How adept were studio-era Hollywood stars at burnishing their legends? Very. In Conversations with Classic Film Stars: Interviews from Hollywood''s Golden Era (University Press of Kentucky, $34.95), journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller provide a fascinating collection of career reflections from many Tinseltown names.
Cary Grant (1904-86) discusses working with Irene Dunne and Katharine Hepburn, how his career got a major boost when "flabby" Mae West twice cast him as her leading man, and how co-star Joan Fontaine "never thanked" him when she won the Oscar in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). But when Bawden mentions 1932's Hot Saturday, Grant says nothing about meeting handsome Randolph Scott on the set. They would soon be living together, before and after their respective marriages. They co-starred with Dunne in My Favorite Wife (1940) and seemed more interested in each other than in their leading lady. Scott once called himself Grant's wife. Nonetheless, Grant always denied being gay. The topic is completely ignored.
Van Johnson (1916-2008) acknowledges his sexual orientation but doesn't discuss it. "I never met Rock Hudson" was his first comment to Bawden, who got the message. Johnson gives an astute assessment of his tenure at MGM, which often cast him as "the boy next door" romancing June Allyson and giving Elizabeth Taylor her first screen kiss.
While filming Suspicion, Fontaine (1917-2013) felt Grant "very self-involved," but on seeing the picture again, realized he was "generous." She also mentions the feud with older sister Olivia de Havilland. It started, she asserts, when she was cast as The Constant Nymph (1943) after de Havilland had been turned down for it. "It takes two to feud. I know how Livvie was shocked that night in 1942 when I won the Oscar over her. But I've always tried to make amends. I'm always shocking her, but she doesn't ever shock me. We're so close in birth terms, we're more like twins, and twins do quarrel on occasion, right?"
Dunne (1898-1990) is among the few big stars to have successfully juggled her personal and professional lives. She earned five Best Actress Oscar nominations without winning. She triumphed in comedies, musicals, and melodramas. She candidly refers to the "vanity" of actors, including conflicts over billing. Her 22-year movie career ended in 1952. MGM offered her the "choice" part of Grace Kelly's mother in The Swan (1956) with fourth billing. Her husband told her to forget that. "Go out #1." She adds, "I couldn't go around with an ax in my hand, like Bette [Davis] and Joan [Crawford] did to keep things going. The difference was that I had a family and they didn't have one, only the all-mighty career."
Beautiful Loretta Young (1913-2000) was the first A-list Oscar winner to leave the movies for television. The Loretta Young Show (1953-61) earned her more money than did her 25-year film career, which began in silent movies. A second series didn't do well. When Crawford withdrew from Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Young was offered the part. "I couldn't do that to my old pal. Besides, I'd look silly running around with a saw in my hand. I'm not passing judgment on these old gals who do this sort of thing. They really need the money." She made television films in 1986 and 89, then spent the last years of her life comforting patients in a Catholic hospice in Palm Springs.
Kirk Douglas (b. 1916), interviewed when he was 67, was an intelligent, committed professional who made entertaining and serious pictures. He starred in a 1963 Broadway adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but no studio would film it. Eventually, he and son Michael produced the 1975 movie, which swept the Oscars, including one for Jack Nicholson in the role Douglas created. Unlike most stars, Douglas didn't worry about audiences liking him onscreen. He wanted them to be "interested" in his characters, which included villains, cowboys, romantic leads, Vincent Van Gogh, a megalomaniacal Hollywood producer, a Viking, and the Roman slave Spartacus.
Rosalind Russell's (1907-76) ego prevented her from realizing she was terribly miscast as the Jewish widow in A Majority of One (1961) and as Mama Rose in Gypsy (1962), parts she got because her husband, producer Frederick Brisson, bought the movie rights. Nor would she admit that Rosemary, her character in Picnic (1955), was a supporting role. She might have won an Oscar in that category for her powerful performance, but she refused to have her name submitted. She never won the little man, despite four Best Actress nominations.
Jane Wyman (1917-2007) was the second Oscar-winning top star who succeeded on television, with two series running decades apart. Wyman had "a major hissy fit" when she was given an "inferior" table at the Polo Lounge in 1974. She wouldn't discuss former husband Ronald Reagan. But her insights into the studio system are rewarding. Her recollection of the casting for Amanda in 1950's The Glass Menagerie (she played Laura) is revealing. Studio honcho Jack Warner rejected Tallulah Bankhead and Miriam Hopkins (either would have been excellent). Inexplicably, he cast English stage comedienne Gertrude Lawrence, who was awful. Author Tennessee Williams rewrote lines to suit her strengths, but to no avail.
Other splendid interviewees include Sunset Boulevard 's imperious Gloria Swanson, 1930s favorite Joan Blondell, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., 1940s pin-up "girl" Dorothy Lamour, two-time Oscar-winner Melvyn Douglas, noir queen Jane Greer, character actress Margaret Hamilton, General Hospital's Anna Lee, who dishes about 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and King Kong's Fay Wray, whose anecdote about appearing in Joan Crawford's 1955 melodrama Queen Bee is priceless. All About Eve 's Anne Baxter reveals that in 1938, Katharine Hepburn had her fired during the pre-Broadway tryouts of The Philadelphia Story because she was getting too many laughs. Egos indeed.