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It was the
summer of 1974, second week in June to be more precise, and I
was languishing at the annual TV critics’ convention at
Los Angeles’ Century Plaza hotel. Rather than sit through
another boring industry talk at lunch I sneaked out with three
other colleagues by the hotel’s back door. We rushed over
a short bridge and onto what was left of the back lot of 20th
Century Fox.
A publicist waited to guide us inside one of the cavernous sound
stages and right onto the ballroom scene of the latest disaster
movie. Before long director Irwin Allen appeared and an assistant
bawled, “Quiet”. The band began playing as dozens of
extras waltzed around before breaking off to reveal a lovely
couple waltzing by themselves.
He was the screen’s all-time most famous tap dancer. And
Fred Astaire looked terrific at 75.
She was equally, if not more, dazzling with a beehive hairdo
and soft, pink baby skin plus just the glimmer of a smile. At
55, the ever elusive Jennifer Jones was making her last ever
movie appearance.
The film was the all star disaster flick "The Towering Inferno"
starring the likes of Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway
etcetera etcetera.
It all went off beautifully and Allen asked for a second take
for insurance and got that, too.
Then he gently took the hands of Jones and Astaire and guided
them our way where pleasantries were exchanged. As soon as a
colleague pulled out his reporter’s pad Jones changed, looking
very dour, then shaky. And then she simply walked off as fast
as she could.
“Guess Jenny has had it for the day,” beamed Astaire,
who stayed on to chat for another 20 minutes or so.
And that’s how I met the mostly reclusive Jennifer Jones,
a great star of the 1940s who became increasingly insecure in
the 1950s as her career seemed to implode after the death of
her powerful husband, producer David O. Selznick, in 1965.\
And that’s how I sort of met (but
never actually interviewed) Jennifer Jones.
When she died this past Dec. 17 at the age of 90, Jennifer Jones
had long been out of the spotlight. The obituaries were perfunctory
at best. After all, Jones stopped acting 35 years ago. Film historian
David Thomson was positively dismissive in his obituary in The
Guardian and all because Jones had refused his repeated requests
to be interviewed when he was writing his mammoth biography of
her second husband David O. Selznick.
But so what? That was her prerogative and she rather emerges
as the heavy in Thomson’s account of Selznick’s decline
and fall.
She was born Phyllis Isley in Tulsa in 1919 and made several
regrettable grade B westerns during her first stay in Hollywood.
She was back in New York city with first husband Robert Walker
when producer David Selznick noticed her during an open audition
for the lead in the film "Claudia".
Selznick’s aide, Kay Brown, brought her into the Selznick
office and who could not be blown away by her outstanding beauty:
big, bright doe eyes, a mane of dark hair, great smile. She already
was the mother of two infants.
But she didn’t get the "Claudia" lead. That went
to another Selznick contract player, Dorothy McGuire. Instead
Selznick placed her under exclusive contract and rechristened
her Jennifer Jones.
She became an overnight sensation in 1943’s "The Song
of Bernadette" and she won her Oscar for it over at 20th
Century-Fox. Anne Baxter once told me she was the leading candidate
for the role until Jones and Selznick appeared.
But the best female performance that year, the one truly remembered,
today was Ingrid Bergman's in "Casablanca." But Bergman
insisted she be nominated for her other 1943 movie "For
Whom the Bell Tolls." Silly Ingrid. "Casablanca"
plays almost continuously on TV but "For Whom the Bell Tolls"
is tough to sit through these days.
But "The Song of Bernadette" still plays on TV every
year around Christmas time.
Selznick had another dewy part for her as Claudette Colbert’s
daughter and Shirley Temple’s sister in the gargantuan (172
minutes)1944 salute to the home front called "Since You
Went Away." Colbert got the Oscar nomination and Selznick
got Jones a best supporting actress nominaton although she clearly
was one of the leads.
Joseph Cotten, who was the male co-star, once told me Jones was
in perpetual turmoil because Selznick had borrowed husband Robert
Walker from MGM to play her beau. Their marriage was already
crumbling and Walker quite rightly suspected Selznick meant to
have her as his next wife. Selznick was, at the time, separated
from his first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick.
Because shooting dragged on so long Jones was not available to
play the title role in "Laura" and losing that picture
really damaged her career although she did win a third Oscar
nomination in three years for the wartime romance "Love
Letters ," again opposite Cotten. (Cotten said he and Jones
were deluged with memos from Selznick even though Paramount was
producing "Love Letters" and not him.)
Selznick then put her into the sprawling western "Duel in
the Sun" opposite Cotten and Gregory Peck, who played brothers
both vying for her favors. Shooting continued over many months
with director King Vidor finally quitting to be temporarily replaced
by Josef von Sternberg. Selznick thought it would be as big a
hit and as prestigious a production as his "Gone With the
Wind."
The film did make a lot of money but it also went well over budget.
And it was cruelly overlooked by the National Board of Review,
the New York Film Critics and even The Golden Globes at the year
end evaluations.
Selznick couldn’t even manage a best picture nomination
although somehow Jones and Lillian Gish took nominations. It
was her fourth Oscar nomination in four years but she would only
earn one other a decade later.
Interestingly enough Selznick told Cotten that if he were making
"Gone With the Wind" in 1946 and not as it had been
made in 1939 his cast would have read: Gregory Peck as Rhett,
Jennifer Jones (Scarlett), Joseph Cotten (Ashley) and Dorothy
McGuire (Melanie).
Far better was the comedy Jones made back at 20th, Ernst Lubitsch's
"Cluny Brown" with Charles Boyer. Left to her own devices,
Jones really could act and she proved it again in "Cluny
Brown.
But it seemed Selznick preferred to see
Jones playing sluts like the steamy Pearl in "Duel in the
Sun" or the title character in the later "Ruby Gentry"
opposite Charlton Heston. In both parts she appears tremendously
ill at ease. Critics naturally ask what kind of a movie career
she might have had on her own--without the interference of her
powerful husband. But possibly her innate shyness would have
doomed her from the start.
If Jones had a favorite part it was the
lead in "Portrait of Jennie" (1949) where she ages
from a 12-year-old school girl to a beautiful woman, always the
object of the dreams and desires of a failed painter, played
persuasively by Cotten. She had this talent for bewitching, but
Selznick at the last minute added an eye popping storm to end
the movie. It broke the spell Jones had so carefully concocted.
The film’s financial failure forced him to leave production.
Also in 1949 Jones gave an excellent portrayal as "Madame
Bovary." Director Vincente Minnelli once told me he thought
her performance as the classic French character in Flaubert's
famous novel was the best anyone could expect from an American
actress. She was also impressive in William Wyler’s "Carrie"
(1952).
But the movies made at Selznick’s instigation were unfortunate:
"The Wild Heart" (1952), known as "Gone To Earth"
in England; "Ruby Gentry" (1952) and Vittorio De Sica's
"Indiscretion of An American Wife" (1954), known in
Italy as "Terminal Station."
Out on her own she did surprisingly well.
Granted, "We Were Strangers" (1949) is hard going.
But it introduced her to director John Huston who used her again
in "Beat the Devil" (1953), filmed continents away
from Selznick where as a cynical blonde she captures the wackiness
of the situation perfectly. Huston was the original director
on Selznick's comeback production, "A Farewell To Arms"
(1957), but left after clashes with Selznick. He was replaced
by the bland Charles Vidor.
A subsequent contract with Fox gave Jones prominent parts in
a succession of box office melodramas: "Love Is A Many-Splendored
Thing" (1955), "Good Morning, Miss Dove" (1955)
and "The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit" (1956).
But 1957 was not a good year for her. She was dull as Elizabeth
Barrett Browning in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street"
and too old as the nurse opposite a wooden Rock Hudson in Selznick’s
"A Farewell To Arms," a role originally played by Helen
Hayes in Frank Borzage's 1932 version.
Selznick sold his rights to F.Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender
is the Night" (1961) to Fox with the understanding Jones
star as the tormented Nicole. The book of Selznick memos documents
his search to find a suitable co-star. Bing Crosby, William Holden,
Gregory Peck all turned the part down because Jones had become
difficult to act with and Jason Robards, who eventually got the
part, was badly miscast.
Joan Fontaine, originally another Selznick protege, was cast
as her older sister and once told me she listened in on a crossed
party wire a dressing room away as Jones took direction from
Selznick and then did the scene exactly as he had instructed
her to play it.
For years, Jones had been plagued with mental breakdowns, starting
with the death of first husband Robert Walker in 1951, who had
battled alcoholism for years. She had divorced Walker in 1945,
finally marrying Selznick in 1949. When afflicted with a breakdown,
she often stayed in Swiss sanitariums to try to find peace. But
Selznick’s death in 1965 was another major shock for her
to endure.
Ironically, she wound up filling in for actress Kim Stanley on
the British made film "The Idol" in 1966. Director
Daniel Petrie told me, “Kim had a breakdown, a massive
one. We substituted another actress even more manic, Jennifer
Jones, who often wept and wept on set. I didn’t think she
could finish it. We did but barely. I think the result is a real
mess.”
In 1967 Jones was discovered unconscious on a Malibu beach in
a failed suicide attempt that came after she learned of the death
of longtime friend Charles Bickford, who co-starred with her
in "The Song of Bernadette."
Despite her health woes, Jones could not stop acting. In 1969
she hit rock bottom with the dreadful exploitation flick "Angel,
Angel Down We Go." One of her oft quoted lines: “I’ve
been in stag films and never faked an orgasm.”
In 1971, her personal finances exhausted, she married billionaire
Norton Simon. Eventually she sat on the board of directors of
his prestigious Pasadena art museum. Simon died in 1993.
Jones had neglected to inform daughter Mary Selznick of her remarriage
and the two were estranged at the time that Mary jumped from
a Beverly Hills high rise to her death in 1976.
For a time Jones plotted a comeback and had Simon purchase rights
to the novel "Terms of Endearment" by Larry McMurtry.
But she concluded she was too old for the part and sold it. When
finally made in 1991, "Terms" won the Best Picture
Oscar and Shirley MacLaine earned the Best Actress Oscar for
the role Jones would have played.
Jones also wanted to film the life of convicted
murderess Jean Harris but withdrew after Ellen Burstyn played
Harris in a TV movie version.
Jones did make rare TV appearances on the Academy awards and
she also popped up in several American Film Institute Salutes,
including the one for her "Duel in the Sun" co-star,
Lillian Gish. On camera, she seemed unnerved by the applause
she received.
In her last years she was confined to a wheelchair and lived
with her sole surviving son, Robert Walker Jr. Her other son
Michael Walker died in 2007.
TV obituaries, however perfunctory, revealed
clips of Jones at the height of her beauty as Pearl Chavez in
"Duel in the Sun" and Jennie Appleton in "Portrait
of Jennie."
Jones’ death leaves Luise Rainer ("The Great Ziegfeld,"
"The Good Earth") as the sole surviving female Oscar
winner from the 1930s. (Rainer turns 100 this month.) From the
1940s, the only surviving female winners are sisters Joan Fontaine
and Olivia de Havilland.
But a couple of other Jones contemporaries are still going strong.
Lauren Bacall, 86 this year, just received an honorary Oscar
and Angela Lansbury, who remains Oscarless has stormed Broadway
at 84 in a new version of "A Little Night Music."
©2010 by Jim Bawden.
This column first posted Jan. 4, 2010.
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