INTERMISSION I

I’d like to pause in this procession of leading ladies to pay a belated but sincere tribute to character actresses. When I was growing up, I was always pleased to see Eve Arden’s name in the cast, because I knew she’d come in and expertly deliver cynical one-liners that would puncture the pretensions of the other characters, if not the entire movie.

Eve Arden’s characters were always lamenting their inability to attract a man. Actually, Eve was quite attractive, although her husband, the actor Brooks West, was an alcoholic who didn’t work much. They stayed married for more than forty years, although Eve had several long-running affairs. I knew Eve and found her to be a very warm and open person.

She was probably the best at what she did, but there were others, as well. Before Eve, there were wonderful actresses like Edna May Oliver and Marie Dressler. Their job was to speak for the audience, and deliver some pointed humor at the expense of the other characters and, often, themselves.

Take Thelma Ritter, for instance. She got off some of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s best one-liners in All About Eve (“Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end”), and backed up Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Thelma didn’t hide her light under a bushel; she got nominated for six Academy Awards.

Thelma was pretty much what she was typically cast as: a working-class woman from Brooklyn. This may well be one of the reasons she played her parts so well. She had been on the stage, but never in a hit, and became much more successful in the movies. Before her film career took off, her husband made his living by being a contestant on radio and TV game shows. I was lucky enough to work with her in one of my first movies, With a Song in My Heart. I was too green to ask her a lot of questions about style and technique, but I was sufficiently aware to notice that she was a nervous actress—nervous about getting it right.

A few years later, she was part of the cast of Titanic, with Barbara Stanwyck and me. She was friends with Barbara, and was aware of the relationship that developed between us. Unlike her characters, who tended to blurt out whatever was on their mind, Thelma was very discreet by nature, and never spoke to anyone about the affair. Although Thelma was most often used as a comedienne, she was a terrific dramatic actress; I defy anyone to watch her performances in Pickup on South Street or Birdman of Alcatraz and not be simultaneously moved and impressed.

Character actresses like Thelma often shone with a brighter light than the supposed stars of the movies. In a sense, that was their job; their screen time was limited, and their dialogue often more pointed than what was written for the leads. They were like pinch hitters in baseball, paid to advance the offense, i.e., the plot or characters.

I knew Maureen Stapleton before she worked with Natalie, Larry Olivier, and me in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was a thoroughly lovable woman, a devoted fan of old movies. I once gave her autographs of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard that I’d gotten at the golf course at the Bel-Air Country Club. Maureen couldn’t have been any more thrilled if I’d given her a piece of the True Cross.

Maureen was nervous. About everything. She absolutely refused to fly, so came to England to play Big Mama via ocean liner. We were already rehearsing in Liverpool when Maureen arrived a few days late, and I’m sure she had walked up the stairs because she was frightened to take the elevator.

Thelma Ritter

Besides being a superb actress and timid about traveling, Maureen was one of the legendary show-business alcoholics, although it didn’t seem to lessen the affection that people had for her. What was amazing was that it never interfered with her work. She drank at night and on the weekends, and was Johnny-on-the-spot in the morning. Neil Simon even wrote a semibiographical play about Maureen, called The Gingerbread Lady, that starred . . . Maureen.

Drunk or sober, Maureen was totally uninhibited. She regaled Larry Olivier and me with a story about a hot and heavy affair she was having with George Abbott—how he was ninety years old but couldn’t keep his hands off her. She paid great and specific tribute to his remarkable standards of sexual performance and staying power. Larry and I would just nod our heads in amazement . . . and envy.

One night after rehearsal, Larry, Maureen, Natalie, and I went out for a night of drinking. (Larry liked to drink, but never when he was working.) The rest of us got slightly tipsy, but Maureen was totally soused, literally falling-down drunk. Larry and I had to carry her to bed, and just as we got her comfortable, her bladder let loose, and she wet the bed.

Well, we hadn’t bargained on that, but Larry didn’t take it personally. He took her toes and began the old nursery rhyme in a singsong voice: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home . . .” He ended up by saying, “And this little piggy went wee-wee-wee-wee all over the bed!”

As an actress, Maureen always became the character, became what she had to play. That might have been one of the reasons she drank to such excess—she kept losing herself. A dear woman; everybody who knew Maureen adored her. Especially me.

Another of my favorite people was Ann Rutherford. Ann had a strong career in the 1930s and 1940s playing Polly Benedict opposite Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy films, and she’s one of Vivien Leigh’s sisters in Gone with the Wind, which ought to be sufficient grounds for immortality for any actress.

Maureen Stapleton

Ann never really made the transition to the name above the title. Her last big picture was Adventures of Don Juan opposite Errol Flynn. It was always hard to get any attention if you were making a movie with Flynn, who was much more gorgeous than any of his leading ladies, with the possible exception of Olivia de Havilland.

But Ann didn’t mind one bit. She knew that the movie business was brutal and was happy just to have survived. As a matter of fact, Ann may have been the most positive person I’ve ever met. She believed in belief.

Ann was the daughter of a man who once sang at the Metropolitan Opera. She broke into the movies at a low-budget outfit called Mascot when she was only seventeen. She appeared in serials, and she worked opposite Gene Autry, which meant that Gene’s horse got more footage than she did. For a girl who began her career at Mascot, MGM was a plush country club, and Ann enjoyed every minute of it.

Ann’s first husband was Dave May, the heir to the May Company. That marriage didn’t last, but her second, to William Dozier, was successful. Dozier was one of those movie industry guys who was more interesting for whom he married than for what he achieved. Dozier had previously been married to Joan Fontaine, and today he’s best known for producing the Batman TV series. (My future wife, Jill St. John, was in the pilot!)

Ann always had her eyes open. She told me that one of the most important moments of her life occurred during the filming of an unimportant picture called Waterfront Lady. She looked up one day and noticed an actor named Jack LaRue playing a small part as a bartender. Only a few years earlier, LaRue had been an up-and-coming star at Paramount as a sort of George Raft in training.

Ann asked what Jack was doing in such a throwaway part, and they told her that he hadn’t saved his money when he was starring. Now he was broke and took whatever he could get.

That was it—a light dawned. Ann was a naturally sensible woman, and she became determined to never find herself in Jack LaRue’s shoes. Although she was at MGM, earning MGM money for years—she started at three hundred dollars a week—she took the bus to work. She told me she saved for three years before she went so far as to buy a car. She was glad she did, too, because every six months she would notice how all the contract players would be sweating over whether or not the studio would pick up their options for another six months of employment. Ann saw stark fear on the faces of the girls who’d spent their money on dresses and furs and were suddenly out of work with no savings.

That’s when the casting couch could come into play, as a sort of insurance policy for starlets who thought they were on the bubble between getting dropped and maintaining their jobs.

But Ann was like Scarlett O’Hara—she was never going to be hungry.

While Louis B. Mayer adored Ann because she incarnated thrift, one of his cherished virtues, he did try to take advantage of what he thought were her fears of impoverishment. When her option time would come up, he would call her into his office and tell her the studio wanted to keep her, they had big plans for her and so forth, but they couldn’t afford to give her the raise her contract mandated.

Now, both of them knew this was pure fantasy; MGM was the only studio in Hollywood that never lost money during the Depression, and the Andy Hardy pictures routinely grossed ten times their cost. Besides the Hardy pictures, Ann was also working regularly in a popular series of films with Red Skelton.

But Mayer played his sad song for all it was worth, and in response Ann would wave her little bankbook and show Mayer how much money she’d saved out of her salary. Mayer would graciously capitulate and give her the raise. It was a game they both enjoyed playing for years.

When MGM loaned out Clark Gable to David Selznick and leveraged that into the distribution rights for Gone with the Wind, they threw Ann into the cast as well to play Scarlett’s sister Carreen. It was a minor role, and Ann didn’t really have much to do. She told me that she had already been playing leading parts, and in the back of her mind she thought this one was a comedown. And she would conclude that anecdote by saying “And that, my dear, is why actors have no business deciding what to play or what not to play.”

MGM was known in the trade as the Tiffany studio, but even Ann was astonished at the extent to which David Selznick lavished time and money on his pet project. She told me that her costumes had layers and layers of petticoats beneath the dresses. She went to Selznick and said he could save a lot of money by not bothering with such elaborate costuming. The audience would never know the difference.

Ann Rutherford

“But you’ll know,” he replied, arguing that the wardrobe would help her with the part—that she would be able to play a rich landowner’s daughter with more credibility if her costumes lived up to the standard of living of the O’Haras. What I thought, when she told me the story, was that Selznick’s rationalization might very well hold true for Vivien Leigh, who was in practically every scene of the movie, but that it might not be relevant for Ann, who was in about eight scenes. But it was David Selznick’s movie, and he did almost everything right in making it.

Ann loved her years at MGM and was always grateful that she hadn’t ended up working for Jack Warner, who thought nothing of purposely casting actors in bad pictures in order to exact revenge for real or imagined slights. Of course, this would also depress their value on the open market when they finally left the studio. Warners did that to Kay Francis, and Bette Davis always thought they did it to her as well. “Jack Warner was always selling people down the river,” Ann would complain.

Ann finally left MGM around the end of World War II and by 1950 had retired to Beverly Hills. She got out while the getting was good. By then, MGM and the rest of the studios were in free fall and shrinking their contract lists. It would have killed Ann to see the studio she loved deteriorate at such a rapid pace.

As it was, she returned there in 1972 for a few days’ work in a James Garner picture called They Only Kill Their Masters, and she was appalled. The studio that had been making eighteen pictures simultaneously in 1939 was now down to making only one. All the departments were closed; there was no makeup department, there was no camera department, there were no actors or writers or directors under contract. It was a shell operation.

For the rest of her long life—she died in 2012—she was a delight, a positive person who was never a Pollyanna, but who just felt lucky to have been a part of the greatest studio at the most prosperous and creative time of its corporate life.

MGM gave her more than a livelihood; it taught her to appreciate fine things. For instance, the studio prop department often outfitted sets with authentic antiques they’d buy in Europe and ship over to Culver City. On top of the tables they placed porcelain statues, and that triggered a fascination that led to Ann collecting antique porcelain for the rest of her life. In less abstract matters, Ann would talk about making Pride and Prejudice with Larry Olivier, and how she developed a huge crush on him that was unfortunately unrequited.

By the time Ann died, MGM had ceased to exist as a functioning movie studio. It was a brutal demonstration of the fact that nothing lasts forever.

But you know what does last? The movies the great studios made. The films that MGM churned out are still around, and still riveting audiences.

That, at least, is something. Maybe everything.