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

by Robert J. Wagner

  I’ve mentioned something else that comes into play with careers, and that is luck. Breaks. When they land in front of you, you have to take advantage of them, but they have to land there first.

  Bogart only got The Maltese Falcon because George Raft turned it down—he didn’t want to work with a first-time director, who happened to be John Huston. As a matter of fact, George Raft made several careers because of his insensitivity to good scripts—he also turned down Double Indemnity, so Fred MacMurray got to actor’s heaven.

  So much of it is fortune; so much of it is breaks.

  All of us bring ourselves to the screen; somehow or another the soul, the loving essence of a person, usually comes through the lens of the camera and resides in the film. I’ve mentioned how Bette Davis emphasized her character’s passion and irascibility in All About Eve. Bette was drawn to those aspects of the character—the jealousy, the blood on the show-business floor—because that’s the way she perceived her life and career: as a constant struggle.

  When she was a young actress in New York, she was denied admission to the Civic Repertory Theatre by the great Eva Le Gallienne; when she got a job in a stock company in Rochester, she was fired by the director, a young George Cukor. Her first screen test, for Sam Goldwyn, was rejected. When she was finally signed for the movies, by Universal, Carl Laemmle famously said that she had about as much sex appeal as the gangly comic Slim Summerville, and she was quickly thrown overboard.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have talent, it was her looks and her inability to project the simpering adoration of the leading man that was expected of young leading ladies of that period. She simply was not a conventional ingénue by any means, and she never simpered. And then there was the larger fact that she had a tendency to want to do things her own way, theatrical courtesies be damned.

  She was saved by George Arliss, speaking of unconventional-looking actors. Arliss looked a lot like a fish, and he appears remarkably hammy to modern eyes, but his thundering style earned a great deal of respect back in the day. When he hired Bette to make The Man Who Played God with him, and then went out of his way to praise her abilities, it got a lot of people’s attention and earned her a contract at Warner Bros.

  The thing to remember about Bette was that all the rejection she endured only strengthened her desire to make it. Her attitude was never “Maybe they’re right . . .,” it was “I’ll show those ignorant bastards!”

  She regarded Jack Warner as the primary ignorant bastard, simply because Jack was congenitally disinclined to believe anything an actor ever told him. It took him years to figure out what to do with Bette, but through sheer bloody-minded perseverance she gradually accrued the outlines of a screen character—a woman who would do as she pleased, consequences be damned.

  By 1944, when I was going to the movies several times a week, Bette was a huge star, with movies like Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, Mr. Skeffington, and Now, Voyager. A couple of them were great, but all of them were unforgettable, simply because of Bette’s strength and a personality so forceful you couldn’t take your eyes off her, even when she was playing a bedraggled caterpillar who was soon to become a beautiful butterfly in Now, Voyager.

  Bette had a magnificent instrument, magnificent body behavior. She was a small woman, but she came into the movie frame with a rush, as if she owned the light and couldn’t wait for the arcs to warm her face. She took a scene and ran with it. That’s the way she saw the work, and that’s the way she saw life—as a battle to be won, and she was determined to vanquish anyone or anything that got in between her and what she believed to be the truth of a character or a script. And if there weren’t any obstacles, Bette was quite capable of creating them, just so she could sail into battle.

  She wanted to dominate, which is why she married weak men. Her husbands were, in order, Harmon Nelson, Arthur Farnsworth, William Grant Sherry, and Gary Merrill. Well, Gary Merrill wasn’t actually weak, as he gave Bette as good as he got, but most of it was the booze talking, and that only inflamed the situation. You couldn’t win with Bette in a romantic relationship.

  Bette Davis

  Professionally or personally, she didn’t want to be told what to do. She bridled at William Wyler, who insisted in sculpting her performances in Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes. She was attracted to the idea of strength in a man—she and Wyler had a brief affair—but she would not, could not be subservient, not even to a director as great as Wyler, with whom, I believe, she did her best work. She could overwhelm a weak director and battle a strong one to the point of mutual exhaustion.

  I first met Bette just about the time she was doing All About Eve through our mutual friend Claire Trevor. We were at Claire’s house in Newport Beach. Bette and I became good friends and stayed good friends for the rest of her life. I produced Madame Sin, a TV movie that Bette starred in, and got to witness her firsthand as a destructive force. She gave David Greene, the director, a very hard time, but he deserved it—he lied to her, and you could not lie to Bette.

  What always surprised people about Bette was the extent of her domesticity. She took her work quite seriously, but that was also true of her private time. She loved to cook New England boiled dinners—lobster and such—and that alone set her off from almost all the actresses who were her contemporaries. It’s not that none of them could cook, it’s that they worked six days a week. On the seventh day, they needed to rest, and their homes were not staging areas for parties so much as they were a refuge, a retreat from the exhausting pressures of show business.

  Bette would rent in places like Laguna, and they were always lovely houses—I particularly remember one she had in Coldwater Canyon. Whether she owned or rented, she had a housekeeper who traveled with her and kept her homes the way Bette wanted them kept.

  In that era, actors were itinerant and grew used to living in hotels, so they didn’t really have much opportunity to develop a decorating taste of their own. When the serious money started rolling in, decorators became necessary; they could help stars find the proper style that would set them off. In the process of seeing what other women were doing with their houses, and in hiring and firing decorators, actresses could develop a taste of their own.

  But even there Bette set her own course. She didn’t pay any attention to designers because she knew exactly what she wanted. She had a knack for decorating in a specific style—again, very New England. She would repurpose old wooden commodes for use as end tables. And once you got over the initial surprise—and hesitation—of seeing them, they looked marvelous, if eccentric, and functioned beautifully.

  Similarly, Bette was also a good, attentive mother. The children of many stars were raised by nannies, simply because the parents had other priorities—their careers, mainly. But Bette would vacation with her kids, made them not just a part of her life, but a focus of it.

  In 1961, she did the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, and pulled the play down around her head like Samson bringing down the temple. She didn’t act the part. Instead, she turned a perfectly good script into “The Bette Davis Show.” She wouldn’t take direction and she antagonized her leading man to the point that he tried to strangle her during a rehearsal.

  When she made her entrance on opening night, she was greeted by an ovation, and she responded by breaking character, walking down to the edge of the stage, and clasping her hands over her head like a triumphant prizefighter. The crowd ate it up, but her behavior was completely disrespectful of the play and her fellow actors.

  All this derived from fear. Her marriage to Gary Merrill had just broken up, she was drinking too much, her movie career was in the doldrums, and she was losing her looks. She was desperate for the love of the audience. Tennessee Williams was equally desperate for a hit, which was the only reason he didn’t fire her. And Bette did sell tickets, although what the audience saw wasn’t The Night of the Iguana, but something else entirely.

  The
reviews were pretty bad, and Bette blamed Tennessee, blamed the director, blamed everyone but herself. Classic self-sabotage.

  Tennessee certainly had his problems, but The Night of the Iguana had good bones—strong characters clashing in interesting ways. Bette left after 128 performances, and the show struggled on for a while longer. The play was converted into a fine movie by John Huston. Because of the stellar cast, it’s probably a better film than it was a play, but it could still have provided Bette with a springboard. Instead, The Night of the Iguana was regarded as a flamboyant flop. Neurosis is usually a component of failure, but there are ways that neurosis can be converted into strength. When Bette was thirty, she knew that; when she was fifty-six, she had forgotten it.

  For all of her volatility and the special handling she mandated, I always adored her. Her personal courage never flagged. She brought up a mentally disabled daughter, which was extraordinarily difficult emotionally. She did the best job she could raising her children, and I genuinely believe that the vile memoir her daughter B.D. wrote helped kill her—it was the kind of primal betrayal that destroys the will to live.

  Bette spoke to me about the book. She wasn’t so much angry as broken by it. I had heard B.D. tell her that she was the greatest mother in the world, that only Bette would have stuck with her through thick and thin. And then to have the child you thought loved you betray you, not just privately but publicly . . .

  At first Bette couldn’t believe it was happening; later she tried to avoid talking about it. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her; it was the worst thing that ever could have happened to her. She never got over it, and the people who loved Bette never got over it, either.

  When Bette died in 1989, she was buried at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, looking down on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where she had worked for more than fourteen years. Robert Osborne and Kathy Sermak, Bette’s loyal assistant and surrogate daughter, planned the memorial service on Stage 18 at Warners, Bette’s favorite stage. She had made The Letter, Old Acquaintance, and Now, Voyager there, among others. She used to say that the reason she liked Warners as much as she did was because it was a “workers” studio. She would have gone crazy at MGM, with Norma Shearer and Greer Garson swanning around.

  The atmosphere on Stage 18 was that of a film set. There were lights, there were cameras, there were film props, including the clock that had been on the set of Mr. Skeffington. Above the podium was a screen to project film clips. On either side of the screen, enormous photographs of Bette hung by thin wires strung from the rafters.

  People who had loved and respected Bette were there: Clint Eastwood, George Hamilton, Vincent Price, Stefanie Powers, Glenn Ford, Diane Baker, Teresa Wright. Jill and I were there, of course, and the contingent from the Warner Bros. of Bette’s era included the screenwriter Julius Epstein, the director Vincent Sherman, the editor Rudi Fehr, and the actress Joan Leslie.

  The hosts were David Hartman, James Woods, and Angela Lansbury. Jimmy Woods said that seeing Bette in Now, Voyager had inspired him to pursue an acting career, and that Bette wrote a poetry on the screen that was the equal of Yeats: “There are two kinds of people, those of us who write poetry and those of us who read it. Even those of us who couldn’t read poetry, read her work with some amount of genius, simply because of the beauty with which she’d written it.” After the remembrances and the film clips, Bette’s own version of “I Wish You Love” was played, and then I got up and turned on the work light, which is the signal on a film set that the day’s work is done and it’s time to go home.

  As we filed out, each of us was given a white rose as a memento of one of the most remarkable human beings we had ever known.

  Later, Kathy Sermak gave me a pewter ashtray with an oak handle that Bette had always carried with her while she smoked and prowled through her house. That battered ashtray and Bette’s friendship will always be two of my most prized possessions.

  • • •

  Bette brought passion to her work, but an actress like Rosalind Russell brought something else: joy. Roz had a most interesting career; she was never one of the hot, sexy young actresses of the moment. She was good-looking, but no more than that. What she had was an incandescent gift for comedy. (I wasn’t crazy about Roz in drama—like Norma Shearer, she tended to go for noble uplift, and that killed her natural ebullience.)

  Roz was another New England girl, born in Connecticut to a lawyer and a fashion editor, who sent their daughter to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

  Because Roz grew up in a two-career house, she was very comfortable playing women who had no intention of devoting their lives to a man, or even conceding a point. But it took her a while to find her sea legs. She was making movies as early as 1934, and you can see the filmmakers trying to figure out what would work for this high-energy but not overwhelmingly beautiful girl.

  She started to hit her stride in 1935, when she made China Seas opposite heavyweights Clark Gable and Jean Harlow and more than held her own. Her career hit fourth gear with comedies like The Women and Four’s a Crowd, and she alternated comedy with drama for the rest of her career.

  To watch Roz in pictures like His Girl Friday and Auntie Mame is to see a woman who can do both near-slapstick and stylized high comedy. She had energy, and she had timing that was spot on. Cary Grant made everyone who worked with him look good, but Roz made Cary even better than he was ordinarily, because she gave him confidence—whatever he threw at her, she could return. If you stuck to the script, Roz could give the words a twist or lilt that made the lines seem better than they were; if you wanted to improvise, Roz could hit the ball back over the net with ease.

  Yet Roz was wildly underrated in her time, largely, I think, because she was a talent in a time that was largely devoted to beauty. Even now, she’s not spoken of as one of the greats, although I think she was, and her best pictures are in constant rotation on Turner Classic Movies.

  Rosalind Russell

  I got to know Roz in the 1950s, when Natalie and I lived down the street from her. A few years later, Natalie worked with her in Gypsy. We both thought Roz was subtly miscast as Momma Rose, a part that Natalie and I felt cried out for Judy Garland. But Jack Warner refused even to consider hiring Judy because he felt she had personally driven the budget of A Star Is Born to outlandish heights—she simply refused to show up on time, day after day, week after week. That, and the fact that she and Sid Luft, her hustler/husband, had stolen furniture from the studio and used it to furnish their house.

  Roz could Rex Harrison her way through a song, but by the time she came to make Gypsy, her voice had gotten very deep and throaty from age and cigarettes, narrowing what little range she had. A lot of her songs had to be dubbed, and rather obviously so.

  As a woman, Roz was very tasteful and quite religious, although not relentlessly pious in the way that Loretta Young was. Mostly, Roz was perpetually involved—she always had a project or six. Like Claire Trevor, she had an innately positive outlook on life.

  When Roz threw a dinner party, everything was impeccable. The food and wine, of course, but also the guest list. Cary Grant would be there, especially when he was married to Barbara Hutton, with whom Roz was very close. Barbara once gave Roz a stunning piece of jewelry, a gorgeous bracelet that was white gold and baguettes. But when Roz named her newborn son Lance, Barbara saw red, because she had also named her son Lance—a name she had gotten out of a Victorian novel.

  Barbara felt that Roz had violated some sort of personal copyright she held on the name Lance and stopped speaking to her old friend. The extremely close friendship was over. Small-world department: Years later, Barbara’s son, Lance, married Jill St. John. Barbara adored him all his life, until his tragic death in a plane crash.

  (Speaking of jewelry, the owner of what might have been the finest jewelry collection in Hollywood was Sonja Henie, although there are those who think Paulette Goddard’s was even better, and I often heard Merle Oberon’s name mentioned
in that regard, as well. Why Paulette and Sonja Henie? I think it might be because they were more involved with the gifts they received from their lovers and husbands than they were with their lovers and husbands. Jewelry mattered to them—it was a way of keeping score. After Henie’s movie career was over, she fronted an ice show that was quite lucrative, and she remained attentive to the kind of men who were, shall we say, generous by nature.)

  Everyone liked Roz. Nobody liked her husband, Freddie Brisson, who was known to everybody in Hollywood as “The Lizard of Roz.” Freddie was universally disliked because—how to put this delicately?—because he was an arrogant asshole.

  Nobody could ever figure out from where Freddie’s arrogance derived, because he really hadn’t accomplished much. He was the son of Carl Brisson, an actor who had starred in one of Hitchcock’s early movies, The Ring, in 1927. Freddie produced some of Roz’s pictures and some of Roz’s plays, but like a lot of Hollywood mates he was basically a satellite that orbited the star’s planet. But that reflected glory was enough to give Freddie a head the size of Jupiter.

  Everyone put up with Freddie because, well, Roz was Roz.

  And they did have a great backstory: Freddie was Danish and had sailed to America in late 1939. The trip across the Atlantic took about twelve days, because the ship had to keep zigzagging to avoid German U-boats. The passengers on the boat only had two movies to keep them amused. One of them was The Women, which featured Roz. Freddie fell in love with her through the movie.