Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  Years later, when I went to Europe for four or five years and then came back, Louella was very pissed off and called me an expatriate, which was a dirty word in her vocabulary. It was as if by going to Europe I had been disloyal to Hollywood and, more importantly, to her.

  As my star continued to rise at Fox, I came to realize that the relationship between an actor and a studio was complex, and not always in the actor’s best interests. After Titanic, I was making a movie for Robert D. Webb called Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, when my costar, Terry Moore, suddenly realized she was pregnant. The father was Howard Hughes. She got very weepy and told me about the situation. Obviously, she told a few other people as well, because the studio blindsided both of us by releasing a story that we were engaged! They never called, they never told me they were going to do this, it just appeared in the papers.

  I was livid; for one thing, I was very involved with Barbara and called her from Tarpon Springs every night, while Terry was calling Hughes every night. Terry was also a much younger woman, and Barbara was—how to put this delicately?—not pleased about that. Beyond that, the studio was trying to railroad Terry and me into a marriage for its own convenience. The studio evidently thought that I was terribly suggestible, I would succumb to the pressure, and the resulting marriage would be great for the movie, great for my career, and, not coincidentally, great for the studio.

  It was at that point that I realized the true nature of the transaction between an actor and a movie studio. Fox was very interested in me in terms of generating publicity for a movie or a series of movies. The studio wanted to create momentum for me as an actor, as a personality, but it had a very limited interest in what was best for me as a human being. I was looking for a home, and the studio was looking for a saleable commodity. It was a difficult but necessary lesson, and I’m glad I learned it early.

  So everybody was in the loop but Terry and me. She was in tears not only about being pregnant but because she was being pressured to marry somebody she didn’t love. And I started getting congratulatory telegrams from people about my impending marriage!

  There was nothing to do but be blunt. I told Harry Brand there was no chance of my marrying Terry, not then, not ever. Fox never actually retracted the stories so much as let them dry up.

  Being part of events like this made me realize that there is no more brutal, front-runner’s business in the world. The pressures can be staggering. I remember being on the set of Love Is a Many Splendored Thing and watching Jennifer Jones work. I noticed the hem of her skirt vibrating. I looked down and saw that her knees were quivering like aspen leaves. She was absolutely terrified! Over on the side, behind the big lights, I could see a pair of shoes that belonged to her husband, the great producer David O. Selznick. He was hovering, making sure that his Jennifer was all right. But it was clear that Jennifer wasn’t all right, and never would be. As experiences like these began to accumulate, I realized that it was mandatory to have some kind of meaningful life outside the movie business.

  So the marriage to Terry Moore didn’t happen. For that matter, neither did the baby.

  Other than that, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef was a very positive experience. I came to admire my costar, Gilbert Roland, tremendously. He had come across the Mexican border when he was a boy, accompanied only by a friend named Polo. He began in the business as an extra for $2 a day and a box lunch. He told me that in the mid-1920s he and another young extra named Clark Gable used to stand outside Musso & Frank’s restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, watching the swells eat great food and dreaming of the day when they’d be able to do the same thing.

  The dream came true for Gil, just as it was coming true for me, which explains why I felt such an affinity with him. The dream came true for his brother too, who went by the name of Chico Day. Chico followed his brother to Hollywood and became probably the most respected unit manager and assistant director in the movies. He even worked for Cecil B. DeMille on the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, one of the most demanding jobs ever for one of the most demanding directors ever.

  Gil began his rise out of the extras ranks when he became the costar and lover of the silent screen star Norma Talmadge and broke up her marriage to producer Joe Schenck. A few years after that he married Constance Bennett. Gil was good in silent pictures as a dashing lover—he played Armand opposite Talmadge’s Camille—but his accent limited him in talkies. Nevertheless, his performances in The Bullfighter and the Lady and The Bad and the Beautiful were quite good.

  I admired the fact that he maintained—and for nearly sixty years: his last movie was Barbarosa, in 1982! As a man, he had immense dignity and showed great loyalty to his friends. He was close with Antonio Moreno practically all their lives. If Gilbert Roland was your friend, you had a man you could count on, in any situation.

  Beneath the 12-Mile Reef grossed $4 million—a very big hit. Harry Brand’s publicity department claimed that I was getting more fan mail than Marilyn Monroe, although I’m not sure I believe that. I do know that during one month in 1953 I was on seven different magazine covers. My agent negotiated a new contract that bumped my salary from $350 a week to $1,250 a week.

  I’m not going to pretend that there were an awful lot of negatives attached to being a young star in Hollywood. The perks are just what you might imagine them to be: every reporter wants to talk to you, and every girl wants you, not that I could indulge. Because of Barbara, I was off-limits to the girls. During the four years we were together, I had a couple of one-night stands on location but was otherwise loyal.

  When you’re hot, the good times never really stop coming. Because of my friendship with Leo Durocher, I even got to work out with the New York Giants. Sal “The Barber” Maglie offered to pitch to me. Durocher took me aside and said, “Don’t move. Whatever you do, just don’t move.” It was a good thing he told me that, because Maglie’s pitches were something else. Initially, the ball came right at your head, so the instinct was to duck down. The problem was that at the last second the pitch would dive down and away and catch the corner for a strike. If you ducked, the ball would nail you on the skull. I can assure you that standing in the box against him took courage because he was authentically scary—the equivalent of Bob Gibson or Roger Clemens in a later era.

  One of the negatives that occurs to every actor is miscasting, which finally came to roost on my doorstep when Darryl cast me in the title role of Prince Valiant, an adaptation of Hal Foster’s beautifully drawn comic strip that I had loved as a child. During the production, I was happy to be working for director Henry Hathaway; I thought the picture was good, and I loved the romance of the subject matter. I was working with James Mason, another one of my favorite actors, and I thought I was sensational. I had no idea it would become for me what “Yonda lies the castle of my fadduh” was for Tony Curtis.

  If I’d been paying a little more attention, I would have known something was wrong. Mainly, it was the wig. One day Dean Martin visited the set and spent ten minutes talking to me before he realized I wasn’t Jane Wyman. Then I sat in a screening with the guys in the studio doing impersonations of the Singing Sword, not to mention me as Prince Valiant. And then I had to listen to jokes about the wig, which I now think made me look more like Louise Brooks than Jane Wyman. And I got upset about the ridicule, so much so that I still have a block about that movie.

  But life teaches you many things, and one of them is that something good can come out of the worst experiences. I got a couple of lifelong friends out of Prince Valiant (Janet Leigh and the great cameraman Lucien Ballard), and I also got to know Sterling Hayden, who was so much more interesting as a man than, with a couple of exceptions (The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove), he was on screen. Sterling was a purist about life, with an interesting political point of view that was very much on the left. He had originally wanted to be a carpenter, and he was one of those rare guys in the movie business who genuinely didn’t give a shit about the movie business.

  Sterling
was exceedingly well read—his tortured autobiography, Wanderer, should be required reading—and he was without question one of the most accomplished sailors I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw him take his twin-masted schooner and land it single-handedly at a dock in Santa Monica. He had a feather-light touch at the helm. On a boat, he was the artist he always wanted to be.

  Another person I got to know well and to admire about this time was Claire Trevor. I had gone to school with her sons, Peter and Donald, but I really got to know Claire and her husband, Milton Bren, through our mutual regard for boats. Milton had begun as an agent and become very successful in real estate and home building. Because of the fortune Milton made, Claire was able to back out of the movie business and only worked when she wanted to.

  Claire was very much her own woman, and I came to admire her honesty and directness. She was a straightforward, creative human being who became a very good painter. She was also terribly underrated as an actress, as anybody who has seen her in John Ford’s Stagecoach or John Huston’s Key Largo can attest. Neither part was original—a whore with a heart of gold and a well-meaning but weak alcoholic chanteuse—but she gave each of these women a soul. No actress alive, not even Barbara Stanwyck, could have played those parts any better than Claire did. She was able to tend her career while having a very happy marriage to Milton, and she also had the complete respect of everybody in show business.

  My realization about what Fox actually wanted from me, as well as the chance to get to know well-rounded people like Sterling and Claire, showed me how important it was to have a life outside of show business. It was a concept that would take another decade or so to ripen in my head, but I was beginning to realize that the most important parts of life didn’t take place on a soundstage.

  SIX

  “THE SCENE, THAT ONE MOMENT, AND NOTHING ELSE.”

  A scene from Broken Lance with Hugh O’Brien, Spencer Tracy, Earl Holliman, and Richard Widmark. (BROKEN LANCE © 1954 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

  Beneath the 12-Mile Reef won me Photoplay magazine’s “Most Promising Newcomer” award, which led to one of the most crucial relationships in my life.

  I respected Spencer Tracy before I knew him, and not just because he was a great actor. One of the many places I had gone to school was the Hollywood Military Academy. Down the street from the Academy was a school called Town and Country, where John and Susie, Spence’s kids, were enrolled. John Tracy was born profoundly deaf, and with Spence’s financial backing, his wife Louise founded the John Tracy Clinic to help other children with the same malady.

  Louise Tracy was a truly remarkable woman whose accomplishments and strength of character should be more widely appreciated. It was largely because of her efforts that the phrase “deaf and dumb” was gradually banished from the language. There’s no such thing as “deaf and dumb,” and Louise was one of the first to know it. The Tracy Clinic has done fantastic work for the deaf for decades now; when I was single, I made the Tracy Clinic my heir, and I’m proud to say that I serve on the board of directors of the Tracy Clinic to this day.

  I first saw Spence when I was a kid. He was playing polo at the Riviera Polo Field, directly across from where I lived for more than twenty years in Brentwood. Spence had been hit by a ball and was bleeding, so they stopped the game to patch him up.

  Years later, when I won the Photoplay award, he was there accepting an award as well. I went over and introduced myself. “I saw your picture,” he said, referring to Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. On the basis of that, he okayed me to play his son in a big western Fox was planning called Broken Lance. I thanked him and he said, “Ah, it’s nothing.”

  The first day we worked together on Broken Lance, we were to ride into the shot together. My line was, “We better ride down there, Pa.” When I said the line, he broke character and said, “I couldn’t hear that.” So I said, “Boy, that’s something, when I underplay you.” So we rode in and did it again, and the second take was a print.

  A few hours later, it was lunch, and I was going by his trailer. “Come here a second,” he called out to me. I trooped inside, and he said, “Shut the door.” He then proceeded to ream me out.

  “You don’t imagine that you can underplay me, do you? What are you even thinking about things like that for? Are you thinking at all? You shouldn’t be thinking about any of that, you should be thinking about playing the scene. Not about whether you’re underplaying, overplaying, or anything else. Concentrate on what you’re going to do! The scene, that one moment, and nothing else. Don’t learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade!”

  “But I was only kidding….”

  “Don’t kid about it. Ever! Now get your ass out of here.”

  Jesus! I realize he had no patience for a young actor’s bullshit, but he really beat me up. I was very shaken, but sometime after that he came up and said, “How are you doing now?” He put his arm around me, and at that moment I realized he liked me a lot. We became very close for the rest of the picture, as well as on The Mountain—where he requested me as his costar—and for the rest of his life.

  As an actor, Spence didn’t analyze. He didn’t worry about where it comes from and where it goes. He never got in his own way. He would do only one or two takes, not because he was lazy, but because he felt they were always the best. His attitude was: block it, rehearse it, do it, move on. He possessed simplicity, the most valuable thing an artist can have and the hardest thing to achieve.

  Once, I had to hit him in a scene, and he told me not to pull it. “Be sure and really hit me,” he said. “It never works if you pull it.” And that’s what acting with him was like. He was completely alive, and he never faked it, never pulled it. He had an absolute authenticity of emotion that transcended things like technique or acting styles.

  He was a wonderful, wonderful man, and to have him put his arm around me both actually and symbolically, to care for me and be interested in me, was a transformative experience. Spence became more than my friend and mentor; he inspired me and, once again, gave me a sense of self-esteem. Because this great actor and great man touched my life, I finally felt that I had a father in more than a biological sense.

  Broken Lance had a very fine cast. Besides Spence, there was Richard Widmark, E. G. Marshall, Katy Jurado, Hugh O’Brien, Earl Holliman, and Jean Peters. It also had a good script by Philip Yordan that was ostensibly based on an old Fox movie called House of Strangers, which had starred Edward G. Robinson and Richard Conte. Our picture was a lot better. For one thing, it had more content. I played Joe Devereaux, the half-breed son of Matt Devereaux (Spence) and his Comanche wife (Katy Jurado). The theme of race prejudice—Devereaux’s three sons from his first marriage hate his second wife and his mixed-breed son—was added to the nominal western plot of an old-guard pioneer fighting against the tide of civilization. Yordan also was adding in a touch of King Lear, although with sons instead of daughters—not that a lot of people noticed.

  I felt an attraction to Jean Peters, but nothing happened because I was with Barbara. Later, when Barbara and I broke up, I developed what I can only call a crush on Jean. We never had an affair, because she was already interested in Howard Hughes. Actually, Hughes was passionately interested in her, and Jean…well, Jean acquiesced to his passion.

  If Jean wasn’t working, she had to stick close to her dressing room or hotel room just in case he telephoned. Hughes was the reason Jean retired from the movies in 1957, but Hughes wasn’t the reason she and I didn’t get together. That was strictly because of Jean Peters, who was not one of those ladies who hopped from bed to bed. She was a loyal woman. That meant that we were friends and had fun together, but it never went beyond that. Unfortunately.

  Broken Lance was another hit, as it deserved to be. The director, Edward Dmytryk, gave Broken Lance mythic overtones it was strong enough to support. It’s a film I remain proud of.

  Fox had me alternating between A pictures and B pictures at this point. Despite my feeling
s about Prince Valiant, it was a hit, as was Broken Lance. In the spring of 1954, Photoplay named me the “Fastest Rising Star of the Year.” I was in good company—Marilyn Monroe and Alan Ladd won the established star category.

  The good times kept coming. That summer of 1954, Life magazine ran a story entitled “The Stronger Sex” that ran down the prospects of the next generation of leading men who were supposed to take over from Gable, Cooper, and Stewart. There were three young actors called “the Big Three for Bobbysoxers”: Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and yours truly. The photographer got us all to pose on a ladder, struggling for a higher rung against each other. Ranked on the level beneath Rock, Tony, and me were John Erickson, Steve Forrest, Tab Hunter, and Robert Francis.

  From two lavish pictures, each with an A-list director, I went into White Feather, with Robert D. Webb as director and Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter as costars. It was a variation on Broken Arrow, with me as a government agent trying to convince the Indians to move onto the reservation. Bob Webb was Henry King’s second-unit director, a good man and a good sailor, but he didn’t get a lot of opportunities. The studio clearly didn’t regard him as a peer of Henry Hathaway or Eddie Dmytryk.

  Then came a loan-out to United Artists for A Kiss Before Dying, back to Fox for Between Heaven and Hell, and another loan-out, to Paramount for The Mountain.

  A Kiss Before Dying has become a cult film over the years, and it erased a lot of the jokes about Prince Valiant. I played a lower-middle-class college student with a clinging mother (Mary Astor). He’s determined to get into society, even if it means killing anybody who gets in his way, including his pregnant girlfriend. It was sort of An American Tragedy recast as a thriller. (When Alain Delon later played a totally emotionless killer in René Clément’s Purple Noon, he would be compared to me, which was immensely flattering.) In Ira Levin’s original novel, the actual murders take place offstage, as it were, but the movie’s high point is my pushing a pregnant Joanne Woodward off the top of a building with a complete lack of emotion. We shot that scene in Tucson, and at the time that building was the tallest structure in Arizona.