Conversations in the Raw Page 3

  The eyes looked bathed in the glow of a thousand Christmas mornings. “Well liss-en, why dintcha ask that three hours ago, ’cause it’s gonna take three days to answer that one, I mean, liss-en, you hafta come back again some time. Sayyy, I didn’t even offer you a drink or anything. You want a beer or anything? I mean I gave a lecture at the American Academy to the graduating class and I don’t have a lotta pictures of me in frames around the house, but here’s the picture they took. The text of the sermon was ‘Don’t give up!’ and Garson said, ‘That’s silly, you’re talking to kids who are not even started yet and you’re telling them don’t give up,’ and I said, ‘Sure, that’s when they do give up, when they’re just getting started.’ I had a lotta success and everything’s swingin’ and look at me in the picture, I look just like I did when I was in school. You can see I’m doin’ OK ’cause all the other people in the picture are standing up and clapping for me. So liss-en, I’m determined to have a film career and I’m gonna do a Broadway musical—Hal Prince offered me the Lotte Lenya role in Cabaret but I told him I’d rather play the Joel Grey role and I still think I was right—and right now I’m the valet to Garson Kanin and I’m finishing the screenplay to Thornton Wilder’s book Heaven’s My Destination which is gonna be the greatest thing ever hit the movies and”. . . the door was closing on the smell of lilacs and the sound of rain. . . “I haven’t even started yet. . .”

  It was the last thing I got squeezed into the notebook before the pencil point broke.

  Jane Wyman

  Joan Crawford sells Pepsi, Veronica Lake waits on tables, June Allyson married a barber, Merle Oberon moved to Mexico, and when last heard from, Hedy Lamarr was still trying to get a new Diner’s Club card. In Hollywood, the only thing you hear more than “Let’s have lunch someday” is “Whatever happened to. . . ?” New faces and short memories is what it’s all about. For the star ladies over 40, it can be rough. The smart ones save their money, the lucky ones end up on TV battling out the ratings with the new faces, and the ones who are desperate either make horror movies or play the new faces’ mothers. Well, don’t worry about Jane Wyman.

  At 55, the gal who started out as Sarah Jane Fulks from St. Joseph, Missouri, is smart (“She’s loaded,” says a friend who knew her when and still knows her now), lucky (Along with Loretta Young, she pioneered the movement into TV, starred in her own TV series which ran for three years at a time when most of the declining glamour queens were still being photographed through gauze), and she’s never been desperate. “I dropped out for a while because all they offered me was ax-murderers and Lesbians. I won’t play Lesbians, honey, not this kid.”

  Now she’s back, starring in her first movie in six years, looking keen and peachy in her old Jane Wyman bangs (it’s a wig), and giving the Paramount lot a run for its money. She sits in the commissary, full of ginger and jazz, behind a big Paramount menu that reads “Keep the Ten Commandments Says Cecil B. DeMille” and says, “OK, C.B., I’ll begin by declining the Dorothy Lamour salad. What in the hell is a Dorothy Lamour salad, anyway?” It’s fresh pineapple, sliced bananas and strawberries with cream cheese and bar-le-duc. No thanks. She decides instead on a steak with french fries, a package of Kents, which she chain-smokes with the energy of a lady riveter, and a slice of watermelon. “This is where it all started, honey,” she says, spitting out watermelon seeds. “I came out here from Missouri and became one of the Leroy Prinz dancers. They made a test of me at Universal for a Carole Lombard movie, then I got cut out of that and signed a contract at Warners in 1936 and became the Torchy Blaine of the B’s, following right along in Glenda Farrell’s footsteps. I thought I was the greatest thing since Seven-Up. I even remember my first line. Bill Powell played a producer and I was in the chorus line. ‘What is your name?’ he asked. And my line was, ‘My name is Bessie Fuffnik; I swim, ride, dive, imitate wild birds and play the trombone.’” She hoots so loud she nearly falls into the watermelon juice. “It was one of the Golddiggers, honey, but I forgot the year. Years later, on the night I won the Oscar for Johnny Belinda, I got this wire from Ray Heindorf: ‘Dear Bessie Fuffnik—I swim, ride, dive, imitate wild birds, play the trombone, and win Academy Awards.’ I’ve never forgotten it. Anyway, for ten years I was the wisecracking lady reporter who stormed the city desk snapping, ‘Stop the presses, I’ve got a story that will break this town wide open!”’ Another hoot. “But you know, honey, I was one brassy blonde who tried to learn something about both the camera and my craft. The turning point came in a big dramatic scene in a Chinese restaurant in Princess O’Rourke. I went to New York to do some publicity and while I was there this book called The Lost Weekend came out and it was all anybody talked about. I got a call saying come home, Billy Wilder wants you for the girl opposite Ray Milland. He’d seen O’Rourke and wanted me for this serious role and I got it and we made it right here at Paramount and it changed my whole professional life. Now I’m back.”

  The new film is called How to Commit Marriage. It’s her 74th (count ’em) film and she’s teamed with Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason. Plot: Jane and Bob are getting a divorce but decide to wait until after their daughter’s wedding to break the news. Gleason, the groom’s father, is the president of a rock ’n roll company who is anti-marriage, anti-Establishment, anti-anti. When he meets the in-laws he recognizes Bob as a realtor who once sold him a house that got demolished in a mud slide. Everybody fights. At the wedding, Gleason announces the divorce plans and the disillusioned kids end up unmarried hippies expecting a baby. Bob and Jane get remarried, Bob dresses up like the Maharishi to reunite the kids, and everything ends happily in a rock ’n roll theme song. The End. OK, so it’s not Johnny Belinda, but if it gets Jane Wyman back on the screen, nobody’s asking questions, least of all the lady herself.

  “The studios are afraid to hire the old stars because they’re afraid we might bomb. Then they bring in people who bomb anyway because they have no experience. This way, they figure the combination of three old pros like us plus the kids and the music of today gives them something to sell. I haven’t worked in so many years and I just wanted to get back in front of the cameras and see if I could do it. It’s not a return. What do you call it? A re-entrance? Anyway, it’s a lot of fun, and comedy is harder to play than drama. I was going to do a nightclub act with Donald O’Connor in Tahoe. I had the white furs and the Spanish guitars and I was going to make a very glamorous movie-star entrance on a white staircase, but I got peritonitis of the pancreas and nearly died, so that was off. This is the first movie I’ve been offered that I figured I could have a good time with, and working with Bob and Gleason is a ball. I’m not complaining.”

  We saunter over to the sound stage where Bob Hope is shooting. Everyone lights up like the Accutron sign on Times Square when they see her coming. Hope blows her a kiss from across the set. “I’m not in this scene, so let’s go over to my dressing room. I don’t like to stand in Bob’s line of vision when he’s working. It throws him off.” We cross the lot where Alan Ladd rode the Orient Express with Veronica Lake and it stirs memories. “We used to have such a ball on the set,” she reminisces. “Over at Warners we were like a family. Every room had a bar and we used to yell at each other from one room to another. Even when we weren’t working, we’d have lunch together every day in the studio commissary. We turned out 52 pictures a year from one studio alone, so we had to get along. I remember when Bette Davis went back to New York—she always hated Hollywood—she had the biggest trailer this town has ever seen and she said, ‘I want Janie to have it.’ I tried to bring it to Paramount and it was so big we couldn’t get it through the DeMille gate. I finally had to give it away and now some real estate man uses it for an office out in the San Fernando Valley. We all got along and we helped each other. We were trained by pros. Kay Francis helped me the most when I got started. And we weren’t afraid to get out there and get our feet wet. These kids now can’t learn. There’s nobody around to help them. It’s like baking a cake for the first time. Y
ou gotta get the oven right. There’s TV, but you turn out a show in three days, the writers keep changing and the directors don’t know what they’re doing. They’re learning on the job, too. It’s ticker-tape entertainment. TV hasn’t got its diapers wet yet.”

  There’s no bitterness in the dialogue. She has somehow managed to survive the toughness and the harshness that happens to most women who have made 74 pictures. “What happened to me was part of a cycle. We had the gangster cycle with Jimmy Cagney and Bogart, then the war cycle, then the John Wayne movies where all the men got the best parts, then the Ben Hurs and the Charlton Heston spectaculars, then the ‘method’ came in and they lost me right there. Somewhere along the line the kind of pictures I used to make—Belinda, So Big, Blue Veil, Magnificent Obsession—the women’s pictures—went out of style. The year I won the Oscar for Belinda I was up against Irene Dunne for I Remember Mama, Olivia de Havilland in Snake Pit, Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number and Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc. Now they’re old-fashioned and were going back to musicals. There’s not much imagination around. The screen is not building women for women’s pictures. TV has ruined everything. People talk and eat while everything’s going on on the screen. It’s taken a big bite out of the industry. Also, after the war the studios lost their theatres and the double bills went out, so they stopped making A and B pictures. Everyone went independent. I made two pictures, but I had bad luck because they both came at the end of cycles. Stage Fright, which I did for Hitchcock, came at the end of the suspense drama movies. We had to re-dub everything because Michael Wilding mumbled all the way through it and you couldn’t understand a word he said. By the time it came out, that kind of movie was dead. Then I did Miracle in the Rain. I hate to bring up my own work, honey, but what a wonderful movie! But by the time we got that one out, Van Johnson and I weren’t so big and Warners was already spending all its money promoting Giant, so it never got any attention.”

  The conversation was interrupted by three Belgian priests visiting the lot. They passed up Richard Harris and Sean Connery. The only person they wanted to meet was Jane Wyman. “Isn’t that sweet? They remembered The Yearling. You can’t fault that one; it’s a classic. Spencer Tracy and Anne Revere had started it and the deer got too big and they had to shelve it and Gregory Peck and I came in late on it. I always did what I wanted to do, so I don’t have a favorite. The Blue Veil was the hardest, but Belinda was the most creative. I studied for six months in a school for the deaf and did the whole movie with my ears sealed in wax to blot out every noise except percussion sounds. I still remember the sign language. That film was almost never released. We filmed up on the California coast and Jack Warner hated it because when he saw the footage he yelled, ‘It’s just a simple story and they’re up on the coast shooting a bunch of damned sea gulls!’ After the first preview, he hated it so much he stuck it in cans and nobody knew what happened to it. Everyone was fired at the end of the picture and Jean Negulesco wasn’t even allowed to do his own editing. He has never to this day set foot in the Warner Brothers studio again. One day somebody was rummaging around in a lot of dusty cans of film in the New York office and found some reels of the picture and ran them and it finally got shown and you know the rest. I made Jack Warner take out an ad and apologize to everyone connected with the film, from the grips to the water boy and he named every person by name. It just proves it’s all timing. You can’t be a smart ass in this business.

  “Then I lost a baby and was sick for a while and I went into television and my eyes went to pot reading 5,000 scripts a month, just to get 38 shows. Loretta and I used to trade. I’d say, ‘This part’s too pretty for me, you do it—that one’s too ugly for you, let me do it.’ We used to trade leading men, too. One of my best shows came from a garage mechanic who handed us two pages of paper while he was filling the car with gas. I gave him $100 for it and the damned thing won an Emmy nomination. It was very grueling work for three years. I had to cast, produce, do the office work. I used to go down to the airport and hand the film to the pilot myself to get it to New York by Tuesday night so it could go on the air. Things are more sophisticated now—bigger budgets, shorter working hours. But the reason I got out of it was because of a cycle again. The anthology show went out of style overnight and the series with regular characters came in. But I learned one thing—you can always get quality if you are quality. Some of these new shows are lousy even with their big budgets because they don’t have the quality to begin with. I learn every sequence of a film in its exact place before the picture ever begins. Now they just learn each day’s take and the hell with it. I have no patience with that. If an actor says, ‘I can’t do that because I don’t feel it,’ I just get my hat on and go home or have a beer someplace.”

  The one subject she does not discuss is ex-husbands who become governors of California. Namely Ronald Reagan, whom she divorced in 1948. “It’s not because I’m bitter or because I disagree with him politically. I’ve always been a registered Republican. But it’s bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that’s all. Also, I don’t know a damn thing about politics. I don’t care who does what to who and anyway, now that I’ve moved into a new apartment, I live in a different district and I forgot to register, so I can’t vote anyway.”

  Both of her children by Reagan are grown. Maureen, 28, makes records in Nashville, and Michael, 24, is a boat racer. (“You can only mother them up to a point, then if there’s anything they need to know they can ask somebody.”) Her third marriage, to composer Fred Karger, ended in 1965 and her house in Beverly Hills was robbed (“three times, honey, once by a Mexican who was in the house while I was undressing for bed—they found him in a church in Tijuana with my pearls in his pocket”), so she now lives alone in a modern apartment building at a spot in Century City which used to be the Twentieth Century Fox back lot. Living alone has now increased her enthusiasm for returning to the cameras. “I’m perfectly willing to make more pictures as long as I can find good ones, but I won’t play monsters or women who are terrorized by hoodlums on LSD or any of that stuff. Somehow along the way, I got a nice-lady image and it got in the way. I’m ready to work, but they just haven’t gotten around to me yet.”

  As for the future, she’s trying to write a book of anecdotes called Whatever’s Fair but “I can’t write, honey. I’m the kind of gal who spells cat K-A-T. There was some talk about me doing Mame on Broadway, but I sang a few songs for them—it was the first time in my life I ever auditioned for anything—and they were willing to give me only a week’s rehearsal. I need a lot longer than that. I would like to do a play.” They were calling her back to the set to shoot a new scene with Bob Hope and there was a new batch of autographs to sign outside the door. She grabbed a fresh pack of Kents, waved merrily and, bangs bobbing in the afternoon sunshine, bounced across the parking lot, still chattering. “If you need a closer, just write ‘The End’ at the bottom of the page. Like I said, I’d like to do a Broadway show, I’d like to do a lotta things. But if they want me for a Broadway show, let ’em build one. I got no place to go in a hurry.”

  Ingrid Bergman

  “I owe my entire career to an elevator boy.”

  With that, she begins. Ingrid Bergman backstage on a windy November evening, waiting for the curtain to rise. Sitting on the bony edge of an uncomfortable chair in a lime Jello-colored shift and soft mauve boots up to her still-pretty knees, with her soft brown hair pulled back in a girlish pony tail, streaked now with silver strands too real and unphony to lose in a bottle of rinse, smoking cigarettes and smashing them out in a tiny ashtray no bigger than a cameo in her tiny snuffbox dressing room that smells of rouge and powder and greasepaint and stale smoke. I don’t know what people expect movie stars to be like, but surely this Bergman would be a disappointment. No prize for the moon-faced and starry-eyed, she drinks her Scotches and laughs her curly giggle and doesn’t give a damn what people think. Behind her are the klieg lights and the countless Hollywood movies (“I don’t
remember how many; I didn’t count”) and the Rossellini scandal and the Academy Awards and the bloody headlines and the pain. But people love to forgive, and now she’s back on Broadway, for the first time in 21 years, acting on the stage in a marathon role in Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions, a play the critics didn’t care much for and she’s mad as hell. “Yes, mad. Really mad.” But the anger comes later. After she’s gotten down to the nitty-gritty.

  “I will tell you about how I decided to come back to Broadway, but first let me start at the beginning. I was studying in a dramatic school in Stockholm. It was my first year and in the summer vacation I went to the Swedish film industry and did a test and got a job. Just like that. I was 18, and I felt that if I went back to school I’d be an old woman before I got out, so I stayed in films. But all the while I knew I had to learn something. I didn’t want to be one of those girls who get discovered in drug stores and become movie stars. So I kept up my theatre training on the side while I made Swedish movies. Two years later, I made my first stage appearance in a little French comedy called The Hour Age. Then I got my first lead in a play, written by a Hungarian, called Jean. Hollywood was all over Europe then, looking for talent, and I had barely begun my stage career when I was asked to come to America. Every studio was signing girls to seven-year contracts and then they’d come back after a year and their chances at home were ruined, because if you’re no good in Hollywood who wants to see you at home? Many girls ruined their careers that way, jumping into films. Anyway, I played it cagey and waited for the right role and the right man who would only sign me to one film. I had done Intermezzo in Swedish, but I don’t think anyone in Hollywood noticed. However, there was an elevator boy of Swedish descent in David Selznick’s office building in New York who went to every little Swedish movie he could find. One day Selznick’s story editor, Kathryn Brown, rode up in his elevator and he told her, ‘You’re always looking for new faces, why don’t you go down to such-and-such a cinema on so-and-so avenue and look at this picture, Intermezzo?’ She saw it, sent a copy of the print to California, and Selznick wrote to me with one of those seven-year offers and I said no. So he sent Miss Brown to Sweden to see what was wrong with me. I guess they thought I was crazy. But when I learned they wanted to do a remake of Intermezzo in English I agreed to come to America and I loved it. I did that one film and by that time the war had broken out and I stayed.