But after that bad start the rest of my 1931 films were pleasure itself. The first, Sawdust Circe, was a circus story starring lovely Pixie Portnoy and that great clown, Stuart Harris. But, in the rôle of a trapeze artiste, I got not only featured billing but also the pleasure of playing opposite Letch Feeley once more. I had never met a young man quite so accomplished—and he seemed to grow with each performance. It was a happy company and the work went smoothly with only one unpleasant incident to mar our enjoyment—the young stunt woman who did my dangerous trapeze work for me fell to her death! I was dreadfully upset but Letch came to my dressing room to comfort me and stayed quite a long time. As he pointed out, she was insured. It made me feel a great deal better in my mind.
My next film was also a joy although, spiritually speaking, it took a great deal out of me. It was a great Biblical pageant entitled Jesus Wept. Dear old Carstairs Bagley was cast as Pontius Pilate and I played the unsympathetic rôle of his mistress. Darling Carstairs! What a lot I learned from him! He was the grandest of all the grand old character actors in Hollywood.
Many people have made cruel fun of Carstairs Bagley simply because he felt more comfortable in women’s clothes during his off hours. I, for one, see nothing amusing or unusual about that. I—and millions of other women—relax in slacks. Why, then, was it so wrong for poor Carstairs to take his leisure in the lovely creations designed and made for him by the late Omar Kiam? (Or “Omar the Tentmaker” as Dudley du Pont used to call him because of Carstairs’ great avoirdupois !) Cheerful, witty, generous, outgoing and always eager to help younger actors, Carstairs Bagley’s mysterious death, in that unwholesome hotel for men during World War II, left an empty void in “filmdom” and in my heart.
above: As Pilate’s mistress in “Jesus Wept” with my darling Carstairs.
In “Jolly Roger” with Letch and Carstairs
With Letch and “Tex” Lonestar in “Caw Girl”
But I digress! Jesus Wept, although boycotted by both Catholic and Protestant faiths, was a reverent and moving film and its loss of nearly seven million dollars does nothing to persuade me that I was wrong in urging Morris to produce it.
Next came my only “horse opera,” and although it was a Grade “B” Western, I was at last the leading lady. The film was called Caw Girl. In it I played the title rôle, that of an Indian princess, head of the Oklahoma Caw tribe. I fall in love with the leader of a wagon train (Letch Feeley) and because of my great and enduring love for the enemy white man, my people turn on me and torture us, until we are miraculously saved from a hideous death by “Tex” Lonestar (as General Custer) and the U.S. Cavalry. A trite story, you will say, but one which I found very touching.
In my next picture—the last before achieving stardom—I was a fullfledged feature player with my name given the same importance as Carstairs Bagley’s and (I insisted on this because he was such a talented boy) Letch Feeley’s. As I said to Letch one day in my dressing room, “Isn’t life odd? I played opposite you in your screen test for Papaya Paradise when we were both unknown and now here we are, not two years later, still playing opposite one another with our names in lights!”
“Yeah,” Letch said.
This film was called Jolly Roger. It was a buccaneering saga something like the ones “Doug” Fairbanks and “Jack” Barrymore used to make. Kindly old Carstairs, who wouldn’t have laid a hand on Letch in anything except affection, was again the blackest sort of villain. I was the damsel in distress and Letch the bold, romantic pirate. A lot of the picture was filmed at sea, actually on an old sailing ship, and I remember the long, moonlit nights lying out on deck with Letch and listening to him talk of his love of the sea, and spinning dreams about the boat he hoped someday to own. We were six weeks over our shooting schedule but I didn’t mind. Jolly Roger, while not a great critical success, was a fun picture to make and even turned a modest profit.
Because of the financial success of Caw Girl and Jolly Roger (both of them low-budget pictures), I felt that now I was ready to star in a vehicle tailored expressly to my needs and I said so to Morris. He put up a “howl” when I suggested hiring someone like Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Frederick Lonsdale, Philip Barry—a “name” author who was au courant with the pressures of contemporary life. Morris was most unreasonable and suggested that I employ the services of his nephew, Sheldon, in the Metronome script department, as no one else would. I was furious. I told him that if a common “greaser” like Magdalena Montezuma could have her pick of such famous writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather and Elinor Glyn, why should I, his own wife, have to put up with a nobody like Sheldon? I said that I intended to have a “name” author, too. With that Morris tossed a copy of The Scarlet Letter at me and said that I could probably play it to perfection. I asked Momma, Helen Highwater, Vivienne Vixen and some of the other girls in my set if they had ever heard of this Hawthorne and they said they thought they had. Lynn Caine was almost sure of it. Dudley du Pont had read the book and explained the story to me and I thought it was cute and certainly had some good scenes in it for the leading lady. The only thing I objected to was that it was so old-fashioned. I had been in so many costume pictures recently that I felt a change of pace would be good for me. So I told Morris that I liked the story and to go ahead and buy it for me, but that I did want some changes made and to get hold of the author for some story conferences. Morris just laughed and said something to the effect that Hawthorne didn’t live in Hollywood but was eccentric and hung around a Public Domain where they couldn’t call him, and that I could do anything I liked with the script.
What a challenge! I admired the character and the nobility of Hester Prynne and I thought the title was very catchy. Otherwise I wanted a free hand to bring the story up-to-date and to make a lot of changes. So many men in the story department at Metronome said that The Scarlet Letter was a great classic and that it was a sacrilege to touch it that I decided to handle the script myself. (They’d certainly taken liberties with the Bible, but just try to change one comma in some old book about a girl having a baby in Massachusetts and they’re all up in arms!! That’s the sort of help one used to be forced to endure on the Metronome “lot”!)
What I did to The Scarlet Letter is now history. I have been both lauded and criticized for “taking liberties” with the work of “Nat” Hawthorne, who was the only person involved not to make any comments, either “pro” or “con,” about my film. Suffice it to say that I transformed it from a dusty classic, about dead people in a dead age, to a vital, living story about a girl everyone could understand. In modernizing the story, I kept the essentials—Hester Prynne is a good, lively, spirited girl who makes a mistake, pays the price and ends up happily married—and mercilessly cut out the “deadwood.” As this was my first real starring vehicle, I wrote in parts for the people on the Metronome “lot” whom I knew I could trust (too many others had made the mistake of “showing their hands” to me in the past). Helen Hightwater was scheduled to appear but suffered an unfortunate relapse and was once again placed in a sanitarium. I gave Carstairs Bagley a “fat” character rôle and offered a specially written part to witty Dudley du Pont. However, he said that he had been put out on loan to Alexander Korda (later Sir Alexander Korda) and had to go to England for a long time on the very next boat. I was sick with disappointment, but that, alas, is life in show “biz.” I went to Morris and demanded—and got—Letch Feeley as my leading man. With a “team” like that, how could any picture help but be a huge success?
As you may remember, my version of The Scarlet Letter was a college musical set in a big coeducational university called Allstate. Hester, the daughter of a man who renounced a fortune of millions to become a minister, is working her way through college (this was the time of the depression and I felt that she would lose sympathy and “audience identification” if she was just a pampered coed in some radical school like Vassar or Foxcroft) selling subscriptions to College Humor and she is also captain of the
cheer leaders’ team. She meets Brick Barclay (the new name I gave the hero, as Letch didn’t like the one “Nat” chose), who is captain of the football team. They fall in love at a beautiful formal ball held in his fraternity house and, having drunk too much “spiked” punch, Hester allows Brick to take liberties with her that she would never have otherwise permitted. The next day she is horrified when she finds out what she has done and realizes that she is pregnant, and that a hard society girl is wearing Brick’s “frat” pin and that he is the son of a millionaire and would never consider finding happiness with a poor girl. Hester is sick with worry but she puts on a brave face, avoids Brick whenever he tries to “date” her or even “cut in” at a dance, and she goes out to cheer the Allstate team on to victory against Plymouth U. It is then that she faints and Brick, realizing how much he loves her and that her unborn child is his, picks her up in his arms and tells his millionaire father that if he can’t marry Hester he won’t finish the game for the old alma mater. The father recognizes Hester as the daughter of his old college roommate, the man who lent him enough money to get started in business, and gives the young people his blessing. With Hester cheering him on, Brick goes in to make the winning touchdown in the last minute of the game. Then Hester, wearing proudly the big red “A” of Allstate, leads the team and student body in a big victory snake dance culminating in their wedding under the visitors’ goal post. I felt that it brought home a real message for the youth of America.
It took us more than four months to film The Scarlet Letter, I insisted on a closed “set” with only Manny, head of the publicity department, permitted to visit. Morris ranted and raved about the budget, but I wanted my chef-d’oeuvre to be the one flawless film of my career. And it was. Why should I, a serious artiste, care for Morris’ hysterical outbursts over deficits when I have in my scrapbook reviews such as “Devastating . . .” “An unbelievable four hours in the theatre . . .” “Belle Poitrine brings to Hester Prynne all the innocence and virtue of a John Held flapper . . .”
After a carefully planned campaign of advertising, publicity, personal appearances and interviews, The Scarlet Letter had its world première at the Buchsbaum Baghdad in New York’s fabulous Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
The première was a very exclusive invitational affair. All the top stars of the Metronome “stable” were invited (with one glowing exception) as were rival producers, stars, international celebrities, critics and leading “opinion-makers.” I was terribly disappointed when Louella O. (“Lolly”) Parsons telegraphed that she had suddenly been taken ill. Walter Winchell was also suddenly unable to attend and President and Mrs. Hoover regretted that they had a prior engagement. Otherwise it was a succès fou. The showing began promptly at eight (I am one star who won’t put up with latecomers) and ended on the stroke of midnight. Although I had seen “rushes” and screenings of The Scarlet Letter many times before, I was dissolved in tears at the beauty of my performance and even my “hardboiled” husband, Morris, sobbed brokenly in the seat beside mine, muttering softly in his quaint native tongue. The rest of the audience was so touched that they were unable even to applaud at the end of the film.
When I stepped out of the theatre onto Times Square, pandemonium broke loose. From the wildly cheering populace of New York I knew that I had arrived. Never before was any actress given such an ovation. As the shouts, whistles, horns, sirens, serpentine and confetti swirled around me, I knew that this was something more than the work of Manny and the “boys” in the P.R. department. This demonstration was far beyond something staged in the name of publicity.
“Morris,” I breathed. “The shouting! The cheers!”
“It’s 1932, nafkeh,” he said affectionately.
1932—those magic numbers—the year of Belle Poitrine’s elevation! With my head held high, I waved to the multitude who had turned out to pay homage to little me. It was a new year and I was a star of the first magnitude!
With Letch in “Paradise Lost”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A DIFFICULT YEAR
1932
Stardom • My heavy “shooting” schedule • Busy days • The hectic
social whirl • I become a leading Hollywood hostess • Famous feuds of Filmdom
Baby-dear • A part-time mother or a full-time star? • Re-enter Mr. Musgrove!
A dreadful accident in the gun room • Trial by jury
NO POOR WORDS OF MINE can ever describe the international furor caused by The Scarlet Letter. Editorials, petitions, sermons, radio lectures—there was even talk about having a bill passed in Congress concerning the adaptation of classics—appeared everywhere. Overnight Belle Poitrine became a household word. I was delighted and paid no attention to dear Morris’ morose muttering that all publicity is not necessarily good. I think he was still jealous of “sharing” me with the public.
Naturally I wanted to make another picture while I was still “hot,” as the saying goes. But I didn’t want to make just any picture. Instead I required a superb vehicle which would bring out my best qualities and show me off to the greatest advantage. (I have always had trouble finding material that is suitable for my talents.) I was totally “stymied” until I received a letter from my dear old “chum,” Dudley du Pont, written from the Savoy Hotel in London.
Darling, darling Belle—
Caught you and that cute Letch in The Scarlet Letter at the Odeon. Too divinely unbelievable! You are the absolute dish of London— where, ça va sans dire, you are still most vividly remembered.
Ducky, don’t spread this around to those old bitches in H’wood, but I think I’ve found the film divine for you and Prettykins to do next. This old side-kick of mine, Milton, has written the most heavenly thing called Paradise Lost and it’s a natch for pix!
Unlike Scott Fitzgerald and other writers I could—but won’t—name, Milton is absolutely buried in St. Giles’s and wouldn’t make a bit of troubleabout your changing bits about. He’s a perfect pet, although there is unpleasant talk about his being blind now and again. However, if you rush $10,000 to me I can promise you that Milton will be as still as the grave and not lift a pinkie to interfere with anything you want to do to Paradise Lost.
Ivor and I rather see you and Lover Boy in simply celestial things by Lanvin and then a flashback to the Garden of Eden with the two of you in absolutely minuscule rhinestone fig leaves and things too divine . . .
Isn’t that like darling Dudley, always taking time to think of his friends? Without even consulting Morris (who would have thrown cold water on the whole idea) I sent Dudley a check for his friend Milton and got right to work on plotting Paradise Lost. As Dudley suggested (if he had not chosen to be an actor, he might have been a famous author—what an imagination!) I did part of the story in the present where Eve is a rich Junior Leaguer who wants to lead Adam, a young, idealistic architect, astray (with flashbacks to the Garden of Eden) until the modern Eve happens to stumble into the Four-Square Gospel and get saved. In the end she and Adam marry and settle down happily on a big ranch, with a lovely apple orchard. The film created a furor and I was once and for all established, not as a “one-shot” star, but as a performer who could be counted on to do truly unique films.
I was driving myself too fast, working too hard, but I loved it for I am one of those truly dedicated artistes who will sacrifice anything for his career. In addition to my actual “shooting” schedule there was a constant round of activity—posing for “stills,” interviews, publicity “gimmicks,” radio engagements, personal appearances, goodwill tours, addressing the Belle Poitrine Fan Clubs, which Manny started all over the world. It was a busy life.
In addition to my hectic career, I still had to make the “social rounds” of Hollywood. Sympathetic, friendly and gregarious, I was naturally popular with everyone in the movie colony and always at the center of some gay “high jinks.”
I had so many, many good friends that it is now almost impossible to name them all. Jean Harlow simply doted on me,
for example, even though she was under contract to M-G-M and we were considered “deadly rivals” by all those who did not know what dear friends we were in real life. Darling Jean! How can the millions of “fans” who saw and adored this fabulous “blonde bombshell” on the silver screen ever hope to understand what a shy, timid, retiring creature she was in real life? Although she worshipped the very ground I walked on, she was so shy that she never once accepted an invitation to one of my fabulous parties at Casa Torquemada—nor did she ever invite me into her own modest home for, despite what the “fan” magazines said (many times they simply made up the “facts” they published), Jean never entertained. She was even too timid to telephone me or to return my many calls. However, she did adore me and to prove her great friendship she gave me the formula for making her hair platinum blonde! If that isn’t a sign of one woman’s devotion for another, I ask you, what is? But a tragic thing happened. The day after my beautician had “platinumed” my hair it began falling out in fistfuls! By the end of the week I was totally bald. I was beside myself with grief and anger at the stupidity of my hairdresser (who claimed in court to have followed Miss Harlow’s secret formula to the letter). For the next six months I wore a platinum wig and had to go to Max Factor’s twice a day for treatment.
But I must not take my readers on a sentimental détour down Memory Lane. On with my story!
In Hollywood’s halcyon days there was the perfect basis for a truly chic Society—beautiful women, handsome men, gifted writers, artists, directors and creative people of all sorts. There was plenty of money and almost no crippling income tax to rob those talented ladies and gentlemen who had sacrificed so much to earn it. There were big mansions, glossy cars, servants galore, the most breathtaking gowns, furs and jewels—all overly abundant in Southern California’s faultless climate. With these perfect ingredients for a Society, then, why was there none as I had always known it in England? The reason, my friends, is because Filmdom lacked a Social Leader, a true “arbiter,” an experienced woman of the world to mould all these outstanding members of the “liveliest Art” into one cohesive social structure.
Little Me Page 14