Chapter VI: Part 6

Under the swan’s-down and sequins, Marlene remains at heart what she was in the beginning: a _Hausfrau_ with a mothering instinct a mile wide. She has mothered every man in her life. They’ve loved her for that, and much more. Mike Todd enjoyed a special place under her warm, protective wing. A great friendship started when he went to see her in Las Vegas to ask her to appear as a “cameo” star along with Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, and George Raft in the San Francisco honky-tonk sequence in _Around the World in Eighty Days_.

She agreed and instantly took on the full-time job of mothering Mike. She saw to it that he ate regularly, and the proper food. She helped him with advice. She bought him his first matched set of expensive luggage when she saw the ratty collection of cheap suitcases in which he’d been living. “You are a very great man, Mike,” she told him; “you must look and act like one.” He bought her nothing in return. Every dollar he could scrape up had to go into completing his picture. He hadn’t then met Elizabeth Taylor.

I watched Marlene play the honky-tonk scene, which wasn’t suited to her--she could have written a much better script herself. Then Mike drove me over to Metro, the only place where Todd-AO equipment had been installed, to see José Greco, David Niven, Cantinflas, and Cesar Romero in the flamenco and bullfight sequences. I sat stunned. “If the rest is as good as this,” I told Mike, “you’ve got one of the greatest spectacles ever made.” Joe Schenck, who’d sat with us, agreed. “If you need money to finish it,” he promised, “all you have to do is come to me.”

Mike gave Marlene and me his word that we could see the first rough cut of the complete picture. He kept his promises with most people, certainly with us. We had a six o’clock date to attend the screening with him before the three of us ate a quick dinner at Chasen’s and he flew to New York. He was late, as usual, but at six-thirty he was there to call: “Roll ’em.”

When the screening ended, Marlene and I sat in total silence. Mike couldn’t stand it. “Why don’t you say something? What’s the matter? I’ve never known you two broads at a loss for words.”

“Shall I tell him?” I asked Marlene.

“Go ahead.”

I gave it to him on the chin. “Who cut this picture? A butcher? Where are those wonderful scenes I saw in the gypsy tavern and the bull ring? Why have they been cut to bits?”

“She’s right,” murmured Marlene. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“The cutter said they ran too long,” Mike explained.

“Well, fire him. Get the negative put back together and start all over again. Pay him off and find yourself an artist, not the man who did this.”

“I don’t know if I can do it. I gave him a year’s contract. It’d cost a fortune.”

“If you don’t, it will cost you a great picture.”

“Who could I get?” he begged.

“You’ve got one friend in this town who wants to see you succeed, not fail,” I said, “and that’s Sam Goldwyn. He has saved his own pictures in the cutting room many a time. Go to Sam and let him find you the finest cutter in the business. It’s the only way you can save it. You haven’t got a picture unless you do.”

Mike sat there churning with anger. This was his first picture. We made a sad threesome in the restaurant, with Mike complaining about how hard he’d worked already and us not listening to him. “You’re going on a plane and you’ll get no food there,” Marlene interrupted. “I’ll order dinner for you. Hedda and I will eat later.”

He accepted that idea, then grumbled that he didn’t feel like going to New York anyway and he’d cancel his reservation. “You must go. You’ve got money questions to settle there,” said Marlene, the mother again.

After he’d left, she telephoned the airport: “Mr. Michael Todd will be a few minutes late for his flight, number ten, TWA, for New York. Would you please hold the plane for him? It’s very important.” Then she asked me: “Are you hungry?” We hadn’t eaten a mouthful with him.

He went to New York. On his return he saw Sam Goldwyn, who came through with the right cutter. The first real preview, loaded down with Hollywood and New York big shots, was a sensation. But by then Mike had met and been dazzled by Liz, who arrived late at that screening nursing a highball, and sipped her way through the performance. Marlene saw very little of him after that, and Liz got all the glory.

On the afternoon of March 22, 1958, I was in Havana, Cuba, bowing before Madame Fulgencio Batista, wife of the reigning dictator, who was guest of honor at a fashion show being staged to celebrate the opening of a new Conrad Hilton hotel. In my outstretched hand I held a hat for presentation to her. A newspaperman in the crowd couldn’t wait until I’d finished. He hurried forward and whispered in my ear: “Mike Todd’s dead--his plane crashed.”

I quickly dipped my head to Madame. “Will you excuse me? I’ve had some very sad news.”

When I flew back to New York next day, Marlene telephoned me at the Waldorf Towers, broken up by the news of Mike. We talked for ninety minutes. She wept for him, and so did I.

Over cocktails in Havana I’d met an ex-subject of my movie-making days. Ernest Hemingway had cursed like a troop of cavalry in 1942 when my cameraman trailed him around Sun Valley and ruined a day’s quail hunting for him. I wanted to bag him and the Gary Coopers on film for my series of two-reelers called _Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood_. In Cuba I got very chummy with Ernest and his lovely wife, Mary. “We should have met twenty-five years ago,” he said gallantly.

“Yes, I think we might have made some sweet music then.”

“It’s not too late now,” the old flirt replied.

“It is for me,” I said.

He sighed. “I was boasting a bit. I guess for me, too.”

The following winter in New York I saw Mary at a Broadway opening. “Where’s your ever-loving?” I asked.

“Out with Marlene Dietrich. He preferred dining with her to coming to see this play.”

“Can’t blame him. But how come I never get that much attention from your husband?”

“Because you don’t do as much for him as Marlene,” said Mary.

* * * * *

Where Marlene was a challenge and an inspiration to Travis Banton, Garbo was a challenge, exclamation point, to Gilbert Adrian at Metro. Marlene loves seductive glamour in clothes, and she finished up knowing as much as her master. The Swede hated dressing up, enjoyed wearing only her drab woolen skirt, turtle-neck sweater, flat-heeled shoes, and men’s socks on her big feet.

Travis delighted in high fashion. Adrian came up with more fantastic designs, though when femininity was in order, his clothes dripped with it for Greer Garson, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald. He sized up Garbo like a bone surgeon, with his keen, kind, hazel eyes. She moved like a man, and she had a man’s square shoulders. Her arms were muscular; her bosom--let’s just say meager. Yet on the screen there was a commanding presence and luminous beauty.

She had an acting secret that only a few of us who watched her closely caught on to. In every clinch, a split second before the leading man put his arms around her, she would reach out and embrace him. It was one of the subconscious things that marked the difference between a European and an American woman--and Americans were always awed by Garbo. Her pictures are still earning lots more praise and money overseas than at home.

Her face hinted at sadness. She suffered her first bitter taste of that not long after she was brought over from Stockholm by Metro, to land in the middle of a New York heat wave, when she spent most of her days sitting in a hotel bathtub full of cold water. It wasn’t Garbo that the studio wanted but Maurice Stiller, the Swedish director who had discovered her and refused to travel without her. But Stiller was subsequently fired by Irving Thalberg, and it was Garbo who was given the build-up. Stiller returned to Stockholm, a defeated, ailing giant of a man, and she was heartbroken.

She stored up bitterness against MGM. In her early days Pete Smith, head of publicity, had her pose for cheesecake shots wearing track shorts, to be photographed with another Scandinavian, Paavo Nurmi, the record-breaking runner, on the athletic fields of the University of Southern California. When she had made her name a household word and insisted on working in complete privacy on the set behind tall screens, Louis B. Mayer brought six important New York stockholders to see her. She sent them packing. “When Lillian Gish was queen of the lot, all I was allowed to do was show my knees. Now let these visitors bend their rusty knees to me, but they shall not watch,” she said.

Once Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s top editor, came on the set to watch. When she saw him she walked out of the scene. “If he wants to see me, he can see me in the theater.” She went to her dressing room and wouldn’t come back until he’d gone.

Adrian accentuated Garbo’s assets and concealed her liabilities. For her he devised the high-necked, long-sleeved evening gown that swept the world of fashion in the thirties. For _As You Desire Me_, in which I played her sister, he invented the pillbox hat with strings tied under her chin, which became part of every smart woman’s wardrobe. He had her dripping in lace and melting costume lines for _Anna Karenina_, sent the dress industry off on an oriental kick with her exotic outfits for _The Painted Veil_. Her costumes in _Grand Hotel_ could be worn today and still be high fashion.

He achieved much the same kind of fashion influence for Crawford. Her padded halfback’s shoulders in _Chained_ and a dozen other movies convinced half the women of America that this was exactly how they wanted to appear. His _Letty Lynton_ dress, with wide sleeves and sweetheart neck, was a garment-center classic. “If Crawford has an apron,” we used to say, “it has to be by Adrian.”

His new clothes for any top star were guarded like the gold of Fort Knox. Until the premiere costumes were kept under lock and key so manufacturers’ spies couldn’t run off with his designs and pirate them. A new Garbo or Crawford or Norma Shearer picture carried the fashion wallop of a Paris opening today.

No more. The tradition that the designers fostered has vanished. Women used to follow Hollywood fashion as avidly as they copied Veronica Lake’s peekaboo hairdo or dreamed that some miracle might endow them with legs like Betty Grable or Esther Williams’ classy chassis. Now they haven’t got much to build their diet of dreams on except Ben Casey’s surgical smock--television doesn’t go in strong for women, much less gals in glamorous gowns.

When I look at Jackie Kennedy these days I think: “If those fellows were around today, what they couldn’t have done for her!” She’d be queen of fashion the world over. Oleg Cassini can’t hold a candle to any of them, and he never had it so good, not even when he was married to Gene Tierney.

Who’s left in motion-picture fashions? Nobody much outside the industry has heard of Irene Sharaff, or Helen Rose. Edith Head started as Travis Banton’s sketch girl, and her designs continue to follow his lead. Jean Louis is the one designer that picture stars ask for today, just as stage stars beg for Mainbocher.

Sometimes Jean overdresses Doris Day, but the clothes he makes for her, at producer Ross Hunter’s insistence, have transformed Doris from a plain Jane into a fashion plate. One difference between Jean Louis and Adrian: Doris Day and Lana Turner got all the clothes to keep, as a wonderful bonus from Ross Hunter. At Metro, the dresses belonged to the studio, and Adrian had to ignore the pleas from a New York socialite who, after every Garbo picture, used to send him a blank check, willing to pay anything for just one of the costumes Garbo wore.

Metro’s meanness and lack of judgment was one reason he quit and opened his own salon. A New York wholesale house wanted him to design a total of thirty-five dresses a year and offered to pay $150,000 for the job, split between him and Metro. “What’s that to us?” his bosses said. “That’s peanuts. No, you can’t take it, and that’s final.”

Reason number two was the reaction Adrian got from director George Cukor to the twenty-four beautiful costumes designed for Garbo in _Two-Faced Woman_. I saw them hanging in the Wardrobe Department and drooled over them. But Cukor made up his mind that for this picture she was going to look as she does in reality. No glamour; two fake diamond clips in her frizzed-up hair. No clothes to make an audience’s eyes pop, but wool sweaters and sack frocks.

“After making her a fashion legend, you want to do this to her?” cried Adrian. “Won’t you at least come and see the clothes I’ve made?”

Cukor refused even that. _Two-Faced Woman_ was the last picture Garbo made. She respected Adrian, to the point where she’d sometimes eat her vegetarian lunch in his office. The picture was one of her few failures. He handed in his notice. Metro was burned to a cinder when it had to hire six people to replace him. He’d been in the habit of designing clothes not only for the stars but for the whole company in movies he worked on.

When Garbo retired from the screen, she gave only one autograph as a souvenir. It went neither to Adrian nor Louis Mayer. To her colored maid, the only living soul allowed in her dressing room, whom the studio paid for, she presented a framed photograph of herself on which she had written: “To Ursula, from your friend, Greta Garbo.” I’ve heard of only one similar gesture of hers. Dr. Henry Bieler, of California, put her on a diet to which she’s clung over the years. When he wrote a book, he asked her for an endorsement, which she promptly sent him.

Nowadays she’s lost the passion for self-effacement that had her masquerading as “Harriet Brown,” hidden in a floppy hat and dark glasses. Neighbors in the New York apartment where she lives are devoted to her. Their children exchange greetings with her on the street. Among those neighbors are Mary Martin and Richard Halliday. Their daughter Heller lived with them until she eloped last year.

One day Mary’s front-door bell rang. Garbo was standing outside. “Forgive my intrusion,” she said shyly, “but I have often watched from my window and seen you and your family. Sometimes going shopping. Sometimes getting into your car. You look so happy, and I feel so alone.”

Over the tea that Mary insisted on serving for them both, Garbo found one more friend, to add to the precious few she’s made in her lifetime. Two others, who are devotion itself, are the designer Valentina and her husband, George Schlee.

There was a Christmas Eve before Adrian resigned when I was the stooge in a plot to turn him green around the edges. Omar Kiam, who designed for Sam Goldwyn, was the one to arrange it. Adrian had just announced his engagement to Janet Gaynor. He was giving a party, and Omar was to be my escort. On December 22, Omar informed me that I had to have a new gown. But I hadn’t time to get anything, I told him. “Then I’ll make one. You won’t even need fittings; I’ve got your dress form at the studio. You’ve got to be dressed to the teeth.”

At six o’clock on Christmas Eve, ninety minutes before he was due to collect me to go to Adrian’s, Omar arrived on my doorstep with the dress over his arm. I have never seen anything lovelier: American Beauty red velvet, tightly fitted, with a full, flounced skirt and train. “If this doesn’t knock their eyes out, nothing will,” he grinned.

“It sure will,” I said. “I’ll be ready sharp on time.” But I was still waiting at eight-thirty. Wondering what went wrong, I telephoned Omar’s house. His butler answered: “I’m terribly sorry, and I should have let you know. Mr. Kiam won’t be able to come for you. He has retired for the night.”

It dawned on me then what had happened. After delivering the gown he went home to celebrate, not wisely but too well, and had to be put to bed. I swept into Adrian’s living room an hour late. My red gown dimmed everything else in the room. Ina Clair, who was there, said: “You did it on purpose.”

I still have that red velvet--as the upholstery on two French chairs once owned by Elinor Glyn. Every morning when I open my eyes I see a memento of Omar Kiam. He did the clothes for both the pictures I made for Sam Goldwyn. In one of them, _Vogues_ of 1938, which Walter Wanger produced, I played Joan Bennett’s mother. She and I had a certain exchange of words some years later.

Two lines in my column brought me the gift of a skunk from her. Here’s the story. Mothers usually had a tough time in pictures, especially with close-ups. They came almost always at the end of the day when you were tired and your make-up was messy. So it was on this picture.

It was not only the end of the day but the last scene in the picture and I was feeling desperately weary. I went to Walter Wanger and said: “I don’t think I can do that close-up. If you’ll let me come tomorrow morning, it won’t cost you anything.”

He said: “You’ll have to do it--I’d have to bring the whole crew in; it would cost a day’s salary for everyone.”

So I finished the scene and went to my dressing room and for the first time in my life fainted. How long I lay there I don’t know. When I woke I called for help. There wasn’t a soul around; everybody had gone home. I finally found a telephone and got the gateman to order me a cab, which took me home. Then I sent for a doctor.

Years later, when Joan was playing mother to Elizabeth Taylor in _Father of the Bride_, I went on the set to interview Liz. There was Joan doing her close-up. I looked at my watch: it was 6:30 P.M. I remembered the misery I’d once endured, and in my column the following day, I wrote: “At last Miss Bennett knows how it feels to get her close-up at the end of the day and not at the beginning.”

For that she sent me a deodorized, live skunk. I christened it Joan and gave it to the James Masons, who had been looking for one as a companion for their nine cats.

In its rosier days, Hollywood Boulevard saw glamour by the carload on Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide across the sidewalk like some special, splendid race of the beautiful and the blessed; gowns swishing, hairdos immaculate; teeth, eyes, and diamonds gleaming together.

Just watching them walk in was as good as a ticket to a world’s fair. They all had gowns made for those evenings, each trying to outdo the other. They’d pester the studio designers to find out what the other girls were getting. “You’ve got to top them for me,” they’d all plead, and the boys would smile the promise to do their best with sketch pads and shears.

During World War II the women of Hollywood let the producers talk them into surrendering every shred of glamour even on Oscar nights. “If you go out, you mustn’t be well dressed,” the front-office men argued, “or else the public will be offended. What you’ve got to do is to look _austere_.”

I knew this was malarkey. So did they. From the mail that poured in, it was as plain as a pikestaff that servicemen were starving for glamour. They wanted pin-up pictures of glamorous girls. I sent out ten thousand of them, until the studios rebelled and pretended they couldn’t afford any more. But they didn’t get away with that.

I waged a little guerrilla war of my own, too, to doll up the Academy Awards when the studio chieftains still wanted the presentation to look no dressier than a missionary’s sewing bee. Telephone calls by the dozen worked the trick. “What are you going to do,” I demanded, “let those clothes rot in your closets? You’re not going to wear anything but your most beautiful gown.”

“But nobody’s going to be dressed,” the girl at the other end would wail.

“Then set the style. Last year you looked like spooks: sackcloth and ashes.”

At least, we managed to re-establish the tradition that year that women should dress for the night they hand out the gold-plated little men who first saw life in 1927, when Cedric Gibbon roughed in the design for them on a tablecloth at the Ambassador Hotel.

But the Academy Awards I’ve cared about most over the years had nothing to do with glamour. They had to do with life, exclusively, in full measure. The first were the two Oscars that went to the crippled veteran, Harold Russell, who proved in _The Best Years of Our Lives_ that a man can lose his hands but not his courage.

The second was willed to Howard University by Hattie McDaniel, who won hers for the best supporting role in 1939 for _Gone With the Wind_ and died penniless in 1952 in the Motion Picture Relief Home.

The third was won by James Baskette for _Song of the South_, after a campaign in which Jean Hersholt, then president of the Academy, and Freeman Gosden gave their immediate support. Some members disdained my idea that a special Oscar should go to a man for playing Uncle Remus, a slave, and they fought at a meeting on the eve of presentation until 4 A.M. Jean finally sent them home with this warning: “If he doesn’t receive an Oscar, I shall stand up tomorrow night and tell the world the whole disgraceful story.”

After he received it from the hands of Ingrid Bergman, James Baskette carried his statuette everywhere he went, in a black velvet bag that his wife made. At night he stood it on his bedroom mantelpiece with a tiny spotlight shining on it.

He was slated to play “De Lawd” in a Broadway revival of _Green Pastures_ when he was taken critically ill. As he lay dying, his eyes returned time and again to Oscar. “No colored man ever got one before,” he said, “and I’m grateful, Lord.”

_Nine_

Our town worships success, the bitch goddess whose smile hides a taste for blood. She has a habit, before she destroys her worshipers, of turning them into spitting images of herself. She has an army of beauties in attendance at her shrine.

Not many survive the encounter with success. Wreathed in smiles, she kills them in cars, like Jimmy Dean; or with torment, like Marilyn Monroe; or with illness, like Jean Harlow. She turns them into drunkards, liars, or cheats who are as dishonest in business as in love. This is the story of four women and what success did to them.

One of them who escaped in a single piece is Lucille Ball. She grabbed the prizes of talent, fame, and money, and Lucy is only slightly battered as a consequence. She even survived after she gave Desi Arnaz, with whom she was madly in love, the shock of his life by divorcing him.

Lucille had the sense to quit as TV’s “Lucy” when she sat on top of the world. That show had an audience rating so high that America took time out for half an hour every Tuesday evening to look at that little black box. I remember that the 1952 inauguration party that Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago _Tribune_ gave in Washington came to a temporary halt while everybody had to watch in silence. Lucy’s baby was being born on the program that night and Bertie wanted to see.

But the time came when Lucy told Desi: “I won’t do any more. The writers have run out of ideas, and I’m dead tired.” They sold out the series to CBS for reruns and on the proceeds bought the two RKO studios for $6,150,000. These studios had a certain sentimental appeal on top of their commercial value. Lucy and Desi first met at RKO in 1940 when they were filming _Too Many Girls_, a prophetic title. The former Earl Carroll chorus girl and the ex-bongo drummer from Cuba proceeded to spread themselves over a whole pile of enterprises that included a Palm Springs hotel, a golf course, and a $12,000,000 production contract for Westinghouse.

Desi took to putting a few drinks under his belt as a diet, and the fireworks started. They split up two or three times, but Lucy always forgave him and took him back. To save the marriage, as she hoped, she set up a trip to Europe for them both. “We’ll take the children along, too,” she said.

I begged her not to. “If you’d just try it alone, the two of you,” I said. “Little Desi and Lucie are too young to enjoy a trip like that.”

But Lucy can be stubborn. “I won’t go without them,” she said. So she took a maid along to look after them. For the voyage, which she hoped would be a second honeymoon, she bought clothes by the trunkload; big picture hats that she never put on her head; a magnificent full-length sable coat. “But it’s May now, and you’ll be running into summer over there,” I said.

“I’ve bought it and I’m going to take it,” she said. “Besides, Desi hasn’t seen it.”

They sailed aboard the _Liberté_. “We are having a wonderful crossing--so far--weather perfect,” she wrote me. “Food divine--too divine. Eating ourselves out of shape. Everyone loves our kids--that makes us happy. They have even forgiven us our forty pieces of baggage and two trunks.”

Just how wonderful the trip was I heard when she got back, scarcely speaking to Desi. He had been weary, resenting the presence of their children, though he’s a loving father. He and Lucy collided head on in one quarrel after another. “What did he think about the sable coat?” I asked.

“Never saw it,” she said. “I used it on the ship as a blanket for the kids.”

The following Christmas, when the Westinghouse contract had three more months to run, she asked me to appear on a TV show on which she was making her bow as director; it included a dozen or more players she had been training in her school. Desi was just back from a solo trip to Europe, shooting a picture there.

On the set, Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley, veterans of happier “I Love Lucy” days, wanted to take cover along with me to shelter from the storms between Lucy and Desi. It was dreadful. “You can’t insult him before the entire company,” I warned her in her dressing room. “You’re partly responsible for this show, too, you know.”

It seemed we were doomed to have a flop on our hands. As director, Lucy was lost without a compass, too mad to see straight, and the show was going to pieces. In dress rehearsal Desi said mildly: “Lucy, dear, will you let me see if I can pull this thing together for you?”

“Okay, try it!” she snapped.

Desi was winning no medals as husband, but he shines as a director and producer. In ten minutes he had that Christmas program ticking like a clock. The New Year hadn’t yet come around the corner before Lucy wanted to sue him for divorce, which was something Desi had been convinced she would never do.

“You can’t,” I told her. “You and Desi both signed the Westinghouse contract as partners. If you walk out, they could cancel and sue you.”

She had to listen to the same tune from me every week. She was itching to dump Desi and so desperate to leave Hollywood that she’d have played _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ if it would take her to Broadway. Instead she took on the next best thing--a musical called _Wildcat_, on which she staked money and her reputation.

Lucy hasn’t many illusions about herself. “I’m not beautiful, not sexy, and I don’t have a good figure,” she says. She knows she can’t sing and she admits that too many years have flowed under the bridge for her to dance like Cyd Charisse. But for _Wildcat_ she had to sing, dance, and hold the show together. She tried to inject some sparkle by ad-libbing wisecracks à la Lucy. The author, instead of being grateful, was fit to be tied.

After a lot of her cash had vanished and she’d collapsed two or three times on stage, she returned to Hollywood. She licked her wounds and, with Desi down on his ranch breeding horses, earned fresh medals as a businesswoman by helping to put Desilu back on its feet.

In November 1961, I went to the wedding of Lucy and Gary Morton, a young man she met on a blind date while she was playing in _Wildcat_ and he was telling jokes at the Copacabana. He makes her happy, and she told me that he’d be able to spend the summer at home while she started a new television series. No, Gary would not co-star.

* * * * *

Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she was a hoofer named Lucille Le Sueur. She’s been put to the sacrificial flames more than once, but has always risen like Lazarus and lived to burn another day.

She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. She labors twenty-four hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye. She’ll time her arrival at a theater seconds before the curtain goes up and make such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one, scene one. The actors on stage may hate it, but she’s having a ball. If she has a surviving fan club in any city she’s visiting, she’ll carefully supply its president in advance with a complete schedule for the day, detailed to the minute, and collect such crowds that by evening there’ll be a mob hundreds strong escorting her.

She was called box-office poison and couldn’t get a job for years after her Metro contract ended. Out of money, she continued to play the star and hold her head high, and she had the town’s sympathy. _Mildred Pierce_ put her back in pictures and won her an Oscar, as much for bravery under fire as for her acting. The same gutsy quality showed when her husband, Al Steele, died and she took on a job as traveling ambassador for his company, Pepsi-Cola. Just before that, he’d arranged for her to visit the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska. Typically, she went through with the visit alone. Going on from there to Hollywood, she told me about it over dinner at the home of Billy Haines, once a picture star, now a top decorator with Joan among his customers.

Nothing would suit but I had to see SAC, too. She fixed it with General Thomas Power, the commander in chief. The Air Force flew me out from Los Angeles. Joan, who’d meantime returned to New York, came on from there on a commercial flight that got in an hour ahead of me. I found her waiting at the airport, with the mayor of the city in tow. She hadn’t yet checked into the hotel suite we were sharing, so we went straight to SAC, where General Power took us through the most amazing setup you could dream of. Joan and I rode to town together in the chauffeured limousine Mr. Mayor had put at her disposal.

She had enough luggage and hatboxes with her to fill a department store. She carried a jewel case two feet long. “I always travel with it,” she told us. “By the way [this to the mayor] would you be kind enough to provide someone to guard my jewels? I’ll need two men--one for day and one for night.”

“Certainly, Miss Crawford,” he said, hypnotized. “Whatever you need, just ask for it.”

Our suite consisted of a living room and two separate bedrooms, one for Joan, and one for me. As soon as we’d checked in, she unpacked. For our two-day visit she brought twenty-two dresses, which she spread out all over her room, and fourteen hats. “I don’t know what I’ll want to wear,” she explained seriously when my eyebrows hit my hairline, “so I brought them along in case.”

We were no sooner unpacked than she rang for an iron and ironing board. The iron the bellboy brought wasn’t the kind she liked, so she sent him out to buy a new one. With it, she proceeded to press every one of the dresses and hang each in its cellophane wrapper in her closet.

“Would you like to see my jewels?” she asked. I nodded, speechless. She unlocked the case and--abracadabra!--it was like peering at Aladdin’s treasure, half a million dollars’ worth; trays and trays loaded with diamonds and emeralds and pearls, bracelets and necklaces and earrings.

“This is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done,” I said. “Someday you’ll wake up with your throat cut.”

“But I always have it guarded,” she said, “and I keep it beside me on the plane.”

“Why isn’t it in a safety-deposit box?”

“I like to look at them,” she said, as though she were talking to an idiot.

I went into my room for a minute. When I came back into the living room she had disappeared. “Where are you?” Her voice came from the bathroom: “In here.” She was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. “It wasn’t very clean,” she said.

Next to the goddess in their prayers, many of the worshipers place a compulsive kind of cleanliness. Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day--they’ll shower three times a day like pilgrims in the Ganges trying to wash away their sins. But only Joan and Garbo will personally scrub the bathroom or kitchen floor to make sure there are no germs lingering there.

The mayor returned to make us his guests at a small dinner party. We both wore simple dresses because Omaha doesn’t run much to evening clothes. We were back in the hotel by eleven-thirty and had Mr. Mayor and two or three others up for a drink.

As soon as they had said their good nights, Joan, who doesn’t smoke, flung every window wide open and carried the ash trays out into the hall, where her night guard had dutifully stationed himself outside the door. She gathered up the glasses and washed them in the kitchenette off the living room. She then unlocked another item of her luggage that the bellboy had staggered under when we moved in.

It was a massive chest perhaps a yard long, packed with ice. It contained four bottles of hundred-proof vodka, bottles of her favorite brand of champagne, and a silver chalice, which she took out for her bedtime ceremony. Into the chalice she poured a split of champagne and raised it in a simple toast, “To Al,” before she put it to her lips.

“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked when the chalice was empty.

“Can’t we order in the morning?”

“No, I like breakfast when I get up. I’ll put our order in tonight.” I settled for juice, coffee, and a boiled egg. That taken care of, we agreed that eight-thirty in the morning would suit us both as time to arise. Come the morrow, I’d bathed when at eight-thirty sharp there was a rapping at my bedroom door. In the living room stood a waiter ready to serve us. Outside the front door stood a new guard, keeping the daytime watch.

Then we spent a full, fascinating, reassuring, awe-inspiring day at SAC; saw the H-bombers take off in a practice scramble; again met General Power, who gave us dinner. I started sleeping more easily from that night on as a result of what I’d witnessed. It seemed to me to be an up-to-date necessity in a fearful world where the best rule for America’s conduct was advocated by Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly and carry a big stick. The next morning, every inch a star and clean as a hound’s tooth, Joan flew on to Chicago, with her twenty-two dresses, fourteen hats, jewel case, ice chest, and silver chalice, to scrub another bathroom if she had to.

* * * * *

Some of our women can walk through the temple’s sacrificial flames and not get as much as singed. They’re so deep-down innocent they wouldn’t recognize the goddess if they saw her. Ann Blyth, a devout Catholic and a darling, doesn’t know that she’s used as regularly as tap water by people seeking favors, charity, or a conducted tour around the studios.

Kathryn Grayson is another, so guileless that a fat, bow-legged producer with lust in his eyes used to arrive on her doorstep many a morning before she’d had breakfast and literally chase her through the house.

The most gullible of all is Mary Martin, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil and, by a miracle, lives by it and through it. Judge Preston Martin’s daughter was friendly as a kitten when she drove her bright, new, yellow convertible to Hollywood in 1936 from Weatherford, Texas, which boasted a population of 5000 people at the time. She’d always been the girl who sang sweetest in church, stood out in school plays, worked the most enthusiastically in civic causes.

Her father gave her $500 as stake money on the strict understanding that as soon as that was gone, she’d come back home. He also saddled her with her five-year-old son, Larry, who resulted when Mary eloped from finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee, with a boy from Fort Worth. That marriage lasted in fact two years, was dissolved in five. “Larry’s your responsibility and you’ve got to take him along,” her father insisted, figuring this was a fair means of keeping his wide-eyed darling out of new romances and would bring her back quicker.

Around the studios they got to calling her “Audition Mary.” She sang for everybody, and everybody turned thumbs down. “Nice voice, fair figure, but impossible to photograph that face,” was the verdict. She sang for Oscar Hammerstein II--remember _South Pacific_?--at his house on Benedict Canyon at the end of my dead-end street. He knew she wasn’t ready. Years later Mary told me he taught her how to phrase a song, how to read lines, how to move. “In fact,” said she, “I learned show business from Oscar Hammerstein.”

When he thought she was ready, he and Richard Rodgers adapted a play called _Green Grow the Lilacs_, and she was offered the leading role. At the same time, she had also been offered a lead in a play produced by Vinton Freedley, who’d given Mary her first Broadway chance in _Leave It to Me_.

“I was torn between the two offers. Talking to Hammerstein over the phone, I said: ‘Will you give me a minute?’ I tossed a coin and Freedley won. The play was a success in Boston, but I felt certain it’d never reach Broadway--it didn’t.”

_Green Grow the Lilacs_ also failed and later was rewritten for a man instead of a woman in a new version called _Oklahoma!_

When her $500 had melted away, she picked up what jobs she could find. She sang for $60 at a little night spot. She taught slew-footed stars how to get through dancing scenes. Her voice was dubbed on sound tracks for tin-eared girls who couldn’t sing. Then she managed to get signed by a producer named Lawrence Schwab for a Broadway musical he had in mind.

When she got to New York, she found that plans for the show had come to nothing, but Schwab lent her to another producer, Vinton Freedley, for _Leave It to Me_. It had a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” by Cole Porter, which Sophie Tucker encouraged Mary to sing with the innocence of a lamb. That was the making of Mary. Soon she was singing on radio, then back in Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. Judge Martin went to his grave believing that “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was written especially for him.

But making movies is a cold-blooded, impersonal, highly technical business. Some performers slowly freeze inside when they work for staring cameras instead of for human beings sitting in a theater waiting to burst into applause. Mary was like that. “I beat my brains out,” she says, “and I like to hear the echo.” She didn’t cotton to Hollywood.

Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in curls and ruffles. She arrived at one dress-up affair in a sports suit. And make-up men hadn’t yet acquired their present techniques, which can transform literally any girl into a beauty queen.

Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in that!” The thought itself puts a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her lips, making her just what she fancies herself to be.

I only once saw Mainbocher cringe at the sight of his pride and joy. That was in New Orleans, when we sat together watching Mary’s opening in _Kind Sir_, produced by her long-time friend and Connecticut neighbor, Josh Logan. I smelled a fiasco during her rehearsals, but I did whatever was possible to boost her morale. She poured out her gratitude in a telegram: ONCE BEFORE ANOTHER GREAT WOMAN SOPHIE TUCKER HELPED ME IN MY VERY FIRST SHOW STOP NOW YOU BY SOME MIRACLE WERE SENT TO ME GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS--MARY.

But nothing helped _Kind Sir_. On opening night, when the last-act curtain fell, even the flowers that were pushed into her arms were tired. In the seat next to me, Mainbocher, who’d done her costumes, slid down almost out of sight so he wouldn’t be asked to take a bow. But he took it with a smile like all the rest.

I almost made an enemy of Josh Logan by nagging him to use Mary in the movie of _South Pacific_ instead of Mitzi Gaynor. “There are make-up men today who’ll make Mary look like a young girl,” I told him. “Mitzi’s a fine entertainer, but she’ll be only a carbon copy of Mary as Nellie Forbush.” Josh wrote me a twelve-page letter explaining why I was wrong. _South Pacific_ turned out to be only a modest success as a movie, earned around $5,000,000, but it would have done better if Mary had starred in it.

She played Nellie in London, of course, and reported rapturously, in red ink yet: “Dear Hedda: Look where we are! Exactly where you said we’d be! And--oh!--it has been just as wonderful as I had hoped and _dreamed_ it would be. All of it has been unbelievably perfect.”

When she came home she was bone-weary. She and her husband, Richard Halliday, had booked passage on a slow boat to South America. Then Leland Hayward told her: “I’m going to do a big TV spectacular, and I can’t do it without you.” She begged off and started on the cruise. When they reached Brazil, Adrian talked her into buying land near the house he and Janet Gaynor built in the middle of the jungle that he loved.

Mary had as much need for a Brazilian hideaway as for two heads, but she can’t go on saying no to anybody. She and Richard, who was the only big reward she won in Hollywood, discovered that the first jungle real estate they bought was sold to them by a woman who didn’t own it. The local authorities hushed that up since they couldn’t afford to have the news leak back to the United States. So Mary, $40,000 poorer, sank another $50,000 into some other property, which the surrounding, giant-sized greenery constantly threatens to steal back from her.

When Leland Hayward heard about her proposed rest cure in Brazil, he flew down ahead of the Hallidays and was waiting for them as they landed. Brushing aside her pleas of fatigue, he told her: “Ethel Merman says she’ll do my TV show if you will.” Mary, as ever, couldn’t say no. After the two of them made television history that season, she asked Ethel casually one day: “How did Leland get you to do it?”

“At first I told him to go to hell,” said Ethel, “but then he said you’d do it if I would, and I couldn’t refuse.”

Where Joan can’t stop washing, Mary can’t stop working. She hasn’t a clue as to the size of her bank account, and I’ll guarantee she never looks inside a checkbook. She waded trustingly into ventures, often backed with her own money, where she found herself up to her ears in problems.

“But that’s all ended,” she declares. “Never again would I do a play that I’m not suited to and take another two and a half years out of my life.”

But so long as she can go on flying, she’ll be happy in the theater. As Peter Pan, which was a lifetime dream come true, she’s the world’s most celebrated flying grandmother. Her son, Larry, and his Swedish wife are the parents of two children.

The other member of the Halliday family, daughter Heller, “eloped” with her fiancé, Tony Weir, along with her parents, his parents and family, and the twenty-six guests. They’d planned a reception at New York’s River Club. Her bridal gown by Mainbocher was made but never worn. Heller decided that instead of a big wedding, she’d rather have cash to get her household started, so Mary’s big production plans went up in smoke.

This was an elopement with a difference. In two cars, one Friday morning, the wedding party made for Elkton, Maryland, without anyone remembering that the state law there requires forty-eight hours’ residence before the knot is tied. That made it impossible for them to get a marriage license before Monday. Heller, Tony, and his sister Karen took one of the cars and headed south for Alexandria, Virginia, while the rest of the faltering band drove up to stay in Baltimore.

The bride and groom went through their blood tests in Alexandria. Heller had to be jabbed half a dozen times before blood could be drawn, and she finished the day with three pieces of adhesive plaster on each arm. But they still couldn’t get a license; Heller, short of twenty-one, needed her parents’ consent. On the following day, Saturday, the nearest license bureau open in the state of Virginia was in Leesburg. The doors there closed at noon. So the party took off bright and early, covered 150 miles in waltz time, and got to Leesburg just before the deadline.

“Our darling elopers,” Mary related, “were married there in the first Methodist Church to be built in America. Both mothers cried. I sat on the wrong side of the church, the groom’s. The happy pair were, oh so happy, and we are, oh so tired.” Heller went to work showing off wedding gowns as a model, instead of wearing one.

* * * * *

Sometimes the first breath of success converts an otherwise nice, well-adjusted girl into a priestess of the cult. Sometimes it takes longer. It took eleven years, her third husband, and a turnabout in her faith to convert Doris Day, who was born to Wilhelm and Alma von Kappelhoff, a German-Catholic couple in Cincinnati, on April 3, 1924, and christened Doris because her mother rated Doris Kenyon the greatest actress that ever breathed.

The von Kappelhoff became “Day” because band leader Barney Rapp wanted a name that would fit on the marquee of the Cincinnati night club where Doris, a puppy-fat sixteen-year-old girl, earned $25 a week singing with his orchestra. She graduated from there to sing with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, and the goddess started to breathe harder on her when Doris recorded her first hit, “Sentimental Journey” with them. She was making $500 a week when she left the band.

She was a girl who fell in love without pausing for breath. In April 1941 she up and married Al Jorden, a trombonist from Cincinnati who played for Jimmy Dorsey. On February 4, 1942, Doris gave birth to her son, Terry. A year later, she went through her first divorce, left her baby in her mother’s care, and joined up again with Les Brown, the girl singer who sat primly in front of the band until her turn came to go up to the microphone.

They were playing at the old Pennsylvania Hotel, which became the Statler, on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, when agent Al Levy first heard her. Struck by a funny feeling that this girl might go someplace, he sent her a note inviting her to join him at the table where he sat with Mannie Sachs, who was then head of Columbia Records. “Have you ever thought of going on your own?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said. “I’m going to get married soon.”

Eighteen months after, Les Brown was appearing at the Palladium in Los Angeles, and Doris and her new husband, George Weidler, a saxophonist in the orchestra, were living in a trailer camp on Sepulveda Boulevard out toward Long Beach. They quit Les Brown and went on living in the camp, Doris out of work, George picking up occasional weekend engagements. Terry was still with his grandmother.

Al Levy had trouble contacting Doris. The trailer was a block away from the only telephone and, if anybody called Doris, the proprietress of the camp found it easier to say “She’s not here” than go get her. But Al managed to exchange a few words: “Call me sometime if you get ambitious, and we’ll talk some more.”

Mannie Sachs got her one brief job--as singer on a sustaining radio show that starred Bob Sweeney, now a TV director, and Hal March, who made a Broadway hit in _Come Blow Your Horn_. She worked for thirteen weeks at $89 a week, after deductions, but then she was dropped; the network figured she had no future. So, with no money coming in, it was time to call Al Levy. “All right, let’s see what can happen now,” she said.

He had put $25,000 into a management agency called Century Artists, which gave him forty per cent ownership. Dick Dorso had started the business with a small stake from Lew Levy, no relation of Al’s, who was manager of the Andrews Sisters and the husband of one of them, Maxine. Lew wasn’t acting out of undiluted generosity--he wanted to get his brother-in-law, Marty Melcher, out from under his feet. Marty, Patti’s husband, used to handle such chores as fixing the lights for the sisters’ act. Marty became the second partner in Century Artists as part of Lew’s deal with Dorso. The agency, which took on the sisters as clients, had its offices next to mine in the Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard. Al also assisted my manager, Dema Harshbarger, in booking talent for my weekly radio show.

Al brought Doris to say hello as soon as he’d signed her. She was a scared little creature, smothered in freckles, wearing scuffed-up shoes, skirt and sweater, but not a lick of make-up. For months she wore skirts and sweaters. When I asked why she never wore a dress, she said: “I can only afford skirts and sweaters.” Her first need was clothes. He found a little dressmaker in Los Angeles to make her four evening dresses on Century Artists’ money.

In New York, Billy Reed was opening his Little Club on East Fifty-fifth Street, uncertain whether or not to have any entertainer work in the squeezed-in room he’d rented, which he was doing up with striped-silk walls. A friend of Billy’s, Monte Proser, thought Doris might fit there. He passed the word to Al, who persuaded Billy by telephone to try her for two weeks at $150 a week.