Susan Hayward helping a very eager and very inexperienced actor through his paces in With a Song in My Heart. (WITH A SONG IN MY HEART © 1952 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX)
Twentieth Century Fox was a studio by, for, and about Darryl Francis Zanuck. It had been formed in 1935 when Zanuck and his friend and business associate Joseph Schenck merged their Twentieth Century productions with the moribund Fox organization. Before that, Darryl had been head of production at Warner Bros. until he realized it was primarily a family business and somebody named Zanuck could never be a member of the family.
In 1933 Darryl went independent with Twentieth Century, which released through United Artists and had a great success. But Twentieth Century had to rent studio facilities, which cost a lot of money, so when the Fox organization became available, acquiring it solved both companies’ problems: Darryl got a first-rate studio complex, and Fox got a production head who understood how to make movies people wanted to see.
Physically, Darryl was a small man, and like many small men, he was commanding and very competitive. He had to be good at everything he did, so when Darryl played polo or croquet, it was always at a very high level. Luckily, he also had a very good sense of humor and was fond of practical jokes, a trait I understand he picked up from Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had mentored him when he was a young man.
Zanuck staffed his studio with top-notch people throughout the departments. The head of publicity was a wonderful man named Harry Brand, who looked just like what you’d imagine a studio publicity chief would look like. Harry usually wore a fedora and was, as they say, heavily connected. He had an in with every police department in California, knew everything that was going on, and could fix anything that needed to be fixed.
In due time, Harry would fix a couple of things for me. Once, I was going into an electrical supply store in Westwood when a guy picked a fight with me. He pushed me, and I foolishly responded by ramming his head into the grille of my car. Technically, this was a felony assault.
Harry took care of it.
Then there were a couple of incidents involving women playing the old badger game. One go-round in a hotel room and they promptly screamed, “I’m pregnant!” even though it was never true.
Harry took care of it.
Zanuck was an incredibly dynamic man who could be seen going up the studio street to the studio café every day for lunch. He would be swinging his polo mallet and behind him would be a retinue of producers, editors, and his French teacher. A few years before I got there, his right-hand man had been William Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, who brought with him an investment in the studio from Mayer. Darryl took the money, but he never respected Goetz.
When Darryl went into the service during World War II, he handed management of the studio over to Goetz. While Darryl was gone, Goetz never missed a chance to run him down verbally. Darryl heard about this, of course, and when Darryl returned, he and Goetz got into an argument—all the moguls were tremendously competitive and regularly engaged in knockdown, drag-out fights with each other. Darryl finally told Goetz he could hire a valet to do his job. Goetz was offended and left the studio to found International Pictures, which later merged with Universal.
For a replacement, Darryl hired Lou Schreiber, who had been Al Jolson’s valet. He hadn’t been kidding: he literally hired a valet, and nothing much changed around the Fox lot.
I soon heard about Darryl’s idiosyncrasies. Every day at four o’clock the atmosphere around the front office became noticeably hushed as Darryl was serviced by one of the contract girls. Darryl was notorious for his proclivities with women, and he had a bad habit of becoming obsessed by his mistresses; he couldn’t take sex lightly and always had to try to elevate his girls to a level where they would be more than glorified call girls, worthy of Darryl F. Zanuck. Not all of them were anywhere near as interested in a starring career as Darryl was—his ego was more involved than theirs was.
I knew Darryl’s children, and they always seemed to adore him. But Darryl was not the sort of man to play catch with his kids—none of those men were. Their identity consisted of their careers and their responsibilities. Think about those responsibilities for a moment: matching up stories—thirty a year!—with the right writers, the right actors, and the right directors; placating stockholders; and wondering if television was going to obliterate the movie business and trying to make pictures accordingly. Darryl really only saw the kids on the weekends, and there wasn’t a lot of weekend—Darryl worked a six-day week.
When I drove onto the Fox lot as a contract player, I made sure not to have any airs about me. I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t. I was very anxious to find out why some people became stars and other people didn’t; I wanted to learn what to wear, how to act, what kind of image to project. I was very analytical about it. I was there every morning whether I was working or not, eager and ready to learn. My life was finally opening before me, and I was smart enough to know it.
I now had my own apartment, at 1298 Devon, off Beverly Glen between Wilshire and Santa Monica. It was a terrific little one-bedroom apartment that I decorated myself and, even better, was paying for myself: $125 a month.
Helena Sorrell began working with me. She would choose scenes, mostly from movies, not plays, because the scenes were shorter, thus easier. After a while we’d get the scene on its feet with an actress and rehearse the material, and we’d end up using it for a test. I was always testing with somebody or another, for some part or another. I tested with everybody and for anything. With actresses, with actors, for westerns, for gangster pictures, you name it. Sometimes I was in a test with another young actor the studio was interested in, so all you could see was the back of my head, but I didn’t care. I was in the movies.
I had motivation in front of me and in back of me. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be a movie star; I didn’t want to have to go back to my father with my tail between my legs. Because I wanted it so badly, I was pretty nervous and carried a lot of anxiety. I got to know the writers, I got to know the directors, and I made it my business to know which scripts were moving toward production and which were moving toward the shelf. Aside from all this, I could fit into the old wardrobes of Tyrone Power and Mark Stevens, which helped.
Helena regarded me as her personal project, and she used every trick in her book to get me up to speed. For a long time my voice was a problem—it was too high-pitched and I knew it, so I would throw lines away or mumble. Helena had to pretend to be hard of hearing to get me to speak up. For extra voice coaching, I went to see Gertrude Fogler at MGM. Gertrude had been at MGM for the twenty years since talkies arrived and, beginning with John Gilbert, had worked with practically every actor on the lot. She was an excellent voice teacher, which was good—I was paying for her lessons myself.
When I wasn’t working with Helena or Gertrude, I was in the wardrobe department, the sound department, the camera department, the set department. I was on the stages, watching people act. Hell, I even watched the studio cops. My basic attitude was that anything they asked me to do wasn’t a job but an opportunity. I was working in a movie studio, and I was determined to find out how all those gears meshed.
I had enthusiasm and a lot of admiration for the people at Fox, and I made sure that everybody knew it. I was amazed at how a movie came together, and to be completely honest, that amazement has never left me. I’ve made eighty movies and hundreds of hours of television, and I sit in a theater to watch a movie and I’m still thrilled.
Shortly after I was signed at Fox, the process of casting the two leads for Teresa became a story. Edwin Schallert had been the lead movie critic for the Los Angeles Times since the silent days, and MGM showed him a batch of the tests for Teresa. He came out with a story headlined “Robert Wagner a Dark Horse for ‘Teresa’ Part.” Evidently, Schallert thought I was a lot better than MGM did.
Of course, the people at Fox found this very disturbing, as I had just been signed by them, and here I was almost getting a part at MGM. But it had a very positive effect, because the news that Fred Zinnemann had thought enough of me to direct my test got me in to see Lewis Milestone, another very fine director, who was putting a picture together called Halls of Montezuma—the first time I got billing in a movie.
I played a private, which was appropriate. When I met Milly—Milestone’s nickname—I was very wide-eyed. “You made All Quiet on the Western Front!” I said. “That was a long time ago!” He wasn’t too thrilled and said, “It wasn’t that long ago.” Actually, the movie had been made only twenty years before, but I was only twenty myself, so I pled ignorance.
The script was about the Marines in the Pacific campaign of World War II, and it wasn’t much, but the cast was truly excellent: Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Karl Malden, Marty Milner, Neville Brand, Richard Boone, and Jack Webb. Widmark was a terrific guy—years later I bought some land from him, so we had adjacent ranches where we raised horses—while Karl and I began a friendship that has lasted for nearly sixty years. Years later, Marty Milner and I went to see Milly on one of his birthdays, and he told us he should have been smarter about his contract and gotten 10 percent of the cast’s future income—he would never have had to worry about money again.
After that, I was a Navy underwater demolition swimmer in The Frogmen, Claudette Colbert’s junior executive son-in-law in Let’s Make It Legal, a doomed Marine in John Ford’s What Price Glory? and the inventor of the Sousaphone in Stars and Stripes Forever. These were all small supporting parts, but they were all well-chosen supporting parts—showy, with highly dramatic or emotional moments attached to each character.
Let’s Make It Legal was one of the early films of Marilyn Monroe, but she wasn’t the problem. I was. I was so green that I had to do forty-nine takes of one shot—a number I’ve never forgotten. Not all of it was my fault—Claudette Colbert went up a couple of times, the camera broke down, and the dialogue got changed—but most of it was my fault. Forty-nine takes. Jesus!
Claudette Colbert could have blown me right out of the water for being such an amateur, or she could have insisted that I be replaced, but she didn’t. I found her a very caring, giving woman, with a lot of guts and a very special aura around her—a great star. Over forty years later she came to see me when I did Love Letters in the theater, and I felt honored by her presence.
It would be fair to say that I wasn’t very good in this period, but I was diligent. I was also cooperative and I had enthusiasm, which is probably all that made me bearable to some of the pros I was working with. Now, when I look back at some of those early performances, I cringe a little and silently thank the public and the other actors for their patience.
Technically, Let’s Make It Legal wasn’t the only time I worked with Marilyn. She had tested with me for several parts that she got, and I think I was in the test that got her a contract at Fox. I adored her. At this point in her career she wasn’t troublesome at all. She knew her lines cold, was terribly sweet and eager to please, and I loved her. My God, we were so young! I took her out a couple of times, but nothing happened. There were a lot of people in line before me, if you get my drift. It was a tricky situation, but she was a darling, and I thought the world of her.
Then Darryl sent me the script for a movie called With a Song in My Heart, a Susan Hayward picture about the singer Jane Froman, who had been terribly hurt in a plane crash but revived her career anyway. I had precisely two scenes and a couple of lines of dialogue. In the first scene, I meet Froman in a nightclub, and she brings me up on the little mobile stage she used after her accident and sings two songs to me: “Embraceable You” and “Tea for Two.” My response, as indicated by the script, was to smile and look bashful. Well, that was certainly in my skill set.
The second scene took place after I’d gone off to war and become a victim of shell shock. Although my character hasn’t said ten words since he got hurt, I manage to tell Hayward/Froman I’d like to hear her sing “I’ll Walk Alone.” Bingo! I’m cured.
I’m embarrassed to say that I read the script and didn’t see it. “This isn’t very much,” I told Darryl. And with great patience, he told me, “This will be the biggest break you will have had in your career. You will be on the screen for three minutes. When people come out of the theater, they will want to know who you are.”
That was the last time I questioned Darryl Zanuck’s judgment about the movies. I was too young to realize that Darryl was placing me, sculpting moments for me that would compel the audience’s attention. He was taking very good care of me.
When we shot my scenes for With a Song in My Heart, Walter Lang directed me almost exactly as he would have directed Rin-Tin-Tin. Let me explain: Dogs have only a couple of expressions—if you’re making a movie and you want a dog to look intense and his ears to spring up, you show him a cat. Well, Walter wanted me to cry, and he didn’t want me to fake it, so when he directed the scene, he was crying. And even if the dramatic construction of the movie was slightly corny, that moment—what passed between Susan and Walter and myself—was absolutely true.
When Susan was playing to me, I responded automatically. I didn’t have the craft to produce tears on my own, and Susan realized it. She was completely focused on me, giving me what I needed to give her back an emotional reaction. And when she sang “I’ll Walk Alone,” I cried. It was as if I were a child actor, which, in a very real sense, I was. And after the scene was over, it was Susan who fell apart. She was sensational in the picture, and Watson Webb, who would become a good friend, edited my scenes beautifully.
In my callowness, I thought the power of a part was judged by the amount of time the character is on screen; I hadn’t seen Bill Wellman’s Wings, which featured Gary Cooper in a scene that lasted about two minutes. Before that, Coop was just another young actor; after that, he was a star. After With a Song in My Heart opened, Susan was nominated for an Oscar for best actress, the film was a big hit, and I wasn’t exactly a star but for the first time people knew who I was. The Korean War was on, and to the women in the audience that boy I played represented the men in their lives—mothers thought of their sons, wives thought of their husbands, and girls thought of their sweethearts.
I was good enough in these pictures, but I was so terribly young. The energy and innocence you can see in With a Song in My Heart and Stars and Stripes Forever isn’t acting—that was me. Walter Lang and his wife Fieldsie liked me, and Walter often took me fishing. Walter was a very solid human being, and Fieldsie was a ballsy, lovable woman. She had been a bathing beauty for Mack Sennett, and after that she had been Carole Lombard’s secretary. Clark Gable remained close to them after Carole’s death; he would often come to their house to play poker. The result was that Gable and I became closer than we had been as golfer and caddy.
My first real trial by fire was John Ford. Believe me, if you can survive John Ford in a bad mood, you can survive anything. Jimmy Cagney and Dan Dailey were the stars of What Price Glory?, which was originally a very strong antiwar statement in its theatrical version and in Raoul Walsh’s 1926 silent version. In Ford’s version, it became mostly about male camaraderie. Besides Cagney and Dailey, the cast was dotted with wonderful character actors—Bill Demarest, James Gleason, Wallace Ford—and then there was me, the green kid, which in Ford’s world was a euphemism for “designated patsy.”
Ford was a tall, lean man who had had a distinguished career in the Navy during World War II (he would eventually rise to the rank of admiral) as a break from his distinguished career in Hollywood (he won five Oscars). He wore a slouch hat and dark glasses and had a sharp, pointed command personality, although he never raised his voice. Ford didn’t call me RJ and didn’t even call me Bob. Throughout the picture, he called me Boob. One day we were shooting on the French street that had been built for The Song of Bernadette. I was to come out of a house with Bill Demarest, Wally Ford, and Dan Dailey. We did a take, Ford said, “Cut,” and then he walked the length of the street and came up to me.
“You know, Boob, if you can’t see the camera, the camera can’t see you. You be clear to the camera.” And then he pushed me, hard. I wasn’t expecting it, and I fell flat on my ass. By the time I hit the ground, he’d turned and was walking back up the street. I was too stunned to be angry. I struggled to my feet and said, “My God!”
Jim Cagney was standing next to me and said, “Don’t worry, kid. He does that. You’ll be all right. Just remember your lines, that’s all you have to do.”
If Ford had had the camera running when he knocked me down, I would have gotten the Academy Award. Another time he picked up a rock and started to throw it at me. He was basically interested in destabilizing me, and he succeeded. He scared the living hell out of me. The fact that he had scared the living hell out of John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, and practically every other person who had ever worked with him was very small consolation.
One day on the set Ford was sitting in his director’s chair when he turned to me. “Boob?” he said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ford!”
“Don’t look now. Over there? That man? That’s Barry Norton. He played your part in the original picture. He’s the king of the queens. He’s an extra now. That can happen to you.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ford.” I turned around and bumped into another man. “That’s King Baggott,” Ford said. “He used to make $27,500 a week. See where he is now, Boob?”
What a tough son of a bitch. I didn’t find out until years later that the second guy wasn’t King Baggott; King Baggott had been a high-priced actor and director who drank himself out of the business and ended up as a security guard at MGM. He died in 1948, the year I signed with Fox and a couple of years before I worked with Ford on What Price Glory? But it might as well have been King Baggott, because whoever that man was, Ford used him to scare the hell out of me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. He was telling me that making movies was a brutal business, that things end, and I needed to hold on to my money. He was telling me something I needed to learn, and for that I thank him, if not for the way he told me.
My primary consolation during What Price Glory? was Corinne Calvet, a gorgeous woman but one who didn’t have the clarity needed for a major career. As for Jimmy Cagney, he was as wonderful to me as Ford was harsh. I had known Cagney when I was a kid, when I had jogged his horses for him. Jimmy kept Morgans and trotters, and he was a very giving, generous man whom I had admired for years. Here I was, only a couple of years into my career, and I ended up dying in his arms in a John Ford movie!
As an actor, Cagney was very free and open. The emotional coloring of his work could vary quite a bit from take to take, although he was always very concerned about matching his action. Among that generation of actors, the only one with whom I worked who I found to be uninterested in much variation was Henry Fonda. He didn’t vary much, and he didn’t use much. He didn’t even use other actors much.
Throughout this period I trusted in Darryl to do right by me, and I must say that he never failed me, not once. The studio system could be emotionally difficult, because I wasn’t the only hopeful juvenile leading man being groomed for a career. There were a dozen or so at each studio, all starting out at $75 a week, all more or less good-looking, all more or less types who could conceivably replace an older leading man who was already at the studio. I was tagged as a possible replacement for Tyrone Power, as was Jeffrey Hunter—a fine man, a good actor, and a valued friend. One of the small tortures of the way the studios operated was that there were plenty of other people who were something like you. Every time you looked around, you saw someone who was a living, breathing implication that you were replaceable. And the sad fact was that you were.
On the other hand, the studio system gave you opportunities to fail, to learn, to fail less miserably, to gradually master your craft. And the studio did have a way of taking care of you if it thought you had something. For the publicity tour for Let’s Make It Legal, MacDonald Carey, Joyce McKenzie, Larry Carr, and I were sent on the road. We went through Philadelphia and then on to a lot of Midwest towns, dancing and singing on the stage, then signing autographs as a live attraction before the film. We all lived together, and it was fun.
Mac Carey had been around for years, making a hit on Broadway in Lady in the Dark with Gertrude Lawrence and working with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and a lot of other movies. Mac was kind enough to take me under his wing and tell me how the studio game was played—what things were important and what things weren’t.
For most of the tour Mac and I roomed together, but just after we got to New York the studio put us up at the Warwick Hotel, right across the street from the Stage Delicatessen. At that point his wife came to town, so I was thrown out of the room. His wife promptly got pregnant, and I’ve always thought I deserved at least some of the credit.
I had been to New York only once before—my dad had taken us there—but I had never been there professionally, and on an expense account to boot, and that made all the difference in the world. I’ve been passionate about the city ever since, at the studio’s expense or my own.
For the most part, I wasn’t disappointed by the people I was meeting around the studio, although Paul Douglas was certainly an exception. He was a brusque, unpleasant man, always carrying around a sour edge about something or another. I’ve never understood why someone would want to live like that; whenever I’ve had a problem with somebody, I confront it head-on. And then I step back and wait. I usually find that the direct approach works.
The perquisites of a rising young actor in Hollywood were and are obvious, and I did my best to get my share.
I met Joan Crawford at a cocktail party and sensed that she was interested in me. She suggested I follow her back to her house in Brentwood. After I got there, she asked me if I would like a swim. Sure, I said. She told me that there were some trunks down by the pool and I could help myself. I went down to the pool, took my clothes off, put on a pair of trunks, and got in the pool.
After a few minutes, Joan came out of the house with absolutely nothing on, did a very graceful dive off the board, swam the length of the pool underwater, and came up right between my legs.
“Hi there!” she said in her brightest, most vivacious voice. It was a lovely, creative invitation, and I responded accordingly. She was a dynamic lover, both domineering—which you might expect—and yielding—which you might not. All in all, a memorable one-night stand.
Around this same time I drove my 1950 Ford convertible into a drive-in restaurant called Jack’s at the Beach. The top was down, the day was lovely, and I was a young actor about town. I looked over, and there was Yvonne De Carlo next to me in her car. She was at the height of her career as well as of the physical splendor that was on display in tits-and-sand Universal pictures like Song of Scheherazade and Slave Girl, as well as noirs like Brute Force and Criss Cross. We looked each other over, and she nodded her head for me to come over. I backed my car up, parked it in the rear of the restaurant, and got into Yvonne’s car.
“I’m Robert Wagner.”
“I know. I’m Yvonne De Carlo.”
“I know. I’m such a fan of yours.”
One thing led to another, and we went back to her house. Three days later, I staggered out, depleted and disheveled. I wasn’t sure what month it was, but I dimly remembered leaving my car at the drive-in. Luckily, it was still parked where I’d left it.
A week later, I ran into Tony Curtis. “You can’t imagine what just happened to me,” he says. “I pull into Jack’s at the Beach. Yvonne De Carlo pulls up next to me! She looks at me, I look at her. Well, to make a long story short….”
I just stared at him, then I began laughing hysterically. Baby, I was in the movies!
It’s interesting how friendships form and either strengthen or recede with time. Tony Curtis and I were friends for years, had a bad falling-out, then patched things up. But Robert Stack and I were pals for more than forty years with never a cross word. Initially, it was based on the fact that each of us possessed an athletic skill the other one was interested in. Bob was a world-class skeet shooter, and he taught me how to shoot; I was a good golfer, and I taught him how to play. Beyond that, we shared a similar background and a positive outlook on life, and we both genuinely enjoyed being in show business.
Bob died in 2003, and I was so moved when he left me a beautiful pair of pearl and diamond studs, accompanied by a note he’d written thanking me for my friendship. Believe me, the honor was all mine.
There weren’t really issues with drugs in those days—the most you’d ever see was some marijuana if you were hanging around musicians. But one way or another, there has always been a need for people to blow off the steam that builds up in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of show business. Take, for instance, OK Freddy.
By common consent, OK Freddy had the biggest cock in Hollywood. It was twelve inches long, with the thickness of a baby’s arm. I never knew his real name—I don’t know that anyone did, as he seemed to be universally known as OK Freddy. Freddy was an extra, and he was always around and always working, mostly because if anybody, at any time, asked him, “Freddy, show us your cock,” Freddy would say, “Okay,” and bring it out—depending on the circumstances and the company, a formula for either enduring popularity or serious jail time. He was a very pleasant, amiable man, but then, most men would be pleasant and amiable if they were carrying what OK Freddy had.
My favorite experience with OK Freddy involved Gary Cooper, who loved practical jokes. Coop was throwing a party at his house, and among those attending was Henry Ford II and his wife. Coop had hired both OK Freddy and Vince Barnett for the evening. Barnett was a character actor who often played the part of a waiter at parties, where he would proceed to insult out-of-town guests or anybody else who didn’t know it was a setup. One of Vince’s set-pieces involved accusing people of stealing silver, but he would also customize his attacks. Once he told Jack Warner he didn’t know how to make pictures, and he also accused Charlie Chaplin of monopolizing the conversation. OK Freddy, also working the party as a waiter, carried a tray of hors d’oeuvres, among which was his massive unit, jostling the garnish and pâté.
For this particular party, Vince Barnett was playing the part of a doctor, and he got into a loud argument with Henry Ford II. Coop came over, pretended to be angry at his guest being insulted, and decked Barnett. When he hit the ground, Barnett bit down on a blood capsule he had in his mouth, and the fake blood cascaded down his chin and onto his white shirt. Mrs. Henry Ford II proceeded to faint dead away! Clearly, they didn’t have people like Vince Barnett and OK Freddy around the country clubs of Detroit.
After With a Song in My Heart was released, the fan mail began to pour in. In those days the studio looked at fan mail the same way that modern TV networks do ratings—as a leading indicator that someone was provoking a reaction. Suddenly, there were thousands of letters every week asking for autographed photos, biographies, fan club information. I was becoming a bobby-sox idol, along with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson. In very short order, the studio started up a monthly newsletter called Wagner’s World, and my fan club signed up 250,000 members.
By 1952 I was regarded as a rising young star. Darryl Zanuck’s daughter Susan liked me—she liked me a lot. She was just getting out of high school, and I began to take her out. I really enjoyed her company, but I wasn’t in love with her, and the problem was that she was obviously enthralled—when she went to Paris, she brought me back a beautiful gold watch.
I sensed that this could be a very dark part of the woods, with obvious potential for disaster, at least in relation to my career. My father, on the other hand, thought marrying Susan Zanuck was a great idea. He liked the dynastic implications and thought the marriage would mean job security for me. Darryl knew what was going on, and since he liked me a lot, he was perfectly happy with my being involved with Susan. I wrote Darryl a letter, explaining the awkwardness I felt, and I told him I certainly didn’t want to hurt Susan, or myself.
Darryl was a class act. “I will always be in your corner,” he wrote in his reply, and he assured me that “this has nothing to do with your career.” He continued to invite me down to the Zanuck house in Palm Springs, where I got to know his wife, Virginia, and the rest of the family. Virginia was a lovely, tenacious woman who took great pride in being Mrs. Darryl Zanuck. Despite all of Darryl’s wanderings—and they were legion—she never gave up. In the end, she got him back.
For a time I went out with Debbie Reynolds, just before she went over to MGM and made Singin’ in the Rain. She was a contract player at Warner’s, and I was a contract player at Fox. We never had an affair, although I think it’s fair to say that she liked me very much. Basically, we were kids together.
As if Susan Zanuck wasn’t enough potential trouble, along came Bella Darvi. Her real name was Bayla Wegier, and she had spent time in a concentration camp during the war. Darryl met her in 1951, placed her under contract, then placed her in his bed. Now that I think of it, it might have been the other way around. Anyway, he paid off her gambling debts, decided he would make her a star, and changed her name. Darvi came from the first letters of his name and Virginia’s. I understand that for a time she even lived in their house.
Bella made three movies for Darryl, none of which was very good. I met her on the lot, and she made it very clear that she would like us to have some private sessions that would have nothing to do with acting. I never thought she was particularly beautiful, but she did have great personal presence that didn’t quite come across on camera.
Did I consider going to bed with her? God Almighty, no! Aside from my affection for Darryl as a man, I also respected him as my boss, and I would never have poached on his territory. Plus, Bella was obviously unstable—she gambled away vast amounts of Darryl’s money. Mrs. Wagner didn’t raise a fool; I went on my way.
With my career gathering momentum and my contracted raises clicking in, it was easier for me to indulge in my passion for music, specifically jazz. I had been brought up on American music because my mother played the piano and we always had plenty of 78-rpm records of the big bands of the thirties—Benny Goodman and so forth.
But my introduction to jazz came courtesy of Herbert Stothart Jr., who had been with me in one of the many military academies where I was interned. His father was a former professor, head of the music department at MGM, and had composed some famous operettas in the 1920s before he came to Hollywood. Stothart was a serious musician, and he had passed his passion on to his son, who exposed me to people like Chick Webb, who had a young girl named Ella Fitzgerald working as his vocalist.
In the early fifties in Los Angeles, there was a lot of jazz being played at clubs like the Crescendo and the Interlude. Chet Baker was always around, as were Jeri Southern and Frances Faye. I became a fan of Stan Kenton and all the people Norman Granz was recording. Supremely, I became a fan of Billie Holiday. Basically, I followed her from gig to gig. And if I was in New York, I always made it a point to go to a place called the Embers, where Peggy Lee liked to work.
I got to know Holiday, who was a tiny little thing; it was like meeting a doll. I thought she had the most fantastic talent of any singer of her time—or ours. Sometimes she was on drugs, and you weren’t sure she was going to be able to make it to the end of the song, let alone finish the set, but she always did. And even if she hadn’t made it, it wouldn’t have mattered, because she sang every note from her soul, and the emotion trumped the notes. (In a sense, Judy Garland was the same way.) I was in New York when it was announced that Holiday was dying, and I tried to get into Bellevue to see her, but I was too late.
I sat there for hundreds of nights listening to these men and women, amazed at how they got to those notes, got to that emotion. Jazz became very beneficial for me. I came from a background where if something was set, it was set in stone. And here were artists, people who were communicating emotion—the same thing I wanted to do—who worked with freedom, who were open, who joined together in an attitude of community and made things happen with great musicality, and who did it while maintaining their personalities. You can listen to three or four notes on the trumpet and know it’s Louis Armstrong—there are thousands of trumpet players, but nobody else has that unique Armstrong sound. It’s the same thing every actor strives for—a tone that’s all their own.