The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (185 page)

Far from Heaven
was a breakthrough for Haynes, and a gorgeous recreation of Douglas Sirk. Beyond the detailed ditto of 1957, one had to ask why. Might the film have been more urgent still set in 2002? So Haynes seemed more talented, yet more hidden, too. Except that
I’m Not There
—his Bob Dylan film—was excruciatingly pretentious.

Susan Hayward
(Edythe Marrener) (1918–75), b. Brooklyn, New York
Susan Hayward was a trouper who never saw any reason to do anything other than sock it to us. If, as I feel, she is largely devoid of appeal, it is a credit to her determination and uncompromising directness that she lasted so long. Indeed, her jaw had that firmness of a girl who came nearer than many to playing Scarlett O’Hara and who resolved to show everyone that she could have had the part.

After modeling, she made her debut in
Girls on Probation
(38) and for several years cultivated bright sweetness—as in Alfred Santell’s
Our Leading Citizen
(39); Wellman’s
Beau Geste
(39); Ratoff’s
Adam Had Four Sons
(41); Stuart Heisler’s
Among the Living
(41); and De Mille’s
Reap the Wild Wind
(42). She worked throughout the 1940s without really distinguishing herself:
The Forest Rangers
(42, George Marshall);
Young and Willing
(42, Edward H. Griffith);
I Married a Witch
(42, René Clair);
Jack London
(43, Santell);
And Now Tomorrow
(44, Irving Pichel);
The Hairy Ape
(44, Santell);
Canyon Passage
(46, Jacques Tourneur);
Deadline at Dawn
(46, Harold Clurman); a very good drunk and a disaster in
Smash-Up
(47, Heisler); uncommonly severe in
The Lost Moment
(47, Martin Gabel);
They Won’t Believe Me
(47, Pichel);
The Saxon Charm
(48, Claude Binyon);
Tulsa
(49, Heisler);
My Foolish Heart
(49, Mark Robson); and
House of Strangers
(49, Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

But in the 1950s, she came gradually into her own kingdom. After a spell at Fox in costume and as an adventurer’s woman
—I Can Get It For You Wholesale
(51, Michael Gordon);
Rawhide
(51, Henry Hathaway);
David and Bathsheba
(51, Henry King);
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(52, King);
White Witch Doctor
(53, Hathaway);
Demetrius and the Gladiators
(54, Delmer Daves);
Garden of Evil
(54, Hathaway);
Untamed
(55, King);
The Conqueror
(55, Dick Powell)—she settled for being a woman’s woman. Ironically, the first and best film in this new vein was Nicholas Ray’s
The Lusty Men
(52), in which she is the brusque wife attempting to dissuade her husband from the rodeo life. Gradually, she gathered suffering to herself, first as Jane Froman in Walter Lang’s
With a Song in My Heart
(52), and then nominated as the alcoholic Lillian Roth in
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
(55, Daniel Mann). Suffering was again triumphant and Oscar-winning in Robert Wise’s
I Want to Live!
(58), in which she played a woman on death row.

In the 1960s, sheer survival brought her major parts in women’s pictures, the tears of which she stirred as vigorously as a strong-armed cook:
Ada
(61, Mann);
Back Street
(61, David Miller);
Stolen Hours
(63, Daniel Petrie);
I Thank a Fool
(63, Robert Stevens); Bette Davis’s daughter in
Where
Love Has Gone
(64, Edward Dmytryk). She was not very happy in Mankiewicz’s
The Honey Pot
(67), but undiminished in Robson’s
Valley of the Dolls
(67) and in
The Revengers
(71, Mann).

Rita Hayworth
(Margarita Carmen Cansino) (1918–87), b. Brooklyn, New York
The cousin of Ginger Rogers, her father a Spanish dancer, and her mother a Ziegfeld girl, no wonder Margarita joined her father’s act and danced at Los Angeles clubs while still in her teens. Fox noticed her and put her in
Under the Pampas Moon
(35, James Tinling),
Dante’s Inferno
(35, Harry Lachman), and
Human Cargo
(36, Allan Dwan). Her contract at Fox was largely due to Winfield Sheehan, who planned to star her in
Ramona
, but when Fox became Twentieth Century–Fox, Sheehan was fired and Cansino replaced by Loretta Young. She was reduced to B pictures, one of which,
Meet Nero Wolfe
(36, Herbert Biberman), was her first job at Columbia. In 1937 she married Edward Judson; he engineered a contract for her at Columbia, who changed her name to Rita Hayworth and put her in
Girls Can Play
(37, Lambert Hillyer) and
Paid to Dance
(37, Charles Coleman). Judson also ordered the electrolysis that radically altered her hairline. Around 1938–39, her looks became classier. She had better parts in
There’s Always a Woman
(38, Alexander Hall) and Peter Godfrey’s
The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt
(39), but it was as Richard Barthelmess’s wife in Howard Hawks’s
Only Angels Have Wings
(39) that her glamour acquired luster and assurance.

The sudden revelation of a balanced but vulnerable woman in Hawks’s banana republic was the origin of the Hayworth cult. Columbia now began to exploit her by loaning her out—to MGM for George Cukor’s
Susan and God
(40); to Warners for Raoul Walsh’s
Strawberry Blonde
(41) and Lloyd Bacon’s
Affectionately Yours
(41); and to Fox for Rouben Mamoulian’s
Blood and Sand
(41). Meanwhile, at her contract studio she appeared in Ben Hecht’s
Angels Over Broadway
(40), replacing Jean Arthur, and in Charles Vidor’s
The Lady in Question
(40).

Success did wonders for her looks, and it was this blooming that made Hayworth a forces favorite. Columbia teamed her with Fred Astaire in Sidney Lanfield’s
You’ll Never Get Rich
(41) and loaned her to Fox for
My Gal Sal
(42, Irving Cummings). Although always dubbed for singing, she was a good dancer (sensual and romantic), and Columbia concentrated on her as a star of musicals, with Astaire again in William Seiter’s
You Were Never Lovelier
(42), with Gene Kelly in Charles Vidor’s
Cover Girl
(44), and in
Tonight and Every Night
(45, Victor Saville). But she was more than just a dancer, and in Charles Vidor’s
Gilda
(46) she played a sexy woman of the world, quite riveting in the casual eroticism of “Put the Blame on Mame,” languorously discarding elbow-length black satin gloves. It is worth emphasizing how much of her best work was done for the less-than-profound Vidor.

In 1943 she had married Orson Welles and, as their marriage broke up, he exposed her in
The Lady from Shanghai
(48) as an insanely beautiful, mercilessly predatory woman. There was surely something of the rage of Welles’s Kane-like disappointment in the notorious beauty he had taken for a wife. Intensely misogynist, that film somehow added to the Hayworth mystique. But her career was on the point of decline. After the failure of
Down to Earth
(47, Hall), in which she had to play the goddess Terpsichore, she was far from credible in Vidor’s
The Loves of Carmen
(48). It was as if, when asked to play the scarlet woman, she appeared abashed; whereas in conventional material she felt able to introduce her own sexual frankness.

Reputation now conspired to ruin her. No matter how ardently Columbia had described her voluptuousness, it could not tolerate her elopement with Aly Khan in 1949. Scandal sheets hounded her and, when her third marriage had failed, she returned, visibly faded, to a fourth marriage, a disaster, with singer Dick Haymes, and to conventional movies about fallen women:
Affair in Trinidad
(52, Vincent Sherman), Dieterle’s
Salome
(53), and Curtis Bernhardt’s
Miss Sadie Thompson
(54). Fame, looks, and confidence deserted her all at once, but her unresolved character meant that even bad films might offer moments of interest: thus she is good in Parrish’s
Fire Down Below
(57) and in George Sidney’s
Pal Joey
(57). But
Separate Tables
(58, Delbert Mann), Rossen’s
They Came to Cordura
(59), and Clifford Odets’s
The Story on Page One
(59) all too clearly presented a middle-aged woman. Her later films dwindled toward obscurity:
The Happy Thieves
(61, George Marshall);
Circus World
(64, Henry Hathaway);
The Money Trap
(65, Burt Kennedy);
The Rover
(67, Terence Young);
Sons of Satan
(69, Duccio Tessari); and
The Wrath of God
(72, Ralph Nelson).

It is one of Hollywood’s sadder stories, the more so because of the feeling that her talent was seldom used properly. She was, briefly, the emblem of vaguely decadent beauty—thus she is on the poster on which the father is working in
Bicycle Thieves
when his bike is stolen. Perhaps that is why so many retain memories of her—like the sheikh in John Huston’s
Beat the Devil
. Fond feelings were shocked toward the end of 1976 when it became known that alcoholic breakdown had so disabled her that her business affairs had been taken in hand by the Orange County Public Guardian’s Office. She had Alzheimer’s disease, and for the last few years of her life she depended on the care of her daughter, Princess Yasmin, her child by Aly Khan.

Edith Head
(1907–81), b. Los Angeles
Edith Head won eight Oscars for costuming, and she was nominated thirty-five times between 1948 and 1977—thus John Huston’s wisecrack that the Academy Award was written into her contract. In fact, that load of nominations is not the record: that is forty-three (he won nine times) for Alfred Newman, whose brother, Lionel, was head of music at Twentieth Century–Fox. I don’t mean to belittle Newman (no matter that his wins included many musicals, where the music belonged to other composers;
Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
, which somehow beat
Picnic;
and
Song of Bernadette
, where even God might have flinched). Newman put his name on most Fox films, while Edith Head genuinely approved the costumes on those films she hadn’t worked on directly. You can make the case that she was the most influential woman in Hollywood—as witness the way, from 1945 onwards, she was a regular on Art Linkletter’s radio show, giving advice on what to wear.

Her childhood was spent roaming around Western mining camps, but she picked up enough education to get into Stanford, where she got a degree in French. She was teaching French and art at Hollywood High School when she grew bored, walked into Paramount, and said she knew clothes. She got a job, and by the end of the thirties she was in charge of the department. That lasted until 1967, when she moved over to Universal. Far from glamorous herself, she kept a very tidy, severe style, with dark bangs and tinted spectacles.

Her Oscars were awarded for
The Heiress
(49, William Wyler);
All About Eve
(50, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)—she created Bette Davis’s famous off-the-shoulder gown;
Samson and Delilah
(50, Cecil B. De Mille)—there were separate awards for color and black-and-white in those days;
A Place in the Sun
(51, George Stevens);
Roman Holiday
(53, Wyler);
Sabrina
(54, Billy Wilder);
The Facts of Life
(60, Melvin Frank);
The Sting
(73, George Roy Hill).

But just as we may recall clothes from those films, and see how much Head had to do with the image of Audrey Hepburn, still it’s worth noting credits that did not get an Oscar:
She Done Him Wrong
(33, Lowell Sherman)—Head helped develop that feeling of Mae West being wrapped within an inch of her life in silk;
The Lady Eve
(41, Preston Sturges)—just think of Stanwyck’s look in that picture;
Lady in the Dark
(44, Mitchell Leisen—a clothes expert, enjoying her work);
Double Indemnity
(44, Wilder)—did Head think of that anklet and the burning sexiness of Stanwyck’s pale, tight sweater?;
Notorious
(46, Alfred Hitchcock);
Sunset Boulevard
(50, Wilder)—recall the clothes bought for Joe Gillis;
Shane
(53, Stevens)—Alan Ladd’s buckskin suit, Jack Palance’s black boots;
Rear Window
(54, Hitchcock)—which means Grace Kelly in coming attractions; as well as
Funny Face, Vertigo
, and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. All of which, if I may remind you, did not win.

Edith Head was a marvel and a kind of genius. For example, on
Window
, when Grace Kelly is in the night dress, Hitchcock felt she needed a little more bosom. So Edith Head was called in. Head and Kelly retired to a dressing room. Kelly said she would not wear falsies. So Head took in a tuck here and there and told Grace to stand tall. Hitch was delighted—and so were the rest of us, ever after.

Anne Heche
, b. Aurora, Ohio, 1969
Yes, that Anne Heche: the most eventful private life in show business at the turn of the century. But no one else delivers what Anne Heche brings to the screen. She’s tart, slender, pale, altogether lemony—and this in a culture where actresses are encouraged to be peaches, strawberries, or jelly doughnuts. Remember her acid, nearly forsaken wife in
Donnie Brasco
(97, Mike Newell), her wintry, murmured asides in
Wag the Dog
(97, Barry Levinson), and even her tremendous efforts to mask the daft fabrication of
Return to Paradise
(98, Joseph Ruben) and make its love story human.