I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses

by Robert J. Wagner

  When Tom Mankiewicz wrote Hart to Hart, I told him that I wanted the series to have some of the feeling I got when I watched the Thin Man movies, right down to having a dog like the Charleses’ Asta. Let me put it another way: Hart to Hart was creative plagiarism. When Tom had brought me the original script by Sidney Sheldon, it felt to me like a rip-off of the Matt Helm character that Dean Martin had been playing in films. I thought it was vulgar and I didn’t want to do it. Tom and Mart Crowley turned it around so we could emulate something with class, as opposed to something crass.

  Bill and Myrna made a lot of pictures together, and Loy had a starring career that lasted into the 1950s, which was very unusual for that time, largely because she could play both comedy and drama with charm and assurance.

  The actresses of this period had a great deal of authority . . . assuming they cared to exercise it. Generally speaking, they were usually given veto power over their cameramen. Garbo insisted that William Daniels shoot her pictures, while Myrna was more concerned about directors than she was cinematographers. When Darryl Zanuck borrowed Myrna from MGM for The Rains Came, she insisted that Clarence Brown, her favorite director at MGM, make the picture.

  This had all taken place twenty years before I heard the story, but Darryl still seemed miffed about it; the inference was that no Fox director was good enough to direct an MGM actress. Since Darryl had such talents as John Ford and Henry King under contract, this was clearly not the case, but what Myrna wanted, Myrna got.

  So MGM lent out Brown, for the first and last time in his career at that studio, and he spent the rest of his life singing the praises of Darryl and the way he produced a movie. Brown always said that The Rains Came was the happiest picture he ever made.

  Years later, when Myrna came back to Fox to make Cheaper by the Dozen, she was older and more docile, and accepted Darryl’s choice in directors.

  Myrna’s comic specialty was unspoken disapproval. She could eye a man with a palpable air of disdain for the lovable lug. Her leverage was her unpretentious intelligence. She was the American woman par excellence, making up in insight and command what she lacked in physical size.

  Claudette Colbert had similar gifts, but Claudette could carry a film by herself, as Myrna could not, perhaps because Claudette was more overtly sexy and might have appealed as much to men as to women.

  Claudette could play anything—temptresses (Cleopatra), mothers (Since You Went Away), wives (Skylark). She could play screwball comedy (It Happened One Night), she could play heavy drama (So Proudly We Hail). Irrepressibly chic in the 1930s, she matured in the 1940s into something special; like Myrna Loy, but on a grander scale, she became the epitome of the American woman, as American women thought of themselves—witty, smart, resourceful, and incapable of giving up. Whatever fate dished out, Claudette could take it and look good doing so.

  It was no secret that she was French and had come to America when she was a child, but nobody held that against her; Claudette Colbert was as intrinsically American as Joan Crawford, but much more elegant. She was only five or six when she arrived in New York, which accounted for her perfect English. Her original intent was to be a fashion designer, and to facilitate her drawing she attended the Art Students League across the street from Carnegie Hall in New York. She went into the theater more or less on a lark, and that segued into movies when she was only twenty-two, when she left New York and came to Hollywood as sound hit, along with a host of others: Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, Miriam Hopkins, and Bette Davis. Most of these women had a certain working-class quality, but not Claudette, who was always upper crust. A few years later, Kate Hepburn—speaking of upper crust—joined them.

  I think Claudette’s true gift might have been toward the lighter side of the scale. Even in a movie like DeMille’s Cleopatra, which has a lot of the great showman’s spectacular set pieces, Claudette conveys an irony that isn’t necessarily present in the dialogue. She treats Henry Wilcoxon’s Marc Antony as if he’s the cutest lummox she’s come across in months. He may not be the sharpest sword in the armory, but he’s cute. It gives the pairing a humor and strength that later, straighter interpretations of the part all lacked.

  Claudette’s reputation within the business was that of a cool, collected customer, very businesslike. I was a fan of hers at the time and became even more of a fan when I had the opportunity to work with her.

  By the time I acted with her, Claudette had been a star for twenty years, and her status had never diminished. This was something of an amazing accomplishment, because Claudette didn’t actually make a lot of great movies. It Happened One Night, certainly, and a few others. But most of the time she appeared in what can be classified as smooth entertainments.

  It’s easy to understand the career of an actress like Bette Davis—just look at her roster of memorable films. But Claudette mostly made very solid, professional movies, which is a guarantee of contemporary popularity, but not necessarily popularity with posterity.

  Because acting had never been Claudette’s primary ambition, she had a very levelheaded way of approaching it. For one thing, she understood the importance of projecting a consistent personality: She may have played all kinds of parts, but she tended to always look the same in them—wearing the same hairstyle and being shot consistently from the left side.

  It was well known in the industry that she had had a car accident early on, and the bones in her nose had healed in such a way as to make the right side of her face look slightly different from the left. It wasn’t anything out of a horror movie, but when the cameraman George Folsey—again!—told her that her right side was problematic, Claudette was convinced. After that, close-ups of the right side of her face simply didn’t happen.

  Around Hollywood, the right side of Claudette’s face became known as “the dark side of the moon.”

  Claudette Colbert

  Claudette observed this single rule with absolute fidelity. When George Hurrell wanted to shoot stills of her right side, Claudette shrugged and let him click away. But she made sure those shots never saw the light of day. I’m sure she had a conversation about how she would be photographed with directors of her films before shooting started.

  I had always thought all this was an affectation until I happened to see one of her very early movies recently. It was made in 1931, before her dictates would be obeyed without question. Her left profile was, as always, symmetrical and perfect; her right was slightly off. I was forced to admit that Claudette, like the equally demanding Marlene Dietrich, knew exactly what was right for her.

  The next time one of her movies from 1930 or 1931 runs, check it out. You’ll find that George Folsey was right—the left side of her face was better. My favorite performance of Claudette’s is in It Happened One Night, probably because she comes undone over the course of the movie. Claudette was always so collected, on screen and off, that I never believed she was capable of being ravaged or was likely to be. It was hard to imagine her discombobulated, although I certainly must have tried her patience on the film we made together.

  I was twenty years old and appearing with Claudette in a movie called Let’s Make It Legal. It was a young actor’s worst nightmare. I was nervous and couldn’t get the lines out, and the takes just kept mounting up. (I distinctly remember having to do forty-nine takes of a single scene.) Not all the errors were my fault, but most of them were. The day ground on, and my nervousness only increased. I was beyond green, and it showed. I didn’t have much confidence to begin with, and I gradually lost what little I had.

  Claudette’s reaction? She hardly blinked, never evinced the least trace of impatience. I can only guess that something similar must have happened with her at an equivalent stage of her career, she had been met with patience, and she was paying it forward. Now, there are actors and actresses who get better the longer they work on a scene, but there aren’t many. I was told that Garbo was good for maybe five or six takes and after that she got progressively worse. Kate Hepburn, on the other h
and, was born to act, so she was perfectly content to go twenty takes or more if she thought there was any point to it. And Audrey Hepburn was a bear—she’d stay out there all day working on one scene.

  But I got the distinct feeling that Claudette was closer to the five-or-six-takes-and-move-on school. She could easily have had me replaced by uttering a single sentence. Not only did she not have me replaced, not once did she roll her eyes, not once did she sigh, not once did she betray any impatience or anger at my incompetence.

  It was an object lesson in the discipline necessary to be an actor, not to mention a star. On that nightmarish day, Claudette made no distinction between a distinguished veteran (her) and a fumbling rookie (me). The unspoken message was that we were an ensemble, a team, and if one of us was having a bad day it was up to the rest of the group to back him up. Every actor has a bad day at one time or another, but it happens to young, nervous actors most often, so they need the most support.

  It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten and have always tried to impart on any picture or TV show I’ve done. It’s an especially valuable lesson in TV, where a cast is working together as a group for years at a time, and directors come and go. The only constant is the actors, so esprit de corps is crucial. Claudette taught me that a true star stands by his or her co-workers and is there for them come what may.

  On the set, these women were almost always pleasant pros, but you did have to be careful not to cross them, even accidentally. Shirley Temple told me about an experience she had had with Claudette during the filming of Since You Went Away. Shirley had been stealing scenes since she was four years old, so Claudette was on her guard. She was playing Claudette’s daughter, and they had a lot of scenes together. During one take, Shirley moved so that Claudette had to turn around to follow her, whereupon her right side was about to come into view of the camera. It was classic upstaging.

  “Claudette reached out and grabbed my chin,” Shirley told me. “She held on to my chin and rotated herself to a left exposure. She would not tolerate any tricks.”

  I don’t know if Shirley’s move was inadvertent or intentional. Nothing was said, but Claudette’s meaning was clear.

  I’ve always wondered how different All About Eve would have been with Claudette—who was originally cast as Margo Channing but bowed out shortly before shooting—instead of Bette Davis.

  When Claudette threw out her back, Bette stepped in and revived her career. Claudette would have been good in the part—it’s so well written that almost any actress outside of Marjorie Main would have been good in the part—but Bette brought something blazingly original to it, something that no other actress would have.

  Bette delighted in showing the audience the raw places in the character of Margo. Would Claudette have been willing to do the same? Somehow I doubt it; I think she would have substituted irony for Bette’s bitterness. The picture would still have worked—you couldn’t kill that script with a cannon—but it would have lost some of its bite.

  Claudette had a talent that only a few stars have: She managed her career brilliantly. She sustained professionally, and she had a sense of discretion about her private life. She was married to Dr. Joel Pressman, and the two of them were members of the Bel-Air Country Club, where I saw them frequently. He was an extremely pleasant man, somewhat asexual in manner and bearing. After he died in 1968, Claudette lived mostly in Barbados, where she adopted the lifestyle of Scarlett O’Hara, living in a lovely house manned by a platoon of black servants. Next door was the house of her female companion.

  She was a movie star for more than thirty years, and when the parts in movies got uninteresting, she returned to the stage in comedies with leading men like Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger until she was eighty. Who else did that?

  When I did A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters on stage in London forty years after we had worked together, Claudette came backstage afterward to tell me I had been wonderful. I was just happy that she didn’t mention that agonizing day on the set of Let’s Make It Legal, but she was far too gracious to do that.

  A great star. A great lady.

  • • •

  Sound brought a lot of interesting actresses to the movies, not all of whom are remembered today. Take Ruth Chatterton, who was born in 1893, which made her forty years old just about the time she was at her height. Chatterton was what was generally known as a handsome woman, but she had a powerful dramatic force, obvious in William Wyler’s Dodsworth, in which she plays Walter Huston’s vain, panicked wife. It’s a great, brave performance, because Chatterton keeps her ego out of it; she never tries to win the audience’s sympathy. You feel sorry for her because her character is so relentlessly deluded.

  Offscreen, Chatterton was the same kind of woman as Kate Hepburn: She did as she damn well pleased. She flew her own plane, married three actors in succession—Ralph Forbes, George Brent, and Barry Thomson—and when she left the movie business, she wrote several successful novels.

  Then there was Constance Bennett, who made a number of silent films, though not very successfully. But sound freed her up and showcased her very attractive, slightly husky voice. Her predominantly female audience responded to her in the same way they did to Bette Davis a few years later. For a time, Bennett was the highest paid leading lady in films.

  Carole Lombard had also made silent films, but couldn’t break out of the pack until sound revealed her great gift for comedy. Lombard was a fearless talent; she’d do anything, match herself against anybody—John Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, or anybody in between.

  All these women came to the movies as part of the vast reshuffling that rendered great silent stars like Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, and Lillian Gish irrelevant. Pickford and Talmadge retired, Swanson kept busy until the staggering comeback of Sunset Boulevard, and Gish reconstituted herself as a distinguished character actress equally at home on stage or screen.

  Another actress of the same generation was Loretta Young, who was working on the Fox lot when I started there. She was always a great beauty, with patrician looks—huge eyes, full lips, high cheekbones. Loretta had been in the movies since she was a child. Her mother, Gladys, ran a boardinghouse for actors when she was younger, and later became a highly regarded decorator who did houses for movie people; she also owned a lot of property. Loretta’s three sisters were all quite beautiful—one, Georgiana, married Ricardo Montalban and had a lengthy and successful marriage, while another one, Sally Blane, also had a decent acting career. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. went out with Sally for a while, and made a batch of movies with Loretta at Warners; like everybody else she was close to, he called her “Gretch,” short for her real name.

  Loretta used to claim that her mother didn’t care all that much about the movie industry. Gladys once told her daughter, “I don’t understand how you can be an actress—the people are so rude. The men don’t even know enough to stand up from their desks when you walk into a room.”

  Of course, this posture of noblesse oblige raises the question of why all four of Gladys’s daughters went into the movies if their mother was so indifferent toward the industry. Part of it was that Loretta’s father disappeared when she was about four years old; the family had to have some money coming in, and acting was as good a way as any other, and more lucrative than most. I think the only time all the girls worked together was in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, with Don Ameche and Henry Fonda. Since there was such a strong family resemblance, they could only play sisters, which rather limited the opportunities for the other girls.

  But none of them got close to the career Loretta had because none of them cared as much or worked as hard. Once, when one of her sisters showed up in a movie wearing a bad hairstyle, Loretta read her the riot act. Her sister protested that her hairstylist had insisted it would look good, and Loretta snapped, “If you don’t know more than your hairstylist, you don’t deserve to have one.”

  Loretta herself started playing juvenile leads shortly after reaching puberty, a
nd by 1928, when she was only about fifteen, she was working with Lon Chaney at MGM.

  She once told me that Chaney had been patient with her when she was a very nervous girl. Once he asked her, “Gretchen, do you like milkshakes?”

  She said yes, and then he asked her what kind.

  “Vanilla.”

  So he suggested that whenever she looked at him during a scene, she should think of vanilla milkshakes. Lon Chaney was obviously a good guy who could cope with a young actress’s inexperience by talking to her as if she were a child, which Loretta basically was. Unfortunately, Herbert Brenon, the director, wasn’t as indulgent. He once threw a chair at her.

  Stanwyck and Crawford came up the hard way, which couldn’t really be said of Loretta. But the life of a young actress in Hollywood is never easy, and people devise various methods of coping. Loretta’s armor was her Catholicism and her reputation for being a grande dame.

  She certainly lived up to her billing. I had heard about her swear box on her sets, but I didn’t really believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. Anybody who cut loose with a burst of profanity, whether it was a grip or a costar, was obligated to drop some money into the box. At the end of the week, Loretta donated the proceeds to a Catholic charity.

  The end result of all this was that people watched their language and everything else around her. She was regarded as one of the true ladies of the movies, although her offscreen life indicated she was perfectly capable of dropping her rosary when the occasion demanded.