Teresa Wright’s odyssey as Eleanor began with a telegram.
On January 19, 1942, a wire arrived at Eleanor’s home in the Bronx carrying news: Teresa Wright would be playing her in The Pride of the Yankees.
“WANT YOU TO BE THE FIRST TO KNOW THAT T.W. HAS BEEN SELECTED TO PORTRAY YOU AFTER VERY CONVINCING TESTS,” wrote William Hebert, Samuel Goldwyn’s aggressive and creative publicity chief.
Wright was quickly becoming a major star: Her first movie role, in The Little Foxes, brought her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress; her second role, in Mrs. Miniver, which she had just wrapped, would earn her another in the same category. Now signed to play Eleanor in The Pride of the Yankees, the twenty-three-year-old Wright was moving into rare company, shifting from supporting roles to co-starring opposite Gary Cooper, one of Hollywood’s elite actors.
“I don’t believe anyone is surprised that Teresa Wright has been selected by Sam Goldwyn to play Mrs. Lou Gehrig,” gossip queen Louella Parsons wrote. “It was in the bag, so to speak, days ago—just as Gary Cooper was chosen long before the public announcement was made.”
A Hollywood career was not Muriel Teresa Wright’s intended career path. Her upbringing presaged a troubled, psychologically compromised future.
Her father, Arthur, was a traveling insurance salesman. Her mother, Martha, was a prostitute who had sex with men while her daughter was in their apartment, wrote Wright’s biographer, Donald Spoto. Her parents may never have been married. But her father had the good sense to take Muriel from the house and send her to live with friends in New Jersey, later enrolling her in boarding school and supporting her financially. Eventually, her mother faded from her life.
Wright started acting in school and coveted an onstage life like Helen Hayes’s. At eighteen, she watched Hayes play the title role in Victoria Regina on Broadway and was further inspired. She performed in high school and two summers at the nonprofit Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, advancing her ambitions—until they hit overdrive with an invitation to meet the cast backstage at the original Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It wasn’t long before nineteen-year-old Muriel—she soon dropped her first name to avoid confusion with a Muriel Wright in Actors’ Equity—was understudying the Emily Webb role in the play, then going out on the national tour.
In late 1939, shortly after she turned twenty-one, she took the stage at the Empire Theater as Mary Skinner in the Clarence Day comedy Life with Father, which would run for more than 3,000 performances—straight through World War II. New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson said that she “plays a young lady with uncommon charm as a person and willowy skill as an actress.”
Soon after Life opened, Katharine Hepburn congratulated Wright backstage at the Empire Theater and suggested that she would be ideal to play the leading lady in The Outlaw, which was being produced and directed by her friend Howard Hughes, according to Spoto.
Wright, bent on a theatrical career, told Hepburn: “Oh, I couldn’t. I don’t want to make movies. I want to be a legitimate actress.” The role went to Jane Russell, who wore a specially designed cantilevered bra to best showcase her breasts. Wright stayed with the play for two years, through more than six hundred performances, afraid to take a day off or leave for a vacation.
“Everyone else did but I was sure that if I took a vacation and stopped saying the words, I’d never be able to go on saying them again,” she said.
Late in her two-year stint as Mary Skinner, The Little Foxes playwright, Lillian Hellman, stopped by on a scouting mission for Goldwyn to find an actress to play Alexandra Giddens, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Regina Giddens, who was being played by Bette Davis in the proposed film. Hellman was impressed with Wright’s performance and told Goldwyn, who flew to New York. Goldwyn waited for Wright to return to her dressing room after the cast took its curtain calls and recalled: “I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.”
He signed her immediately to a contract for $500 a week, for the first forty weeks of her employment, which covered The Little Foxes. When the long-term option kicked in, her weekly pay escalated annually to $750, $1,000, $1,500, $2,250, and $3,000. Years later, in an oral history interview at Columbia University, she said that she had other offers in addition to Goldwyn’s.
“I wasn’t interested in any of them, but I was interested in this part,” she said. She passed her screen test, returned to Life with Father for a little while, then filmed Foxes with Davis, Herbert Marshall, and Richard Carlson, and directed by William Wyler, who elicited great performances out of Davis.
During a break in filming, Davis implored a reporter to meet Wright.
“And don’t mind if she twists her fingers,” she said. “She’s nervous.”
Indeed, Donald Hough of the Los Angeles Times found her in a black evening dress, doing a costume test. Wright was smiling, Hough wrote, “But it was a nervous smile. One corner of her mouth kept twitching a little. I did not look at her hands, but I knew what she was doing. She was twisting her fingers. I glanced down and saw that her knuckles were white.” When Hough told her that Davis thought she was a fine actor, Wright said, “She didn’t say anything like that!”
He further assessed her state of mind, writing: “Miss Wright was—and is—more wistful than forward, more doubtful of herself than sure. Her class at one of the schools she attended voted her least likely to succeed.”
Goldwyn was often smitten with young actresses and lavished great attention on them. He watched Wright closely during the filming. One day, he called out an instruction to her from behind the camera to persuade her to loosen up, A. Scott Berg wrote in Goldwyn, his biography of the producer.
“Teresa,” Goldwyn exhorted her, “let your breasts flow in the breeze.”
Little Foxes over, Wright worked with Wyler again on Mrs. Miniver, a story about an English family trying to survive the early days of World War II in a rural English village. Wyler, one of the best directors in Hollywood (whose credits included Wuthering Heights and Dodsworth), worked deliberately, like a stage director, which appealed to Wright. Wyler also worked with cinematographer Gregg Toland, whose deep-focus camera innovations were seen in Citizen Kane.
“Wyler was the first one out there, so far as I know, really to use a certain amount of stage technique to doing a film,” she said in the oral history at Columbia. “He would rehearse for two weeks, which is unheard of in most places. He knew by the time we got there exactly what he wanted from us in the ways of performances, and we knew, too, what he wanted.”
Wright played Carol Beldon in Mrs. Miniver, who marries Vin, the son of Kay Miniver (Greer Garson). Goldwyn had lent Wright to MGM for the film but Variety’s review reminded him of Wright’s broadening appeal.
“Miss Wright,” the trade magazine wrote, “has many of the fine screen characteristics of Miss Garson and will undoubtedly prove b.o. gold to Samuel Goldwyn, to whom she is under contract.”
Playing Eleanor in Pride elevated Wright to a new level. She was now a co-star, although Cooper’s fame and experience eclipsed hers. She was nearly twenty years younger than Cooper, about a foot shorter (remedied in part by her wearing high heels to bridge their height difference), and possibly more ignorant of baseball.
“I never knew anything about baseball and never cared,” she said.
Goldwyn was willing to play that up.
“If you queried Miss Wright carefully,” studio publicity offered as a story peg, “you would probably discover that she thinks they play polo in the Polo Grounds in New York. Such is the power of illusion.” If William Hebert had asked Goldwyn the same question, the answer would likely have been similarly erroneous.
Wright was a year into her Hollywood career and, while critically acclaimed, was not well known. Being in Pride was an assurance that that would change. Her intelligence and reverence for the stage probably made her cringe at the sort of silliness published in one of Hollywood gossip Sidney Skolsky’s columns: “She despises bananas… She reads all the time and eats all the time. She constantly chews on a candy bar or a piece of fruit but never puts any weight on… She wrinkles her nose when she smiles, has dimples, walks with her toes pointed in and likes to keep her hands in her pockets.”
Hebert put out word about Cooper’s kissing, with comments from Wright and Virginia Gilmore, who plays flirty Myrna at Pride’s fraternity dance. “As a woo pitcher,” the release said, “Cooper is reported to be a better first baseman.”
In Cooper’s assessment of Wright as an actor, he sounded a small note of 1940s-era condescension: “This little girl’s a natural and even though she’s been in Hollywood a year, she has it all over most actresses who’ve been here ten years.”
Hebert, upping the ante, reminded reporters that Wright had twenty-eight changes of costume in Pride, eight more than Vivien Leigh had in Gone with the Wind.
Wright was happy to puncture expectations that she would do anything more than basic publicity about her films for Goldwyn. Studio moguls loved to turn their female stars into sex symbols in low-cut dresses or bathing suits. Glam was an essential tool in the Hollywood marketing machine, but Wright wanted nothing of it. In her contract with Goldwyn she inserted a clause that guaranteed that she would not let the studio exploit her—an early feminist stance that Goldwyn grudgingly accepted.
In her original, anti-cheesecake language, the clause read:
I will not pose for publicity photographs in a bathing suit—unless I’m doing a water scene in a picture. I will not be photographed on the beach with my hair flying in the wind, holding aloft a beach ball. I will not pose in shorts, playing with a cute cocker spaniel. I will not be shown happily whipping up a meal for a huge family. I will not be dressed in firecrackers for the Fourth of July. I will not look insinuatingly at a turkey on Thanksgiving. I will not wear a bunny cap with long ears for Easter. I will not twinkle for the camera on prop snow in a skiing outfit, while a fan blows my scarf. And I will not assume an athletic stance while pretending to hit something or other with a bow and arrow.
Wright’s bathing suit scene in Pride was sanctioned by this being a scripted scene, not a publicity shot. She and Cooper wrestle playfully on a beach during spring training as others look on, including a black extra, one of the few African-Americans in the cast. Wrestling was the most physical part of their onscreen story and this scene, which is hardly salacious, sends them into fits of giggling on the sand brought in to simulate a beach on a soundstage. Cooper pins Wright and out of nowhere, Brennan’s Sam Blake darts into the shot, wearing business clothes, and raises Cooper’s left arm in victory.
“The winner!” he declares. “Not only that, you just handed me my next story on a silver platter, ‘How I Beat My Wife,’ by Lou Gehrig.”
Cooper, showing Gehrig’s newfound confidence as a happily married man, says “Nix” to the story proposal and tells his sidekick to lay off his private life.
While she and Cooper are lying prone together, Wright is struck warmly by how he shielded their lives from Brennan’s intrusion and deflects any regret that they’ve never honeymooned.
Stroking his arm softly, she says, “We’ve never had anything else.”
It is one of the most romantic, genuine scenes in the film.
The mores of the time did not prevent Collier’s magazine from spending the first few paragraphs of a profile on the fact that Wright’s stockings were usually wrinkled around her ankles; how a bellhop in Detroit left her a note after a performance of Our Town praising her personal appearance save for her stockings bunching up and how Wright had done nothing about it. Writer Kyle Crichton’s verdict: “It must be the contour of the Wright limb.” In view of the frumpiness caused by her serially wrinkled hose, the writer noted that her employment by Goldwyn “is in the nature of a phenomenon” because of the producer’s “attendance at the altar of glamour.”
Goldwyn’s only excuse for tolerating Wright’s poor stocking maintenance?
“She is an actress,” Crichton added.
Wright’s screen persona was fixed as an intelligent, pretty, blue-eyed girl-next-door who could hold her own against Bette Davis, Greer Garson, and, as audiences would learn, Cooper. Their chemistry is at the center of Pride—a traditional romantic couple in a 1940s film but a joining of screen equals: Cooper, the big star, playing a quiet man with dignity, and Wright, portraying a loving girlfriend and wife with a sense of humor and flashes of willfulness. As the Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman said: “She incarnated a domestic radiance.”
Her job, if not easy, was simpler than Cooper’s: He not only had to incarnate Gehrig, but learn to play baseball for the first time in his life.