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

by Robert J. Wagner

  Afterward, she was as big a star as ever, until her career slowed down in the 1960s. Susan stepped away for a while to concentrate on her second marriage, which was quite successful. She was set to go into television when she became ill with a brain tumor.

  Susan had agreed to present the Best Actress award at the 1974 Academy Awards, but she was in failing health. My friend, the great makeup man Frank Westmore, sailed into battle and helped her out. He custom made a wig for Susan so that she could still sport her trademark red hair, and did her makeup so impeccably you never would have known she was undergoing radiation treatments. With Frank’s help, Susan’s last public appearance was a triumph.

  She died in 1975, when she was only fifty-seven years old. Her grace, patience, and generosity with an inexperienced newcomer changed my life. I will always be in her debt.

  • • •

  One of the most breathtaking women I’ve ever seen was Jean Peters, who was at 20th Century Fox in the early and mid-1950s. I was besotted by the woman.

  Susan Hayward

  Jean was from Ohio—Canton, to be specific—and she was the Midwest at its best: a sincere, loving personality, to which she added stunning looks. She originally came to Hollywood as a prize for winning the Miss Ohio State pageant, and somehow or other landed the job as Tyrone Power’s leading lady in Captain from Castile within a year of arriving in town. She didn’t have much to do in the movie, although she did it well.

  Darryl Zanuck worked hard to make her a star, using her in all sorts of movies: comedies (It Happens Every Spring), Oscar bait (Viva Zapata!), and throbbing melodramas (Niagara).

  Jean was good in everything, but she was never great. Something was lost in the space between her gorgeous face and the film running through the camera. She was beautiful on-screen, but in a slightly antiseptic way; the sensuality she had in person didn’t register on celluloid, and as an actress she seemed placid, without a lot of fire.

  Darryl saw the problem and attempted to elevate Jean’s temperature by casting her as a tempestuous pirate queen, the sort of part that would normally be played by Maureen O’Hara, but that strategy wasn’t successful, either. She worked in a couple of big hits like Three Coins in the Fountain and with Spencer Tracy and me in Broken Lance, but she ended up quitting the movie business in 1955 at the age of twenty-eight. It was all very strange; it may be that Jean was simply too inhibited for a movie career—she couldn’t seem to open up in front of the camera.

  But in 1957, Jean married Howard Hughes, who was never thought of as marriage material. He had had half of the women in Hollywood and could probably have had most of the other ones, as well. This was in spite of some of Hughes’s personal issues. I had a brief relationship with Anita Ekberg, who had a brief relationship with Hughes, and she told me that Hughes had a problem with premature ejaculation. This meant that a lot of Hughes’s relationships were probably due more to his bank account than to any of his other assets.

  His marriage to Jean was hopelessly compromised as he declined into his various manias, and they spent most of their time as a couple separately. They were finally divorced, and Jean married Stan Hough, a second-generation producer who was the son of Lefty Hough, a wonderful old prop man and production manager at Fox. Stan was a good guy, and after they married Jean did some acting on TV for old times’ sake.

  Some of the girls around Fox were on their own, but some of them were chaperoned—very much so. Debra Paget was guarded by her mother as if she were the Crown Jewels; she wouldn’t let Debra out of her sight, going so far as following her into the bathroom! This was terribly frustrating for me, because I had a major crush on Debra.

  She was born in Denver, and had two sisters, who were also quite lovely, although not up to Debra’s level. Eventually she went with Howard Hughes for a while (before he landed Jean Peters), a match I’ve always suspected took place only because Debra’s mother was gobsmacked by Hughes’s money.

  Debra had an interesting marital history. She married her first husband in 1958, but that was annulled in a couple of months. Her next husband was the director Budd Boetticher, and they separated after only twenty-two days. Finally, she wed a Chinese-American oilman who happened to be the nephew of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. That union lasted seven years.

  Debra came to a measure of fame in the early 1950s, when she was still a teenager. She played Jimmy Stewart’s doomed Indian love interest in Broken Arrow, and Louis Jourdan’s doomed Tahitian love interest in Bird of Paradise. I made two movies with her: Stars and Stripes Forever and White Feather, where she again played an American Indian, although this time she managed to stay alive.

  She gave Cecil B. DeMille fits on The Ten Commandments, because he found her inexpressive. But what he and the rest of Hollywood didn’t know was that Debra was actually a dancer, not an actress. To dance with her was a beautiful and very sensual experience.

  In 1960, she went to Germany to make two movies for Fritz Lang. In this country, the two films were combined into one and called Journey to the Lost City. Debra does a dance in the film that’s reason enough to watch it—it’s right up there with Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame” number in Gilda.

  Debra was like Rita Hayworth in that dancing released something in her that acting didn’t—when she acted she was sincere and even soulful, but when she danced she was alive. If Darryl Zanuck had put Debra in musicals instead of casting her as a conventional ingénue, she might have had a major career. As it was, she stopped acting in 1962, when she was only twenty-nine years old.

  • • •

  Most of the women I knew in that era had successful careers and somewhat compromised offscreen lives, some of which involved a great deal of pain.

  For some years, I hung around with Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Janet was brought to the movies by Norma Shearer—small world, isn’t it?—who had seen Janet’s picture on her father’s desk at a Sun Valley ski resort. Before you could say “seven-year contract,” Janet had a deal at MGM.

  When I met Janet, she had been dating Arthur Loew Jr., but he couldn’t compete with Tony. Tony had energy and charm to burn, and Janet was bewitched. Janet was very much in love with Tony, but Tony . . . let’s put it this way: I liked Tony a great deal. He was a guy’s guy, but Tony’s main object of affection was always going to be Tony. He simply had to have women adore him. Whether he was on location or at the studio, he couldn’t be faithful.

  Janet had not been brought up to countenance that; however much she liked the lifestyle she and Tony shared, she could not put up with infidelity indefinitely. So the marriage broke up, and Tony spent the rest of his life pollinating all the flowers he could find. Personally, I thought he was crazy to forfeit a girl with Janet’s level of beauty and class, but that was Tony.

  Janet was a star, but she was also a sensible woman. She took advantage of what she’d learned at MGM when she was young, and could separate the wheat from the chaff. I remember her talking about Howard Strickling, who was the director of publicity there, and his explanation of how one person could control a crowd of dozens, if not hundreds, at a promotional appearance.

  Janet Leigh

  “If you stay calm,” Strickling told her, “the crowd stays calm. If you act like you’re going to stay there until the last autograph hunter is satisfied, they’ll wait their turn.” But, Strickling went on to explain, the trick is to keep moving at all times, slowly but methodically. Smile and sign, but don’t stop moving toward the car. If you stop and they corner you, it’s a much harder situation to handle. Janet said that Strickling’s crowd psychology had always worked for her, and I might add that it’s always worked for me, too.

  Janet was very perceptive—and often funny—about directors. For instance, when she made Psycho, she realized that Hitchcock was far more interested in his shots than he was in his actors, and he would only concern himself with matters of character if an actor went off the rails. By the same token, he trusted his cast to summon whatever motivations they
needed to explain the behavior that was indicated in the script. He would listen if an actor went to him for help, but he didn’t have limitless reserves of patience for such guidance. His attitude was: “You are an actor. You have been hired to act. I make very few casting errors, so can we get on with our business without a lot of discussion?”

  Janet realized that her character, Marion Crane, had absolutely no backstory, nothing to explain why her character was having a tawdry lunch-hour affair, so she did what Hitchcock didn’t find necessary to do—she constructed an entire life for Marion before the film opens. It didn’t show on-screen, but it gave Janet a feeling of conviction about her actions, which in turn convinced the audience. And, not coincidentally, made the audience that much more shocked when she was slaughtered in the shower so early in the film.

  Later in life Janet had a very happy marriage to Robert Brandt, and was thrilled when the acting career of her daughter Jamie Lee took off, and she was also very proud of her daughter Kelly. Janet was a remarkably well-adjusted woman—a class act all the way.

  • • •

  I didn’t really know what to expect when I worked with Joanne Woodward in A Kiss Before Dying. Joanne was a Method actress, and I came from a different school. I had consciously modeled myself after an older generation of actors, and although I had nothing against the Method, which involved summoning personal memories to authenticate emotions in a given scene, it didn’t particularly work for me.

  I thought then and I think now that actors should be able to rely on their imagination—one of the most important things in life. I also believe that every talent needs to use whatever is most effective for him or her. It’s up to the director to find an emotional through line that makes sense of all the differing techniques and aims that the cast in a particular film embodies.

  I needn’t have worried about Joanne. Between scenes, she would sit and knit. While she knitted, she would think about her character and the scene she was about to shoot. She would fall into a neutral state in which her own personality receded and the character edged closer and closer to her. Gradually, finally, the character took up residence.

  Joanne knew who she was, she knew how to make her process work for her in a manner that freed her up instead of locking her down. She never tried to convince anyone else that her way was the way. There was no stress or strain to how Joanne worked. Acting with her was a great experience.

  She was born in Georgia, and she always had a trace of that soft Southern touch in her voice. Joanne was one of those huge talents like Meryl Streep—she got to the top quickly, and without any sense of strain. She was an understudy for several parts in the Broadway production of Picnic, which led to some TV work. She made her first movie when she was twenty-five, and her second was A Kiss Before Dying. You never would have known she was at such an early stage in her career; she was incredibly centered for a young actress—an old soul. After our picture, she got her Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve, married Paul Newman in 1958, and was off on a stellar career and, far more important, a stellar life.

  I’ve never worked with Meryl Streep, but I know people who have, and they tell me she’s a lot like Joanne—a great talent that bloomed early, and also something a little more unusual: a quality temperament that makes her a pure pleasure to work with. She’s liked within the business and without, which is one reason she’s had such a remarkable career; she’s respected for her talent and liked for the woman she is.

  Joanne married a man who was professionally like her in many ways. Paul didn’t use his technique as something to set him apart, or as some sort of status symbol. He was more obviously given to dissecting the arc of a character than she was, but he was also insistent on being one of the guys.

  Paul and Joanne had one of the greatest marriages I was ever privileged to witness. Not greatest show-business marriages—greatest marriages, period. Joanne’s ambition extended far past her profession; she wanted to be responsible and responsive to all things. Most obviously, she had a commitment to her children. The great gift she and Paul shared was a lack of overwhelming ego; they had no pre-conceived ideas of who they were as actors. They both understood that careers are like smoke; at different times in your life, your career is going to waft in different directions, and not all of them are going to be positive. Most of it has little to do with who you are as a person or even as an actor, but that’s easier to accept in concept than it is to live with when the scripts aren’t arriving or the ones that are arriving are terrible. Both Paul and Joanne were completely secure within themselves. Paul never sweated if a picture or two failed; he figured that the next one might hit, and everything would be all right.

  I worked with Paul and Joanne in 1969 in a good picture called Winning, and that was the beginning of a solid friendship. They confirmed my own sense that the best way to survive the vagaries of show business is to have a life outside of it. There is no finer example of living that principle than Paul and Joanne. They worked in the theater, they started up the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill kids, and Paul established the Newman’s Own line of food products that has churned out hundreds of millions of dollars for charity.

  Joanne Woodward

  Paul continued his career on a very high level until just a year or two before his death in 2008. I stay in touch with Joanne to this day. She remains a woman to admire and love.

  • • •

  Lauren Bacall became a star in her first film, To Have and Have Not, by channeling some of Marlene Dietrich’s quality of bored hauteur. Dietrich wasn’t going to pursue a man—she would simply indicate her interest, and if he was too dumb or square to do anything about it, she’d move on to the next guy.

  Bacall had never acted before, so Howard Hawks had to trick out a personality for her in that first movie, and he directed her beautifully. Bacall projected brilliantly in her scenes with Bogart, so when they got married a few years later, the marriage made a lot of sense; they had an ease with each other and great on-screen timing that made you believe the marriage must have been a lot of fun.

  This is emphatically not always the case with real-life married couples—Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had a roaring affair that led to not one, but two unsuccessful marriages. Burton’s diaries attest to their real-life sexual chemistry, but they never really struck sparks on-screen, and there were times, such as in The Comedians, when their love scenes were terribly phony. The same thing happened with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

  Sometimes it photographs, sometimes it doesn’t.

  • • •

  By the 1950s, leading ladies weren’t just marginalized, they were endangered. To take just one obvious bellwether: Every year since 1932, the trade paper Motion Picture Herald had been putting out a list of the top ten box office stars. In the 1930s, women reliably held five or six of the top ten spots. By the 1940s, the average had dropped to about four, and in the 1950s, two. In 1957, no women appeared on the list at all. In the early 1960s, Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day consistently charted, but the fact remains that the audience and the industry as a whole became far more interested in men than women.

  But then, everything in the film business turned upside down in the 1950s, although the events that led to the crash originated in the previous decade. The government won an antitrust suit against the movie studios that forced them to sell off their theater chains, which the government said made them a monopoly. This meant that the studios lost an entire profit stream.

  Simultaneously, TV started draining away the audience. By the mid-1950s, you could see the studio system was falling apart. Some of the independents hung on—Disney, Goldwyn—but they didn’t do mass production. Rather, they were more like independent jewelers; each of their pictures was handcrafted.

  RKO went out of business after a decade of Howard Hughes’s mismanagement. Darryl Zanuck opted out of running his studio; he simply burned out. He moved to Paris and went into independent production, making a picture a year instead of overs
eeing thirty, and Fox began to have severe problems under his successor, Buddy Adler.

  Unfortunately, the pictures Darryl produced in Europe (The Roots of Heaven, Crack in the Mirror, The Sun Also Rises) didn’t help prop Fox up at all. Darryl made good on his losses when he produced The Longest Day, but there were a lot of failures before that.

  Losing the theaters was a financial blow for the studios, but it was also a psychological one. If you take the long view, it’s obvious that the movie industry has always been resistant to any form of change. They’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming into every new era.

  In the nickelodeon days, they didn’t want feature pictures, only shorts. In the silent era, they didn’t want sound. Then they put off color as long as they possibly could, and then came the civil war with television. More recently, we’ve seen the revolution in digital production—the one change the industry did leap into, simply because it meant a vast saving of money.

  It’s a mark of how psychologically conservative the movie business is that no major technological change has ever been developed in-house at a movie studio. Not one. Warners rented Western Electric’s sound system; the Technicolor Corporation developed its own process and rented it out to the studios; Fox bought CinemaScope from a French inventor. And so forth. It’s always the same: A tidal wave of change that begins outside the studio walls ultimately can’t be resisted, and the studios finally capitulate.

  And the tragic thing is that the studios could have owned all of it. They could have owned sound instead of renting it; they could have owned color instead of renting it; they could have owned NBC and CBS instead of gradually becoming subservient to them. And 20th Century Fox could have built and owned Century City instead of selling off so much prime real estate to raise money for Cleopatra.