by Ray Hagen
She married actor Roger Barrett on August 25, 1968. They’d met in Chicago earlier that year while appearing together on stage in Here Today. The marriage seemed to be going well when, on the morning of November 18, less than three months after their wedding, he had a heart attack and died right in front of her. He was 47. Jane was thrown into a massive depression and started drinking again.
Darker Than Amber (1970) was her last movie. She had hoped for a nice character role, but most of it was cut, leaving her with just a few seconds of screen time, calling out to Rod Taylor as their boats passed each other. A sad end to what was, for Jane, a rather frustrating film career.
There was a mere handful of films she was proud of (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the Paleface films, The Tall Men) although she always enjoyed the camaraderie on the sets and liked most of the folks she worked with. She had a mentor, but Howard Hughes had neither the imagination or the story sense to guide her career in a classier direction. While she was always loyal and grateful to Hughes and liked him personally (but never in any way romantically), she has to admit that his tunnel vision of her as a buxom sexpot limited her chances to develop as an actress. He’d made her wealthy and famous, but for reasons with which she was never comfortable.
In 1971, while starring in Catch Me If You Can at New Jersey’s Meadowbrook Theatre, Jane went with her manager Kevin Pines to see Company on Broadway. She loved the play and adored Elaine Stritch as the acerbic Joanne who stopped every show with “The Ladies Who Lunch.” When she went backstage to congratulate Stritch and the company, the stage manager informed Jane that Hal Prince was interested in having her take over the role of Joanne when Stritch left to appear in the London production. Prince got the idea while watching Jane on The Dick Cavett Show and had been trying to find her. She aced the audition and agreed to do it. But her depression over Roger Barrett’s death was still hammering her, and knowing that she’d have only three-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal, along with the difficulties of learning Stephen Sondheim’s complex score, threw her into such a panic she wound up in a hospital. But she pulled it all together, learned it, opened and played it for six months. The New York critics raved about Jane’s Broadway debut.
But Sondheim threw her a curve. “I wanted to kill him,” she says. “He came up to me on opening night and suggested that I sing everything on the beat, not like Elaine did it. And I thought, ‘You dumb shit, why didn’t you come to me three or four weeks ago and tell me how you’d like me to sing, not on opening night just before the performance?’ I didn’t pay any attention to him, who could at that point, you’re a nervous wreck! So I did just what I’d been rehearsing.”
Nerves and curves notwithstanding, Company was among Jane’s most rewarding professional experiences.
Also in 1971, Jane began what turned out to be a pleasant and profitable association with Playtex, doing a long series of bra commercials “for us full-figured gals.” To an entire younger generation, she is today remembered chiefly for those commercials. After 15 years, by which time models were allowed to be shown on TV actually wearing the bras (rather than only showing them on mannequins), she drew the line and quit.
On January 31, 1974, Jane married 49-year-old real estate developer and former Air Force bomber pilot John Calvin Peoples. It was the third marriage for each. Peoples already had a 24-year old son, John, Jr. (called Dude), and two stepdaughters. All quickly became a part of Jane’s own family. Shortly after their marriage, John had accompanied Jane while she toured in Catch Me If You Can for five months, and when it was over he told her that if she didn’t want to work any more, she’d never have to. That sounded great to Jane and she happily took him up on it.
One evening in 1978, she slipped off the wagon and had a few drinks, waking up pretty shaky the next morning. Nonetheless she got in her car to drive to the store but had a nasty collision. Although no one was hurt, Jane was arrested. She immediately envisioned the headlines: Jane Russell Busted in Her Cups. She’d already been pulled over on a DUI two years before, and the judge took that into account and gave her four days in the slammer. To her mortification, this did indeed hit the papers.
For about ten years Jane did occasional TV interviews but no performing until she was asked to appear in a couple of episodes of NBC’s contemporary Western series The Yellow Rose (1984). She liked the script and her role as Sam Elliott’s mother, having long admired Elliott’s work.
Jane had spent a few years on and off writing her memoirs and, in 1985, Jane Russell: My Path and My Detours was published. It was a warts-and-all account of her life, detailing every dizzying height and fall from grace with straight-on candor.
Her mother died during her book tour. For Jane, this was a grievous loss. Back in 1960, Geraldine Jacobi Russell had her own book published, Oh, Lord, What Next? It was a deeply religious but often funny memoir of her own eventful life and her large family, one of whom happened to be a controversial and glamourous movie star.
In 1998 Jane’s marriage to John Peoples was in its twenty-fourth year when, as he was helping his son construct an add-on garage to their home, he suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack right in front of her (just as her second husband had 30 years earlier). Jane’s high school friend Jack Singlaub had remained in touch with her over the years and had become close to John Peoples as well. “It’s really been a shock to lose John,” he told me in 1999, “because he was such an important part of Jane’s daily activities. He was looking after her, taking care of all her managing activities. I don’t know if she’ll ever get back to normal.”
“Jane, John, my wife Brenda and myself were supposed to go on a cruise together,” says Hal Schaefer. “Jane and I were going to lecture and then I’d play a few things for Jane to sing. John had set this up. He and I had many conversations about it and were looking forward to it but John died a week before the cruise. Jane and I are in constant touch. She’s very strong and deeply spiritual and she’ll just go straight ahead until she joins the movie stars in the sky. I admire her greatly.”
Jane didn’t want to continue living in that house and was making plans to sell it when, in March 2000, her beloved stepson Dude (John Peoples, Jr.) also suddenly died of a heart attack, at age 50. “It was ghastly,” says Jane. “I got drunk, stayed that way and ended up in the hospital. All my family came and stood around my bed and said that I was to go into rehab for a month. I spent 30 days in rehab, came home, and have been okay since then.” During that month, her son Buck and his wife Etta moved all Jane’s things into her new home in Santa Maria, California. Buck is now his mother’s business manager.
By 2003, she’d started singing again. “I recently decided we should have something fun to do here in Santa Maria,” she says. “Something for people over 39. There was a restaurant nearby where we started singing ’40s songs with a good piano man, he’s the only one who gets paid. It’s like a piano bar, people just get up and sing. Most of the people in the audience are older folks who know all the ’40s songs, and they grin from ear to ear.”
Apart from occasionally appearing on TV talk shows, often with Larry King, and as an interviewee on various movie-themed documentaries, Jane now has no special desire to resume performing because “I’m too lazy. I’ll do interviews, that’s fine, as long as I don’t have to learn lines. That didn’t bother me while I was doing it, but ‘use it or lose it’ and I haven’t been using it so I’ve lost it.”
Mother of three children, grandmother of 15 and great-grandmother of ten, she keeps close to her extended family and lives in happily lazy semi-retirement. She’s recently been diagnosed with macular degeneration and is part of a research program to help find a cure.
As Jane concisely puts it, “I’ve had an interesting life.”
1943: The Outlaw (RKO). 1946: Young Widow (UA). 1948: The Paleface (Paramount). 1951: His Kind of Woman (RKO), Double Dynamite (RKO). 1952: Macao (RKO), The Las Vegas Story (RKO), Son of Paleface (Paramount), Road to Bali (Paramount), Montana Belle (Republic
/RKO). 1953: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (TCF), The French Line (RKO). 1955: Underwater! (RKO), Foxfire (Universal), The Tall Men (TCF), Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (UA), Hot Blood (Columbia). 1956: The Revolt of Mamie Stover (TCF). 1957: The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (UA). 1964: Fate Is the Hunter (TCF). 1966: Johnny Reno (Paramount), Waco (Paramount), The Honorable Frauds AKA Cauliflower Cupids (unreleased). 1967: Born Losers (AIP). 1970: Darker Than Amber (National General).
Ann Sheridan: Oomph Without Ego
by RAY HAGEN
Few big stars were as genuinely likable as Ann Sheridan. It took her six years to work her way up from bit player to full-fledged star, and that was mostly the result of a silly publicity gimmick. Her studio, Warner Bros., packaged her as a sharp-tongued, smoldering siren, but she (and we) knew better. Under all the upsweeps, shoulder pads and bubbleheaded scripts they threw at her, she developed into a versatile and honest actress with brains, style and wit to burn. Her speaking voice was a uniquely resonant semi-baritone, she had the greatest laugh in pictures, had comedy timing as effective in a hash-house as in a drawing room, and she could even sing.
Clara Lou Sheridan was born on February 21, 1915, in Denton, Texas. Her mother was Lula Stewart Warren and her father was George W. Sheridan, a garage mechanic who was a direct descendant of Civil War Gen. Phil Sheridan. Their first child, Rufus, died at 18 months, followed by five healthy kids—Ida Mae (“Kitty”), Mable, George, Pauline and, finally, Clara Lou. She spent her childhood in tomboy style, riding horses and playing tackle football. “If she punched you,” recalled a Denton neighbor, “she’d break your damn arm.” She attended Robert E. Lee grade school, Denton Junior High and North Texas State Teachers College. (Her father died in 1938, her mother in 1946.)
While at college in 1932, her sister Kitty entered Clara Lou’s photo in Paramount Pictures’ “Search for Beauty” contest. She was one of 30 finalists sent to Hollywood from all over the U.S., and one of the six who were given Paramount stock contracts. (For the record, the others were Julian Madison, Colin Tapley, Gwenllian Gill, Alfred Delcambre and Eldred Tidbury, household names all.) Her first film was a ten-second bit in Search for Beauty (1933), and she remained a Paramount stock player until 1935. Now re-named Ann Sheridan, she signed with Warner Bros. the following year and slowly inched her way to stardom, due in part to a publicity stunt Warners contrived to have her named America’s “Oomph Girl.” She left Warners in ’48 and made her last film in 1957.
By 1965, Ann was living in my home town, New York City, where she’d moved in 1958. She appeared sporadically on TV but kept a rather low public profile. When I got the chance to interview her for Screen Facts magazine I immediately began to panic—what if that sharp, funny “good Joe” that had so besotted me was just an illusion? What if she was bored to tears with talking about her movie days? What if I didn’t like her? What if she didn’t like me? I girded myself for disillusionment, showed up at Sardi’s East at the appointed time, and she was already there—omigawd, it’s Ann Sheridan, be still my heart. She seemed perfectly nice, even friendly, and sized me up at once. After the second or third time I addressed her as “Miss Sheridan” she slowly smiled, leveled that riveting no-nonsense gaze on me and said, “Look, please, call me Annie, because I’m much to old to call you Mr. Hagen.” From that moment on, it was a day at the beach.
For the first five or so minutes she was totally fascinated by the miniature Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder I’d brought along and she couldn’t stop asking questions about this newfangled modern miracle. She kept a wary eye on it, too. At one point, while talking about Olivia de Havilland, she said, “I’m sorry, I like her sister [Joan Fontaine], but Olivia was just—is that thing still on?” “Uh, yes.” “Turn it off.” Some stories were clearly not for publication.
Portrait of Ann Sheridan, 1948.
The following transcript is edited from six-plus hours of taped interviews and phone calls between July and September of 1965.
AS: I hope you’ll ask me questions, so I’ll know what I’m talking about.
RH: I certainly will!
AS: Good. I’ll answer what I can. You’ll be bored to death, so quit any time.
How are you on the early Paramount titles?
I’m fairly good, but I worked in so many it would be impossible to remember all of them. I worked extra in quite a few, and I did doubling—you know, hands and feet kind of doubling. They’d take me on Stage 5 and showed my hands holding a letter and it was supposed to be the star’s. But I worked extra in so many things, I can see a lot of those scenes in my mind, but I couldn’t tell you the names of the pictures to save my neck. Of course there was no billing. I was a stock girl all the time I was at Paramount, almost two years. At one time I had to put on a big scene to try and get my option taken up. I was going to be dropped and I heard about it. The drama coach, Nina Mouise, didn’t think I was serious enough about my career. She advised me to go back to Texas and forget the whole thing, and of course that was just the wrong thing to say. If she’d told me to try harder I might have gone back, but the minute she said go back, that gave me the incentive to prove to her that I was serious about my career. But not as serious as she was. You weren’t supposed to laugh or have any fun, you see. Take everything veddy dramatically. She was the coach on the lot who had us in stock, doing plays like The Milky Way and Pursuit of Happiness. We’d do them one or two nights and the front office was called in and different executives would come by and see us. Of course, most of us were pretty horrible, because we’d had no training whatsoever. Some of the kids who did have training, who worked and starred in pictures on the lot, came and did the plays with us. So that gave us some experience.
Was this the first inkling of dramatic ambition you had?
Well, no, not really, because I’d been in dramatic classes in college and I was intrigued by it. I was going to major in art, but I didn’t like trying to paint leaves and things like that and I didn’t particularly like the teacher. So I decided to switch my major to dramatics because I thought it would be far more interesting. I sang with the college band and always had some idea of ending up in a chorus line on the New York stage. Never thought of pictures at all, that was too far-out. But dramatics intrigued me and I loved the teacher, Myrtle Hardy.
When Paramount held the Search for Beauty contest, was it your sister, Kitty, who sent your bathing suit picture in to The Dallas News?
That’s right, they were representing the competition for that district.
You were 17, in the autumn of 1932, and you didn’t know anything about it?
No, she told me later.
And John Rosenfield, the editor of the paper, asked you to come down to the office for the finals, and on to Hollywood. It sounds mythical.
It was mythical to me, I almost fainted. In those days they held all sorts of beauty contests, just for publicity purposes. And they’re dreadful. They’re horrible on kids, because they break so many hearts. I think every kid who wins a beauty contest thinks, “Well, now I’ve got a chance.” Well, it may be a vague chance, but that’s when your hardest work begins. And you have to live up to the producers’ ideas about how you should look or photograph, and, mind you, it takes years to develop a face on the screen. I was very young and pudgy fat with kinky hair and a space between my teeth—oh God. Well, a lot of producers won’t take that chance. They want someone who’s been tested, who’s had experience. Mind you, the New York stage means a great deal, even today. Or summer stock, anything like that. At that time, the beauty contests had the biggest publicity value. They showed a gal in a bathing suit and that meant a picture in the paper and the name of a film they were producing or releasing. They used the gimmick for so many years and got away with it. They don’t do it any more.
Paramount starlet Clara Lou Sheridan, 1934: “Mind you, it takes years to develop a face on the screen.”
This was during Paramount’s dark days when they were going through a reorganization period, wasn’t it?
; Yes, I’m afraid so. And of course it was the middle of the Depression. I was very lucky to be making 50 bucks a week. I didn’t know it at the time. I came fresh out of college and never worked before in my life. So it was a whole new world to me. And I was fortunate to get it, believe me.
When you first won it, was it a six-month-option contract?
Yes, and I think that on a seven-year contract like that, the six-month options would go on for about two years and then go to a yearly option, maybe with a $25 raise. Or maybe the $25 raise comes after the first year and then on the next six-month option you get another one. Maybe it goes a little higher. I know they’d start some stock people up to $150 a week at that time.
What was the difference in how they decided the rates?
Well, how long the people had been there, or how they had gotten in. Maybe they had done bit parts in other pictures or had come from another studio that had dropped them, so because they had experience they could demand a higher salary.
When and why the change from Clara Lou to Ann?
After Paramount had taken up my second option, we were doing a play in stock called The Milky Way, and I was playing the part of Ann. They called me into the front office and told me that Clara Lou Sheridan was too long for the marquee. It thrilled me to death, I could just see lights all over the place. Scared me to death, too, because I don’t even think I’d had a picture in the paper outside of the one with the 30 other contest winners. So they asked me to choose another name. I chose Lou at first, and they said no, that wouldn’t do, it sounds too much like a boy’s name. So l went back to the kids at rehearsal and somebody said, “Well, you’re playing the part of Ann in The Milky Way, why not Ann?” So I went back to the front office and it became Ann Sheridan.