Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the
Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the
sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared
by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned
or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress
up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide
across the sidewalk like some special, splendid race of the beautiful
and the blessed; gowns swishing, hairdos immaculate; teeth, eyes, and
diamonds gleaming together.
Just watching them walk in was as good as a ticket to a world’s fair.
They all had gowns made for those evenings, each trying to outdo the
other. They’d pester the studio designers to find out what the other
girls were getting. “You’ve got to top them for me,” they’d all plead,
and the boys would smile the promise to do their best with sketch pads
and shears.
During World War II the women of Hollywood let the producers talk them
into surrendering every shred of glamour even on Oscar nights. “If you
go out, you mustn’t be well dressed,” the front-office men argued, “or
else the public will be offended. What you’ve got to do is to look
_austere_.”
I knew this was malarkey. So did they. From the mail that poured in, it
was as plain as a pikestaff that servicemen were starving for glamour.
They wanted pin-up pictures of glamorous girls. I sent out ten thousand
of them, until the studios rebelled and pretended they couldn’t afford
any more. But they didn’t get away with that.
I waged a little guerrilla war of my own, too, to doll up the Academy
Awards when the studio chieftains still wanted the presentation to look
no dressier than a missionary’s sewing bee. Telephone calls by the
dozen worked the trick. “What are you going to do,” I demanded, “let
those clothes rot in your closets? You’re not going to wear anything
but your most beautiful gown.”
“But nobody’s going to be dressed,” the girl at the other end would
wail.
“Then set the style. Last year you looked like spooks: sackcloth and
ashes.”
At least, we managed to re-establish the tradition that year that women
should dress for the night they hand out the gold-plated little men who
first saw life in 1927, when Cedric Gibbon roughed in the design for
them on a tablecloth at the Ambassador Hotel.
But the Academy Awards I’ve cared about most over the years had
nothing to do with glamour. They had to do with life, exclusively, in
full measure. The first were the two Oscars that went to the crippled
veteran, Harold Russell, who proved in _The Best Years of Our Lives_
that a man can lose his hands but not his courage.
The second was willed to Howard University by Hattie McDaniel, who won
hers for the best supporting role in 1939 for _Gone With the Wind_ and
died penniless in 1952 in the Motion Picture Relief Home.
The third was won by James Baskette for _Song of the South_, after a
campaign in which Jean Hersholt, then president of the Academy, and
Freeman Gosden gave their immediate support. Some members disdained my
idea that a special Oscar should go to a man for playing Uncle Remus,
a slave, and they fought at a meeting on the eve of presentation until
4 A.M. Jean finally sent them home with this warning: “If he doesn’t
receive an Oscar, I shall stand up tomorrow night and tell the world
the whole disgraceful story.”
After he received it from the hands of Ingrid Bergman, James Baskette
carried his statuette everywhere he went, in a black velvet bag that
his wife made. At night he stood it on his bedroom mantelpiece with a
tiny spotlight shining on it.
He was slated to play “De Lawd” in a Broadway revival of _Green
Pastures_ when he was taken critically ill. As he lay dying, his eyes
returned time and again to Oscar. “No colored man ever got one before,”
he said, “and I’m grateful, Lord.”
_Nine_
Our town worships success, the bitch goddess whose smile hides a
taste for blood. She has a habit, before she destroys her worshipers,
of turning them into spitting images of herself. She has an army of
beauties in attendance at her shrine.
Not many survive the encounter with success. Wreathed in smiles, she
kills them in cars, like Jimmy Dean; or with torment, like Marilyn
Monroe; or with illness, like Jean Harlow. She turns them into
drunkards, liars, or cheats who are as dishonest in business as in
love. This is the story of four women and what success did to them.
One of them who escaped in a single piece is Lucille Ball. She grabbed
the prizes of talent, fame, and money, and Lucy is only slightly
battered as a consequence. She even survived after she gave Desi Arnaz,
with whom she was madly in love, the shock of his life by divorcing him.
Lucille had the sense to quit as TV’s “Lucy” when she sat on top of
the world. That show had an audience rating so high that America took
time out for half an hour every Tuesday evening to look at that little
black box. I remember that the 1952 inauguration party that Colonel
Robert McCormick of the Chicago _Tribune_ gave in Washington came to a
temporary halt while everybody had to watch in silence. Lucy’s baby was
being born on the program that night and Bertie wanted to see.
But the time came when Lucy told Desi: “I won’t do any more. The
writers have run out of ideas, and I’m dead tired.” They sold out the
series to CBS for reruns and on the proceeds bought the two RKO studios
for $6,150,000. These studios had a certain sentimental appeal on top
of their commercial value. Lucy and Desi first met at RKO in 1940 when
they were filming _Too Many Girls_, a prophetic title. The former Earl
Carroll chorus girl and the ex-bongo drummer from Cuba proceeded to
spread themselves over a whole pile of enterprises that included a Palm
Springs hotel, a golf course, and a $12,000,000 production contract for
Westinghouse.
Desi took to putting a few drinks under his belt as a diet, and the
fireworks started. They split up two or three times, but Lucy always
forgave him and took him back. To save the marriage, as she hoped, she
set up a trip to Europe for them both. “We’ll take the children along,
too,” she said.
I begged her not to. “If you’d just try it alone, the two of you,” I
said. “Little Desi and Lucie are too young to enjoy a trip like that.”
But Lucy can be stubborn. “I won’t go without them,” she said. So she
took a maid along to look after them. For the voyage, which she hoped
would be a second honeymoon, she bought clothes by the trunkload; big
picture hats that she never put on her head; a magnificent full-length
sable coat. “But it’s May now, and you’ll be running into summer over
there,” I said.
“I’ve bought it and I’m going to take it,” she said. “Besides, Desi
hasn’t seen it.”
They sailed aboard the _Liberté_. “We are having a wonderful
crossing--so far--weather perfect,” she wrote me. “Food divine--too
divine. Eating ourselves out of shape. Everyone loves our kids--that
makes us happy. They have even forgiven us our forty pieces of baggage
and two trunks.”
Just how wonderful the trip was I heard when she got back, scarcely
speaking to Desi. He had been weary, resenting the presence of their
children, though he’s a loving father. He and Lucy collided head on in
one quarrel after another. “What did he think about the sable coat?” I
asked.
“Never saw it,” she said. “I used it on the ship as a blanket for the
kids.”
The following Christmas, when the Westinghouse contract had three more
months to run, she asked me to appear on a TV show on which she was
making her bow as director; it included a dozen or more players she had
been training in her school. Desi was just back from a solo trip to
Europe, shooting a picture there.
On the set, Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley, veterans of happier “I Love
Lucy” days, wanted to take cover along with me to shelter from the
storms between Lucy and Desi. It was dreadful. “You can’t insult him
before the entire company,” I warned her in her dressing room. “You’re
partly responsible for this show, too, you know.”
It seemed we were doomed to have a flop on our hands. As director, Lucy
was lost without a compass, too mad to see straight, and the show was
going to pieces. In dress rehearsal Desi said mildly: “Lucy, dear, will
you let me see if I can pull this thing together for you?”
“Okay, try it!” she snapped.
Desi was winning no medals as husband, but he shines as a director
and producer. In ten minutes he had that Christmas program ticking
like a clock. The New Year hadn’t yet come around the corner before
Lucy wanted to sue him for divorce, which was something Desi had been
convinced she would never do.
“You can’t,” I told her. “You and Desi both signed the Westinghouse
contract as partners. If you walk out, they could cancel and sue you.”
She had to listen to the same tune from me every week. She was itching
to dump Desi and so desperate to leave Hollywood that she’d have played
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ if it would take her to Broadway. Instead she took
on the next best thing--a musical called _Wildcat_, on which she staked
money and her reputation.
Lucy hasn’t many illusions about herself. “I’m not beautiful, not sexy,
and I don’t have a good figure,” she says. She knows she can’t sing and
she admits that too many years have flowed under the bridge for her to
dance like Cyd Charisse. But for _Wildcat_ she had to sing, dance, and
hold the show together. She tried to inject some sparkle by ad-libbing
wisecracks à la Lucy. The author, instead of being grateful, was fit to
be tied.
After a lot of her cash had vanished and she’d collapsed two or three
times on stage, she returned to Hollywood. She licked her wounds and,
with Desi down on his ranch breeding horses, earned fresh medals as a
businesswoman by helping to put Desilu back on its feet.
In November 1961, I went to the wedding of Lucy and Gary Morton, a
young man she met on a blind date while she was playing in _Wildcat_
and he was telling jokes at the Copacabana. He makes her happy, and she
told me that he’d be able to spend the summer at home while she started
a new television series. No, Gary would not co-star.
* * * * *
Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she
was a hoofer named Lucille Le Sueur. She’s been put to the sacrificial
flames more than once, but has always risen like Lazarus and lived to
burn another day.
She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. She labors twenty-four
hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye. She’ll
time her arrival at a theater seconds before the curtain goes up and
make such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one,
scene one. The actors on stage may hate it, but she’s having a ball.
If she has a surviving fan club in any city she’s visiting, she’ll
carefully supply its president in advance with a complete schedule
for the day, detailed to the minute, and collect such crowds that by
evening there’ll be a mob hundreds strong escorting her.
She was called box-office poison and couldn’t get a job for years
after her Metro contract ended. Out of money, she continued to play
the star and hold her head high, and she had the town’s sympathy.
_Mildred Pierce_ put her back in pictures and won her an Oscar, as
much for bravery under fire as for her acting. The same gutsy quality
showed when her husband, Al Steele, died and she took on a job as
traveling ambassador for his company, Pepsi-Cola. Just before that,
he’d arranged for her to visit the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha,
Nebraska. Typically, she went through with the visit alone. Going on
from there to Hollywood, she told me about it over dinner at the home
of Billy Haines, once a picture star, now a top decorator with Joan
among his customers.
Nothing would suit but I had to see SAC, too. She fixed it with General
Thomas Power, the commander in chief. The Air Force flew me out from
Los Angeles. Joan, who’d meantime returned to New York, came on from
there on a commercial flight that got in an hour ahead of me. I found
her waiting at the airport, with the mayor of the city in tow. She
hadn’t yet checked into the hotel suite we were sharing, so we went
straight to SAC, where General Power took us through the most amazing
setup you could dream of. Joan and I rode to town together in the
chauffeured limousine Mr. Mayor had put at her disposal.
She had enough luggage and hatboxes with her to fill a department
store. She carried a jewel case two feet long. “I always travel with
it,” she told us. “By the way [this to the mayor] would you be kind
enough to provide someone to guard my jewels? I’ll need two men--one
for day and one for night.”
“Certainly, Miss Crawford,” he said, hypnotized. “Whatever you need,
just ask for it.”
Our suite consisted of a living room and two separate bedrooms, one for
Joan, and one for me. As soon as we’d checked in, she unpacked. For
our two-day visit she brought twenty-two dresses, which she spread out
all over her room, and fourteen hats. “I don’t know what I’ll want to
wear,” she explained seriously when my eyebrows hit my hairline, “so I
brought them along in case.”
We were no sooner unpacked than she rang for an iron and ironing board.
The iron the bellboy brought wasn’t the kind she liked, so she sent him
out to buy a new one. With it, she proceeded to press every one of the
dresses and hang each in its cellophane wrapper in her closet.
“Would you like to see my jewels?” she asked. I nodded, speechless. She
unlocked the case and--abracadabra!--it was like peering at Aladdin’s
treasure, half a million dollars’ worth; trays and trays loaded with
diamonds and emeralds and pearls, bracelets and necklaces and earrings.
“This is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done,” I said. “Someday
you’ll wake up with your throat cut.”
“But I always have it guarded,” she said, “and I keep it beside me on
the plane.”
“Why isn’t it in a safety-deposit box?”
“I like to look at them,” she said, as though she were talking to an
idiot.
I went into my room for a minute. When I came back into the living room
she had disappeared. “Where are you?” Her voice came from the bathroom:
“In here.” She was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. “It
wasn’t very clean,” she said.
Next to the goddess in their prayers, many of the worshipers place
a compulsive kind of cleanliness. Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Doris
Day--they’ll shower three times a day like pilgrims in the Ganges
trying to wash away their sins. But only Joan and Garbo will personally
scrub the bathroom or kitchen floor to make sure there are no germs
lingering there.
The mayor returned to make us his guests at a small dinner party. We
both wore simple dresses because Omaha doesn’t run much to evening
clothes. We were back in the hotel by eleven-thirty and had Mr. Mayor
and two or three others up for a drink.
As soon as they had said their good nights, Joan, who doesn’t smoke,
flung every window wide open and carried the ash trays out into the
hall, where her night guard had dutifully stationed himself outside the
door. She gathered up the glasses and washed them in the kitchenette
off the living room. She then unlocked another item of her luggage that
the bellboy had staggered under when we moved in.
It was a massive chest perhaps a yard long, packed with ice. It
contained four bottles of hundred-proof vodka, bottles of her favorite
brand of champagne, and a silver chalice, which she took out for her
bedtime ceremony. Into the chalice she poured a split of champagne and
raised it in a simple toast, “To Al,” before she put it to her lips.
“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked when the chalice was empty.
“Can’t we order in the morning?”
“No, I like breakfast when I get up. I’ll put our order in tonight.”
I settled for juice, coffee, and a boiled egg. That taken care of, we
agreed that eight-thirty in the morning would suit us both as time to
arise. Come the morrow, I’d bathed when at eight-thirty sharp there was
a rapping at my bedroom door. In the living room stood a waiter ready
to serve us. Outside the front door stood a new guard, keeping the
daytime watch.
Then we spent a full, fascinating, reassuring, awe-inspiring day at
SAC; saw the H-bombers take off in a practice scramble; again met
General Power, who gave us dinner. I started sleeping more easily from
that night on as a result of what I’d witnessed. It seemed to me to
be an up-to-date necessity in a fearful world where the best rule for
America’s conduct was advocated by Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly and
carry a big stick. The next morning, every inch a star and clean as a
hound’s tooth, Joan flew on to Chicago, with her twenty-two dresses,
fourteen hats, jewel case, ice chest, and silver chalice, to scrub
another bathroom if she had to.
* * * * *
Some of our women can walk through the temple’s sacrificial flames and
not get as much as singed. They’re so deep-down innocent they wouldn’t
recognize the goddess if they saw her. Ann Blyth, a devout Catholic and
a darling, doesn’t know that she’s used as regularly as tap water by
people seeking favors, charity, or a conducted tour around the studios.
Kathryn Grayson is another, so guileless that a fat, bow-legged
producer with lust in his eyes used to arrive on her doorstep many a
morning before she’d had breakfast and literally chase her through the
house.
The most gullible of all is Mary Martin, who sees, hears, and speaks
no evil and, by a miracle, lives by it and through it. Judge Preston
Martin’s daughter was friendly as a kitten when she drove her bright,
new, yellow convertible to Hollywood in 1936 from Weatherford, Texas,
which boasted a population of 5000 people at the time. She’d always
been the girl who sang sweetest in church, stood out in school plays,
worked the most enthusiastically in civic causes.
Her father gave her $500 as stake money on the strict understanding
that as soon as that was gone, she’d come back home. He also saddled
her with her five-year-old son, Larry, who resulted when Mary eloped
from finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee, with a boy from Fort
Worth. That marriage lasted in fact two years, was dissolved in five.
“Larry’s your responsibility and you’ve got to take him along,”
her father insisted, figuring this was a fair means of keeping his
wide-eyed darling out of new romances and would bring her back quicker.
Around the studios they got to calling her “Audition Mary.” She sang
for everybody, and everybody turned thumbs down. “Nice voice, fair
figure, but impossible to photograph that face,” was the verdict. She
sang for Oscar Hammerstein II--remember _South Pacific_?--at his house
on Benedict Canyon at the end of my dead-end street. He knew she wasn’t
ready. Years later Mary told me he taught her how to phrase a song,
how to read lines, how to move. “In fact,” said she, “I learned show
business from Oscar Hammerstein.”
When he thought she was ready, he and Richard Rodgers adapted a play
called _Green Grow the Lilacs_, and she was offered the leading role.
At the same time, she had also been offered a lead in a play produced
by Vinton Freedley, who’d given Mary her first Broadway chance in
_Leave It to Me_.
“I was torn between the two offers. Talking to Hammerstein over the
phone, I said: ‘Will you give me a minute?’ I tossed a coin and
Freedley won. The play was a success in Boston, but I felt certain it’d
never reach Broadway--it didn’t.”
_Green Grow the Lilacs_ also failed and later was rewritten for a man
instead of a woman in a new version called _Oklahoma!_
When her $500 had melted away, she picked up what jobs she could find.
She sang for $60 at a little night spot. She taught slew-footed stars
how to get through dancing scenes. Her voice was dubbed on sound tracks
for tin-eared girls who couldn’t sing. Then she managed to get signed
by a producer named Lawrence Schwab for a Broadway musical he had in
mind.
When she got to New York, she found that plans for the show had come
to nothing, but Schwab lent her to another producer, Vinton Freedley,
for _Leave It to Me_. It had a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,”
by Cole Porter, which Sophie Tucker encouraged Mary to sing with the
innocence of a lamb. That was the making of Mary. Soon she was singing
on radio, then back in Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. Judge
Martin went to his grave believing that “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was
written especially for him.
But making movies is a cold-blooded, impersonal, highly technical
business. Some performers slowly freeze inside when they work for
staring cameras instead of for human beings sitting in a theater
waiting to burst into applause. Mary was like that. “I beat my brains
out,” she says, “and I like to hear the echo.” She didn’t cotton to
Hollywood.
Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in
curls and ruffles. She arrived at one dress-up affair in a sports suit.
And make-up men hadn’t yet acquired their present techniques, which can
transform literally any girl into a beauty queen.
Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her
one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown
can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in
that!” The thought itself puts a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her
lips, making her just what she fancies herself to be.
I only once saw Mainbocher cringe at the sight of his pride and joy.
That was in New Orleans, when we sat together watching Mary’s opening
in _Kind Sir_, produced by her long-time friend and Connecticut
neighbor, Josh Logan. I smelled a fiasco during her rehearsals, but
I did whatever was possible to boost her morale. She poured out her
gratitude in a telegram: ONCE BEFORE ANOTHER GREAT WOMAN SOPHIE TUCKER
HELPED ME IN MY VERY FIRST SHOW STOP NOW YOU BY SOME MIRACLE WERE SENT
TO ME GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS--MARY.
But nothing helped _Kind Sir_. On opening night, when the last-act
curtain fell, even the flowers that were pushed into her arms were
tired. In the seat next to me, Mainbocher, who’d done her costumes,
slid down almost out of sight so he wouldn’t be asked to take a bow.
But he took it with a smile like all the rest.
I almost made an enemy of Josh Logan by nagging him to use Mary in the
movie of _South Pacific_ instead of Mitzi Gaynor. “There are make-up
men today who’ll make Mary look like a young girl,” I told him.
“Mitzi’s a fine entertainer, but she’ll be only a carbon copy of Mary
as Nellie Forbush.” Josh wrote me a twelve-page letter explaining why I
was wrong. _South Pacific_ turned out to be only a modest success as a
movie, earned around $5,000,000, but it would have done better if Mary
had starred in it.
She played Nellie in London, of course, and reported rapturously, in
red ink yet: “Dear Hedda: Look where we are! Exactly where you said
we’d be! And--oh!--it has been just as wonderful as I had hoped and
_dreamed_ it would be. All of it has been unbelievably perfect.”
When she came home she was bone-weary. She and her husband, Richard
Halliday, had booked passage on a slow boat to South America. Then
Leland Hayward told her: “I’m going to do a big TV spectacular, and I
can’t do it without you.” She begged off and started on the cruise.
When they reached Brazil, Adrian talked her into buying land near the
house he and Janet Gaynor built in the middle of the jungle that he
loved.
Mary had as much need for a Brazilian hideaway as for two heads, but
she can’t go on saying no to anybody. She and Richard, who was the
only big reward she won in Hollywood, discovered that the first jungle
real estate they bought was sold to them by a woman who didn’t own it.
The local authorities hushed that up since they couldn’t afford to
have the news leak back to the United States. So Mary, $40,000 poorer,
sank another $50,000 into some other property, which the surrounding,
giant-sized greenery constantly threatens to steal back from her.
When Leland Hayward heard about her proposed rest cure in Brazil, he
flew down ahead of the Hallidays and was waiting for them as they
landed. Brushing aside her pleas of fatigue, he told her: “Ethel Merman
says she’ll do my TV show if you will.” Mary, as ever, couldn’t say no.
After the two of them made television history that season, she asked
Ethel casually one day: “How did Leland get you to do it?”
“At first I told him to go to hell,” said Ethel, “but then he said
you’d do it if I would, and I couldn’t refuse.”
Where Joan can’t stop washing, Mary can’t stop working. She hasn’t a
clue as to the size of her bank account, and I’ll guarantee she never
looks inside a checkbook. She waded trustingly into ventures, often
backed with her own money, where she found herself up to her ears in
problems.