Cary-ing On

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At Cinevent 50 in Columbus, Ohio in 2018, there was a moderated Saturday-afternoon discussion between historians Leonard Maltin and Scott Eyman. At one point, Leonard said of Scott:

“…Scott’s book on John Wayne is the best book on John Wayne, just as his book on Cecil B. DeMille is the definitive book on Cecil B. DeMille. I’m compulsive, but I’ve been tempted to actually discard some of my other books because they’re taking up shelf space…I’m too anal, I can’t get rid of the other books, but if I could tame my instincts I would just say, ‘These are useless now ’cause Scott’s done the ultimate job.”‘

Well, if any of you out there happen to have a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books about Cary Grant (Amazon and Alibris list no fewer than twenty, not counting first-hand memoirs by his daughter Jennifer and her mother Dyan Cannon), and if you’re any less obsessive than Leonard Maltin, you can now free up some of that space, because Scott Eyman has done it again. Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise is surely — like Scott’s biographies of John Wayne, John Ford, Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford et al. — the next best thing to having known the subject personally.

Oddly enough, I thought of Cary Grant while reading one of Scott’s earlier books, John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2014). At the time I had no idea Scott would be doing a bio of Grant (and for all I know, neither did he); what made me connect the two was their similarity in thinking of themselves as distinct from their screen personae. Wayne never thought of himself as “John Wayne”; he was, essentially, Marion “Duke” Morrison, doing business as John Wayne. He never even changed his name legally — his death certificate reads “Marion Morrison (John Wayne)”. As Scott put it, John Wayne was to Duke Morrison as the Little Tramp was to Charles Spencer Chaplin, “a character that overlapped his own personality, but not to the point of subsuming it.”

Likewise, Cary Grant always — or at least for much of his career — thought of himself as Archibald Alexander “Archie” Leach of Bristol, UK. But there was a difference. For one thing, Grant did change his name legally, in 1942 (significantly, on the same day he became an American citizen). Despite that, however, he appears never to have seen the “personality overlap” that Duke Morrison had with John Wayne; “Archie Leach” and “Cary Grant” were two separate personalities, never the twain to meet — hence Scott’s subtitle, A Brilliant Disguise.

In writing about Scott’s John Wayne biography, I quoted Grant: “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.” It’s one of Grant’s most famous quotes — so famous, in fact, that Scott doesn’t even feel the need to include it. But he does offer an anecdote that makes much the same point: In 1973, Grant attended the American Film Institute tribute to John Ford. He had forgotten his ticket, and he asked the lady at the reception desk for help. She asked his name, and when he told her she peered at him. “You don’t look like Cary Grant.” Grant smiled. “I know,” he said. “Nobody does.”

For Archie Leach, the Cary Grant persona was, in Scott’s apt phrase, a brilliant disguise — but it was also a precarious balancing act. Somehow, through some alchemical mix of talent, timing, ambition and luck, this music hall acrobat from Bristol crafted a personality unlike any other. The only child of a feckless alcoholic father and an emotionally unstable mother (young Archie’s father committed her to a mental hospital and told the boy she had died; he didn’t learn the truth for over 20 years), Archie Leach managed to remodel himself into the epitome of urbane sophistication and the greatest romantic comedian in the history of the acting profession. 

Even his accent was unique. Where in the world did it come from? Not Bristol, where the local dialect is as distinctive as those for Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall. Cary Grant doesn’t sound British to a Brit, nor American to a Yank. Scott calls his accent “Mid-Atlantic”, but that doesn’t catch it either. The Mid-Atlantic accent is familiar to all actors, not “English” so much as “England-esque”. Think Vincent Price, Raymond Massey, or Brian Aherne. Cary Grant was different. No human being in history has ever talked the way he did — unless (like Rich Little, say, or Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot) they were imitating Cary Grant.

You don’t look like Cary Grant. I know; nobody does…Everybody wants to be Cary Grant; even I want to be Cary Grant. That was the man’s dilemma: “Cary Grant” embodied a glamorous ideal that Archie Leach knew perfectly well was unattainable — or at least, if not exactly unattainable, it certainly wasn’t him. As a result, Cary/Archie spent pretty much his entire career grappling with an impostor complex, always looking over his shoulder, worried he’d be found out. Duke Morrison looked at John Wayne and saw himself; Archie Leach looked at Cary Grant and saw somebody else.

Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise paints a striking portrait of a man by turns charming and exasperating, immensely likeable when he wasn’t being an ambitious narcissist, or a penny-pinching fussbudget — and often, even when he was. (Scott illustrates the old saw that no man is a hero to his valet by quoting Dudley Walker, Grant’s actual valet in the 1940s: “…he was stingy as hell…too cheap to enjoy his own wealth.”)

As for the questions about Grant’s sexuality, and particularly those unkillable rumors about him and his 1930s housemate Randolph Scott, Scott Eyman tackles them head-on, while granting that evidence is thin on the ground and largely circumstantial. True, Grant and Randy Scott always spoke of each other with undeniable affection, and Scott E. doesn’t discount the possibility of, shall we say, youthful experimentation. But would a supposedly gay man bother to marry five times? A number of Grant’s wives and friends are heard from. Peter Bogdanovich once asked director Howard Hawks about the rumors, and Hawks snorted: “Every time I see him, he’s got a younger girl on his arm. No, that’s just ridiculous.” Grant’s first wife Virginia Cherrill once remarked on how great Cary was in bed, and called Randy Scott “a darling” when she and Grant double-dated with him and tobacco heiress Doris Duke: “Randolph Scott was no more gay than Cary was.” Third wife Betsy Drake said something similar, while fourth wife Dyan Cannon was downright blunt: “Why would I believe that Cary was homosexual when we were busy fucking?” Even so, she conceded: “He lived 43 years before he met me” — actually, it was 57 years — “I don’t know what he did [before that].” Grant himself (like Randolph Scott) tended to laugh off the rumors, though he had his limits: He blew his stack and sued when Chevy Chase called him “a homo…what a gal!” on Tom Snyder’s late-night talk show (it was settled out of court, and Chase apologized). Anyhow, Scott Eyman lays out the evidence, such as it is, and invites us to draw our own conclusions.

At Cinevent in 2018, Scott Eyman expressed hesitancy in approaching any forthcoming projects: “Now, I circle and circle, is this worth those years of my life I have remaining…?” At the time, he was midway through this book on Cary Grant. I trust that he still has many years remaining, and I hope he finds another subject soon. Personally, I vote for Lillian Gish. I’ve always wanted to meet her, and I’d like Scott Eyman to introduce us.

The Mark of Kane

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As a rule, Cinedrome doesn’t concern itself with the contemporary movie scene, or with any movie made after, say, 1964 or so (that being the year to which I more or less arbitrarily date the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age). But rules are for breaking, after all, and I last broke that one in February 2019, when I wrote that Mary Poppins Returns was manifestly the best and most enduring movie of 2018 (when I bought the Blu-ray in early ’19, I told the twenty-something Target clerk who rang it up, “It’s the only movie from last year that your great-grandchildren will know.”) I used that observation to segue into a discussion of the long shadow of Walt Disney. My original plan was to follow up with a second post about the contentious relationship between author P.L. Travers and Disney’s Bill Walsh, Don Da Gradi and the Sherman Brothers in crafting the script, with possibly a sidebar discussion of 2013’s bucket of enjoyable hogwash Saving Mr. Banks, which purported to tell the same story. But in reading up on it, I found the querulous, intransigent Ms. Travers such churlish and unpleasant company that I dropped the idea early on, and that follow-up post (“Mary Poppins: Enter the Dragon”) never materialized. 

Well, that was then, this is now, and I’m breaking that rule again to discuss another contemporary movie and another long shadow. The movie is Mank, directed by David Fincher from a script by his father Jack, and the shadow belongs to Citizen Kane (1941). The younger Fincher appears to have undertaken Mank as a tribute to his father, who died in 2003 (the movie is dedicated to his memory). Besides that, it fits into the intermittent vogue for making movies about the making of movies — that is, about the making of specific movies. It’s a sub-genre that dates back at least as far as 1980’s TV movie The Scarlett O’Hara War, in which 55-year-old Tony Curtis played the 35-year-old David O. Selznick beating the bushes to find a leading lady for Gone With the Wind. The vogue has cropped up from time to time ever since; examples include the aforementioned Saving Mr. Banks and 2012’s Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho. Even Citizen Kane‘s production has been done before, in RKO 281 (1999), with Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles and James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst.

Mank covers ground similar to RKO 281, but concentrating not on Welles (played by Tom Burke as a drive-by cameo) but on co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). In the spring of 1940, after hashing out with Welles a rough outline of what would become Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz was dispatched to a distraction-free exile in Victorville, in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, to crank out a first draft. He was encased in a half-body cast after thrice-breaking his leg in September ’39 in an auto accident en route to New York. He had just been fired from MGM and was headed east to beg work from friends, having burned too many bridges in Hollywood; his convalescence put the kibosh on that, but it led to the job with Welles.

Accompanying Mankiewicz to Victorville was a German nurse (named “Fräulein Frieda” in Mank and played by Monika Grossman); an English secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), whose last name would be used for Charles Foster Kane’s second wife; and Welles’s former producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who had had a violent falling-out with the Boy Genius but was coaxed back for this assignment at Mankiewicz’s request. Mank covers the twelve weeks the group spent writing, editing, and (in Mankiewicz’s case) recuperating in Victorville, with flashbacks to Herman’s feckless, self-destructive career in Hollywood to that time. 

 

As luck would have it, the theatrical-and-streaming release of Mank followed close on the heels of my reading Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s definitive dual biography The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. Ms. Stern’s subject, of course, is not only Herman J. Mankiewicz but his kid brother Joseph L., their literary ambitions and cinematic achievements. Both spent their lives hungry for the approval of their college professor father, who always seemed to feel his sons were wasting their abilities by working in movies. She makes a convincing case that Herman’s accomplishments arguably surpassed those of “Pop”, and that Joe’s undeniably surpassed them both, yet neither quite managed (if only in their own eyes) to live up to Pop’s expectations.

The Brothers Mankiewicz was published just over a year ago, much too late for Ms. Stern’s research and insights to have benefited Fincher père when he wrote Mank, or Fincher fils when he filmed it, but in plenty of time to pique our interest in their movie — at least it piqued mine — and to let us compare it with the historical record.

The impetus for this post was an email from my friend Jean in Spokane, Washington, who asked me what I thought of it. She said she had a “fairly middle of the road reaction to it overall”; she “did find it a bit long” but was fascinated by “the way it presents the characters — the Mankiewiczes, Mayer, Thalberg, Hearst et al.” and was particularly impressed by Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Marion Davies. She also spoke well of Tom Burke as Welles. I told her that no, I hadn’t seen Mank yet, but I was looking forward to it, especially now that I’d read Sydney Stern’s book — twice: once to myself, then again to my uncle.

Speaking of people playing Orson Welles in movies [I wrote her], have you by any chance seen Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008)? I urge you to give it a look; it’s a modest masterpiece. It’s based on a 2003 novel by Robert Kaplow; Zac Efron plays this high school kid in 1937 who stumbles into a sort of internship with the Mercury Theatre and works on Orson Welles’s modern-dress Fascist-themed production of Julius Caesar. Welles is played by one Christian McKay, and he’s absolutely uncanny. Should have won an Academy Award, but like most people who deserve Oscars, he wasn’t even nominated; besides, it was 2008, and that was the year they decided to give it to Heath Ledger for being dead. The movie is a brilliant portrait of Welles at a time when his career was still rocketing upward, with the sky seemingly the limit, and Welles himself was like an unstoppable force of nature, by turns inspiring and insufferable, but always Herculean and awe-inspiring. Also, it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to feeling the impact of that Caesar (scenes from which were, I understand, painstakingly researched and recreated). It’s also brilliantly cast; McKay is actually just first among equals. This is all the more impressive in that there are only three major characters who are fictitious, played by Efron, Claire Danes and Zoe Kazan. Just about everybody else in the cast is not only historical, but familiar from countless movies – Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, John Houseman, John Hoyt, Norman Lloyd, George Coulouris, Les Tremayne. All of them perfect, especially a fellow named James Tupper as Joseph Cotten – I mean, how would you go about even looking for the ideal Joseph Cotten? So kudos to Lucy Bevan, the casting director (casting directors are often unsung heroes of movies, and never more so than here). (And by the way, in case you didn’t notice, dear old Norman Lloyd is still with us, bless his heart, having turned 106 exactly one month ago; continued long life to him, say I.)

And so it was, with the memory of Me and Orson Welles fairly fresh in my mind, that I sat down a couple of nights later to watch Mank on Netflix. What follows it what I wrote to Jean a few days after that.

*                         *                         *

Hi Jean —

I watched Mank the other night, and I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over what to tell you about it, and I finally decided what the hell, I might as well cut to the chase.

I detested it. I found it to be a pompous, overstuffed, bloviating gasbag of a movie, a comically dumb-ass parade of falsehoods great and small. I’ll start with the great ones – which, paradoxically, are the least important. By “great” I mean the movie as a chronicle of the writing of Citizen Kane. Bullcrap from first frame to last. I hardly know where to begin with its tin-eared idiocies, but a few more-or-less random thoughts:

Marion Davies went to her grave insisting that she never saw Citizen Kane, and while I’m not sure I believe that, it was her story and she stuck to it to the end. In any case, the idea that she would have driven out to Victorville to sit on the porch critiquing the fine points of Mankiewicz’s script before shooting even started is just plain stupid.

Also, somewhere along the line the movie goes off onto a completely irrelevant tangent about Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for governor of California, and the fake newsreels MGM made to undermine him. (This may be why you found it “a bit long”; cutting this wild goose chase could have saved half an hour to 45 minutes.) Herman Mankiewicz had nothing to do with any of that, and none of that had anything to do with writing Citizen Kane. I don’t know why it was even there (honestly, by that time my attention had already begun to wander), but it appeared to me that the movie was suggesting that Mankiewicz somehow undertook Kane as revenge against Hearst for spearheading the torpedoing of Sinclair’s campaign, and for helping drive Mankiewicz’s pal Shelly Metcalf to suicide out of shame over his part in it. Bollocks, bollocks, and bollocks. To begin with, “Shelly Metcalf” never existed, and nobody in Hollywood cared that Upton Sinclair lost the election or that MGM’s “newsreels” had anything to do with it. Certainly nobody killed themselves out of guilt over it — that’s a daydream of 21st century leftists.

At one point Mankiewicz tells Marion Davies, in one of their soulful moonlight chats on the grounds at San Simeon (itself a silly invention), that L.B. Mayer loathes Sinclair because Sinclair wrote that he “took a bribe to look the other way so a rival could buy MGM.” Another crock. The movie doesn’t say who this “rival” was, but it may be a reference to William Fox, who in the late 1920s did indeed embark on a project to buy every studio in Hollywood, intending to monopolize the business. (Adolph Zukor at Paramount had tried something similar in the late 1910s, and Thomas Edison before him. Monopoly-building has always been a tempting pastime in the movie business, and such efforts continue to this day.) Fox started by aiming big and, yes, he did try to buy MGM. He came pretty close, too — but far from looking the other way, Mayer (and Thalberg) fought doggedly against the deal. Almost to no avail; Fox came very near to pulling it off. Then, in the summer of 1929, Fox was in a horrible automobile accident that damn near killed him. He was months recuperating, and just as he was getting up and around again, the stock market crashed, taking all his credit with it. Fox was overextended, creditors pounced, and when the dust cleared he was ruined. By late 1930 he was out of the movie business forever (he lived on until 1952). He didn’t buy MGM – or rather, he did, in a way, but when the chips were down he didn’t have the cash to close the deal, and Mayer’s job at the studio was saved. I don’t know what Upton Sinclair may have written (he did write a book, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, published in 1933), and Mayer, a conservative Republican, may well have loathed Sinclair. But Sinclair wrote nothing about any bribe because there wasn’t one.

There’s hardly a detail too minor for the movie to go out of its way to get wrong. Herman Mankiewicz had a mustache in 1940. Marion Davies was sweet and well-loved, but she drank too much and, having retired from the screen in 1937, she was puffy and tending to overweight by 1939; also, she stuttered. As for Rita Alexander, no Englishwoman then, or Englishman either, would have used the word “shitty” in mixed company, even if they did think aircraft carriers were “a shitty idea” (which nobody did). That word was a pure Americanism – and for that matter, even in America few women would have said it in those days. The road accident that broke Mankiewicz’s leg happened not because a letter fluttered out of his convertible with the top down, but because Tommy Phipps, who was driving, lost control of the car in the rain on Route 66. The Mankiewicz brothers never called each other “Hermie” and “Joey”, and nobody on Planet Earth was dumb enough to call William Randolph Hearst “Willie”, even behind his back in a soundproof room.

But honestly, none of that is really important; in fact, it’s all beside the point. I mean, if you want to know about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, you don’t watch John Sturges’s 1957 movie, or even John Ford’s My Darling Clementine; nor do you go to The Adventures of Robin Hood for insights about Medieval England in the reign of Richard I (or for that matter, to Shakespeare about Richard III). You certainly don’t sit through Lawrence of Arabia, your butt going permanently numb, if you want to know anything about T.E. Lawrence. So the fact that Mank falsifies the writing of Citizen Kane and the career of Herman J. Mankiewicz beyond any semblance of the actual events, is not what matters. The salient fact about Mank is simply that it’s a lousy movie.

I can’t really fault the actors, except that the roles they’re shoved into are unplayable and none of them seems to have complained about it. At a minimum, they do struggle bravely with dialogue that positively bristles with name-dropping howlers:

“Mark my words, The Wizard of Oz will sink that studio.”

 

“Well, you know most everyone here. Mr. Kaufman…” “‘George’ is fine, kid.” “…Mr. Perelman…” “Do you prefer Sidney or S.J.?”

 

“Aimee Semple McPherson says you’re a godless commie, Upton!”

 

“We all want to welcome the Thalbergs back from Irving’s long convalescence in Europe…”

 

“L.B., this is my brother Joe.” “Nice to meet you, Joseph, I’m Louis Mayer.” (As if Mayer would find it necessary to introduce himself to someone in his own office!)

 

“You all know Jo von Sternberg…”

 

“I love Lowell Thomas’s voice. I sat across from him at the Brown Derby once.”

 

“How is Marie Antoinette coming along?” “Norma is a nervous wreck.”

 

“That’s Herman Mankiewicz. He wrote one of our Lon Chaneys.”

 

“I know you, we met at John Gilbert’s birthday party; you’re Herman Mankiewicz…You fractured Wally Beery’s wrist Indian wrestling.”

There’s hardly a minute without such low-camp groaners. I’d love to go on, but you get the idea; the script is a chortler’s paradise.

The look of the movie is flat and murky. Not “evocative” or “atmospheric”, just dark and indistinct. It was shot in something called “Hi-Dynamic Range”, whatever the hell that is. Faces, even architectural details, are lost in shadows or merge into background darkness. The cinematography, credited to someone named Erik Messerschmidt, is perfectly atrocious. It’s obvious Messerschmidt didn’t light the film for black and white, he lit it for color and shot it that way, then just leached the color out, as if that’s the same thing. You light a subject differently for black and white than you do for color, a fact that they used to teach you in the first ten minutes of Photography 101. Either Mr. Messerschmidt cut class that day or he’s merely incompetent (that’s my vote). Either way, he’s in well over his head here, and I intend to remember that name.

Late in the movie, I think at the climax (such as it was), there was a long scene in the “Refectory” at San Simeon (although in Messerschmidt’s hands it just looked like a rather well-furnished cave). The scene seemed to be terribly important; anyhow, it had Gary Oldman going tooth-and-nail for his second Oscar. But by that time the movie had completely lost me and I was no longer even pretending to pay attention; I just sat there rolling my eyes and making that wrist-rotating gesture that is the universal signal for let’s-wind-this-thing-up-already. (I couldn’t help remembering something Pauline Kael wrote in one of her reviews: “Sitting in the darkened theater, I kept listening for snorts, but every time I heard one I could feel the breath on my hands.”) Somewhere in this seemingly-terribly-important scene, Mankiewicz puked and made his famous wisecrack about the white wine coming up with the fish (which actually happened at the home of Arthur Hornblow Jr.), but that’s really all I remember. I was just marking time, waiting for this ridiculous, fraudulent movie to be over. And then…finally…it was.

So for what it’s worth, that’s my reaction to Mank, a silly and terrible movie where not a scene, not a minute, not a second, not a frame has the ring of truth – plus it’s ugly to look at, and it’s more trouble trying to peer through the stygian gloom than it’s worth. It’s 131 minutes I’ll never get back, but on the whole I might well have frittered the time away on something almost as useless, so no great harm done. Still, having gotten it out of the way, I now dismiss it from my mind forever, and I intend never to give it another moment’s thought.

On the other hand, I can’t wait to watch Me and Orson Welles again. Now that’s how it’s done.

All for now; write when you can.

Jim

 

A Cinedrome “Christmas Tradition” Returns

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Last December I took the holiday season off, but this year I’m departing once again from my focus on Golden Age Hollywood to share my story “The Sensible Christmas Wish”, first published here in 2017 about this time. That first year’s introduction can be found by clicking here if you’re interested in knowing what I said then — or, if you’d rather, just click on the title and you’ll be taken directly to the story, which came to me from a wise and wonderful older person I once knew. I hope it brings you some of the magic and joy of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Happy Holidays!

The Stainless Steel Maiden, 1916-2020

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This isn’t the way we usually picture Olivia de Havilland — so naturally it’s one of my favorite photographs of her. This image is reproduced in Robert Matzen’s lavishly illustrated dual study Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood. Robert’s aim in publishing this pose, along with others from the same photo session, was to refute the assertion of a 1978 biographer that Olivia was “always a lady [but] never sexy”. Well, mission accomplished, says I. “Never sexy”? Ha! Not much.

 

 

For those who may find that view of Olivia a trifle, ahem, disconcerting, here’s another one from the same sitting. She’s upright this time — less overtly wanton, more watchful and appraising. But she’s still clad in nothing but garlands of strategically-placed flowers — quite literally, la dame aux camelias.  These shots were taken by Warner Bros. staff photographer Scotty Welbourne in the summer of 1940, around the time she turned 24. She looks less like Maid Marian or Melanie Wilkes than like Dorothy Lamour in one of her South Seas sarong romances. (Thank you, Scotty Welbourne.)

Olivia left us two weeks ago at the age of 104, making her the world’s longest-lived movie star. In that, she edged out Kirk Douglas, who passed away in February, two months after turning 103. And speaking of those two — it’s odd, isn’t it, to think of Olivia de Havilland and Kirk Douglas as almost exact contemporaries. We tend to think of them as belonging to different generations — which, in point of fact, they did. Douglas got his first Oscar nomination the same year de Havilland got her last (she won, he didn’t). He made his first movie at 29 and became a star at 32; by 32 she’d been a star for fourteen years. And just to put a little cherry on top of the Odd-Isn’t-It Sundae, both of them were brought into movies by Hal B. Wallis — Olivia at Warner Bros., Kirk at Paramount. That Wallis fellow did have an eye for talent.

Strictly speaking, though, the first eye for talent to which we are indebted for Olivia de Havilland belonged to somebody else. In fact, we’re indebted to a whole series of improbable events for the fact that she didn’t live out her life as an obscure schoolteacher whom nobody but her own students had ever heard of. Born in Tokyo in 1916 to an English patent attorney and his wife, a former actress and opera singer, she was two-and-a-half when her mother persuaded her father to move the family to England for the sake of Olivia and her baby sister Joan. They got as far as San Francisco, then the family fell apart. Olivia came down with tonsillitis, Joan with pneumonia (both life-threatening afflictions in those pre-antibiotic days), and their father ran out on them all, returning to Tokyo and the Japanese housekeeper he’d been fooling around with (and whom he later married). Mother de Havilland settled permanently in California with her girls, eventually marrying George M. Fontaine, a manager for Hale Bros. Department Store in San Jose (thus providing a nom de screen for sister Joan when she followed Olivia into movies).

A precocious student with an artistic bent, Olivia caught the acting bug as a teenager, making her debut at 16 playing Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the Saratoga Community Players. Her stepfather, a real petty tyrant, disapproved, and he tried putting his foot down after she was cast in a school production of Pride and Prejudice. None of this acting nonsense, he decreed, not if she wanted to live under his roof — only to learn the lesson others would learn when they tried pushing Olivia de Havilland around: She moved in with a family friend, and the show (and Olivia) went on.

She graduated from Los Gatos High School in 1934 with a scholarship to Mills College in the fall. But first she was cast as Puck in a Saratoga Players production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And wouldn’t you know it, that same summer the great Austrian director Max Reinhardt was coming to California to stage Midsummer (his favorite play) at the Hollywood Bowl, Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and the San Francisco Opera House. And so it was that one of Reinhardt’s assistants, surveying the turf for the Maestro and beating the bush for ensemble talent, stumbled upon 17-year-old Olivia in the hinterlands of Saratoga. Whoever he was (possibly Felix Weissberger, Reinhardt’s credited assistant on the Hollywood Bowl program), he offered her a job carrying a candle in Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding procession, and as second understudy for the role of Hermia.

Second understudy. Second. Understudy. A dead-end gig if there ever was one. No doubt she was expecting nothing more than a little excitement, a brush with the Reinhardt greatness, and some nifty memories to take with her when she started college in the fall. But wonder of wonders, just a week before opening night at the Bowl, Reinhardt’s Hermia (Gloria Stuart) and her first understudy (Jean Rouverol) both left the company. And Olivia, just turned 18, went on as Hermia, on such short notice that they didn’t even get her name straight in the program (“de Havelland”).

She never made it to Mills College (at least not until 2018, when they awarded her an honorary degree). Hal Wallis caught the Hollywood Bowl engagement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he talked Jack Warner into approaching Reinhardt about putting it on film, Reinhardt insisted that Warners cast Olivia in the movie, and Wallis and Henry Blanke (Midsummer‘s line producer) had the good sense to offer her a five-year contract. (Olivia wavered briefly — she still had this idea she wanted to be a teacher — but the money was good for 1934, and she still had the bug, so she signed.)

 

 

It was as simple — and as quick — as that. One day, Olivia de Havilland is this kid fresh out of high school, doing one last show before knuckling down to college in the fall to become an English teacher. Then whoooooosh! — she’s starring for Max-Freakin’-Reinhardt at the Hollywood Bowl. Then whoooooosh! again — and she’s Warner Bros.’ hot new contract player. That kind of thing happens in corny showbiz movies, not in real life.

 

 

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first movie Olivia made, but it wasn’t her first one to hit theaters. While Midsummer took shape in the cutting room and got a slow publicity build-up to an October ’35 release, Warner Bros. wasted no time getting their money’s worth out of her. They didn’t shunt her off into supporting “trainer wheel” roles, either. On the contrary, they made her a leading lady to some of the studio’s biggest stars. By age 19, she had dealt with Joe E. Brown’s incessant excuses as Alibi Ike (above), and been double-teamed by Pat O’Brien and James Cagney (below) in The Irish in Us. By the time Midsummer finally opened, she was no longer a lucky unknown promoted out of obscurity; she was an established Warner Bros. star-in-training.

 

Her next picture completed her training program. Sometimes, becoming a star is a matter of being teamed with the right co-star. No disrespect to Joe E. Brown or Pat O’Brien, but they weren’t a good match for Olivia, nor she for them, and those experiments wouldn’t be repeated. (She would be teamed once more with Cagney in 1941’s The Strawberry Blonde, to good effect.) Then seemingly out of nowhere came this son of a Tasmanian biology professor.

Unlike Olivia, Warner contract player Errol Flynn did get shunted off into trainer wheel parts — a dead body in The Case of the Curious Bride, one of Warren William’s Perry Mason mysteries; three minutes on screen and nine lines in Don’t Bet on Blondes, a screwball comedy also starring Warren William.

Then Warner Bros. decided to bring back the swashbuckler. When they saw the success that United Artists had in 1934 with the British actor Robert Donat as The Count of Monte Cristo, they decided the time was right to dust off Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novel Captain Blood, one of the properties they acquired when they absorbed the Vitagraph Company in 1925. Warners even signed Donat for the lead — but between Donat’s chronic asthma and the fact that he didn’t much like America anyway, he wound up bowing out (Monte Cristo would remain his only Hollywood picture). Jack Warner and Hal Wallis bandied names for a while: Leslie Howard, Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, Brian Aherne, Ian Hunter — and George Brent, of all people (thank God nothing came of that bright idea). Finally, based on a couple of good screen tests and a hunch (Hal Wallis’s eye for talent again), they decided to take a chance and promote Errol overnight from corpse-cum-bit-player to leading man.

And for the haughty English lady whose path crosses Peter Blood’s, with romantic and adventurous consequences for both of them, Warner and Wallis (after floating a trial balloon to W.R. Hearst for Marion Davies) decided to team Errol Flynn with Olivia de Havilland.

Now before we go on, let’s pause to consider how Captain Blood might have turned out with Robert Donat and Marion Davies. Fortunately, we were spared that. Instead of Donat and Davies, we got Captain Blood with Errol and Olivia, and it made stars of them both. In eight pictures together, they shared a reserved grace that provided a good complement each for the other. Not to mention an erotic chemistry so strong that in those few pictures where their characters don’t end up together — like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Four’s a Crowd (1938) — something seems distinctly out of whack.

Errol and Olivia reached their apotheosis in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood — not surprising, since that was pretty much an apotheosis for everyone involved, one of the most intoxicatingly flawless movies ever made. Olivia herself didn’t know it for over twenty years; she felt no affinity for Maid Marian, and when director William Keighley was fired and replaced with Michael Curtiz — well, she felt no affinity for Curtiz either. With no confidence in Curtiz or in her own performance, she couldn’t bring herself to see the picture in 1938. Finally, one Saturday in the autumn of 1959, at a loss for some way to amuse her son Benjamin, 10, and daughter Gisèle, 3, she took them to see Robin Hood at a theater near their Paris home. It was a revelation. “I had no idea it was so good,” she recalled. “I thought, good gracious, it’s a classic, it really is a classic! When we made those films we had no idea what we were making, that we were making the best of their kind.”

By that time Olivia and Errol had been estranged for over fifteen years, for some reason that both of them seem to have taken to their graves. In that time they had seen each other only once. Depending on which account you read, it may have been at a charity ball for the costumers’ union in 1957, or maybe at the wrap party for her picture The Proud Rebel in 1958. Either she was disconcerted by this disheveled, staring stranger, or he planted a kiss on the back of her neck and she spun around and slapped him. In any case, she didn’t recognize this puffy, bleary-eyed drunk. “Do I know you?”

“It’s Errol…” She later recalled that she actually said, “Errol who?”

Now, sitting in that Paris cinema with her children, those days of their intimate friendship (which by all accounts had never been more than that) came flooding back. She and the kids sat through the picture twice, then she went home and wrote Errol: “If you haven’t seen the film recently, run it. You will be so proud of it, so glad that you were Robin Hood.” Then she had second thoughts. The letter was awfully sentimental; perhaps she shouldn’t send it. So she didn’t. A few weeks later she got a phone call from a French journalist who warned her he had “some very sad news.” Errol Flynn was dead; would she care to make a statement?

Years later, she said: “I wish I had sent that letter. It would have pleased him after all those years, but I didn’t.”

 

About the time her friendship with Flynn fell by the wayside, in the early 1940s, she was also reaching the end of her rope with Warner Bros. In 1936, in the afterglow of Captain Blood, the studio had offered her a new contract, seven years instead of five, and at a higher weekly salary. Still, it seemed as if Jack L. Warner couldn’t picture her as anything but the damsel in an Errol Flynn adventure movie. It finally began to dawn on Olivia that her best roles — or at least her most personally satisfying — had been on loan-out to other studios. First it had been to Selznick International to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Olivia had really wanted that one, and Selznick had really wanted her. But Jack Warner wouldn’t have it — maybe because Selznick had shot down his idea of lending Bette Davis and Errol Flynn for Scarlett and Rhett, maybe just because he enjoyed showing whose name was on the water tower. Anyhow, as all the world knows, J.L. relented in the end — but only because Olivia and his wife Ann double-teamed him. Olivia got to sink her teeth into her first death scene — and came away with her first Oscar nomination. (She lost — as the world also knows — to Hattie McDaniel.)

 

Next — two years and several damsels later — it was Hold Back the Dawn over at Paramount. Olivia played Emmy Brown, a naïve schoolteacher on a field trip to Tijuana who gets swept off her feet by Charles Boyer as a scheming Romanian refugee seeking to enter the U.S. by — well, by marrying some naïve pushover like Emmy, then dumping her once he’s inside the border. Olivia got her second Oscar nomination, and her second loss.

This one no doubt stung a bit more than losing to Hattie McDaniel in ’39. Also nominated in 1941 was sister Joan Fontaine for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. It was the first time acting sisters had been nominated against each other — it would happen only once more, with Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave in 1966 (both lost) — and it was the race everyone was following. Joan won.

 

What to say about Olivia and Joan? Their relationship was…complicated. Here are two views of them, as teenagers at a Saratoga garden party, and striking a sporting may-the-best-gal-win pose at the Academy Awards Banquet for 1941 (before any of the winners were announced). In the Saratoga picture they look like conjoined twins, fused at the back and fated never to look in the same direction. It’s an apt metaphor for the most notorious sibling rivalry in Hollywood history.

Surely it didn’t help that they were born only fifteen months apart, making them more like competing twins than anything else. Moreover, they seem to have grown up in a Rashomon universe. Olivia remembered playing big sister and loving it; Joan would climb into bed with her, she recalled, and “put her little head on my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story.” Joan’s recollection differed: “I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood.”

It does seem that Joan went out of her way to compete. She showed no interest in acting until, after living a year or two in Japan with their father and his second wife, she came home in 1934 to find Olivia appearing in Midsummer in San Francisco and on her way to Hollywood. As Olivia told it, Joan’s mantra became “I want to do what you’re doing.” Olivia urged her to finish high school, become a debutante, even a leader in San Francisco society, but Joan refused. As Olivia remembered Joan’s resolve, it was never “I want to be an actress,” or even “I want to be a movie star.” It was always “I want to do what you are doing.”

For her part, Joan remembered only her sister’s petty resentments. “I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first…” True, Joan did get married first — but then, her first husband was Brian Aherne, Olivia’s ex-boyfriend. That might have stuck in Big Sister’s craw. And as for getting the Oscar first — well, Alfred Hitchcock always insisted that it was he and not Joan who created her performance in Suspicion, cobbling together reactions, thoughts, and subtexts in the cutting room that weren’t in evidence on the set. Now we all know that Joan’s talents were (to put it kindly) more modest than Olivia’s. So if Olivia got a little miffed that Joan skated to the winner’s circle on Hitch’s editing tricks while she, Olivia, had done some real acting in Hold Back the Dawn… Well, personally, I’ll cut her a little slack. And “had a child first”? Now Joan is just gloating.

Over the years the sisters — protesting a bit too much, perhaps — would sometimes pose for photos to show that things were just fine between them. They were always burying the hatchet, and always remembering where they left it. The “final schism”, as Joan phrased it, seems to have come with their mother’s terminal illness in 1975. Joan, on tour in Cactus Flower, felt slighted at being excluded from end-of-life treatment decisions; worse, she felt Olivia was dilatory in letting her know when the end was near, so she was still on the road when Mummy breathed her last. At the memorial service, Joan refused to speak to her older sister. Three years later, in her autobiography, Joan, like a volcano that would not stop, spewed sixty years’ worth of pent-up hostility — prompted, perhaps, by still-tender wounds about their mother. In an interview promoting the book she said, “You can divorce your sister as well as your husbands. I don’t see her and I don’t intend to.” In public, Olivia maintained a lofty silence; privately she took to calling Joan the Dragon Lady. Joan titled her memoir No Bed of Roses. Olivia dubbed it No Shred of Truth. 

Olivia eventually got her own Oscar, of course. Two of them, in fact, and both at Paramount, the studio that had borrowed her for Hold Back the Dawn. First, in 1946, came To Each His Own. Olivia played an unwed mother who, when her lover is killed in World War I, is forced to give up her baby to be adopted by an old frenemy, then to watch from afar as the boy grows up, thinking of her only as a fussy and rather pathetic family friend. It was, in Oscar historian Robert Osborne’s apt phrase, “a Tiffany tear-jerker”. In the movie’s final scene, when the boy, now grown to manhood, finally gets it through his head why “Aunt Jody” has always been so nice to him, and says to her, “May I have this dance…Mother?” — the look on Olivia’s face is enough to reduce a bronze statue to helpless sobs.

Then three years later came The Heiress, from the play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square. As James’s timid, insecure heroine beset with, on one hand, a father whose pretended solicitude masks a withering contempt, and on the other, an ardent suitor who may only be after her money, Olivia gave perhaps her finest performance (although her turn as a mental patient in 1948’s The Snake Pit would be up there as well; she was nominated for that one too). So Joan may boast of winning her Oscar first, but Olivia matched her, and raised her one. Not only that, but Olivia (like Joan) earned her awards working for A-list directors (Mitchell Leisen on To Each His Own, William Wyler on The Heiress) — and neither of them ever said that he had to do Olivia’s acting for her.

But the truth is, even without those well-deserved Oscars, by 1946 she had already earned her place in the history books — and all because she finally had it to here with Jack L. Warner. Perhaps Warner wanted to punish her for that end run to his wife over Gone With the Wind, or maybe he was just being his usual boorish, obtuse, screw-the-talent self. Either way, Olivia found herself being offered an unvarying succession of two-dimensional ingenues; every time she turned one down she’d go on suspension. As 1942 turned into 1943, she was counting the days until her seven-year contract ran out in May. Then came a nasty shock: Warner informed her that the time she’d spent on suspension was being added to the end of her contract, another twenty-five weeks.

Any other contract star might have simply gritted her teeth and ridden out those six months, doing whatever Jack Warner threw at her just to be done with the studio, and with him. But this was one of those moments, like the showdown with George Fontaine over that high-school production of Pride and Prejudice, that showed what Olivia de Havilland was made of. In August 1943 she sued.

Jack Warner had dealt with rebellious stars before. Bette Davis had sued in British court to get out of her contract and lost; James Cagney had sued for breach of contract and — because Warners had clearly breached — fought the studio to a draw. This time J.L. wasn’t giving an inch; besides, Bette Davis and James Cagney had been (and were still) bigger stars than Olivia de Havilland.

But Olivia had a good lawyer, one Martin Gang. He found California Labor Code (CLC) Sec. 2855, which limited a personal-services contract to no more than seven years. The Hollywood studios had always interpreted that to mean seven years of actual work; Gang argued that such a limit was really no limit at all, and that the law must mean seven calendar years. Since her contract had been signed on May 5, 1936, he said, it had run out on May 5, 1943.

The Superior Court of California agreed, and so did the Court of Appeals. In February 1945 the State Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and Olivia was a free agent. She hadn’t worked in nearly two years and had run up steep legal fees, squeaking by on the occasional radio gig. Jack Warner effectively blacklisted her; as far as the studio was concerned she was still under suspension, and he wrote personally to every production company in America warning them not to hire her. But now it was over, she had won, and it was worth it. 

And not only for her. She had broken what was essentially a system of indentured servitude in which the studios had all the power and the stars had none. No more. Henceforth movie actors — indeed, anyone under contract for anything — would have much more control over their careers because Olivia de Havilland wouldn’t let Jack Warner push her around. And Hollywood seemed to respect her for it. Her first picture after the long dry spell was To Each His Own, and the Academy Award may have been as much a tribute to her legal victory as it was to her performance.

In his book Errol & Olivia, Robert Matzen suggests that the forced hiatus while her lawsuit trudged through the courts stunted Olivia’s momentum, causing her to “lose a chunk of her career as a youthful leading lady during three of Hollywood’s last good years” — and there’s something to that. Still, there were those two Oscars, plus a nomination for The Snake Pit — those three pictures probably constituting her best performances. If the shadow of Gone With the Wind loomed over the rest of her life — well, she wasn’t alone in that. And if her career turned down after 1950 — whose didn’t? She worked when she felt like it, and when she didn’t, she was happy at home in Paris, where she relocated with her second marriage to Paris Match editor Pierre Galante in 1955 (they divorced in 1979 but remained good friends, and she tended him as he lay dying of cancer in 1998).

Her last performance came in 1988, as the aunt of the future Duchess of Windsor in a TV movie about the abdication of Edward VIII; her last credit, narrating a 2009 documentary about art therapy for Alzheimer’s patients. Otherwise, it was a comfortable dowager retirement in her home near the Bois de Boulogne overlooking the Seine, sprinkled with life-achievement honors — including, at the age of 100, being made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. So be it duly noted, she died not simply Ms. de Havilland, but Dame Olivia.

Also at 100, she showed the world that there was litigation in the old girl yet. She sued FX Networks and producer Ryan Murphy over Feud: Bette and Joan, an eight-part miniseries that purported to dish the dirt on the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962 and the diva-rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Olivia had been a good friend of Bette’s, and she replaced Joan when she was fired from her and Bette’s follow-up teaming on Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), so Olivia was represented as a supporting character in the miniseries, and played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. As these two pictures suggest, neither Ms. Zeta-Jones, her costumer, nor her hairdresser gave much evidence of ever having seen or heard of Olivia. Neither did any of the writers, and that’s what she sued over, charging that her privacy had been invaded without her permission or input, that she had been slandered and misrepresented. True enough; Feud was sleazy stuff, despite all the A-list names, and it misrepresented pretty much everybody it mentioned. The only reason Olivia was the only plaintiff in the case is that she was the only one who was still alive.

The case got fast-tracked out of deference to Olivia’s advanced age, but nobody expected her to prevail, and she didn’t. Feud: Bette and Joan, distasteful as it was, was ruled to be protected First Amendment speech. Turns out it’s not against the law for someone to make a lousy movie, even if it’s about you, and on balance that’s no doubt a good thing; America’s prisons are crowded enough. Still, if there’s anything to karma, someday somebody will make a miniseries that does to Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alfred Molina and Judy Davis what they did to (respectively) Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, director Robert Aldrich and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. For that matter, Catherine Zeta-Jones won’t get off scot-free either.

So Olivia lost that one, but she made her point: she still didn’t like being pushed around. Besides, I wonder if she didn’t have a longer game in mind. Feud was originally pitched by Ryan Murphy as an ongoing project, with each season consisting of an eight-part miniseries dramatizing some famous celebrity feud. Bette and Joan was simply Season One; Season Two would deal with Charles and Diana. Was Olivia’s lawsuit a proactive move, a shot across Ryan Murphy’s bow warning him not to plot out any episodes for Feud: Olivia and Joan? If so, maybe she could claim a strategic victory: it’s been three years now and there are still no plans for a Season Two of Feud (though Ryan Murphy has reserved the right to reanimate the project).

Over the years, Olivia granted a reasonable number of interviews, and she always graciously answered fan mail. But she frequently turned aside specific questions by saying that she would deal with that in her memoirs. Did she really write them, I wonder, or was that just her way of dodging nosy questions from strangers? I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later. If there is a manuscript somewhere in that house in Paris, I imagine it will be complete without being laborious, honest without being cruel, dignified without being snooty, assertive without being rude, and strong without being vulgar. Pretty much the way she was in all her movies — and, as far as anyone ever knew, in real life.

 

Films of Henry Hathaway: Fourteen Hours (1951)

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This title card appears early in Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours — at the “climax” of the opening credits, you might say, just before the credit cards for producer Sol C. Siegel and director Hathaway. It’s the standard “entirely fictional and any similarity” disclaimer, the kind that usually appears in super-small type somewhere near the copyright notice, the MPAA “approved” certificate number, the Western Electric and IATSE credits, and other things that are legally required but nobody really cares if you see or not. For this picture, though, 20th Century Fox took the unusual step of making sure the disclaimer was very prominently placed where even the most inattentive could hardly miss it.

The studio didst protest too much; the disclaimer was disingenuous. Fourteen Hours was generally fictional, but not entirely, and its similarity to “actual occurrences” and “actual persons” was fully intended.

Here’s Exhibit A. This isn’t a still from the movie, it’s a news photo from real life, taken on Tuesday, July 26, 1938. The man is 26-year-old John William Warde; the woman is his sister Katherine, 22. On that day, John and Katherine were visiting friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Valentine, who lived in Room 1714 of New York’s Gotham Hotel. Sometime around 10:30 in the morning, after John, Katherine and Mrs. Valentine had ordered lunch from Room Service, John calmly announced, “I’m going out the window.” And as the two women stared dumbfounded, he did. In a panic, Katherine phoned the front desk, screaming that her brother had jumped out the window — but he had only clambered out onto the ledge. And there he stayed while a crowd of spectators gathered in the street 170 feet below, traffic came to a standstill, and police emergency crews scrambled to coax, cajole or drag him to safety. Hoping to talk him in, NYPD traffic cop Charles Glasco chatted with Warde disguised as a hotel bellhop (Warde had threatened to jump if any cop came near him). Warde, who had attempted suicide before and been diagnosed with “manic-depressive psychosis” (that era’s term for bipolar disorder), resisted every effort. “I’ve got to work things out for myself,” he kept saying, “I’ve got problems to think about.”

 

 

That, in a nutshell, is the story of that day in 1938, and it’s also the premise of Fourteen Hours. This lobby card even eerily mirrors the photo — although the characters here aren’t brother and sister, they’re Robert Cosick (Richard Basehart) and Virginia Foster (Barbara Bel Geddes), his ex-fiancée. The movie’s disclaimer is further belied by its writing credit: “Screen Play by John Paxton From a Story by Joel Sayre”. The “story” was an article by Sayre, “That Was New York: The Man on the Ledge”, which appeared in The New Yorker on April 16, 1949, chronicling John Warde’s story. And the picture’s original working title was The Man on the Ledge, just like Sayre’s factual article. (As for why the title was changed, I’ll get to that later.)

So much for those supposedly not-intended similarities; some of them, anyhow. It’s the differences between real life and the movie that make Fourteen Hours so interesting.

The picture opens quietly — in silence, in fact, without dialogue or even background music. (Indeed, except for Alfred Newman’s fervid theme under the opening credits, then a second theme swelling through the movie’s last 90 seconds, there’s no music in the entire picture.) We are introduced to what will prove to be the two central characters in the drama that follows. First we see Patrolman Charlie Dunnigan (Paul Douglas as the movie’s version of Charles Glasco) walking his beat in the early morning calm. He passes the Rodney Hotel, where a worker is polishing the brass plate at the entrance. Meanwhile, up in Room 1505…

 

 

 

 

…a room service waiter (Frank Faylen) is delivering a breakfast tray to a guest registered as William E. Cook of Philadelphia, but who is really Robert Cosick (Basehart). He hands the waiter some cash, and the waiter turns his back to count out his change on a tray. When he turns back, the room is empty. He checks the closet, then the bathroom. He notices the curtains billowing at the open window. Glancing out, he sees the missing guest standing on the ledge, breathing heavily, looking agitated.

 

Then the silence is rudely broken by the first human sound we hear — a secretary screaming in the window of a bank building across the street. Dunnigan dashes into the hotel to alert the staff, while the waiter calls down to the switchboard for the same reason. Dunnigan and Harris, the assistant manager (Willard Waterman), knowing now which room to go to, head up in the elevator. In the room, Harris blusters at Robert to come inside, sounding like an impotent scold. 

Down in the street, pedestrians are beginning to gather. The first two we see idly wonder if this is some kind of advertising stunt. Patrol cars screech to a halt at the hotel entrance, sirens blaring. Up in 1505, Robert warns Harris that if a cop comes near him, he’ll jump. Hearing that, Dunnigan commandeers Harris’s necktie to disguise his own uniform, then sits on the window sill, trying to strike up a conversation with the distraught Robert.

 

The colloquy between Charlie Dunnigan and Robert Cosick, a mixture of urgent pleading and forced-casual chitchat, provides the spine of Fourteen Hours, just as the real one between Charles Glasco and John Warde did for Joel Sayre’s New Yorker article. (Notice too how Joe MacDonald’s deep-focus photography emphasizes both men’s perilous perch 15 stories up. MacDonald was a master cinematographer who worked with Hathaway on nine pictures, including some of his best.)  

Over this bare factual skeleton Paxton’s script skillfully weaves a variety of fictional stories among the people drawn for one reason or another to the Rodney Hotel and the street outside. It amounts to a cross-section of the New York public circa 1950 — and for all the changes the city has seen in 69 years, it still rings true today.

Caught in the traffic jam down in the street are several cab drivers, unable to move their vehicles and looking at a day with no fares. “If I had my M-2 I could knock him off from here, clean,” says one of them (Harvey Lembeck). (And by the way, the African American gentleman is the great Ossie Davis, at the very beginning of his long career.) Another cabbie grumbles that if the guy wants to jump he should go ahead so the rest of New York can get on with their business. “Who cares? I figured on a good day today.”

Later on, this same sour cabbie suggests they should all pony up a buck for a pool and pick an hour; “the guy that gets closest to the time this joker jumps, that guy wins the pot.” His fellows are uneasy at his ghoulish idea, but they all go along.

Elsewhere in the crowd the reaction is more compassionate. Two young office workers, Ruth (Debra Paget, left) and Barbara (Joyce Van Patten, right), have gotten sidetracked on their way to work. The fretful Barbara wants only to get to work before they get in trouble with the boss. But Ruth is more worried about the stranger on the fifteenth floor: How old is he? What kind of trouble is he in? “Maybe someone was cruel to him, or maybe he’s just lonely…I wish I could help him.” Her tender words catch the ear of Danny behind her (Jeffrey Hunter), also pausing on his way to work. When Barbara gives up and leaves, Danny and Ruth strike up a sweetly tentative conversation. As the day wears on, neither of them will get to work. Feelings grow between them, and Danny reflects on how they might have gone their whole lives, missing each other by minutes, if it hadn’t been for this day. Hunter and the 17-year-old Paget were already launched on their successful careers as Fox contract players. Van Patten, making her film debut at 16, would in time become one of television’s busiest character actresses in a career that is still going strong today.

Needless to say, New York’s newshounds are also Johnny-on-the-spot. Newspapermen swarm over the scene like ants on a sugar cube. New York announcer George Putnam, playing himself, gives a play-by-play summary from a radio truck in the street. Another radio reporter barges into Room 1505 to jam a microphone out the window to eavesdrop on Dunnigan and Robert’s conversation — only to get the bum’s rush from the vigilant police. Station WNBC dispatches a television camera crew to the roof of a building across the street from the hotel. (Curiously enough, this wasn’t just an embellishment in Paxton’s script. NBC really did broadcast TV coverage of John Warde’s exploit back in 1938, even though there probably weren’t more than a few dozen sets in the whole city, and practically none in the rest of the country. It may well have been the very first example of television covering a breaking news story.)

 

 

Also making her film debut in Fourteen Hours was 21-year-old Grace Kelly, playing Louise Ann Fuller, on her way to discuss a divorce settlement with her estranged husband (James Warren) and their lawyers in an office overlooking the ongoing crisis. As the legal beagles drone on about the division of community property, Mrs. Fuller is preoccupied with the drama outside the office window; it begins to dawn on her that her own marital problems might not be so irreconcilable after all.

Kelly’s performance here led directly to landing her star-making role in High Noon the following year, but the casting became a bone of contention between Hathaway and Darryl F. Zanuck. Hathaway tested two women for the role, and he wanted Kelly. But Zanuck held out for the other woman — Anne Bancroft, who had just been signed to a Fox contract. As Hathaway acknowledged years later, they were both right, though Bancroft was only 19 and her talent wouldn’t reach full bloom for another ten years. Still, it’s intriguing to imagine how differently the two women’s careers might have gone if Zanuck had won that particular standoff.

While the crowd in the street mills about gawking, wringing their hands, or cracking callous jokes, up on the fifteenth floor things are in a muffled uproar. The NYPD’s rescue efforts are commanded by the officious but efficient Deputy Chief Moksar (Howard Da Silva, left), who coordinates activities while straight-arming a swarm of reporters and dealing with other interfering looky-loos (at one excruciatingly delicate moment, a crackpot preacher bursts into the room bellowing at Robert to kneel and pray). Police psychiatrist Dr. Strauss (Martin Gabel, center) offers on-the-fly advice to Moksar and Dunnigan on Robert’s mental state. Further complications come with the arrival of Robert’s divorced parents — his clutching, hysterical mother (Agnes Moorehead, second right) and feckless alcoholic father (Robert Keith, right), who graphically illustrate the Cosick family dysfunction. (“No wonder he’s cuckoo!” growls Moksar.)

 

 

The last puzzle piece slips into place with the arrival of Virginia Foster (Barbara Bel Geddes), Robert’s ex-fiancée. Strauss and Dunnigan take her aside. Why did she break the engagement?, they ask. “I didn’t, he did,” she says. Why? “He just said that he couldn’t…that he’d make me unhappy…”

Dunnigan: “Did you have a fight?”

Virginia: “No, but he’d get mad…”

Strauss: “What about?”

Virginia: “Whenever I tried to help him…”

Strauss launches into a Freudian spiel about how Robert’s mother couldn’t admit, even to herself, that she never wanted him, so she sublimated by teaching Robert to hate his father — which Robert subconsciously knew was wrong, so he only ended up hating himself. It’s a slick piece of 1950s Psych 101 to explain why Robert is out on that ledge.

BUT…That dialogue exchange among Strauss, Dunnigan and Virginia is a classic piece of Breen Office-era code. Adult audiences in 1951 would have had no trouble reading between those lines, imagining exactly what Robert “couldn’t” do that would make Virginia “unhappy”, and with a little more imagination they could picture what Virginia did to “try to help him” that made him so mad. This plants a suggestion, taboo in 1951, that may still go over viewers’ heads today just as it did the Breen Office’s back then, and for the same reason: they’re not accustomed to reading between the lines.

‘Nuff said.

In early 1950, when Darryl Zanuck decided that Joel Sayre’s human-interest New Yorker piece would make a good picture, he first offered the director’s chair to Howard Hawks. Hawks turned him down. Supposedly, Hawks said that the only way he could make the movie would be to convert it into a mistaken-identity comedy starring Cary Grant — an idea so bizarrely stupid that (if it really happened) it could only have been a ploy by Hawks to make sure Zanuck didn’t try to talk him into saying yes.

Zanuck next turned to Hathaway, who liked Sayre’s story, and Zanuck teamed him with writer John Paxton, a specialist in film noir (Murder, My Sweet, 1944; Crossfire, ’47, for which he was Oscar-nominated). Paxton’s noir credentials explain why the Fourteen Hours DVD was released under the “Fox Film Noir” banner. It doesn’t really resemble a film noir except in Joe MacDonald’s urban black-and-white cinematography; there are few of the customary noir characters or plot elements. It fits more neatly into the group of semi-documentary pictures Hathaway made in the mid-’40s, things like The House on 92nd Street (’45), 13 Rue Madeleine (’46), Call Northside 777 (’48), and Kiss of Death (’47) — that last of which actually straddles the border between semi-doc and noir much more than Fourteen Hours does.

Fourteen Hours was what was known as an A-minus picture — that is, a picture with an A budget but no major stars. The closest thing to one was Paul Douglas, the former sports announcer who had been one of Fox’s most popular and reliable supporting actors since his breakout work as Linda Darnell’s husband in A Letter to Three Wives (’49). In 1950 as Fourteen Hours went into production he was teetering between first and second leads, which he would continue to do for the rest of his life, until his untimely death from a heart attack in 1959 at 52. In Fourteen Hours, top-billed in a first-rate ensemble cast, he carries much of the film as his Charlie Dunnigan tries to lure Robert Cosick literally back from the brink, winging it from moment to moment with a seat-of-the-pants common sense.

Douglas essentially split leading-man duties with Richard Basehart as Robert Cosick. Basehart had been earning positive notice ever since his debut in 1947’s Repeat Performance. His good buzz gained momentum with his performance in He Walked by Night (’48) as a petty criminal and cop-killer. After Fourteen Hours he seemed to be on track to become one of America’s greatest actors. That never quite came to pass — most likely because of his unshakeable identification with the camp/kitsch sci-fi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in which he starred from 1964 to ’68 for producer Irwin (“Irwin the Terrible”) Allen. Despite that gig, which no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time, he remained an actor’s actor to the end of his days (a series of strokes took him off at 70 in 1984). In 1951 he still had fine performances ahead of him, especially the Fool in Fellini’s La Strada in 1954 and as Ishmael in John Huston’s Moby Dick two years later. As with Douglas, his work in Fourteen Hours is among his best. (Basehart’s performance is all the more impressive in light of what he dealt with during production. In May 1950, his wife of ten years, Stephanie Klein, was diagnosed with a brain tumor; she died on July 28 after surgery. Returning to work after her funeral, Basehart sprained an ankle. Then he contracted poison oak while cutting down a tree on the grounds of his Coldwater Canyon home.)

Fourteen Hours shot two weeks in Manhattan, with the Guaranty Trust Co. of New York at 23 Wall Street standing in for the fictitious Rodney Hotel. The original plan was to shoot the crowd scenes over Memorial Day (May 30, a Tuesday that year), but that proved impractical — especially when it was found that a wider ledge had to be added to the building’s facade to accommodate the stuntman doubling for Basehart. Then it was seven weeks back at the Fox studio, where a duplicate of the fifteenth floor, inside and out, was built on Stage 8. Studio records estimate that Basehart spent 300 hours standing on that replica ledge, which integrates seamlessly with the location footage of his stunt double actually fifteen stories up (that brave man is identified by Wikipedia — if we can believe Wikipedia — as one Richard Lacovara).

In the final analysis, I think, Henry Hathaway proved to be much better suited to the picture than the estimable Howard Hawks would have been. Fourteen Hours is among Hathaway’s finest work — one of his least actionful, but one of his most suspenseful. He and Paxton tighten the suspense steadily as the movie progresses, and Hathaway draws understated performances from the large ensemble. And that cast is an unusually strong one. Grace Kelly, Ossie Davis and Joyce Van Patten weren’t the only ones who were going places; among the future “names” in the cast are John Cassavetes, Richard Beymer, David Burns, Brad Dexter, John Randolph, Brian Keith (Robert Keith’s son), and Janice Rule — though you’ll have to look pretty fast to spot some of them. As a suspense drama, a psychological study, a comment on crowd psychology, and a wry critique of self-serving news media (as pungent today as it was in 1951), Fourteen Hours is one of the best movies of the 1950s.

EPILOGUE: Spoilers ahead — proceed at your own risk!

At the end of Fourteen Hours Robert Cosick is finally brought in through the window to safety — you’ll have to see the movie to find out exactly how that comes about. Unfortunately, the day didn’t end as happily for John William Warde. At 10:30 p.m. that night, John said to Officer Glasco, “I’ve made up my mind.” Glasco took this as an optimistic sign that John had decided to come in; at least that’s how he chose to read it. “That’s the way to talk,” he said. About that time, a childhood friend of John’s arrived in room 1714, and he relieved Glasco at the window talking to John.

Joel Sayre doesn’t identify the friend or say what he and John talked about. But at 10:38, after twelve hours — not fourteen — Glasco, sitting on the bed rubbing his tired legs, heard a roar from the crowd below: “There he goes!” Glasco burst into tears.

If you care to look for them, there are pictures of John falling, hitting the hotel’s marquee, lying like a bloody rag doll where he fell, and being almost literally scraped off the sidewalk into an ambulance. The pictures are out there, and they’re pretty grisly. New York’s news photographers were diligent that night; they didn’t want to miss something like that.

In the original version of Fourteen Hours the same thing (more or less) was supposed to happen to Robert Cosick. (It was probably the suicide angle that made Howard Hawks turn down the job.) In a series of oral history interviews with Polly Platt late in his life, Hathaway told the following story:

“The protagonist, played by Richard Basehart, was a weakling, and in my original version, he did commit suicide. But we previewed the picture the very day [Fox president] Spyros Skouras’ daughter actually jumped from a window. He wanted the picture burned. Six months later, Darryl ordered a happy ending and I felt the picture messed up…”

This story found its way, in almost exactly those words, into both Harold N. Pomaineville’s biography of Hathaway and Michael Troyan’s history of 20th Century Fox, and I hate to rain on another juicy Hollywood story, but the chronology doesn’t fit. Fourteen Hours began location shooting in Manhattan in June 1950, delayed from the Memorial Day start by the dressing of the bank building. Even if they started on June 1, the company would have resumed shooting at the Fox studio no earlier than June 16. Seven weeks on Stage 8 takes them to August 4 at the earliest.

Dionysia Colleen Skouras, age 24, leapt to her death from the roof of the Fox West Coast Building in Los Angeles on July 17. Obviously, Hathaway’s memory was playing him false. Fourteen Hours couldn’t have been ready to preview by then; it still had three weeks to shoot.

But here’s what does make sense. Midway through shooting, Ms. Skouras makes her sad exit. Maybe her father wants the picture shelved, maybe he doesn’t; in any case, Darryl Zanuck realizes he’s got an awfully delicate situation on his hands. He calls in John Paxton and orders a rewrite in which Robert Cosick survives. Hathaway balks; he wants to stick with the downbeat ending. Maybe Zanuck tells him that the only alternative is to shelve the picture, maybe he doesn’t. In any case, the compromise they reach is to shoot both endings.

Life Magazine (March 12, 1951) confirms that both endings were indeed shot, and the IMDb claims that “[s]ome original prints show the two different endings one right after the other.” Personally, I’ve never seen that other ending, and it’s not included among the extras on the DVD, so my guess is that it hasn’t survived. But it’s quite possible that when the picture was previewed — say, sometime in late August or early September — the preview audience saw both endings and were allowed to express their preference. Or there could have been two previews with one ending apiece, just to see which one went over better. Maybe Spyros Skouras chimed in, maybe he didn’t. In any case, Zanuck made the executive decision to go with the upbeat ending. Then, out of consideration for Skouras’s grief, he delayed the picture’s release until February (in L.A.) and March (New York and Great Britain).

Of course, all this is pure speculation — aside from the fact that Dionysia Skouras clearly didn’t die on the day of any preview. A search of the Fox archives might clear up what actually happened, but that’s a chore for another day. For the rest of his life, Hathaway preferred the ending where Robert jumps to his death, believing that Zanuck’s ending “messed up” the picture — and that’s his privilege.

But Hathaway was wrong. As Alfred Hitchcock learned with the boy carrying the briefcase bomb in Sabotage (1936), you can’t build up suspense like that, get an audience all wound up, only to end with “…and then he died.” Not when people have invested so much time in hoping things will work out. Not to mention that the subplots with Grace Kelly and James Warren giving marriage another go, and Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter strolling away in the glow of young love in bloom, would turn to ashes in the mouth if they had to walk past Robert Cosick lying on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood.

Fourteen Hours‘s multiple stories are resolved with Dickensian neatness; even that cabbie with his tasteless betting pool finally grows an uneasy conscience. Zanuck — or that preview audience — was right; the ending is completely satisfying as it is. To hell with “real life”.

And one last thing. I promised an explanation for why Joel Sayre’s title, “The Man on the Ledge”, was changed to Fourteen Hours. This was done at the request of John Warde’s mother. Sayre’s 1949 article had reopened an 11-year-old wound and put her son’s last day back in the public eye; she wanted to distance the picture from him (and, perhaps, herself from the screeching harpy played by Agnes Moorehead). Even so, when a 60-minute version was produced in 1955 for the 20th Century Fox Hour TV series (with Cameron Mitchell and William Gargan replacing Basehart and Douglas), the title was once again “The Man on the Ledge”.