The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (68 page)

For French television, he adapted
Le Père Goriot
(04, Verhaeghe), and
Galilée ou l’Amour de Dieu
(05, Verhaeghe); he did the script for
Goya’s Ghosts
(06, Milos Forman);
Marie-Antoinette
(06, Francis Leclere and Yves Simoneau);
Ulzhan
(07, Schlondorff).

Madeleine Carroll
(1906–87), b. West Bromwich, England
The first English rose transplanted to America, Madeleine Carroll had all the regal beauty of the English leading lady and nothing that a dozen others did not share. But in the early 1930s she was so popular in England that her reception in Hollywood established a model to aim at for women in the English cinema. Twenty years after she left England, and ten years after her career had petered out, British cinema admired the fragrance and bloom of Virginia McKenna—the same bush in flower. Carroll made her debut in
The Guns of Loos
(28, Sinclair Hill) and quickly rose to British stardom:
Atlantic
(29, E. A. Dupont);
Young Woodley
(30, Thomas Bentley); Lady Teazle in
The School for Scandal
(30, Maurice Elvey);
Fascination
(31, Miles Mander);
I Was a Spy
(33, Victor Saville), the latter after a stately retirement to mark marriage—the first of four. Fox invited her to America for
The World Moves On
(34, John Ford), but it was her two films for Hitchcock that added a little spice to blondeness—even if no other director ever detected it. She was handcuffed to Robert Donat in
The Thirty-nine Steps
(35), and plainly frightened by Peter Lorre in
The Secret Agent
(36). America then took her up:
The General Died at Dawn
(36, Lewis Milestone);
Lloyds of London
(36, Henry King);
On the Avenue
(37, Roy del Ruth);
It’s All Yours
(37, Elliott Nugent);
The Prisoner of Zenda
(37, John Cromwell);
Blockade
(38, William Dieterle);
Cafe Society
(39, Edward H. Griffith);
Honeymoon in Bali
(39, Griffith);
Virginia
(40, Griffith), with another husband, Sterling Hayden;
My Son, My Son!
(40, Charles Vidor);
Safari
(40, Griffith);
North West Mounted Police
(40, Cecil B. De Mille);
One Night in Lisbon
(41, Griffith); and
Bahama Passage
(41, Griffith). She worked for the Red Cross during the war and returned only for
White Cradle Inn
(46, Harold French),
Don’t Trust Your Husband
(48, Lloyd Bacon), and a rather meek Mrs. Erlynne in
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(49, Otto Preminger).

Nancy Carroll
(Ann Veronica La Hiff) (1904–65), b. New York
The pretty, talented, and versatile Nancy Carroll is a textbook case of a mismanaged career. Her family had theatrical connections, but—according to her—her ambition was to become a teacher. She had to go to work, though (she was one of eleven children), and with her winning personality, vivid red hair, Cupid’s-bow mouth, and bounce, she was soon a chorus girl on Broadway. One show led to another, and to marriage with reporter Jack Kirkland (he wrote the record-shattering dramatization of
Tobacco Road
). They moved to Los Angeles and soon she was on the stage there, and taking screen tests—more than a dozen of them, all of which failed: her face was too round.

She came in at the tail end of the silents—her first big role was the Irish Rose herself in the film of Anne Nichols’s
Abie’s Irish Rose
(28, Victor Fleming), opposite Buddy Rogers’s Abie. They added some music and a song for her, proving that she could handle sound. Within two years she was Paramount’s most popular star.

Her real breakthrough was the quintessential weeper
Shopworn Angel
(29, Richard Wallace), opposite Gary Cooper. But Carroll sang and danced
—Sweetie
(29, Frank Tuttle);
Honey
(30, Wesley Ruggles);
Follow Thru
(31, Lawrence Schwab and Lloyd Corrigan)—and did both romantic comedy and heavy drama. One of the problems was that no one seemed able to decide just what she was; another was that her behavior alienated colleagues and the studio—she was known as “the Firebrand of Hollywood.” Apparently she had a violent temper and was suspicious of everyone. (“Because you think differently, you’re considered disagreeable, and upstage, and difficult. An original thinker always has to fight.”) By 1934 her career was on the rocks, with only a few films to come. But she went on to years of theater work, mostly on the road, in summer stock, etc., and often with her daughter, Patricia Kirkland. She also appeared in a TV series,
The Aldrich Family
, in the early fifties and went through another marriage or two. Long before her death, her real stardom had been forgotten.

Still, at least four movies deserve serious attention:
The Shopworn Angel; Laughter
(30, Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast), opposite Fredric March in a romantic comedy that proves that love and laughter (cavorting under a couple of polar bear rugs) and the carefree Bohemian life count more than money and respectability and marriage to stuffy old Frank Morgan;
The Devil’s Holiday
(30, Edmund Goulding), very convincing as a gold digger turned fine through love of Phillips Holmes, and apparently a close second to Norma Shearer for that year’s Oscar; and, best of all, the 1929
The Dance of Life
(John Cromwell and A. Edward Sutherland), based on the Broadway play
Burlesque
(it had made a star out of Barbara Stanwyck) and starring the play’s leading man, the extraordinary Hal Skelly. This may be the most moving version of that old chestnut, the burlesque/vaudeville couple who suffer ups and downs—she leaves him when he gives way to alcohol, comes back when he needs her, and there’s a tear in every eye. But she was also involved in disasters like Goulding’s
Night Angel
(31) and a mismatch with Lubitsch in
The Man I Killed
. The roles and the movies got worse and worse, and she was gone, her place at Paramount superseded by Claudette Colbert, who could also do everything, but who also knew how to control herself and her career. Of course, she was French, not Irish.

Her costar (twice) George Murphy tactfully put it, “Nancy herself wasn’t too easy to work with. She was potentially one of the great stars, but she never quite made it—maybe because she used stage tricks instead of her God-given talents … She seemed to enjoy making others uncomfortable.” Still photographer John Engstead was less tactful: “Nancy Carroll was a little bit of a bitch. She was a very talented woman … But she always went around with a chip on her shoulder like someone was going to do her in … she approached
everything
that way.” Clearly, the person who did her in was herself. Among her more respectable films:
Manhattan Cocktail
(28, Dorothy Arzner)—romance/melodrama, opposite Richard Arlen;
Scarlet Dawn
(32, William Dieterle)—revolutionary Russia, opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr.;
Hot Saturday
(31, William A. Seiter)—charming as a smalltown girl choosing between the very young Cary Grant and Randolph Scott;
Child of Manhattan
(33, Eddie Buzzell)—dance-hall girl wins, gives up, rewins rich guy John Boles;
Springtime for Henry
(34, Tuttle)—an amusing farce, with Carroll second-billed behind Otto Kruger. Her final film was
That Certain Age
(38, Edward Ludwig), sixth-billed in a Deanna Durbin vehicle. It had come to that.

Jack
(John Elmer)
Carson
(1910–63), b. Carman, Manitoba, Canada
Never nominated or celebrated, never given lead roles in front-rank pictures, Jack Carson could be stupid, vacant, coarse, vain, amiable, decent, touching, nasty, hateful … even ordinary. Somehow one doubts that he ever got, or needed, much direction. Instead he understood story and character. He was cast and he was relied on, and let us say that one in ten times he was indelible—as the softhearted sucker who kills himself for love and dignity in
The Hard Way
(42, Vincent Sherman); as the scapegrace dreamer/schemer in
Roughly Speaking
(45, Michael Curtiz); as the hopeless lech and would-be smartie in
Mildred Pierce
(45, Curtiz); as Matt Libby, the odious studio publicity man, in
A Star Is Born
(54, George Cukor) and as the father to no-neck monsters in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(58, Richard Brooks).

Apart from that, he was only perfect:
Stage Door
(37, Gregory La Cava);
You Only Live Once
(37, Fritz Lang);
Vivacious Lady
(38, George Stevens); a roustabout in
Bringing Up Baby
(38, Howard Hawks);
Carefree
(38, Mark Sandrich);
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(39, Frank Capra);
Destry Rides Again
(39, George Marshall);
I Take This Woman
(40, W. S. Van Dyke);
Lucky Partners
(40, Lewis Milestone);
Typhoon
(40, Louis King);
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(41, Alfred Hitchcock);
The Strawberry Blonde
(41, Raoul Walsh); very funny in
Love Crazy
(41, Jack Conway);
The Bride Came C.O.D
. (41, William Keighley);
Navy Blues
(41, Lloyd Bacon);
The Male Animal
(42, Elliott Nugent);
Larceny Inc
. (42, Bacon);
Wings for the Eagle
(42, Bacon);
Gentleman Jim
(42, Walsh);
Princess O’Rourke
(43, Norman Krasna); newly wed to Jane Wyman in
The Doughgirls
(44, James V. Kern).

In
The Hard Way
, he and Dennis Morgan had played a showbiz double act, and they were teamed up in several more pictures, like
Shine On, Harvest Moon
(44, David Butler); he was a detective in
Make Your Own Bed
(44, Peter Godfrey); with Morgan in
One More Tomorrow
(46, Godfrey),
Two Guys from Milwaukee
(46, Butler), and
The Time, the Place and the Girl
(46, Butler);
Love and Learn
(47, Frederick De Cordova); with Ann Sothern in
April Showers
(48, Kern);
Romance on the High Seas
(48, Curtiz), his first Doris Day picture; with Morgan again in
Two Guys from Texas
(48, Butler); with Morgan and Day in
It’s a Great Feeling
(49, Butler); with Day in
My Dream Is Yours
(49, Curtiz); with Ronald Reagan in
John Loves Mary
(49, Butler);
Bright Leaf
(50, Curtiz).

He was
The Good Humor Man
(50, Bacon), with Lola Albright, who became his fourth wife; a wrestling promoter in
Mr. Universe
(51, Joseph Lerner);
The Groom Wore Spurs
(51, Richard Whorf);
Dangerous When Wet
(53, Charles Walters);
Red Garters
(54, Marshall);
Phffft!
(54, Mark Robson);
Ain’t Misbehavin’
(55, Edward Buzzell);
The Bottom of the Bottle
(56, Henry Hathaway);
The Tattered Dress
(57, Jack Arnold);
Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!
(58, Leo McCarey);
The Bramble Bush
(60, Daniel Petrie);
King of the Roaring 20s
(61, Joseph M. Newman).

Johnny Carson
(1925–2005), b. Corning, Iowa
Why Johnny Carson in a book about movies? The short answer goes like this: 1. Carson’s
Tonight Show
ran thirty years. Make a generous allowance for reruns and days when Johnny was absent, and still, at the very least, he was there, on the screen for five thousand hours (or twenty-five hundred movies).

2. He came away from that scrutiny as both an American ideal and a mystery man: agreeable and withdrawn; good company and intensely alone; attractive yet cold, and in some ways defensive or grim; always there, never graspable.

I like Johnny Carson, though I feel he has stayed unknowable so as to be seductive, to stay
there
, on TV. It was a power play. I liked him long ago, in the late sixties, in England where I lived. Wimbledon tennis was on television, and the camera searched the crowd between games. There sat this upright, smart, CIA-ish fellow, more pepper than salt then, watching play. “And that,” said the English commentator, “that, I am told, is Mr. Johnny Carson, who is a television personality in America.”

The face was pinched, blank but impatient; the head seemed narrow, the dot eyes close together; the figure was like a pretzel or flute. He could snap—or make music; the balance seemed delicate. Yet he looked tough in spirit, raised in winter country, capable of meanness; and I know a movie director who once dreamed of casting Carson as a hard, cold power-monger. But his face wanted to be amused; and if that was impossible, then it would be amusing. Before I heard or knew Johnny, I guessed at his most endearing tic—the panicky, eager laugh, so yearning to be spontaneous. After thirty years, he remained curiously hopeful, and on the direst
Tonight
s that could lift the spirit.

He negotiated so many awkward hours for us: that hesitation between a bad night out, a quarrel, the fateful close to one more disappointing day, and going to bed, making up in the dark and discovering some scrap of hope again. It is an old joke that people went to bed with Johnny Carson, but do not forget the thirty years of forgiveness and farfetched romance made out of his sad smile. Do not overlook the children, or the saving in Valium. Marriage has always been his subtext, somber but wistful. He stirred the embers of its absurdity, yet he could not abandon the habit or the hope. He and Ed McMahon complained about the alimony they had to pay. But only the very plush are so rueful, and what else was a frost like Johnny going to do with his money?