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

by Robert J. Wagner

  The project cost $250,000 and opened in 1926 at 1215 Lodi Place, just south of Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. It was a three-story Mediterranean building designed by Julia Morgan, who designed San Simeon for William Randolph Hearst. Each room at the club had a nameplate identifying the people who had contributed at least a thousand dollars to the building fund. There were rooms named for Douglas Fairbanks, Howard Hughes, Gloria Swanson, and Harold Lloyd, among others.

  Marjorie Williams (center), director of the Hollywood Studio Club, stands with the girls at Carlos Avenue clubhouse

  The club could house eighty women, who initially paid ten dollars a week for a room shared with two others, or fifteen dollars a week for a room with one other woman. There were modest age requirements; you couldn’t be younger than eighteen or older than thirty. One of the few times they waived the age requirements was for Linda Darnell, who was only sixteen when she arrived. The club offered classes and also offered plays and fashion shows. The longest a girl could stay was three years. It wasn’t a bad place to live at all; the girls had a way of bonding with each other, and the club made no effort to impart a religious message to the residents. Alcohol was a no-no, but smoking was permitted. It goes without saying that men were not allowed in the rooms; when a girl had a date, the guy would wait downstairs until the girl came down a luxurious staircase that led from the lobby to the dorm rooms. By the 1930s, the building’s yearly budget ran to around $50,000, and most of that was covered by the girls’ rents; any deficit was made up by the national YWCA.

  Marilyn lived there for a little more than a year, from 1948 to 1949, in rooms 307 and 334. She told me her rent was fifty dollars a month, which included two meals a day—a great deal for a girl struggling to make ends meet. She liked to reminisce that the reason she posed for the famous nude photographs was to get enough money to pay her rent at the club. (People at the club, however, would insist that she had left there by the time of that photo session.)

  The girls who resided at the club could tell who among them was likely to make it. There was a certain inner resolution, a confidence, possessed by those who were heading for bigger things. I was told that when Marilyn lived there she was quiet—I believe it—and was usually carrying a book. When she came down for breakfast, the other girls would notice and be impressed, but not jealous. There was always something vulnerable and likeable about her.

  During the Depression, when I was just starting to watch movies, jobs were scarce, and times were tough. If you were an average girl trying to break into the movies, and were unable to get space at the Studio Club, you might be rooming with five or six other girls in a bungalow apartment. Two girls would share a bed, one would take the couch, one would be on a reclining chair, and whoever drew the short straw would be on the floor with a pillow. The girl who had worked most recently would pay for groceries, and someone was designated to stay close to home to answer the phone, just in case a job came through for any of the housemates. None of the girls had a car—you either took the streetcar, or counted on your boyfriend, if you had one, to take you where you needed to go. Even under these conditions, you could count on a couple of the girls not being able to make their share of the rent.

  Diana Serra Cary is a fine writer who did time as a child star in silent movies as Baby Peggy. She wrote about the bizarre circumstances of Hollywood in those years: “There were two Hollywoods, the packaged export on which our very lives depended and the real thing, on which most of us practically starved to death . . . Among a dozen of our close friends, not one family could stay on top of the electric, gas, water and telephone bills as well. One or the other was always being shut off or ‘temporarily disconnected.’ This brought into existence an unspoken code of conduct that helped us cope with an abnormal situation which, for the time being at least, was our way of life.

  “If we were the ones whose telephone was working (but whose water had been turned off) . . . we let the next-door neighbor, who was without phone service, call . . . and she in turn gave us enough water to make supper. If our gas was off it was no disgrace to put the makings of dinner in a roaster and march upstairs to Mrs. Lundquist’s kitchen. There we cooked the meal while Mrs. Lundquist was downstairs using our phone. The combinations and reciprocations were endless, and fortunately everyone possessed a sense of the ridiculous, which made it possible to laugh instead of cry over the way things were.”

  By these standards, which were more or less normal for all those who didn’t have a contract at a major studio during the 1930s, the Hollywood Studio Club was nirvana. The club would even carry you until you could make good on your back rent.

  There’s a semifamous movie called Stage Door that owed a great deal to the Studio Club. The basis for the 1937 movie was a play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber about a theatrical boardinghouse in New York called the Footlights Club, a women-only establishment like the Studio Club. Kaufman and Ferber were high-end writers, and the movie’s cast included Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball, but Gregory La Cava, the director, thought the script needed some salt and pepper.

  La Cava sent his mistress, an actress named Doris Nolan, over to the Studio Club to hang out and listen to the women talk. “Find me some dialogue that’s alive,” he instructed her. “Get some case histories. Who are these kids? Why do they want to be in pictures? Where do they come from? What was their home like? Small town? Why did they leave home to come here? Are they having any success? Have they been to the casting couch? Was it worth it? I want it in their own language.”

  Stage Door was a big hit, and its success inspired Warner Bros. to announce production of a movie starring Olivia de Havilland and Anita Louise that would actually be set at the Hollywood Studio Club. Unfortunately, the movie never happened.

  Others who lived there at one time or another included Barbara Hale, Donna Reed, Frances Bergen (wife of Edgar, mother of Candice), Kim Novak, Maureen O’Sullivan, Sharon Tate, Dorothy Malone, Gale Storm, Marie Windsor, Linda Darnell, Rita Moreno, Barbara Eden, Evelyn Keyes, Sally Struthers, and Ayn Rand. (Most of the inhabitants were aspiring actresses, but not all; if you wanted to work in the movies, as a writer or editor or designer or even as a secretary, you could get into the club.)

  All the girls had money problems, or they wouldn’t have lived there, but evidently Ayn Rand was unusually broke even by the standards of the club. One philanthropist gave fifty dollars to be earmarked for the poorest of the girls. The director of the club chose Rand, who thanked the club for the money and promptly used it to buy black lingerie. Rand, of course, wanted to be a writer, and she had gotten a role in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings as an extra. It was on that film that she met the man she would marry, and the story goes that she wrote Night of January 16th while living at the Studio Club.

  Evelyn Keyes was a young woman who had been raised in Georgia and had an accent to match. That accent would eventually work to her advantage when she was cast as one of Scarlett O’Hara’s sisters in Gone with the Wind. Several years before that, her marriage had broken up, and she went to the Studio Club because she had no place else to stay.

  She thought she had died and gone to heaven. She appreciated the club because it was respectable—it was one of the few spots in Hollywood she thought her mother would approve of. “It was a place where you were protected and it was reasonable,” she said. “They weren’t trying to make money. They were trying to make a haven for young girls.”

  Marie Windsor told me that it was a great place to live because all the boarders there were at the same stage of their lives—the beginning, before they’d had many disappointments or failures, and the world was still opening up before them. Marie said that Marilyn Monroe moved out the same week she moved in. She didn’t know her then, but got to know her a little later, about the time Marilyn was making The Asphalt Jungle. She liked her, but she said that one of the executives had to tell Marilyn to come to work in clean clothes. (I guess MGM had higher standards than the
Studio Club.)

  Marie got a job as a cigarette girl at the Mocambo from a want ad that went up on the bulletin board at the club. The Mocambo was where she met the producer Arthur Hornblow, who liked her and got her work with the choreographer Leroy Prinz. After that, Marie was off to the races, and a nice career that included working for Stanley Kubrick on The Killing. That was the way careers began in the Hollywood of that time. Coincidence, luck, timing, eagerness—pretty much the same way careers have always begun.

  Kim Novak was remembered as being very neat and clean—nobody could look more glamorous in a man’s white shirt and Levi’s. Kim never liked Hollywood, or, for that matter, the movies; she didn’t want to leave the cozy confines of the club, which had by then raised the maximum length of stay to five years. After she left, she donated money and clothes to the club.

  I know that my friend Jeffrey Hunter courted Barbara Rush when she was living at the club; in fact, the club gave a party when they were engaged. And there were various legends that may or may not have been true. I once heard a story that a hotel clerk registered at the Biltmore as a cousin of King Alfonso of Spain. Hollywood has always been impressed by titles, but she couldn’t pay her bill. Somehow or another, the wife of the actor Antonio Moreno took her in and placed her at the Studio Club, where nobody was aware of her fraud.

  When I was a young man around Hollywood, stories about life at the club were legion, though almost all of them would be rated PG-13 at worst. For the most part, its reputation was quite good, but there was the occasional embarrassment; one of the girls was murdered in front of the club by her boyfriend, who then proceeded to kill himself. Evelyn Keyes remembered that pregnancies were not exactly uncommon among the residents. During its final decade, the club was home to people like Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Susan Saint James, and Sally Struthers.

  Eventually it was overtaken by changing times. The idea of a chaperoned dormitory became gradually passé; many girls opted for the simpler alternative of shacking up with their boyfriends. The charter of the club expanded the eligibility requirements to include dancers and models, but it began losing lots of money; in 1971 it stopped serving meals and began to function as a regular hotel in addition to taking care of the girls.

  The Studio Club finally closed in 1975, and the building was awarded landmark status in 1979. Today it is still the property of the Los Angeles YWCA.

  In the fifty-nine-year history of the building on Lodi Place, some ten thousand women lived there.

  Ayn Rand always retained a soft spot for the club, and wrote about it: “The Studio Club is the only organization I know of personally that carries on, quietly and modestly, this great work which is needed so badly—help for young talent. It not only provides human, decent living accommodations which a poor beginner could not afford anywhere else, but it provides that other great necessity of life: understanding. It makes a beginner feel that he is not, after all, an intruder, with all the world laughing at him and rejecting him at every step, but that there are people who consider it worthwhile to dedicate their work to helping and encouraging him.”

  Notice Rand’s use of the masculine pronoun. Interesting. As was the Studio Club, a place that could only have existed as part of the movie business, and only in Hollywood.

  • • •

  People sometimes ask me if I can identify any defining characteristic common to the women I’ve worked with over a nearly seventy-year career. The truth is that the vast majority of those who came up during the studio system were well defined in their own minds. They knew what they wanted, and if they didn’t, they didn’t last long. Almost all of them had endured hardships as kids, and as show business invariably presented its own kinds of hardships, they were by nature and necessity survivors.

  All of them were aware that they had a limited period of opportunity within which to achieve and consolidate stardom; most of them were likewise aware that stardom is a finite state and that eventually that state would pass. At that point, the pressure would be off, so for most of them working could be more of a pleasure at sixty or seventy than it had been at thirty. I also picked up a certain sense of guilt—a number of them felt that they had shortchanged their families and their children in the pursuit of professional success.

  Hearing that made me respect people like Claudette Colbert and Kate Hepburn all the more, because they had the self-awareness to forgo having children. That may be a partial reason why they had the successful careers they did—their eyes were fixed firmly on the prize, and they weren’t hampered by competing emotional or psychological demands.

  Most of these women centered their lives around their acting, but not everybody shared that consuming passion. Doris Day worked hard for a lot of years, and moreover she was a triple threat—she could sing, she was a successful comedienne, and she was excellent in serious roles. But it gradually got to the point where she didn’t want to be in the business anymore, and she walked away when she was only fifty or so, something very few performers do. The ones who leave, who have the fortitude and the lack of ego to do something else with their lives, are particularly interesting to me.

  Doris was a band singer during World War II and got into musicals at Warner Bros., where she made a big splash because of her sunny smile and creamy singing voice.

  She projected midwestern pluck and optimism, and a kind of scrubbed quality in spite of a private life that didn’t always conform to her public image. She didn’t get a lot of love from the critics, who treated her as an offshoot of June Allyson, and who tend to disparage anyone who has enormous commercial success.

  Let me tell you something: Doris could do anything asked of her, do it well, and make it look easy. She could do light comedy with Cary Grant; she could do drama with Jim Cagney; she could do thrillers for Hitchcock.

  She certainly had need of inner reserves of optimism because her husband, Marty Melcher, was a crook and left her nearly broke, then conveniently died, leaving Doris holding an empty bag.

  Doris did what one of her screen characters would have done: she rolled up her sleeves and got to work replenishing her bank account. And when the job was done, she decided to do what would make her happier than show business: working with animals and enjoying her life. She declined every movie offer, even the good ones, and she even resisted appearances on the Academy Awards—she just wasn’t interested in keeping her hand in anymore.

  It’s not a viewpoint I share—I have a passion for show business, always have and always will—but it’s a viewpoint I respect. Doris was a performer who endured for a very long time. She always gave great value for the money; she earned my respect and that of the audience.

  • • •

  Susan Hayward was a Brooklyn girl, the daughter of a transit worker. She was also a movie star. She worked hard, she treated people well, and she had a great reputation around the Fox lot. Among the people she treated kindly was one Robert Wagner.

  The name of the movie we appeared in together was With a Song in My Heart, in which Susan played Jane Froman, a popular singer who made a comeback after almost getting killed in a plane crash. I played a young soldier existing in a catatonic state who was lured back to life by Jane Froman’s singing to me.

  It sounds corny. It was corny, but it also happened to be a true story, and Susan played it for all it was worth, as did I. Shooting that short scene took about three days, and Susan was so deeply into the emotions of the moment that she was brought to tears over and over again. She worked very hard to give me everything I needed to play the scene, and her sincerity and passion compensated for my inexperience.

  The picture was directed by Walter Lang, who became a good friend, and edited by Watson Webb, ditto. It was a phenomenal break for a young actor, and suddenly, I had a career. Susan got an Oscar nomination for the film, one of five she would earn.

  By the time we worked together, Susan was a name-above-the-title star, with a rapidly growing list of hit pictures, but she never had it easy. She’d tested for
the part of Scarlett O’Hara in 1939, but it was too soon for her; she didn’t have Vivien Leigh’s rapturous beauty or, at that point, her skill set.

  Susan was one of those stars who put the pieces together slowly, film by film, year by year. Her first big picture was DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind, with John Wayne and Paulette Goddard. She worked again with the Duke in The Fighting Seabees, back at his home base of Republic, which only indicates Paramount’s lack of faith in her—they would never have lent out anybody they valued to Republic.

  She worked steadily throughout the 1940s, and for a time she was at Walter Wanger’s operation, which undoubtedly meant that she was either being chased around Wanger’s desk or allowing herself to be caught. Long before Wanger shot Jennings Lang in the balls for moving in on his wife, Joan Bennett, he was well known for preying on actresses.

  The 1950s were Susan’s prime. She won an Oscar for I Want to Live!, and she was in big pictures like The Snows of Kilimanjaro, David and Bathsheba, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, and a very good Robert Mitchum picture about rodeo cowboys called The Lusty Men. She made several good movies with Ty Power, and became part of his social group; Cesar Romero thought the world of her.

  Susan was a physically small woman, who became close to the astrologer Carroll Righter and paid close attention to his forecasts. Her on-screen style was sexy, direct, and tough when she needed it to be. She was very much in the mold of actresses like Stanwyck and Davis, but her strong on-screen sense of self didn’t carry over into her private life. Her first husband, Jess Barker, was a small-part actor who had a habit of slapping her around; they had a particularly nasty divorce involving the custody of their twin sons, and the word around the lot had it that Susan was so distraught over the situation that she attempted suicide.