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

by Robert J. Wagner

  • • •

  The thing about Hollywood and its extensions—Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, the San Fernando Valley, and the rest—is that they’re essentially all part of a working town. The opportunities for socializing were more or less limited to the weekends. But a place like Palm Springs was different; people who had houses there went there not to work but to enjoy the weather and the idleness.

  I lived there with Marion, and for a time with Natalie after we remarried. Our daughter Courtney was born there. Frank Sinatra had a place there as well, and Nat and I were over at his house on a regular basis. It was a time when Natalie and I rediscovered each other and our love, so it’s very precious in my memory. And it’s also a time when we made some friends we might not have made back in Hollywood.

  Lucille Ball, for instance. I played a lot of golf with Lucy’s husband, Gary Morton, who had a good game. Gary was the right man at the right time for Lucy. He was very loving and attentive, and she needed that—she had been very bruised by her marriage to Desi Arnaz.

  Desi was a good guy, quite smart, but he was also a Latin male who wanted to enjoy the perquisites traditionally expected by Latin males. There are Hollywood wives who are well aware of that predilection and turn their heads away; they bask in the public image of the happy couple, and they also enjoy the perks that come from being married to a star.

  But Lucy was a star in her own right, and a bigger one than Desi, whose gift for business exceeded his talent for performing. Lucy was similar to Janet Leigh in that she couldn’t accept rampant infidelities. She divorced Desi and eventually married Gary, who had been a good nightclub comic. When he wasn’t golfing, Gary also served as the executive producer of Lucy’s TV shows.

  I found Lucy to be a joy. I never worked with her, but I knew people who did, and some of them weren’t exactly enthralled. She was demanding, a perfectionist, and she was one of those comics who didn’t feel the need to be on all the time; when she wasn’t working, she wasn’t particularly funny. She was, instead, analytical.

  But when she was in Palm Springs, she was on vacation, and reveled in her time off. She would climb on her motor scooter and ride down Highway 111 to our house. She didn’t wear a helmet, and her red hair would blow wildly in the wind as she breezed down the road.

  She fell in love with my daughter Katie. She loved the way Katie looked, she loved the way Katie acted, she loved the way Katie thought. She became Katie’s unofficial godmother. What struck me about Lucy at the time, and even more in retrospect, was how sincerely interested she was in other people. This is not a common trait in show business; actors and actresses spend most of their time obsessing about their own appearance or their careers, or how other actors and actresses might affect their careers. We’re always either looking in the mirror or over our shoulder.

  If Lucy had ever had that quality, it wasn’t apparent when I knew her. She knew what she had accomplished professionally and she was comfortable with it, which is not to say she was complacent. Work was her life, and she only stopped working when the audience began to turn away from her, first in Mame, in which she was completely miscast, and finally in her last TV series, which was a quick failure—an experience with which she was unfamiliar. Knowing her, it had to have been extraordinarily difficult for her to accept.

  As Lucy’s career was slowing down, mine was heating up, and in her later years I rarely saw her because I was working all the time. But I’ll never forget Lucille Ball on her Vespa, hair tousled by the wind, coming to see my daughter with a look of pure love on her face.

  • • •

  Lucy was a friend; Ina Claire was more of an acquaintance. The name Ina Claire doesn’t resonate today the way it once did. She made only about ten movies, the most famous of which was Ninotchka, in which she plays the grand duchess and has a great scene with Garbo.

  But in her day, Ina Claire was one of the great theatrical comediennes, sort of a female Rex Harrison. She had impeccable technique and a knack for high comedy that never turned sentimental. She worked in plays by writers like S. N. Behrman and was a theatrical eminence alongside Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. Unlike them, she retired early, in 1954.

  Ina married three times, the strangest one being to John Gilbert, one of the great romantic idols of silent movies, who was supposedly doomed in the talkies by how he spoke. Actually, there was nothing wrong with his voice; it was a lot like David Niven’s, but it was not what the audience expected him to sound like. The legend of his supposedly bad voice refuses to die. I’ve occasionally wondered if Gilbert married Ina in the hopes of getting some vocal lessons that would save his career. In any case, the marriage lasted little more than a year, while Ina continued her theatrical career for another couple of decades.

  She lived down the road from me in Palm Springs, and I must say I was surprised when she accepted an invitation to our house. Ina was charming, of course, but very much a grande dame—elderly, slightly infirm, and very dignified. A visiting duchess.

  The theater in which Ina had achieved fame was already a thing of the past when I came to know her, and it reminded me of how unforgiving show-business fame can be, especially if you focus on a transient form like the theater.

  Movies and TV go on forever—only the delivery system changes. Theater is a matter of memory. As soon as the curtain comes down, and when those people who were entranced by the performance die, so do the performers. Then, they’re just names on a page, like Ina Claire’s is today . . . except in my memory.

  • • •

  When I came back to America in 1964 after three years in Europe, I felt revived. I’d made some excellent pictures, and I’d found a ready-made family with Marion and her two boys. My confidence, which had been badly compromised by my divorce from Natalie and the run of mediocre pictures in which I appeared at the same time, was back.

  And I found that I was now perceived in a different way than I had been—the environment awaiting me was far more welcoming than it had been when I left. I felt plugged in again, and I was quickly cast in Harper, opposite Paul Newman and a remarkable group of actresses: Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris, and Pamela Tiffin.

  The director was a man named Jack Smight, who lacked confidence; his wife was with him on the set for the entire shoot and seemed to function as a kind of security blanket. That was annoying, because a film set derives its specific temperature from the star and the director. Our director was nervous, which can make the cast and crew nervous. But Paul pretended not to notice, and his confidence spread to the rest of the cast. The reason he was confident was because William Goldman’s script was tight and amusing, and the cast kept things bubbling.

  Of course, there was Shelley Winters. I began this book by saying it wouldn’t be a procession of negativity, but honesty compels me to say that Shelley was a difficult woman on the best of days, and a massive pain in the ass on the worst of them. She was one of those people who enjoyed conflict.

  Shelley had a major career—Actors Studio, sexpot in her youth, eventually winning two Oscars for Best Supporting Actress. As her waistline expanded, she moved into character parts, usually playing vulgar, loudmouthed broads with a touch of vulnerability. She was particularly good in Lolita and Next Stop, Greenwich Village.

  But Shelley enjoyed putting her co-workers on the defensive. After a rehearsal, she’d eye another actor and say, “Is that the way you’re going to do it?” Sometimes she’d even reblock the scene: “Don’t stand there, stand over here.” Jack Smight, who was just trying to get through the picture, would pretend he didn’t see or hear Shelley usurping his job.

  • • •

  Angie Dickinson became a star when she made Rio Bravo with Duke Wayne and Dean Martin in 1959. She was an incredibly sensual woman, the complete package, with a great figure and legs, and a wonderful manner.

  You could say the same things about dozens of other girls who make an impact on Hollywood in any given year, but
you can count the number of them who are able to assemble careers that last forty and fifty years on one hand. Angie was one of those women.

  The reason she was able to do so is, most obviously, because she’s a total professional when the camera is on. There’s no such thing as a bad Angie Dickinson performance, and she proved that in good movies (Ocean’s 11, Point Blank) and bad, and on television, where she had such a great success in Police Woman and in many other projects, including Pearl, a miniseries we did together.

  She’s also a joy to be around. As my mother used to say, Angie is good people—loving and supportive, and more interested in the success of the overall project than in her own. You never caught Angie arguing with a cameraman about the lighting or a designer about her costumes. She’s a selfless person.

  When Angie and her husband, Burt Bacharach, had a daughter who was emotionally compromised, it was Angie who stepped up and raised her. Then and later, Burt’s life was his music, but Angie’s life was that child. Eventually the girl committed suicide. It was the worst nightmare imaginable, but Angie survived it and remains a powerful force for good in anything she does.

  As far as I’m concerned, Angie was the Nordic equivalent of Elizabeth Taylor—gorgeousness personified, and one of the finest women I’ve ever known.

  • • •

  Ah, Elizabeth. After I got some traction in the movies, I got to know her in a more than passing fashion, and she just knocked me out. She had also knocked me out when I was just a green kid, but I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.

  Some people vote for Ava Gardner, but I think Elizabeth was the most beautiful woman of her time. Perhaps Elizabeth’s self-confidence made the difference; Ava never considered herself very talented, and I think that affected some of her choices. But Elizabeth moved through life with bravado, with gusto; she understood that life has to be seized or it can dribble away, and seize it she did.

  Elizabeth’s father ran an art gallery inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, so getting into the movies as a child actress via MGM was not a huge leap. Buying Impressionist art was one of the ways movie people invested their money, and Francis Taylor’s gallery was a major venue. Elizabeth never really knew much of a life outside the movie business, so she was comfortable within it to an unusual degree; she understood its weird, inbred traits, but she didn’t have a lot of patience with them. She was a straight-up woman; if you told her the level truth, she’d reflect it back at you.

  Elizabeth had spectacular looks, but she also had a strong internal compass. She didn’t know what was right for her when it came to men—she simply tried everything—but she was very aware of what was right for her on-screen. MGM made some pretty terrible pictures with her, but she always managed to transcend the material and make the movie at least watchable, which is the greatest tribute you can pay a star of that era. Whether the movies themselves were good or bad, her stardom remained unscathed. So did her personal impact.

  When I produced There Must Be a Pony in 1986 as a vehicle for Elizabeth and me, I was frankly nervous; Elizabeth was always late in her everyday life, and frequently late on set when making a movie, and there wasn’t enough elastic in the shooting schedule to accommodate any tardiness or illness. I had to guarantee the cost of her insurance, but I needn’t have worried. She was on time every day, a model of professionalism, and she gave a very expert performance.

  Elizabeth had a remarkable instinct for calibrating her acting for the camera; her movements got smaller the closer the camera got. For close-ups, she simply projected through her stunning eyes. I asked her where she had learned to do that, and she smiled and said, “Monty.”

  I should have known. Along with Mike Todd and Richard Burton, Montgomery Clift was one of the great loves of her life. If Monty hadn’t been gay, I have no doubt he and Elizabeth would have married and raised stunning children. As it was, she had to be satisfied with being his devoted friend.

  In most respects, Monty was an unlucky man; he was possibly the most naturally gifted actor of his generation, with an element of the romantic that Brando didn’t have. But Monty was undone by alcohol abuse that ramped up after a 1957 auto accident that damaged his beautiful face. His drinking was actually far more damaging to his looks, but the accident was what he fixated on. Monty was only forty-five when he died from a heart attack, and whether the loss was greater to the movies or to Elizabeth is a matter of opinion. I know that she grieved for him for the rest of her life. Elizabeth had a major impact on my emotional life. I adored her as a woman and respected her greatly as an actress. The opportunity of having her in my life still moves me.

  • • •

  In 1959, I made a movie with Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds called Say One for Me. Bing had reached that stage in his career when it was believed that he could no longer carry a movie by himself, so he had to be paired off with younger performers, which, in this case, included me and Debbie.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  I can’t say that the casting helped much. The experience of making the movie and getting to know Bing was considerably more interesting than the movie itself, but show business can be like that.

  For Debbie and me it was Old Home Week. I first met her around 1950 at a party when we were running around Hollywood trying to learn how to be movie stars. She was a lower-middle-class kid, and she was determined not to be lower middle class for a minute longer than she had to be. She had very definite ideas about marriage, about children, and about career. There was no way she was going to be anything other than successful.

  Debbie came from Texas, where her father had worked on the railroad. When I met Debbie, the family lived in Burbank in a very unprepossessing house, and she played the French horn at Burbank High. She entered a local beauty contest and won, and at that point her talent consisted of lip-synching to a Betty Hutton record. That got her a movie contract, but what kept her in the business was her willingness to work.

  Debbie never expected to be handed anything for free, and she never forgot where she came from. When she started making money, she built a big pool in the backyard of her parents’ house, a pool that was damn near the size of the house itself. She would invite over neighbors, as well as her friends in show business, to swim anytime they wanted.

  I escorted Debbie to the premiere of Singin’ in the Rain, the movie that really started her off as a movie star. In fact, I had taken her out a few times while she was shooting the film, and she told me that she had a hard time walking because her feet were bleeding—Gene Kelly was a nice guy and a good friend, but he was a perfectionist and wasn’t about to lower his professional standards for anyone, especially not for a nineteen-year-old kid whom he had to teach to dance. Debbie was crazy about me, and I loved her. In fact, she threw a twenty-first birthday party for me.

  There was a time when I loved Debbie, but I never quite tumbled all the way. I’ve always been a little more casual about life than she was, and I wasn’t sure we’d mesh well together.

  Her attitude toward MGM was similar to my attitude toward Fox—our employment wasn’t servitude, but a God-given opportunity. She was getting free acting, singing, and dancing lessons. If she paid attention and worked hard, she could become expert in all those areas, an all-around entertainer hirable into old age. She was being featured in movies with show-business greats, which in and of itself constituted a compounded opportunity. She was getting a good salary that eventually became a great salary.

  What was not to like?

  Debbie could sing, and Debbie could dance, and Debbie could also act. She was by far the best thing in Paddy Chayefsky’s The Catered Affair, which featured Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine. Her costars were both projecting, both acting, while Debbie was being—yearning and sad, emotions she had certainly experienced in life.

  Debbie has always been one of those people striving to make lemonade out of the most bitter lemons, and there have been some doozies in her life. Bad marriages—I know she paid off Harry Karl’s debts, w
hich were considerable—and bad business decisions, including a bankruptcy when she opened a hotel in Las Vegas that was too far off the Strip to get traffic.

  For Debbie, the hotel was primarily an opportunity to display the astonishing collection of Hollywood memorabilia she’d built up over the years, so she sold off the gambling license. That might not have been the greatest financial option, but it was typical of her integrity. The hotel became a place where other performers would drop in after they’d done their shows for the night. She was always there, greeting people and encouraging them to have a good time.

  Whatever landed on her doorstep, Debbie always managed to bounce back—the Unsinkable Debbie Reynolds. Her honorary Oscar in 2015 was a recognition of her talent, but also of her spirit.

  A few years ago she auctioned off her collection of Hollywood costumes for tens of millions of dollars. I know that she did it with mixed feelings—she had always wanted to open a lavish Hollywood Museum, but nobody else was as interested in that prospect as Debbie, and the value of the costumes had escalated to such an extent that she had no choice but to take advantage of their market value.

  One of the joys of Debbie is her industriousness. Besides her costume collection, she and Ruta Lee founded the Thalians, a great show-business charity. Because she’s been around for so long, Debbie has lately been taken for granted, somewhat in the same way that Mickey Rooney had been. A performer whose career has endured for sixty-odd years, or, in Mickey’s case, ninety years, can fade simply because of overfamiliarity.

  When Albert Brooks couldn’t get Nancy Reagan to star with him in Mother, he hired Debbie, and she was remarkable in the title role—steely and tough and unyielding and funny and, underneath it all, endearing, just as she was playing Liberace’s mother in Behind the Candelabra. If she was overlooked in the latter performance, it was because between the heavy makeup and a convincing Polish accent—Debbie has a great ear for voices—most people didn’t know it was her.