Tyrone Power enlisted in the Marine Corps after The Black Swan wrapped. Henry Fonda, who would become O'Hara's next costar, also signed up. He became an apprentice seaman in downtown Los Angeles and then headed off to boot camp in San Diego. When he arrived, though, he was sent back to Hollywood, where he discovered that Darryl F. Zanuck had figured out a way to “squeeze one more movie out of him, by convincing Washington that a potboiler called The Immortal Sergeant would help the mobilization.”1
Fonda doesn't play the title character; that refers to his commander, Sergeant Kelly (Thomas Mitchell), a whimsical Irishman. Fonda plays Colin Spence, a raw recruit who's in love with Valentine Lee (O'Hara), the beauty he left behind in London. They've had a few dates, but he's unsure of her—or unsure of himself. Before joining the army, Spence is so timid he doesn't even complain when a waiter ruins a dinner reservation. He worries about losing Valentine to their mutual friend Tom Benedict, played by Reginald Gardiner. (The day Henry Fonda loses Maureen O'Hara to someone like Reginald Gardiner, it's time to eat one's hat—or one's war helmet.)
Spence is part of a regiment crossing the Libyan desert. They're a jolly bunch, but after an enemy plane crashes into one of their jeeps, panic sets in. They begin to run short of food, petrol, and men. Every time something goes wrong, though, Kelly looks on the bright side (immortal, maybe; optimistic, definitely). He grooms Spence to take over for him, should tragedy strike. When it does—a bullet rips into the sergeant's groin—he feels like a liability to the other soldiers, so he shoots himself, leaving Spence to carry on. But Spence had earlier confessed to Kelly, “I can carry out orders but I can't give them.” Kelly disagreed; he saw something in the “wartime educated amateur” that made him believe Spence had what it took to lead the men to safety. Kelly's confidence is rewarded. Spence gets his men out of the desert and receives a hero's medal for his troubles. He also gets the girl. Being a hero has its perks, we see. The moral of the film is that war has made a man of him (hardly an original conceit). We now know that, having succeeded in leading his troops across a war zone with only a pineapple for sustenance, Spence will have no trouble at all dealing with an incompetent waiter. Valentine can look forward to many meals with her soft-spoken sergeant in the poshest of restaurants.
The production values are satisfactory, but there's little we haven't seen many times before. The film revives Fonda's milquetoast image, but he looks rather ridiculous when, on the verge of delirium, he starts talking to himself. The flashbacks to his interlude with O'Hara don't work either, mainly because there are too many of them. Fonda was one of the few minimalist actors O'Hara starred with—that is, he conveyed moods through his expressions rather than dialogue. Working with someone like this (in contrast to the broad brushstrokes of, say, a Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) brought out the best in her. She told many interviewers over the years that Fonda was heaven to share a film with. When his eyes teared up in emotional scenes, so did hers. He made it easy for her to generate emotion without fabrication. He was so convincing to play opposite, she even forgave him for sitting on the steps of his trailer every day, “working like a dog” on his mathematics and other skills he would need in the navy.
His last line dutifully delivered, Fonda entered the service much later than intended. He went to the Pacific the following year and became an air combat intelligence officer. He didn't see any action but served with distinction. He was elevated to the rank of lieutenant before his discharge.
O'Hara wondered where her next film would come from. Hollywood's output between 1942 and 1945 decreased from 533 films to 377. Because of wartime shortages, directors couldn't afford to reshoot scenes, except in rare instances, so everyone had to be line perfect. A price ceiling was also placed on the construction of sets. Rubber and steel were in short supply, so sets were often painted to look realistic. Ammunition for the firing of blank cartridges was rationed, which affected mainly westerns and gangster films. Many directors went on location in an effort to achieve the authenticity that was so elusive under such conditions.
RKO lost a total of 847 people to the armed forces, including 13 women. Key technicians were replaced by assistants or hurriedly trained substitutes, resulting in delays and extra production costs. The moguls denied that the situation would result in lower-quality films.
Because so many great actors were in the trenches in real life, O'Hara was lucky to find quality costars in her “reel” life during the war years. Actors who stayed in Hollywood did their bit by appearing in propaganda films and selling war bonds at functions to boost national morale. O'Hara became a pinup girl under the moniker “Big Red.” She was often photographed in off-the-shoulder evening dresses that emphasized her patrician bearing, a shadowy backdrop underscoring her features to create a semierotic charge. In such poses she became the thinking man's sex symbol. She refused to smolder, leaving that for more obvious beauties. Instead, she seemed to outstare the camera, a formidable Cleopatra clone that challenged all comers with those huge, rarely blinking eyes.
She made a bevy of adventure films during this time. There were three in 1942 alone: To the Shores of Tripoli, Ten Gentlemen from West Point, and The Black Swan. She followed these with The Immortal Sergeant and then made Buffalo Bill and The Spanish Main. None of these films were classics, but they brought in the money and kept her profile high. They also gave her a chance to develop an acting style; rather than being a stumbling block, typecasting became an advantage for her, a mode of identification. Actresses were called on to do; stars, to be. It helped if audiences knew something about a star before they entered the theater, like a brand that defined her, a calling card. In an industry driven mainly by money, the studios knew O'Hara would bring in audiences by swashing her buckle. She was happy to sign on the dotted line for these largely indistinguishable films. She was building up a following based on her persona as a stubborn lass who stood up to villains but was content to play the maiden in distress to her leading man—often after fighting him.
She wasn't averse to rolling up her sleeves or going down on all fours to escape danger. That's what stars like Tyrone Power and John Payne loved about her. She didn't mind getting her hands dirty when the occasion called for it. She wasn't prissy or demure. She didn't give the come-hither look, like so many of her predecessors in this genre. Love was something that happened when the business of saving the fleet or the garrison was expedited. Duty came before passion, just like the head ruled the heart.
She returned to RKO after a two-year absence to reunite with Charles Laughton in 1943 for This Land Is Mine, a World War II story set “somewhere in Europe.” One imagines it's France, but none of the town's inhabitants make any attempt to put on a European accent, unless it's a British one (a newspaper in one scene even has an English headline). It was directed by Jean Renoir, whom Laughton had met at Elstree Studios in 1937. Renoir was sufficiently impressed with O'Hara's previous performances with Laughton to sign her, and she was looking forward to getting her teeth into another potentially meaty endeavor with her old tutor. The script was written by Dudley Nichols, who had famously refused an Oscar for The Informer in 1935. Nichols also coproduced the movie with Renoir.
Laughton plays Albert Lory, a cowardly teacher whose mother (Una O'Connor) dominates him. He's in love with Louise Martin (O'Hara), another teacher at the school, but he's too inhibited to express his feelings for her. Louise's brother Paul (Kent Smith) is a member of the Resistance movement in town. The occupying Nazis have a cozy attitude toward the townsfolk. In one scene, Louise refuses to shake hands with the very jolly Nazi commander, Major von Keller (Walter Slezak), and he takes no action against her. It's difficult to imagine this happening in real life—people were sent to concentration camps for less. Even when Paul sabotages a train, von Keller is reluctant to take action. He prefers to recruit informers like Georges Lambert (George Sanders), who's engaged to be married to Louise. Louise isn't aware that her brother is an activist at the beginning of the film, and when she finds out, her affections cool toward the Nazi-friendly Lambert.
Mrs. Lory, like Lambert, believes that cooperating with the Nazis is the best course of action. She suspects Paul is the saboteur and tells Lambert, who in turn informs von Keller. Paul is then shot. Lambert has turned against his own people, and he has lost Louise for good, so he kills himself. (Sanders would do the same in real life.) Lory discovers his dead body, with a gun beside it, and is accused of murdering Lambert because of his jealousy over Louise. Lory undergoes a catharsis in prison that isn't totally credible, and he signs his death warrant by giving a speech in court against the Nazis. It's very noble, but for some reason, this scene doesn't work. O'Hara is effective in it, crying and smiling at the same time as Lory does his bit for the cause beloved by her dead brother, but Laughton's throwaway delivery is anticlimactic. The fact that there's only one Nazi in the courtroom also beggars belief. Where's von Keller? Lory is acquitted on the murder charge and returns to his classroom. The pupils who once intimidated him are now rightly respectful, agog as he reads the American Declaration of Rights to them. After he's taken away by the Nazis, a fate he accepts with stoical calm, Louise continues to read the declaration, and the film ends there. Viewers are entitled to have mixed feelings about all this. Renoir has tried to do too much and ends up confusing his audience.
Laughton saw This Land Is Mine as a love story between Lory and Louise, the two of them reaching heroic heights in different ways. “As I go to my death at the end of the picture,” he wrote to a friend, “Maureen kisses me, not in daughterly devotion but with physical passion.” This heartened him, even if the plotline meant he could never possess her. Laughton told the same friend he had once espied a note on Irving Thalberg's desk that said, “Laughton must never get the girl.” It was upside down, but he was still able to read it. “I've trained myself to do that,” he blithely informed his friend.2 The content of the message failed to faze him.
The Fallen Sparrow (1943) also has a Nazi undercurrent. RKO was not shy about cashing in on the anti-German fever sweeping the United States at the time. It was directed by Richard Wallace and again costarred Walter Slezak. John Garfield plays Kit, a man who was tortured by Franco's zealots during the Spanish Civil War and for two years afterward while being held captive. A friend helps him escape but is then murdered; the murder is passed off as a suicide. Kit makes a connection between the murder and a Civil War flag the Nazis are looking for, and he knows its location. Why is it so important to them? This information is never disclosed.
Something else we aren't told in this enigmatic drama is why the morally compromised Toni (O'Hara) is working for the oleaginous Dr. Skaas (Slezak). He delights in telling Kit about the latest developments in torture techniques, the most sophisticated of which involves making the tortured person complicit in the process. Kit greets these discourses with a mixture of apprehension and nonchalance, catching the balance well as he tries to keep his posttraumatic stress in check. Toni is also conflicted. O'Hara portrays this well—so well, in fact, that one wonders why she didn't take these ambivalent roles more often. All she has to work off is a close-cropped hairstyle and her instinct for duplicity. It's a finely nuanced performance, and she keeps us guessing just how much—or how little—she cares for Kit right up to the last frame. She tells Kit she's working for Dr. Skaas, “the man who limps when he walks,” because she has a daughter in a concentration camp in Germany. Is this the truth? We doubt it, but our curiosity is aroused.
Garfield wasn't the first choice for the part—James Cagney and Cary Grant both turned it down—but the film's politics appealed to him. He'd always had left-wing sympathies, so playing a character who opposed Franco's totalitarian regime was right up his alley. The fact that Franco and his cohorts aren't specifically named is strange. Why would the Nazis be propping up the government and not the Spaniards? Obviously, the script was tailored to tap into Americans’ anti-German sentiment. As a result, Garfield's battle is described as being “between me and the little man in Berlin” rather than the little man in Madrid.
O'Hara liked Garfield, referring to him as a “sweetheart.” He didn't really rate her as an actress, but the pair of them played off each other effectively. Their characters conceal secrets from each other as they quietly evaluate how much the other knows, scene by scene. This gives an added frisson to their would-be romance. The film may not have the same resonance as Casablanca, but no false notes are struck, apart from one trivial scene early on when Garfield has O'Hara try on a string of hats to punish her for being offhand with him; it maintains the tension admirably.
Kit always seems just a step away from sliding back into the psychic pit he inhabited in Spain. Toni eyes him warily, trying to discover why he's so protective about “a little piece of cloth, a dirty rag that you wouldn't even pick up on the street.” O'Hara wears an almost permanent look of anxiety in the film and gives a delicate performance; all her broad reactions evinced in less subtle films are scrubbed out of this one, as Wallace opts for a nuanced mien that perfectly suits the material. In some scenes she doesn't have any dialogue, so we watch her expressions for clues as to why she wants to pick Kit's brain. O'Hara hints at more emotions than she expresses, and Garfield picks up on this with equally telling glances and gestures.
This Land Is Mine and The Fallen Sparrow were two important films for O'Hara, adding to her growing prestige in the film industry. They helped her crawl out from the gimcrack melodrama of adventure films. Offscreen, though, her life was as miserable as ever. She continued to bamboozle the public about how happy she was with Will Price, while her heart was breaking inside. In an interview conducted after The Fallen Sparrow wrapped, she sang his praises, claiming to be offended if anyone was “tactless enough” to ring their home and ask for “Miss O'Hara.” In such instances, the caller was informed he had the wrong number. As she explained, “I never intend to embarrass my husband by having someone call me Miss O'Hara in front of him. If the lesson has to be driven home, I do it.”3
As a little girl, she took pleasure in humoring her father; now the compliant housewife delighted in doing the same for her husband. “When you have pleased him you have really accomplished something. I can't tell you how much fun it is to do things for Will because he is so appreciative.”4 She expressed satisfaction over the fact that Price put a “shiny brass” knocker on the front door and also put the keyhole at eye level, like the one she had in her house in Dublin—presumably so she could look through it and vet visitors. She indulged him by cooking “strange and delectable dishes.” She drew a line between her screen persona, for which she adopted a more formal guise, and her “at home” one, where she could “put my feet on the coffee table or dangle from the living room chandelier.” She looked forward to calling her baby Maureen if it was a girl.5 (It was, but she didn't.)
She gave an interview to Motion Picture magazine in which she talked about her relationship with Kathryn Grayson, her neighbor in Bel Air. The article described Grayson as O'Hara's “only movie star friend.” Apart from acting, they shared an interest in opera, went shopping and walking together, and spent hours discussing what constituted a good or a bad film. Grayson, like O'Hara, was married to a man named Price. This caused much confusion among mailmen and grocery deliverers. One day Grayson got O'Hara's milk bill. Another time, O'Hara's lamb chops were delivered to Grayson's house. They laughed about these mix-ups. O'Hara enjoyed Grayson because she was natural, a homebody like herself. Neither of them needed the falseness of the party scene. Their comfort zone was the home, far from the madding crowd. In that interview, O'Hara claimed her husband was important to her “for the very selfish reason that I want someone I love in the other chair by the fireplace later on when I am old and fame has gone.”6 This was an unusual pronouncement, considering it was made so early in her career. Few stars would have looked so far into the future for an emotional insurance policy.
In between filming This Land Is Mine and The Fallen Sparrow, O'Hara was asked to speak at a function in Texas geared toward selling war bonds. The man seated beside her that night was Errol Flynn. In accordance with his wild-man image, Flynn spent the evening sipping whiskey from a teacup and making lewd suggestions to her. As someone who lived with an alcoholic, she found this behavior hard to take. She eventually warned Flynn she'd knock his block off if he didn't stop. He got the message and slid from his chair, going down on all fours to crawl under the table as he made his way to the exit, giving her a little wave at the door. Flynn had also been scheduled to give a speech that night, but not surprisingly, it didn't happen.
Price, who was drinking more than ever by now, decided to join the marines. O'Hara couldn't believe her luck: it meant he would be out of her hair for a while. Although she was relieved he was gone, she wore her heart on her sleeve in public utterances. “I shall never forget the gnawing loneliness—and perhaps the fear—that I felt when my husband was in Iwo Jima. It was so easy to draw up terrifying images in my mind. But I knew that I must not dwell on these things. Not if I was to dignify the work my husband was doing in the war, or my own responsibility as his wife and the mother of his child.”7 She crossed the line of believability when she talked about missing the raggedy towels he used to leave in the bathroom. “Nothing is any fun any more,” she said. “When I get all dressed up to go to a premiere I'm empty inside. When people say, ‘How nice you look’ it doesn't mean a thing. Will didn't say it.”8 In ruminations like this, she seems to be trying to convince herself that she had a loving marriage. It's possible she believed it at the time, but it's hard to accept when compared with passages like this from her autobiography: “Will returned from battle in August 1943…. Unfortunately, war had only made him worse. He had turned angry and mean. This new dark side came out whenever he drank. In the morning, however, he wouldn't remember any of it.”9
She said she wrote to Price three times a day and vowed to be a better wife after his wartime duties were over: “When he comes home he will find that I have progressed and have widened my horizons, both mentally and materially.”10 His actual homecoming, on a furlough, wasn't quite what she expected. He fell in the door of their home one night, accompanied by a minister friend, and passed out. The minister made a pass at her, which she spurned, but he told her not to worry about being faithful to Price: her wandering husband had been with a woman the previous night and had asked the minister to marry them! After hearing this, O'Hara ordered Price to leave the house, but he said he was too drunk to drive. She allowed him to stay under her roof with this proviso: “If you so much as come one step toward my door, I'll report you to the police and to your base immediately. Then I'll kill you.”11
She became pregnant by him that year too. The bigger the child grew inside her, the more he seemed to rage. On a film set, she could have reported him to the producer or even to the front office, but what could she do in her own home? She was a prisoner of her fame, her marital status, and her strangely inhibited self. She viewed her life as though outside herself, wondering how she'd managed to exchange a happy home in Dublin for this house of horrors.
Yet in June 1944, not long before her baby was due to be born, she praised Price in Photoplay magazine. He had guided her through her pregnancy, she said, and he had been there for her during the medical complications of recent months. It was also Price who had decided the baby would be called Bronwyn, not Maureen, because “there's only one Maureen in my life and there'll not be another.”12 Did he really say that? It certainly sounds out of character. She fretted that Will might be gone to war when the baby was born. “And yet I'll not be really alone, for I shall know that no matter where Will is, our love will be the voice through which we shall speak to each other.”13
Shortly before the birth, Price turned up on another furlough, roaring drunk and in a “particularly nasty mood.” He looked at her prized collection of antique dolls and snapped, “You and those goddamned dolls. They're everywhere.” When she told him they were dear to her, he said, “Well I hate them. Get them out of here.” When she refused to do so, he smashed them to bits and burned them. One night he “buried his fist” in her stomach when she tried to stop him from going out drinking.14 His mother witnessed the incident, advising her daughter-in-law to go to the police if it happened again. The blow actually endangered the life of the baby. Nights like this were almost commonplace, but they were too revolting to relate to the world or even her family. Instead, she dusted herself down and did what she did best—make movies.
By now, she worked primarily for Fox, with the proviso that she do one film a year for RKO. Her first film under the new arrangement was Buffalo Bill, directed by William Wellman. She plays Louisa, spouse to Buffalo Bill Cody (Joel McCrea). There's a discernible lack of depth in this plot-driven farrago, and O'Hara was understandably unhappy with it. Event follows event as the film chases its tail in an episodic search for something significant. The famous scout is trying to live peacefully with the Indians, but Chief Yellow Hand (Anthony Quinn) is having none of it. Louisa marries Bill despite her aversion to the hard life of the frontier. She undergoes a dark night of the soul when their son dies of diphtheria, but she rallies. Bill gets his second wind with a Wild West show set up by Thomas Mitchell. It all resembles a poor man's epic, a mixed grill of buffalo hunts and tenuous peace with the Indians.
McCrea gives an almost somnambulant performance. He rouses himself briefly, such as when O'Hara whispers that she's pregnant, but then reverts back to that deadpan sense of frontier calm. Quinn does his best with his lines: “It is a bad thing for man to starve; there are better ways to die.” But the film's sense of earnestness is pedantic. Too many things happen too fast for comfort. The voiceover does not help. One has the sensation of viewing a comic book on film. The emotions are tabloid, the characters’ reactions out of proportion to their actions. It's a tribute to O'Hara's professionalism that she maintains any semblance of credibility. She portrays a lady of simple charm, and it works—almost. Sadly, McCrea gives her little to work off. She has no lines to help her scenes reach liftoff, so she must content herself with being part of his reflected glory.
Wellman made a gallant effort to create a seminal biopic, but this is more a dutiful exercise in staid storytelling than the purported panegyric on white supremacy and westward expansion we were promised. By the time we get to Cody's Comeback Special, we're all a little weary. It's a pity the film is remembered primarily for this “overly sentimental” section, as Todd Robinson notes.15 Wellman admired O'Hara's performance, but she characterized the film as “forgettable.” She was surprised it turned out to be a box-office success, a fact she attributed mainly to the “masterful use of Technicolor” by Wellman and cinematographer Leon Shamroy, the pair of them teaming up to provide “an outdoor panoramic feast for the eyes.”16
O'Hara had her first and only child in 1944. She called her daughter Bronwyn. After she was born, O'Hara wrote a kind of “Prayer for My Daughter” in which she outlines her hopes for the child. Looking far into the future, she expresses the wish that Bronwyn will find a man who kisses her “first thing in the morning and last thing at night,” brings her candy and flowers, and never lets the sun go down on an argument. Price and O'Hara followed that last rule: they always apologized before they slept if they were in the wrong.17 She advises “Bron” to don “fancy nighties and fabulous negligees” for her man, but says it's okay to go around the house in a robe and slippers and with her hair tied plain if he isn't home. O'Hara warns Bronwyn that she'll be bringing her up the hard way, with no sparing of the rod, because children today are “spoiled rotten.” O'Hara wants her daughter to have a steady job when she grows up: “I want you to know what it means to get up in the morning and go to work and have a boss yell at you and come home tired out. Then you will know how your husband feels and won't nag him, but will be understanding, sympathetic and tender, as a wife should be.”18 She doesn't advocate acting as a career, but if Bronwyn chooses it, it must come second to her marital duties.
Price was uncharacteristically busy with work at this time. According to O'Hara, he was a “producer-director” on the film Woman on the Beach, starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan.19 O'Hara's own next venture was The Spanish Main, but she almost lost the role due to a vicious rumor spread by an unnamed actress. Just before she was due to report to the set, she received a phone call from Joe Nolan, an executive at RKO. He said he had heard from an up-and-coming actress that O'Hara was “as big as a horse” since giving birth. She informed Nolan that this was totally untrue, and he believed her. But it was a reality check for her, a timely reminder that any number of young hopefuls were only too willing to do whatever it took to usurp her place on the totem pole.
In The Spanish Main, O'Hara shows her determination not to leave her sexuality at the birthing stool. She looks deliciously fragrant in the splashy histrionics on view here, in RKO's first film in the three-color Technicolor process. She plays Contessa Francesca, the daughter of a Mexican viceroy in the Caribbean. Paul Henreid is Laurent Van Horn, the Dutch sea captain who captures her. She's engaged to be married to the corrupt governor, Don Juan Alvarado (Walter Slezak), but Van Horn wants her for himself. She reluctantly marries him, but they fight on their wedding night in a prefiguring of a similar scene in The Quiet Man (although O'Hara doesn't try to stab John Wayne with a knife). Francesca gradually softens to Van Horn, as O'Hara does to countless leading men in these costumers. Alvarado isn't perturbed when he learns that his fiancée has married Van Horn; he assumes he'll have no trouble hanging the lowly pirate. What he hasn't factored in is the minor detail that the beautiful Francesca is unlikely to choose an overweight beast like himself over Van Horn (even if Henreid is woefully miscast as a laughing rogue).
Binnie Barnes provides some light relief as Anne Bonney, a chirpy buccaneer. She makes fun of Francesca, who isn't as adept with a sword as Lady Margaret is in The Black Swan. Nor does she know how to handle a pistol. There are minor giggles in a scene in which Francesca and Bonney engage in a mock duel and end up with coal dust on their faces instead of gunpowder. This is Van Horn's idea of a joke, and it's about as riotous as he gets. (His nickname in the film is “Barracuda,” but he looks more like a goldfish.) At one point he refers to Francesca as an “ornament.” She's peeved at the slight, but she doesn't show much more emotion in her green bodice and elegant pigtails. She rescues Van Horn from Alvarado in a protracted narrative, and they engage in a sunset embrace at the end, in a scene reminiscent of the finale of The Black Swan. The whole plot is disconcertingly similar to the earlier movie, but Henreid is no Ty Power.
One day while The Spanish Main was being shot, John Ford came to the studio to see O'Hara, but he wasn't admitted. The guards at the gate thought he looked shabby. (O'Hara explained that he always wore old clothes because whenever his wife bought him new pants, he'd promptly burn holes in them with his cigars.) Ford left in a temper, but O'Hara called him and explained what had happened. She assured him that if he returned the following day, a red carpet would be rolled out for him. And it was. He drove his car over it and then made his way to her room. He was there to offer O'Hara a “handshake” deal on The Quiet Man.
It would be many years before it became anything more than that. They couldn't get the project off the ground, despite their best efforts. “All the studios turned us down,” O'Hara lamented in interviews. “They said it was a little nothing Irish story that would never make a penny.”20
O'Hara was a frequent visitor to Ford's yacht the Araner, which he kept at Catalina Island, off the California coast. The Araner was a 130-foot-long double-masted sailboat that Ford had bought in 1934 for $30,000; he named it after the Aran Islands (situated off the coast of Galway, where his mother had been born). O'Hara spent many days on the yacht with Ford and his children, and she always brought Bronwyn with her. O'Hara would take down various drafts of the screenplay for The Quiet Man as Ford, wearing an old hat O'Hara's father had given him, dictated from his scribbled notes. “He'd send the kids ashore to swim,” she remembered, “then put on his Irish records and chew on his handkerchief while I took notes in my Pitman shorthand and typed them up later on. I could make no comment. I just had to take down what he said and give it back to him.”21 There wasn't much small talk on such excursions, and she wasn't invited to contribute. She was a secretary, pure and simple.
O'Hara became close to Ford during this time, but he was notoriously unpredictable. Toward the end of the year, while attending a party at his house, Ford socked her in the jaw for no reason. She was too stunned to react. Had she said something to upset him? She didn't know. An interviewer once asked her why she didn't hit him back. Her response: she wanted to show him that she could “take a punch.”22
As she waited for The Quiet Man to be green-lighted, she continued to feel shackled by unappetizing swashbucklers. Her frustration was obvious: “Almost every letter I receive asks why Hollywood doesn't take me out of these silly Technicolor features and give me dramatic pictures.”23 Why did she put up with such hymns to trivia? “Every one of us has to pay the groceries at the end of the week,” she said. “You're cast in a film and you go, ‘Mother of God, this is awful, how am I going to do it?’ But you have to, whether you like it or not. You would be suspended if you turned down a script. You would be put off salary.”24 Lew Wasserman's old words of warning had burned themselves into her soul.
However, the stars who were willing to risk suspension created better roles not only for themselves but also for their colleagues. They created a groundswell of discontent, a spirit of rebellion against the dictatorial warlords of the studios. After Olivia de Havilland made Gone with the Wind, she was given a succession of worthless scripts and refused them all. Jack Warner suspended her each time, but after the seventh suspension, she filed suit in the Superior Court of California, as this was the maximum number of times an employer could force a contract on an employee. Warner blacklisted her with every studio in Hollywood, and she didn't work for three years as a result. But in March 1944 a decision was handed down whereby stars could refuse roles without having the resulting layoff period added to the duration of their contracts. It was a limited victory, but an important one. Everybody, including O'Hara, benefited from this ruling, as it took away part of the fear of saying no to a role, thereby weakening the patriarchal studio system.
Her next film would prove to be one of her most memorable ones, albeit for all the wrong reasons. In Sentimental Journey she plays Julie, an actress with a fatal heart condition. She doesn't tell her husband Bill (John Payne), for fear of what the revelation will do to him. He dearly wants a child, so Julie decides to “adopt” one so he'll have something to remember her by after she's gone. One day while she's walking along the beach, she meets a little girl called Hitty (Connie Marshall). They become friendly and start to bond. Julie adopts Hitty, without telling Bill. After Julie dies, Bill is inconsolable, and he neglects the child, who almost drowns on the beach where Julie first met her. Payne rescues her and then realizes his future now resides in this little girl, Julie's posthumous gift to him.
The trade papers lambasted the film, but it appealed to the “six Kleenex brigade,” who tended to flock to soapers like this one. Marshall bore the brunt of the abuse. A critic described her as “just another one of those precocious Hollywood juvenile products who in workaday life would benefit from a good hiding.”25 Sentimental Journey was voted the Worst Film of All Time by Harvard. Bosley Crowther accused it of being “a compound of hackneyed situations, maudlin dialogue and preposterously bad acting.” From the moment O'Hara clutches ominously at her heart after being told by Sir Cecil Hardwicke that it's weak, “the gradient to blubbering bathos begins.” From the moment the “vaporish” O'Hara meets the toddler Marshall on the beach and is mistaken for the Lady of Shalott, the treacle begins to flow. It becomes more viscous when Marshall babbles to Payne about sea horses and unicorns, and it “plainly solidifies to taffy” after O'Hara takes her leave of the world.26
Few could quibble with this estimation, but critics don't pay actors’ wages. The public does. And the public went for it hook, line, and sinker. It became a “honey” for audiences worldwide. O'Hara wasn't too troubled by the critics’ reactions; she fed off the film's goodwill for years. Often when she traveled to foreign countries, people would come up to her and sigh “Oh, you were in my favorite movie.” She would be expecting them to say it was The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Quiet Man or maybe How Green Was My Valley, but they often named Sentimental Journey.27
Payne enjoyed the experience of working with O'Hara. He spoke of the film in glowing terms, citing it as the favorite of his whole career. “I played a grieving widower,” he exulted to a reporter, “and when I tell you that my late wife was played by Maureen O'Hara you'll know why I was grieving.” This was high praise indeed.28
She was less happy with her costars in Do You Love Me? (1946), neither of whom was a “real” actor: Harry James was primarily a trumpeter, and Dick Haymes a crooner. It was her first starring role for Fox, and the film is typical of the lightweight, postwar fripperies Hollywood was churning out with astonishing regularity at the time. Shortly after shooting began, O'Hara was groped by the film's producer, George Jessel, and screamed holy hell. In the simpler era of the 1940s, that was all it took. She didn't need to file a lawsuit or delay work on the movie. She yelled so loudly, she recalled in her memoirs, “You could hear my voice echoing outside my trailer.” The incident hit the trade papers, and Jessel backed off.29
The plot has O'Hara playing the bespectacled dean of a Philadelphia music academy who decides to trade prissiness for glamour when she takes an interest in swing music. Her superiors at the academy aren't impressed and fire her, but she won't be deterred, teaming up with James to perform on campus. Common sense prevails, and she is reinstated as dean. In addition to James, Haymes is now sniffing around her as well, along with the school's business manager, played by Richard Gaines. O'Hara has her pick of men, and she chooses Haymes in the end. The film's director, Gregory Ratoff, wasn't satisfied, so he thought up a new ending: James gets into a cab occupied by his real-life wife Betty Grable—consolation for losing O'Hara.30
Jeanine Basinger sees the film as the story of “a mouseburger who becomes a sexpot” as a result of being “jeweled and gowned.” Basinger goes on to note that character transformation in a “woman's picture” is often a function of sartorial splendor—or what we might call “power dressing” today.31 It's a moot point. O'Hara felt underused in the role, and she didn't even get to sing. She should have, although the songs are nothing special. Haymes covers the cracks in the plot and dialogue with a kind of sleek professionalism, but even he can't rescue this limp revue.
Darryl F. Zanuck offered O'Hara a part in The Razor's Edge while she was shooting Do You Love Me? He warned her not to mention it to anyone, but she couldn't keep the secret and blurted out her news to Linda Darnell while the two were having lunch, not knowing that Darnell was Zanuck's mistress. That afternoon, she was asked to call Zanuck. “I told you you were not to discuss our meeting,” he roared down the line, “but you did and you're now out of the picture.”32 Darnell didn't get the role either. It went to her friend Gene Tierney. The score between O'Hara and Tierney was now one each, considering O'Hara had edged Tierney out of the running for How Green Was My Valley.
Regardless of talent, success often depended on a roll of the dice or who one knew. Another role that escaped O'Hara was the lead in The King and I. Zanuck wanted her instead of Deborah Kerr, but when Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) heard she was in the running, he threw his hands in the air and roared, “A pirate queen to play my Anna? No!” O'Hara pined, “They never even listened to my recording.”33
She was also offered a role in The Paleface with Bob Hope, “but at the time I was going through a difficult period of my life and I didn't think I would be able to laugh every day and have fun. Against my better judgment but feeling I was being honorable and fair to Bob Hope, I turned it down. Jane Russell got the job and I've regretted it all my life. It was a terrible mistake. I should have kicked myself in the rear end.” One can understand her frustration at losing a classic like The Razor's Edge, but hardly a lightweight comedy like this. She became philosophical about such losses, reflecting, “There's many who regret the parts they didn't get, but there's some who regret they didn't get mine in The Quiet Man.”34 (According to author Darwin Porter, she also turned down a potentially career-changing role in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. This is hard to believe, and one must be dubious of Porter's credibility, considering some of the outrageous allegations he has made in his many biographies.)
One reason she lost plum roles, in her view, was her refusal to sleep with Hollywood's power players: “I wouldn't throw myself on the casting couch and I know that cost me parts. I wasn't going to play the whore. That wasn't me.”35 She also felt her squeaky-clean lifestyle worked against her; she lacked the “edge” directors wanted for the spicier parts. “Hollywood won't consider me anything but a cold potato,” she complained, “until I divorce my husband, give my baby away and get my name in all the papers.”36
When her frustration over not getting quality parts reached the boiling point, she gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times to vent. “Producers look at a pretty face,” she griped, “and think: ‘She must have got this far on her looks.’ Then along comes a girl with a plain face and they think, ‘She must be a great actress, she isn't pretty.’ So they give her the glamour treatment and the pretty girl gets left behind.”37 There was a price to pay for everything: “Because I photographed well in color, I missed out on all the great roles that were still being done in black and white.”38 People missed the forest for the titian tresses. An old Hollywood adage goes, “There's no poverty in Technicolor.” It proved true for O'Hara. The gloss of color cut her off from a good 50 percent of the meaty parts. But, she said, “I proved there was a bloody good actress in me. It wasn't just my face. I gave bloody good performances.” She was now at the pinnacle—or nadir—of what she referred to as her “hoop skirts and bonnet” period. “No more duchesses, countesses and great ladies with bangs and parasols,” she pleaded. “Instead the kind of women that Greer Garson and Irene Dunne play. Women who are alive. Not living today, necessarily, but alive.”39 By now, the sense of thwarted potential had become a running sore with her. But she might as well have been talking to the wall.
Her tirade was answered with yet another ocean opera, Sinbad the Sailor. A riot of color, it chronicles the eighth mission of the nautical hero. O'Hara is Princess Shireen to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s Sinbad in a razzmatazz of fun and frolics. Anthony Quinn is the villain, and the ubiquitous Walter Slezak—appearing opposite O'Hara for the third time in four years—is equally entertaining as an eccentric Mongolian barber.
The quality cast handle their lines well, but they are encumbered by a stilted plot and a set that looks more like a painted tapestry than the ninth-century Orient. For all their sumptuous color, the props, like the characters, never become more than cardboard cutouts. For an action film, there isn't much action; Sinbad doesn't sail much, either. He spends most of his time orating, as do most of the cast. O'Hara looks splendid and gets to wear some of the most stunning costumes of her career—a different one in almost every scene—but her dialogue is floridly empty. She exudes potential in the early scenes, where her air of sybaritic slyness seems to promise she'll be something more than window dressing, but the film is almost totally lacking in drama until the fairly sensational death of Quinn's villain. The fight scenes are overly orchestrated—as false as the sets on which they're shot.
Fairbanks had just come back from performing high-level strategic intelligence work during the war. He was entranced by O'Hara's beauty, particularly in the scanty apparel she wore here, but found her physically distant, in line with her “Frozen Champagne” sobriquet. The fact that she had resisted the casting couch and extramarital affairs even led to a rumor that she was a lesbian. That allegation was so ridiculous she could only laugh at it. As for the Frozen Champagne tag, this was her reaction: “How do you want champagne, piping hot?”
Dr. Paul Singh, RKO's technical adviser on Sinbad, was impressed by O'Hara's sexual coyness. “Women should never walk around completely undressed in front of their husbands,” he opined. “That's the quickest way to lose him. He'll look for somebody who keeps part of her figure a mystery.” O'Hara, he concluded “wore just enough to be tantalizing.”40 Her garb, he felt, was even more sexual than nudity. Perhaps these costuming decisions were due to a directive issued by Will Hays's cohort Joseph Breen. Breen had read a report stating that O'Hara's outfits for Sinbad would make her costumes in The Spanish Main look positively puritanical.41 By now, her outfits were garnering more interest than the plots. The New York Times intoned snidely, “The costumes worn by Miss O'Hara are most fetchingly displayed by Miss O'Hara and most fetchingly display Miss O'Hara, which exhausts the subject of O'Hara.”42 One is reminded of Constance Bennett's self-denunciation: “I'm a lot more sartorial than thespian. They come to see me and go out humming costumes.”43
O'Hara continued to laugh all the way to the bank, but deep down, she knew something was wrong. “If you receive too many compliments on the costume you're wearing,” she espoused, “it's a failure. The important thing is for people to find you attractive without knowing why.” Inner beauty was what she sought—and a way out of being a slave to fashion: “I know women who always wear what is new, yet they look like the devil.”44
Back at the ranch, she continued to maintain an aura of connubial bliss as she drifted farther and farther away from Price. Bronwyn was the only light of her days. Price's extravagance gnawed at her, as did his bluff good cheer. The games played by Bronwyn, coupled with her quirky comments on the world opening up before her, made O'Hara's days go round. They helped her forget the bad stuff, or at least put it to the back of her mind.
When Sheilah Graham came to interview O'Hara for an article in Photoplay magazine in 1947, the gossip columnist met Price in the driveway. He was carrying a saw because he was about to build a doghouse for their Great Dane, Tripoli, and joked to Graham, “I'm the only husband in captivity who builds his own doghouse.”45 This is one of the few recorded comments from Price about his marriage. Is it conceivable that he saw himself as the victim, rather than O'Hara? (He died long before she wrote about the “real” Will Price in her memoirs, so her allegations against him went unanswered.)
O'Hara seemed the picture of contentment as she chatted with Graham about Bronwyn, who sat beside them chortling into a make-believe phone. She insisted that she wanted more children, and if they didn't arrive naturally, she was going to adopt some: “A fortune teller in Ireland told me I'd have two redheaded sons.”46 (The fortune teller was obviously way off.) She stressed the importance of family over career, indicating a desire to make only one movie per year so she'd have more time at home. “We're very family people. Will has a million cousins and we like to have our relatives around.” She didn't even like dining out. “It kills us to go out because we'll be missing something good at home. Will sometimes gets up in the middle of the night and I'll find him in the kitchen eating cold beans with homemade mayonnaise.”47 Was this meant to conduce to the excitement, or was she just trying to be funny?
The interview ended with O'Hara informing Graham that she'd lost weight when Price was in the marines due to worrying about his welfare. “The girl nearly lost her mind with anxiety,” Graham wrote, warming to her theme. O'Hara went on to say that she was now building a swimming pool, “not to impress Hollywood. Just for Will and me.” Graham's last sentence completes the rose-tinted picture: “And there you have the keynote to Maureen O'Hara. It's ‘Will and Me.’”48
In truth, the keynote to Maureen O'Hara was “Bronwyn and me.” Her life at this time was a succession of manic work schedules followed by equally manic mothering. After each day's filming, she removed her makeup as quickly as she could and prayed the traffic lights would be with her as she rushed from the studio so that she could get home in time to give the little girl her bedtime kiss. If Price was sober, she'd tell him the day's news; if not, she would read or telephone a family member or catch up on the household chores. If she was entertaining, which didn't happen often, the house would be scrubbed clean, with everything laid out to perfection. Guests would arrive, and the talk would turn to politics, religion, or show business. O'Hara would defend traditional values, cajole her company, and enthrall them with stories from the “Old Country”—tales of fairy rings, leprechauns, ghosts, banshees, and black cats—and superstitious fables, some of which she even believed herself. On such evenings, her guests knew enough not to enter into debates with her. She held strong views but preserved a sense of levity—in contrast to the image of hauteur she seemed to exude on the set.
It was an action-packed life, but one that was empty at the core. The days and nights became a metronomic continuum of fulfilling work and idle play, her need for emotional stability uneasily welded onto the ambitiousness that had been driven into her as a young woman. As the years passed, she became inured to such contradictions. Movies were her protection against falling into the same pit as Price. Work was more therapy than art by now, a way of coping with an inane and insane marriage.
This was her attitude when she stepped onto the set of The Homestretch in 1947. She plays a refined Boston beauty, Leslie Hale, who lives with her maiden aunt and is engaged to a dull diplomat named Bill Van Dyke III. But when Leslie meets raffish racehorse owner Jock Wallace (Cornel Wilde), he turns her head and sweeps her off her feet. Before she knows what's happening, she's left her boring life behind and is tripping the light fantastic with Jock. Another woman from his past, Kitty Brant (Helen Walker), is still on the scene, but Leslie isn't unduly worried about her or about Jock's drinking. She marries him, confident that love will conquer any potential problems. Jock offers liberation to Leslie, but at a price. He's unlikely to settle down after marriage. Bill would obviously be a safer bet, but a life with him would lack excitement.
Zanuck felt the film failed “because we told the story of human beings and not the story of a horse.” People usually believe the converse about films that feature animals, but he had a point. He thought the film was compromised because it tried to mix the two stories: “The people who want to see Cornel Wilde and Maureen O'Hara in a bedroom do not want to see the problems of a cow pony. And the people who want to see the problems of Smoky do not give a damn whether Cornel Wilde is in or out of the picture, and they're certainly not interested in his problems with a society girl.”49
O'Hara received this dubious praise for her performance: “Her perfect clearcut features register no shades of emotion and her poise in any circumstance remains correct and undisturbed. She is ravishing in Technicolor. Who can give a thought to horses when she adorns the screen?”50 She could be forgiven for detecting a tinge of irony in these comments.
Disenchanted with her career, she contemplated her own “home stretch” as she planned a trip back to Dublin. She hadn't been home since the beginning of the war—or, as it was referred to in Ireland, the “Emergency.” Her family was hoarding whatever meager rations they could accumulate, planning to pamper her upon her return. She was really looking forward to seeing them, and when she received permission to fly home in 1946, she “jumped at the chance.”51 Who could blame her?
By this point, her sister Margot had also become an actress, appearing in I Know Where I'm Going!, a British romance, in 1945 and The Captive Heart, a war film, the year after. Both parts were negligible. Her other sister, Florrie, had a bit part in Hotel Reserve, another war movie, in 1944. Florrie was based in Montreal now, and Margot in San Diego.
O'Hara's decision to return to “Erin's green shore” embroiled her in a fracas that ended up on the front pages of newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. When she applied for an American passport, she was informed she would first have to renounce her allegiance to Britain. This confounded her, since she didn't have such an allegiance. Thus began a lengthy process of patriotic to-ing and fro-ing. She refused to allow American authorities to list her nationality as British on her citizenship application and took her case to court. Her refusal to recognize Ireland's old colonial enemy as her native home forced the United States to acknowledge Irish citizenship for the first time. It was a huge campaign on her part and received massive media coverage. Ireland's then-president Eamon de Valera, who had fought in the War of Independence in 1916, hung a photograph of O'Hara on his wall as a tribute to her fighting spirit. She remained rightly proud of her part in shaping the future history of her fellow Irish citizens abroad, the so-called green army.
The captain of the plane that brought O'Hara to Ireland was Charles Blair, the man she would eventually marry. For now, though, he was just a family friend.
She felt emotional being home. She had left as a would-be starlet and was returning as a seasoned professional of the screen. But that didn't matter to her. She was Maureen FitzSimons again, making a “sentimental journey” back to the people who loved her. The prime motivation was to introduce her daughter to the family. Bronwyn ended up getting even more attention than her mother. All the way from Shannon Airport to Dublin, Maureen's father sang Irish songs to the toddler. In the following days, her parents and siblings oohed and aahed over Bronwyn, and O'Hara had to tell them to stop, for fear of spoiling her.
The talk turned to movies. Her brothers Charles and Jimmy expressed a wish to go back to Hollywood with her. She promised to organize some tests for them with Warner Brothers. Her parents were dubious, however, being suspicious of the life of a movie star. They thought Maureen looked awful, that she needed to eat more. “They had forgotten how Hollywood stars are supposed to look,” O'Hara concluded, “all slender and not too well padded. They were used to the womanly curves of the Irish lasses.”52
A reporter asked her if she thought Ireland had changed, and she responded that she lamented its increasing urbanization. Ranelagh and Milltown had once been like the countryside; now the conurbation of postwar housing made everywhere look the same—the suburbs had become part of the inner city by proxy.
She attended the premiere of Do You Love Me? and it proved to be a gala turnout. So many people were there that some of them ended up standing on the stairs (in contravention of fire regulations). After the movie ended, she found a gaggle of children engulfing her car. One official told her he hadn't seen so many fans since Gene Autry had visited Dublin years before. But in general people left her alone, unlike in Hollywood. If they passed her on the street they just said hello and went on their way. The Irish were less frothy than Americans when it came to seeing film stars in the flesh.
Her vacation was spoiled by a call from Twentieth Century–Fox requesting her presence back on the lot. They wanted her for a film called Miracle on 34th Street. It would become one of the most memorable of her career, but she couldn't know that at the time. She was infuriated at the studio's impatience. “I just got here,” she pleaded, “I don't want to go back.”53 She'd waited many years for her trip home, and now it looked to be ending prematurely. Because it was a low-budget movie, Fox couldn't afford to waste any time. Either she came back immediately, or she was out of the picture. So she signed for the film without knowing anything about it. “I didn't know what the script was about,” she gasped. “I didn't know anything except I was ordered by my boss to be back in New York.”54 She was furious. Maybe that was why, during a radio interview in Ireland, she described being an actress as “a hard physical and mental life, and completely unglamorous.”55
She departed Ireland grudgingly but got full value from her visit. As she alighted from the plane in New York, she was carrying five coats in one arm and Bronwyn's toys and a miniature vacuum cleaner in the other. Bronwyn herself had dolls, pandas, and teddies all tied together by a string, a total of fifteen items in all.
When she reached the studio a few days later and read the script, her spirits picked up. She also learned she would be working with a quality cast: John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Thelma Ritter, William Frawley, and Porter Hall. “When these people did their scenes,” she enthused, “you didn't go and lock yourself in the dressing-room. You'd stay around and watch.”56 She was particularly enraptured by Gwenn. He immersed himself so completely in the role he became the character.
The film's story begins when an actor playing Santa at Macy's department store is discovered to be drunk by a man who actually looks the part (Gwenn). O'Hara plays Doris Walker, Macy's special events director, and she persuades the man to take the drunk Santa's place. But he creates a stir when he tells people his name is Kris Kringle. More ominously, he tells customers that anything Macy's doesn't have, Gimbel's might. Doris sacks him but later has to reverse her decision when his eccentricity starts to drum up positive publicity for the store. The personnel manager, Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall), believes Kringle should be committed to an institution. John Payne plays Fred Galley, the attorney who romances Doris and ultimately goes to bat for Kris, who is having fun with the whole business. Doris has raised her daughter Susie (Natalie Wood) to believe in only what she can see and touch, so Susie tells Kringle, “You're just a nice old man with whiskers.” But then things change. Kringle introduces Susie to a whole new world of wonder when he tantalizingly asks her, “How would you like to be able to make snowballs in the summertime? Or drive a great big bus right down Fifth Avenue? How would you like to have a ship all to yourself that makes daily trips to China or Australia? How would you like to be the Statue of Liberty in the morning, then in the afternoon fly south with a flock of geese?” We're getting way beyond the issue of the existence of Santa Claus here, but this film was never really just about Christmas, despite the zealous TV program planners who foist it on us every Yuletide. It's more a parable about getting in touch with our better selves.
There are problems with O'Hara's character. The reasons for her hardness aren't properly explained; her alcoholic ex-husband was virtually eliminated from the plot on Zanuck's instructions. Zanuck dearly wanted to be “Capraesque,” but he succeeded only in making Doris's insistence on “life's harsh realities” less credible to the audience.57 She's cold to Susie, and we don't really know why.
Shirley Temple supposedly stopped believing in Santa Claus when she sat on his knee in a department store and he asked for her autograph. Something similar could have happened to Natalie Wood if she hadn't met Gwenn. On the set, she really believed he was Santa. At the end of the shoot, though, there was a party, “and I saw this strange man without the beard,” she recalled, “and I just couldn't get it together.”58
O'Hara bonded with Wood in the same way she would with another child star years later: Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. Natalie called her “Mama Maureen,” she reminisced fondly, “in a very happy young girl's way.” She used to make ceramic figurines and give them to O'Hara as gifts.
The top brass at Fox were so dubious about Miracle that they decided to “dump it on the market,” to use Wood's phrase, in the middle of summer. They had little hope for a film with a “portly, white-whiskered geriatric patient” as its hero, so they “smuggled” it out.59 Imagine their surprise when it became such a hit that Gimbel's took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to congratulate its competitor.60 Maybe we shouldn't be surprised to learn that for many years after its release, Gwenn received letters addressed to him as “Santa Claus, Care of MGM.”61 The public vicariously allied itself with the film's central motif.
As so often happened in O'Hara's life, celluloid success warred with domestic strife. Her home life continued to go downhill, the elation of the Irish trip and the movie undercut by Price's discharge from the Marine Corps. This meant he would come home for good, decimating her bank account as he partied like there was no tomorrow.
In an interview with Screen Stars, O'Hara claimed money didn't matter to her. She probably should have said that it did matter, but not as much as love. Most Hollywood insiders were aware of how frugal she was. Living with the extravagant Price, maybe she had to be. She spent hours ferreting out auctions and discount stores. “I feel very happy when I get a bargain,” she revealed. “I turn out the lights when I leave the room: I don't let them burn all night. I never throw out food. We have one ‘left-over’ meal a week.”62
Covering for Price's poor earning power, she tried to spare him embarrassment by telling the interviewer, “I make more money than Will now but I'll make it for a shorter period of time. Will's career will be longer than mine. Fifteen years from now, the overall picture will show that he was the person who put the most money in the bank.” She must have known this projection of events was laughable. Equally incomprehensible was her declaration that Price had “built” her house for her: “Not a cent of my money went into it. He pays the household expenses, the utilities, the grocery bill, the nurse's, cook's and gardener's salaries, the upkeep of the cars—everything.”63 In contrast, she wrote in her autobiography: “All the bills for running the house continued to be paid out of my account while Will ran around town like a high-rollin’ playboy.”64
After being demobbed from the marines, Price bought a house in Bel Air for the pair of them—with her money. It was a palatial mansion with five bedrooms, five bathrooms, and a four-car garage with its own gas station in the basement. O'Hara was now earning a salary of $2,000 a week, but “it wouldn't be enough to cover the costs of the new house, nanny, cook, maid, laundress, chauffeur, gardener, pool man, and Will's special talent for blowing money on booze, dames and the races.”65 Lew Wasserman managed to get her a hefty raise to $4,000 a week to help cover her expenses. Price was thrilled at this news, and he hired a business manager named Bill Duce. Duce promptly opened a separate bank account for Price, and half of O'Hara's salary was deposited into that account every week—nice work if you can get it. (For reasons even she could not fathom, O'Hara continued to employ Duce after her marriage to Price broke up.)
She was reunited with her sisters Florrie and Margot after the war and treasured their company. After all the years they spent apart, she enjoyed even the most trivial revelations from them; her virtual starvation of news from the “shamrock patch” fed her enthusiasm as she pumped them for information about family and friends from home. They responded in kind, quizzing her for details about her own radically different lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of Hollywood. The only time the sisters weren't talking was “when we're asleep,” she said delightedly.
O'Hara's two sisters were both military wives. Florrie had married a Canadian serviceman who went into business in Montreal, and Margot had married a marine major she met at the British embassy in London. All three sisters had children under three years old and were committed homemakers. One evening when Price took them all to a nightclub, the women went home early to play Patience as they watched over their babies. Florence looked so much like Maureen that Bronwyn thought she had “two mommies.”66 A similar confusion assailed her years later when, visiting her aunt Peggy, who was a nun, she concluded that the convent was full of Aunt Peggys!
We can see history starting to repeat itself here, the insulated nature of O'Hara's upbringing in Ireland being transposed onto the glitzy tableau of Hollywood. Whether one was in Bel Air or “Bel Eire” (Ireland's nickname for the playground of its stellar expatriates), some things never really changed at all.