 Jane embarked on an unexpectedly successful venture with popular singers Beryl Davis and Connie Haines, all members of the Hollywood Christian Group. That all three were at their peak of success didn’t deter them from embarking upon a career-within-a-career for all three, to everyone’s amazement including their own. As they recalled the saga:

  BERYL: “I was a member of St. Stephen’s Church in Hollywood. The church needed money for a new roof, and they turned to me. I was then married to disc jockey Peter Potter so it was easy to find friends who sang. Connie had a church background and Jane had a very religious background and I knew she liked to sing. When I sang on Your Hit Parade with Andy Russell, I knew his wife, Della, and she sang a little, so she came along.”

  JANE: “At the charity benefit I said, ‘Well, Connie, you’re gonna sing, but what are we gonna do?’ and when she said we could just greet the audience, I said, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous, why don’t we just sing?’ So Connie and I taught Beryl and Della ‘Do Lord’ and the four of us harmonized.”

  BERYL: “We went down to the basement below the stage and we learned ‘Do Lord’ in like three minutes. We went upstairs and closed the show with that. Well, it was a smash, all four of us on stage, you know, very glamourous group.”

  CONNIE: “I’d invited the A & R man from Coral Records to the church benefit and he was in the audience. He was so excited.”

  BERYL: “He came backstage and said, ‘That was great, would you like to record that?’ We said, ‘Okay, if we can find the time.’ We all had our own thing going and were terribly busy. So we picked out a few tunes, went in and recorded ‘Do Lord.’”

  JANE: “When Beryl’s husband put the record on Peter Potter’s Platter Parade, to decide if the song was a hit or a miss, Dinah Washington said, ‘That is the most sacrilegious thing I ever heard,’ but Ernie Kovacs said, ‘That’s terrific, that’s definitely a hit.’ Those were the two extremes we got.”

  BERYL: “So of course following that they said that now we’ve got to record some more. In the meantime, Della ran into some personal problems and asked us if we could find someone else. Rhonda Fleming loved to sing and wanted people to know she could sing, so our second recording session was with Rhonda. All the publicity about The French Line started at about that time and Jane was being severely criticized so the timing couldn’t have been better, or worse, depending on your point of view. The publicity was fabulous [laughs]—I mean it was wacko. The censor wouldn’t give it a clearance, and here we were singing spirituals and this woman is doing this movie that’s being censored! The dichotomy attracted all the newspaper people and all the TV shows wanted us. Then Rhonda had to leave and we went to Capitol and did another album as a trio. We were doing four-part harmony and now we had to switch to three-part. Connie stuck to the melody but Jane and I had to learn all new parts.”

  JANE: “We played Vegas and started touring all around the country. We had our piano man and a drummer, sometimes a bass man, so there’d be the six of us, and we just had a ball.”

  CONNIE: “People didn’t know Jane could sing, she was ‘just a movie star.’ Jane and Beryl had natural ears for harmony but I’m strictly a lead singer. We all sang together ‘til, would you believe, 1984. We gave 15 percent to WAIF and gave to our individual churches too. We were godmothers to each other’s kids. In all those years we never had a major disagreement. We all still talk frequently, we’re like sisters.”

  BERYL: “We kept together through husbands, divorces and babies. I listen every once in awhile to those records and they sound wonderful, really good. I can hardly believe that we got so organized to sing harmony parts. I’d do it again in a minute.”

  After “Do Lord” became a million-seller, the quartet made three more singles for Coral, billing themselves as The Four Girls. All eight sides were then released as an LP album titled Make a Joyful Noise (four songs with Della Russell, four with Fleming). In addition, Jane recorded three more double-sided Coral pop singles on her own. After re-forming as a trio, they signed with Capitol Records to do an album called Jane, Connie and Beryl: The Magic of Believing (1957). By then they had added many popular songs to their repertoire as well as some self-deprecating special material spoofing their public images.

  In the midst of all this, Jane somehow continued making movies. Underwater! was released in 1955 and had Jane swimming toward the audience from all directions in a red bathing suit. Its Florida premiere was actually held underwater as a publicity stunt. Jane, in swimsuit, aqua lung and flippers, watched it unreel with some of the hardier critics way down below. “I’ve had to do everything else,” she remarked at the time, “I might as well do this.” But for all the hoopla, the film itself was merely a standard sea adventure in which Jane had considerable trouble sustaining a Spanish accent.

  This was her last film for RKO, Howard Hughes having sold the studio after completing Underwater! Her contract with him would soon expire, but he proposed a new and extraordinary contract that, despite the advice of others not to re-sign with him, Jane found pretty hard to resist. It would cover six films to be made on loanout over a five-year span and giving Jane director approval, plus leaving her free to do anything else she wanted. It was a million-dollar contract with the payments to be spread out over 20 years at $1,000 a week. It provided Jane a degree of long-term financial security undreamed of when Hughes was paying her 50 bucks a week.

  Meanwhile, an accident of timing cost her the chance to play singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (1955). As Jane explains, “MGM had offered me Love Me or Leave Me, but I’ll Cry Tomorrow [Lillian Roth’s biography] was being filmed at the same time so I couldn’t do them both and I’d heard that Lillian
Roth wanted me to play her. MGM wanted me to play Ruth Etting but I said I’d rather do the Roth thing. I guess nobody thought I could play such a wildly dramatic part, so they finally gave it to Susan Hayward. By that time they’d cast Doris Day in the other one, so that’s the way it went.” She regrets that she never got to work at MGM and would have loved playing opposite James Cagney in the Etting movie.

  Instead, she was next seen as Jeff Chandler’s troubled wife in Foxfire (1955), a middling B-level Universal drama in which she suffered mightily under a new and unbecoming short hairdo.

  The Waterfields had formed their own production company, Russ-Field Productions, with Jane as chief asset and Bob Waterfield as executive producer. Their first production, which turned out to be a less-than-auspicious beginning, was Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955). Jane and Jeanne Crain starred as a pair of dizzy singing sisters in Paris. They sang a slew of hideously over-arranged standards (Anita Ellis dubbed Crain’s voice) and the production numbers were garishly ugly. “Everything about that picture was overdone,” says Jane, “or underdone, whatever. They were just doing it off the cuff, the whole thing, day by day. I knew there wasn’t enough star power to make it go but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. We had a good time ‘cause we spent six months in Europe with Jack Cole, but we didn’t make any money.”

  Upon returning to the States, she had the good fortune to be teamed opposite Clark Gable in Fox’s The Tall Men, her final 1955 release. It was a good, big, rowdy Western in which she amusingly drawled a folksy number called “I Want a Tall Man” at four different points during the story, each version with lyrics wryly mirroring the progress of her scrappy relationship with Gable. (In one of those sequences she was shown bathing outdoors in an old tub, but only from the shoulders up and without a hint of cleavage. No other studio exploited her figure in the crude manner that Hughes had always done.) She was convincingly strong, independent and outdoorsy in The Tall Men, and when at one point her hoyden character was forced to don a fancy red gown she actually seemed realistically uncomfortable and gawky in it. She loved working for director Raoul Walsh (“I adored Raoul, I called him my father and always phoned him on Father’s Day”), and also got on happily with Gable. Their on-screen rapport was easy and credible, despite his being 20 years her senior. The film was a success and critics paid Jane favorable notice.

  Film historian James Robert Parish, in his The RKO Gals, commented on the difference between her work at RKO and at other studios: “It was not simply a case of Jane seeming to be better than she really was because of slick technical production values and a more high-powered cast. She actually rose to the occasion in Grade-A surroundings. Her frequently vulgar screen image (more due to Hughes’s structuring of her screen presentation than to Jane’s own personality) lost much of its hard-boiled crude overtones when in classier company, and she was transfigured frequently into a more brittle character exhibiting confidence, ease and experience.”

  Chicken dinner with Clark Gable in The Tall Men (Fox, 1955).

  In 1956 the Waterfields adopted their third child, a nine-month-old boy. He was named Robert John, at least on the birth certificate. Since Bob Waterfield had been tagged “Buck” by his teammates, their new son was called Buck from the beginning.

  Hot Blood (1956) cast Jane and Cornel Wilde as Hollywood’s idea of a fiery gypsy couple. There wasn’t much to it but Jane did have one excellent song, “I Could Learn to Love You.” Jane sang the verse live, a cappella, during the filming, with her prerecorded vocal of the song proper, which she does not lip-synch, played over the soundtrack as the stars continue miming the action of the scene. The only song in the film, it was an interesting way to move the story along and was by far the classiest sequence in an otherwise pedestrian movie. Jane’s brothers were played by her real-life brothers, Jamie and Wally. (Jamie had previously done a non-speaking bit in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.)

  She next played the title role in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), again being directed by Raoul Walsh. Jane, in a red wig, played a prostitute who was kicked out of the U.S. and made a fortune as a wartime whore in Hawaii. But the movie was so watered down as to seem utterly inexplicable. Mamie’s whorehouse was now a dance hall headed by a blonde-wigged Agnes Moorehead, who admonished her girls that they were to provide only dancing to the avid servicemen, nothing more. Why then was the “house” an illegal military scandal and Mamie so looked down upon by “decent” people? Censorship was still strongly in force in 1956, Howard Hughes notwithstanding. Jane’s leading man was Richard Egan, who had also co-starred with her in Underwater! As with Hope, Mitchum, Walsh and Gable, Egan became a lifelong buddy.

  Jane performed a silly song for her customers, “Keep Your Eyes on the Hands,” which she recorded for Capitol. On the B-side she sang “If You Wanna See Mamie Tonight” (sung under the main titles of the film, but not by Jane).

  The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957) was a drab and unsuccessful comedy about a kidnapped movie actress, and Jane’s first black-and-white movie in five years. Director Norman Taurog saw it as a Technicolor comedy while Jane envisioned a more suspenseful black-and-white drama. “It was just as much my fault as the director’s,” Jane now admits. “It would have been much better if either one of us had been the boss.” A resounding critical and box office failure, it was Russ-Field’s final production.

  A much happier experience was singing with Bobby Troup’s quartet in 1958. Troup was doing a series of programs on jazz music for the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) and, knowing of Jane’s interest in jazz, he invited her to sing on the show every day for a week. Without any film mogul or record company to dictate terms, she was free to sing whatever she wanted the way she wanted, and acetate recordings of the series reveal perhaps the most relaxed and assured singing she had yet done. “I loved doing those things with Bobby,” she says.

  Also in ’58 she recorded an album of 12 songs for MGM Records titled Jane Russell. She now had the clout to sing in the heavily jazz-inflected, harder-edged style she’d always preferred, and comparing this LP to her Columbia album from 11 years before, it’s hard to believe they were done by the same singer.

  Throughout the ’50s Jane had guested on the TV shows of Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Perry Como, Jack Paar, Dinah Shore, Steve Allen, Dick Cavett, David Frost et al., either by herself or with Connie Haines and Beryl Davis. She made a pilot film for a proposed TV series, McCreedy’s Woman (1958), but though the pilot was aired the series wasn’t picked up.

  Soured on producing, free of RKO and not liking the B-grade roles she was now being offered, Jane took the opportunity to play club and theater engagements here and abroad. She alternated between doing trio gigs with Connie and Beryl and putting together an act of her own with two other old and dear friends.

  “Jack Cole created an act for Jane and I became her musical director,” says Hal Schaefer. “I wrote the arrangements and orchestrations, coached her, played piano and led the orchestra. We toured Italy, Spain, South America and Mexico. This was around the late ’50s-early ’60s. You cannot imagine how popular she was. Jane has wonderful rhythm and timing, swing was very natural with her. And a very good ear. Play something for her once and she’s just about got it. When she sang with a big band behind her, she just blew. The public would never have thought how good she was. She had chops. She’s the absolute best I’ve ever met. She’s a very determined lady for good causes, like when she started WAIF, that’s what I most appreciate about her. She’s one of the most positive people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and being friends with.”

  And she hit the boards. She starred in Janus in 1959 on tour in New England, and over the years has starred in plays and musicals all over the country, including Skylark (’61), Bells Are Ringing (’62), Catch Me If You Can (’62, ’70 and ’74), Pal Joey (’65), Here Today (’68), High Button Shoes (’70) and Mame (’73).

  There were even a few more movies. As a favor to producer Aaron Rosenberg she did a cameo as hers
elf in Fate Is the Hunter (1964), singing “No Love, No Nothin’” to the soldiers in a WWII flashback sequence. She was a good friend of Rosenberg’s wife, who had worked with Jane on WAIF. It was the last time she sang on screen.

  In 1966 she was seen in two minor A.C. Lyles Paramount Westerns, Johnny Reno and Waco, about which the less said the better.

  That year she also did a picture called The Honorable Frauds, directed by Jerry Shaw. It was a caper movie about a group of relatives trying to cash in on an inheritance. Jake LaMotta’s people produced it in an effort to launch an acting career for him, and he co-starred with Jane. It was never released. “I’m glad it never came out,” says Jane. “It was a flop.”

  She did a Tom Laughlin biker flick, Born Losers (1967), playing the sort of role Shelley Winters was then doing—the blowsy, overweight, hysterical mother of a teenage girl who’d been raped. This was the sort of glamour-free character role that Jane wanted to do more of, but it didn’t lead to anything.

  In 1967 Jane and Bob Waterfield were divorced after 25 years. There had been many separations, infidelities and too much drinking. “It was a pretty good marriage for 23 years,” Jane told Larry King in 1985. “Then everything just changed and I couldn’t cope. We were both drinking a lot and that certainly didn’t help. Football players drink and most actors drink after the day is over. It’s not a matter of drinking all day long, we never did that, but it got worse and the last year was just impossible. After several humiliations, I realized that I could not drink any more, it was affecting me differently than it ever had before. I got to where if I had a few drinks I didn’t remember things. I don’t know whether your chemistry changes or you get old or what it is. I prayed about it, and just stopped.”

 

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