Olivia de Havilland Robin Hood

What a Dame

Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood by Robert Matzen

I don’t think any photo ever better captured Livvie than this one taken in 1942. Beautiful, brooding, determined and remote, she was then at war with Jack Warner. Ultimately, she would win.

“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” The character Helena uses this description of her friend Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not coincidentally, the description fits Olivia de Havilland, who portrayed Hermia in the 1935 Warner Bros. film adaptation of the play.

I first corresponded with Miss de Havilland in 1978 and have been in and out of touch with her ever since, although off for several years now. I fell head over heels for her as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood as many a male has and have been smitten ever since. I’m also her most recent biographer with my book, Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood (GoodKnight Books, 2010), which is to say I know something of the little and fierce human known as OdeH, who turns 101 today as I sit here and write this.

Happy Birthday, Miss de Havilland!

An Oscar in each mighty little fist. Take that, Jack Warner.

She is indeed little if five-three soaking wet qualifies as little. In my book it does. She is indeed fierce for having thrived in Hollywood for 20 solid years after not really wanting to become a film actress in the first place. She sort of backed into her career but then played by her own rules, earned two Academy Awards (for To Each His Own and The Heiress), and should have won two others (for Gone With the Wind and The Snake Pit). She was, simply put, a tremendous, underappreciated Hollywood home run hitter. A real slugger while in her prime.

You’d have to remind me of a time when OdeH ever grandstanded for publicity. And I mean ever, from 1935 to present day. It wasn’t her style to do that. She was and I’m sure remains a sober, serious, even brooding introvert, measured always in actions and delivery. A pro’s pro as an actor, a stand-up human, and a two-fisted brawler when backed into a corner.

During World War II, more than 70 years ago now, OdeH and Jack L. Warner went to court over the rights of studios and actors. Warner was then one of the two or three most powerful men in a town that respected only power. He was also a loud, uncouth bully and the “little girl” as she was known to the Warner front office kicked his ass in court. There’s no other way to put it. Warner lost and de Havilland won and “freed the slaves,” breaking the back of the studio contract system. Freedom from Warner Bros. led to those Oscars because prior to leaving Burbank, she wasn’t being assigned to Academy Award-caliber pictures. Courtroom combatant Jack Warner has been under the sod nearly 40 years while courtroom combatant Olivia de Havilland (born an English subject) just received, within the past two weeks, appointment by the Queen of England as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In other words, never underestimate the little girl. Seventy-two years after defeating a Hollywood mogul, the fierce one is back in court, this time with a suit against Ryan Murphy Productions for their portrayal of “Olivia de Havilland” in the FX TV series Feud, which is based on real people and real events.

Said the attorneys for Dame OdeH in The Los Angeles Times, “Miss de Havilland was not asked by FX for permission to use her name and identity and was not compensated for such use.”

What bothers her more is what bothered me about Feud’s depiction of de Havilland by Catherine Zeta-Jones: “…the FX series puts words in the mouth of Miss de Havilland which are inaccurate and contrary to the reputation she has built over an 80-year professional life, specifically refusing to engage in gossip mongering about other actors in order to generate media attention for herself.”

The Zeta-Jones presentation doesn’t ring true; at least not in the episodes I saw, and in fairness I didn’t see all 18. My accusation against Ryan Murphy Productions is that they didn’t bother to research the real de Havilland or they wouldn’t have presented her as an insincere, trivial, gossiping, clichéd “movie star.” She deserves so much more credit than that and by God, she’s about to claim it in court because though she be but little, Olivia de Havilland, our birthday girl, is the fiercest of Dames.

Juicy

While researching one of my books at the Academy Library in Beverly Hills, I came across a juicy letter, and I can’t even remember whose papers I was looking at. Logically speaking, it was a John Huston file because the letter was written from Olivia de Havilland to John Huston in January 1967. She opened by saying that she took her kids to the theater to kill time and the picture they walked into was The Bible, and she claims to have been shocked when she heard his voice narrating, and the voice took her back to another time and place, and she went on to describe intimate details about places they spent time together in 1942. I’ll quote the letter a little later, but first, some backstory.

Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland prepare for a scene on a darkened soundstage during production of They Died with Their Boots On at Warner Bros. In three months they would be estranged.

It was the wildest time in the life of a talented, no-nonsense survivor, the time she threw caution away and drove with the top down and no scarf. She was 25 and in a dark place, broken up not long from former boyfriend Jimmy Stewart (see Mission, coming soon), battling Jack Warner over her Warner Bros. contract and on again, off again romantically with long-time costar Errol Flynn. In January 1942 Errol and Olivia were off again because she had gotten too close to him around the time they completed They Died With Their Boots On and finally realized what a troubled soul he possessed. So that January she was a free agent and began production on a drama called In This Our Life with Bette Davis. The first day of work, kaboom, she fell under the spell of the picture’s director, who happened to be the hottest commodity in Hollywood at the time, 35-year-old writer-director (and notorious ladies’ man) John Huston. What Huston didn’t have in the classic looks department he more than made up for in charm, brains, and killer wit. Livvie, known as “Old Iron Pants” around the soundstages at Warners, found herself struck by the big thunderbolt like nothing ever before, not even with Flynn. Livvie was not only in love, she was in total, all-consuming lust, despite the fact that Huston was married at the time. High-profile Huston was involved in making a documentary on the war, Report from the Aleutians, and for a time they carried on from afar, but carry on they did through that year in what became filler for news columns, and a full-fledged scandal among gossip-mongers at Warner Bros.

John Huston doesn’t seem to be very happy with Olivia looming over him in this 1942 shot. They were seldom photographed together in what was supposed to be a secret relationship.

There was no way it would end well, and of course it didn’t. Serial-monogamist Huston grew bored pretty fast and moved on to Livvie’s Gone With the Wind co-star, Evelyn Keyes, while Livvie’s dark time went on. She would battle Warner Bros. for two more years, endure blackballing by all the studios, remain estranged from Flynn, battle her sister Joan Fontaine endlessly, and nearly die of illness contracted when she went off to entertain the troops in World War II. The clouds finally broke over Livvie’s head in 1946, and boy-howdy, what a dawn she witnessed. She won an Oscar for her 1946 picture To Each His Own, then topped that performance playing mentally disturbed Virginia in The Snake Pit in 1948, then won another Oscar in 1949 for The Heiress.

The thing to remember about Livvie is she has always been a loner. She has now spent a century as an island, a closed book, a tough cookie. To me, after having corresponded with this woman since 1978 and studying her life for my book, Errol & Olivia, this was the most revealing document I’d ever encountered. It read in part, “…I heard your voice. It was an extraordinary experience, for no one had told me that you had done the soundtrack, and, of course, with the first word I knew it was you speaking. It brought back, with a rush, the year of 1942 and the Aleutians, and the film you made there, that beautiful film, and ‘I’ve Got Sixpence,’ and your voice on the soundtrack for that picture, and, well, many things. I hope all goes well with you—I always have. I always will.”

Livvie is a beautiful writer, and here in a rare instance she bares her soul and engages in some flirting with a one-time lover who had meant the world to her, who had hurt her so deeply, and this was to say it’s all right. I forgive you and remember the good times. Classy move. Classy woman.

Happy 100^th Birthday, Miss de Havilland. Speaking of your talent as a writer, I hope everyone goes right out and buys your terrific 1962 book, Every Frenchman Has One, which has just been re-released.

Next time we’ll look at one of the most incredible moments in Hollywood history, the time the aforementioned men in Livvie’s life fought over her, almost to the death.

20 Great de Havilland Moments

As we draw closer to July 1, which will mark Olivia de Havilland’s 100^th full year on this planet, I started to think back to the most memorable moments of her screen career. She didn’t have the usual run of a Hollywood legend because she went to war with Warner Bros. and stayed off the screen for three years, and then faded from leading lady status in the 1950s, retrenching in Paris, where she has remained for 60 years.

As I detailed in Errol & Olivia, OdeH never rushed into anything in life, and turned down many scripts that became unmemorable pictures. But those she did make, she made well. I thought about doing the top 5, and then the top 10, but they kept coming so I finally decided to stop at 20, realizing that I’m missing many other great moments. I simply haven’t seen pictures like The Great Garrick, The Strawberry Blonde, The Dark Mirror, and My Cousin Rachel in recent times, so I’m depending on all of you to identify the considerable number of great scenes I must be missing. Yes I skew to Flynn-de Havilland just because I’ve seen them most of all.

Here they are, in reverse order, from 20 to down to 1, a list of memorable screen moments courtesy of OdeH—they just happen to include some of the most powerful scenes in motion picture history.

20. Government Girl—Smokey slithers across the floor of the crowded hotel lobby looking for a missing wedding ring, and Ed can’t miss her high-heeled legs under the sofa. Livvie wasn’t a comedic actress, but she does well in this crowded-hotel-lobby sequence, and also plays along to sell the sex. This little picture proved to be a surprise hit at the box office for struggling RKO.

19. Dodge City—On the staircase Abbie yells at Wade, “You can’t boss me!” and he stifles her protests with a surprise kiss and she makes a noise in her throat as if to convey, “Oh! This isn’t so bad!”

18. The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex—Penelope’s big brown eyes light up as if in neon every time she sees Robert Devereaux. This was her worst screen experience, a thankless role in a prestige picture courtesy of Jack Warner. She stood around a lot, but did what she could with the part.

Down yonder, there he is, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex. Penelope rather fancies him.

17. The Adventures of Robin Hood—Sir Guy paws Marian’s jewel case and then rips it open to find the written warning for Robin. Awesome sexual tension between jilted Sir Guy and scheming Marian, revealing just a little of Basil Rathbone’s undisguised lust for Olivia de Havilland.

16. Light in the Piazza—After her daughter’s wedding to Italian innocent Fabrizio, Meg says to herself, “I did the right thing.” Even though the picture never made sense as presented, Livvie still owned those last moments and made them powerful.

Meg gushes with pride at the wedding of her daughter at the conclusion of Light in the Piazza.

15. The Snake Pit—Virginia stands in the common room at the sanitarium and her gentle, internal VO likens her surroundings to a snake pit. The camera changes focal length, lifting high above the soundstage until the illusion of all those crazy people is of snakes in a pit. And she remains fixed there, alone and vulnerable and, worst of all for her and for us, returning to sanity so she understands what’s going on.

Virginia stands in the middle of snakes in the pit in director Anatole Litvak’s beautiful, chilling shot.

14. They Died with Their Boots On—George scales the trellis to Libby’s balcony and proposes, and she swoons, and then it dawns on her what he just asked, and she scolds, “Oh, lieutenant!” and then a moment later, “Yes, general!”

13. Gone With the Wind—At the door chatting with Scarlett, Melanie spots Ashley coming up the road to Tara after the war.

12. Captain Blood—Snooty young Arabella decides to buy a pirate for personal use and he turns out to be a sassy, wrongly imprisoned English doctor. (Peter to Arabella, with a bow: “Your very humble slave, Miss Bishop.”)

11. Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte—Sweet Miriam stops the car and ever so slowly turns to Charlotte, revealing pure evil, and smacks her across the face repeatedly. Then she leans close and hisses, “Damn you. Now will you shut your mouth!” It was Livvie’s darkest moment onscreen in a picture seen as pure camp today, even though it received seven Academy Award nominations in 1965 and won three Oscars. Somewhere deep down it must have been fun to slap around Bette Davis after their long history together that includes contentious moments on the set of In This Our Life.

If Charlotte thinks she’s troubled now, just wait another minute.

10. Dodge City—At the newspaper office, Wade comes in to taunt Abbie after she takes a job there because a woman working for a living “Tisn’t dignified!” And during their byplay she hints that the natives object to his face. (Wade: “You should be home, doing needlework!”)

9. The Snake Pit—Virginia realizes she isn’t crazy anymore and doesn’t really love Dr. Kik. Then she connects with Hester in a brilliant crowning moment.

8. The Adventures of Robin Hood—Marian lets her hair down and begins to speak of love with Bess, and then Robin Hood barges in and he and Marian both proceed to let their hair down together.

Letting their hair down was a bear to shoot and took three tries with two directors.

7. Gone With the Wind—After Scarlett shoots the Yankee in the face, Melanie drawls, “I’m glad you killed him.” Then she strips off her nightgown to wrap the bloody dead Yankee in.

6. They Died with Their Boots On—Libby strolls onto the West Point green and engages Custer on guard duty, and they get into a big fight right off the bat. It was her first day of work on the picture, and she unleashed pent-up energy that Flynn matched for a terrific sequence.

5. The Heiress—Spinster Catherine finally locks the door on Morris and turns out the lights. She earned Oscar #2 here–she should have won it for The Snake Pit a year earlier.

4. The Adventures of Robin Hood—King Richard commands Robin to claim Marian as his bride; the king asks if she would like that and she beams, “More than anything in the world, sire.” Slam-bang ending to an epic picture. Livvie wasn’t crazy about playing a damsel in distress, but gave it her all anyway.

3. Gone With the Wind—Weakened Melanie forces herself up the long staircase at Tara to tend to Rhett after the death of Bonnie Blue Butler. Did this scene tip the Oscar to Hattie McDaniel? Both were flawless and completed the dramatic stair climb in an unbroken take.

A posed still can’t begin to capture the brilliance of de Havilland and McDaniel on that long walk up the staircase.

2. To Each His Own—Through the whole picture, old Miss Norris has been pinch-faced and bitter, but then the Army lieutenant realizes that she’s his mother and asks her to dance. It was the scene that sealed her first Oscar win, and if it doesn’t make you cry, you don’t have a pulse.

“I believe this is our dance, Mother.”

1. They Died with Their Boots On—George says goodbye to Libby, both sensing they’ll never see each other again. It was the best moment for both actors, and for director Raoul Walsh, and for the technicians who lit the set. Yikes.

If you want to destroy me no matter the mood or time of day, put this scene on. And BTW, however much you’re paying the lighting guy? It ain’t enough.

All right, lay it on me. What are some more great de Havilland moments?

For more on Olivia de Havilland and her upcoming 100th, check out Self-Styled Siren’s blog.

More than Marian

In the category of, “You never know,” Olivia de Havilland turns 99 today. Happy Birthday, Livvie! I say you never know because the woman spent her first 40 years sickly. There’s no other way to put it. She was a delicate flower, driven to bed many times by various maladies and at least once by a nervous breakdown. She was also a smoker at various points, and we know what that does for a person’s longevity (right Errol? Clark? Joan? Bogie? Coop?).

Olivia de Havilland’s first book, published in 1962. Her second has been eagerly awaited for going on 40 years.

Livvie has resided since the 1950s in Paris after marrying a Frenchman and for a long time commuted to Hollywood occasionally to work in pictures and television. She wrote a terrific book about life in Paris called Every Frenchman Has One, published in 1962. She charmed the pants off me with that book, making me wish she had written a lot more besides, like the memoir she promised her publisher in 1979. I clipped an article out of the paper back then (I could only use safety scissors because I was in my playpen); in this page-6-or-whatever story, OdeH regretted that there would be a delay in completing her manuscript beyond the first of the year. As in, beyond the beginning of 1980.

As the crow flies, it’s now 35.5 years later and the publisher continues to wait. The woman has lived a fascinating life from her birth in the Far East as a member of the British Empire to her eventual migration to Hollywood in 1934. As noted in Errol & Olivia, OdeH had a toxic relationship with her stepfather that included sexual abuse. She was driven from her home in Saratoga, California, upon graduation from high school and joined the theater, ending up in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There, Warner Bros. spotted her and the rest is, well, you know. Legal victories (this little bulldog of five-three went toe-to-toe with the Hollywood moguls and beat them); Academy Award nominations and statuettes; national honors from the presidents of the United States and France.

Olivia de Havilland, just turned 18, sits on a prop cart at Warner Bros. with Errol Flynn in the summer of 1935.

You’d never know it to look at her because today she is a Grand Dame who has carefully crafted an image of Grand Dameitude, but Livvie in youth was a handful. She took a lot of anger with her from that tudor-inspired frame house at the end of that quiet dead-end street in Saratoga. Toxic relationships will do that to you. She grew up a loner with loads of self-discipline and has stayed that way all her life. When she moved to Hollywood after signing her Warner Bros. contract in 1934, her mother went with her and kept a watchful eye on young Livvie until 1938 when Mom moved back north and daughter, now age 21, stayed behind to sow some wild oats. That’s when things began to get interesting with Flynn, and with Jimmy Stewart, and with John Huston. There was nothing Grand Dameish about that last one when the movie star and the brash young writer-director embarked on a wild sexual adventure. All that self-discipline went flying out the window when she fell as hard for Huston as a girl could fall. Then he dumped her, and she carried a torch that I am sure still burns on Rue Benouville today.

OdeH could have written several books in the last 35 years. One about her day job, another about Huston, a third about Flynn, and, of course, a whole Harvard Five-Foot Bookshelf about her own sister, Joan Fontaine, the little girl born less than 18 months after Olivia. It’s no fluke that I chose the title Twisted Sisters for my section about the battling de Havillands in Errol & Olivia. These two went at it with only short respites for 96 years, until Joanie gave in and left us in 2013. Today, Olivia lives a life of quiet seclusion in her Paris townhouse. Last I heard she had hired someone to help her finish that memoir so long in the making, and on occasion she receives visitors, like Errol Flynn’s daughter Rory.

Livvie in recent times.

Let’s take a moment and raise our glasses to this great award-winning star of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Way back when she toiled in make-believe Sherwood Forest in northern California portraying Maid Marian, Olivia strived to be much more than Errol Flynn’s girl and she got her wish through hard work, attention to her craft, and when necessary, legal action. In her 40s she embraced exercise and healthy eating and brother has it paid off. Maybe we should convince her to take five from the memoir and write Olivia de Havilland’s Secrets to a Long, Successful Life.

The OdeH abode in the embassy section of Paris.

At the Oscars

One time I got into a feud with my sister Dorothy that lasted six months. When you’re in your twenties you get all full of yourself and feuding seems like a good idea. She said she didn’t think I would ever make money writing—because up to that point I’d made precious little—and I took umbrage and off we went, giving each other the silent treatment. Dorothy died of breast cancer last year, and I’m glad that I indulged in the luxury of a feud only once, only that time; otherwise we managed to spend the rest of our lives thick as thieves.

This story comes to mind as I look back to the Academy Awards of 73 years ago this Thursday, February 26, 1942, at the Biltmore Bowl in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. What a night. The United States was 2.5 months past Pearl Harbor, and the assemblage of actors, directors, moguls, and technical craftspeople included many men in uniform. Second Lt. James Stewart of the Army Air Corps was one of them; Jim had come back—as was custom—to present the Best Actor Oscar since he was the incumbent. High above the giant room and deafening roar of the pre-dinner crowd hung a pall. Clark Gable, king of Hollywood, was not in attendance because 41 days earlier Carole Lombard, his wife, had died in a plane crash. Some at the Biltmore this evening had not gotten past the grief of it; some never would. The absence of mile-a-minute Lombard was deeply felt, because she was in the middle of seemingly everything, every huddle of gossip, every gag, every warm gesture.

Picture this: all the industry bigs pack into the Biltmore Bowl for what is, at this time, a banquet followed by the awards presentation. All the stars but Gable and Lombard are there for the kind of formal dinner we’ve all experienced: too many place settings at tables that are too small. Food in insufficient portions for human sustenance arrives at the table cold. You’re bumping elbows with your neighbors and the waiters are bumping you in turn. You are glad you used Dial and you wish everybody did because it’s hot in there, and between all the body heat and all the nerves, before long the air is overripe.

Among the 10 features up for Best Picture in the auspicious year of 1941 were Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, and two of special note, Suspicion starring Joan Fontaine and Hold Back the Dawn starring Joan’s sister, Olivia de Havilland. As cited chapter and verse in Errol & Olivia, Livvie was an interesting character, a wounded and closed-off soul who professed to have no close friends and who was now into year four of a bitter feud with her boss, Jack L. Warner of Warner Bros. Early in her career Livvie had portrayed Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the play Hermia is described with, “Though she be but little, she is fierce,” and never was there a more perfect description of Miss de Havilland, all five foot three of her.

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Livvie makes nice with Joanie as Burgess Meredith looks on prior to the presentation of Oscars.

As problematic as everything was with Livvie, her relationship with sister Joan de Havilland, rebranded Joan Fontaine, was equally difficult beginning when they were sprouts in Saratoga, California. If you go to the house where they lived as children, you can still see in the concrete driveway their little handprints and carefully carved names beside them, almost as if they were practicing for Grauman’s Chinese. These two were stamped out of the same mold—independent, headstrong, and not afraid to use sex as a weapon. Livvie came first and blazed the trail and Joanie came after and used her sister’s connections and fame and even her dwellings in Hollywood to build a powerhouse career. Livvie spent a lot of her time seething about the encroachments of Joanie but was often shushed by their mother, who lived with and chaperoned the sisters in Hollywood into 1938.

Why, they look so happy. Almost like … sisters.

On this night in February 1942, not only are the sisters’ films going head to head, but so are the actresses themselves, both nominated for Best Actress. Livvie figures she has the leg up because she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind but lost to co-star Hattie McDaniel. As one of GWTW’s also-rans, she would pick up the sentimental vote. But wait—Joanie is an also-ran as well, having lost last year’s Best Actress nomination for Rebecca to last year’s sentimental favorite, Ginger Rogers.

If you’re starting to think that nobody ever seemed to win an Oscar for the right picture, you’re starting to catch on to the politics of Hollywood.

Photos taken prior to the awards ceremony show the sisters cordial because nobody has yet lost anything. Then comes the big moment. And the winner is…………

Joan Fontaine, for Suspicion.

All Livvie’s seven years of hard work in big and little pictures, all her fighting the good fight for better scripts and her quest to be more than “Errol Flynn’s girl,” all of it crumbled like buildings in a California quake as little sister Joanie swept up to receive the Oscar. The situation would come to a head five years later at the Shrine Auditorium when Livvie finally won a Best Actress Oscar of her own. That year, 1946, Livvie was the true sentimental favorite for recently besting Jack Warner in court and winning the freedom of contract players across Hollywood. Livvie wasn’t up against Joanie that evening, and the field was much weaker, and when Joanie approached her sister to offer congratulations, Livvie spun on her heel and snubbed Joan. Said not a word. Stormed off, statuette in hand.

The winners: Gary Cooper for Sergeant York, Joan Fontaine for Suspicion, Mary Astor for The Great Lie, and Army Reservist Donald Crisp for How Green Was My Valley.

They would apply some plaster to the fracture on and off over the years but split forever in the 1970s when their mother died. Joan refused to talk to me about Olivia when I was writing Errol & Olivia; Olivia refused to talk to me about anything of substance ever. My interactions with both were always pleasant, but the secret dark places in their souls remained locked away.

Finally, at the end of 2013, a little more than a year ago, Joan died at age 96 in California while Olivia, aged 97, remained resolute in Paris. I guess you could say the feud ended with Joan’s passing, but did it? The enmity of these two, which came to a head twice at the Academy Awards ceremony, was something for the ages. Me? I’m glad my own sibling feud was just once, and long ago.

In the Shadow of Beasts

I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in a beret. This time it’s Fay Wray in a 1930s pose.

The always-interesting Marina Gray pointed me to the link to a 1998 article that appeared in Scarlet Street magazine. The article detailed an encounter by filmmaker and writer Rick McKay with Hollywood leading lady Fay Wray in New York City in 1997. I was bowled over by the nature of the piece, which included an extensive interview with Wray, who was almost 90 at the time and very much a real-life Norma Desmond in manner, as actresses can be.

You know how sometimes you read about a person now gone and get the feeling you would love to have met him or her? Well that’s the feeling that hit me reading about the evening spent by the author with Fay Wray. Here was a woman who started out in silents and remained so full of life that James Cameron had recently, as of the time the article was written, offered Wray the role of “Old Rose” in his epic in the making, Titanic. Wray had declined the offer because one of the plays she had authored was opening in New England and she didn’t want to miss it. Wray’s contemporary, Gloria Stuart, then landed the role and earned an Oscar she had coveted for 70 years.

Rick McKay asked all the right questions during his evening with Fay Wray, a date that included a Broadway show and dinner and drinks. Man: dinner with Fay Wray. Does it get better than that?

Fay in one of her best pictures.

In the lengthy interview, McKay returned time and again to Kong, Kong, and more Kong. The making of the film, reaction to the film, and Wray’s opinion of the film. After a while it became apparent that Fay Wray was a brilliant person who was (naturally enough) sick to death of King Kong but too gracious to say it in so many words. She was an early—perhaps the first—casualty of that one career-crippling iconic Hollywood role. A chosen few know what it’s like; Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, Leonard Nimoy with Mr. Spock, and so on. But mixed in with Kong Q&A, Fay offered the kind of insight into Old Hollywood that can only be learned on the inside.

Her first big picture was Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, and she describes a sexual Svengali/Trilby sort of vibe between them. She starred in a number of pictures in the early era of sound, including three with Gary Cooper. She also made an early masterpiece with horror undertones, Most Dangerous Game, and two early Technicolor features at Warner Bros., The Mystery of the Wax Museum and Doctor X., both directed by the Hungarian maestro, Michael Curtiz. Like most others who toiled under the Curtiz whip, Wray’s memories of the experience were not fond: “I didn’t appreciate him at all as a director. I thought he was more like a part of the camera. He didn’t have any warmth whatsoever.”

Of course it didn’t help that conditions were brutal on Warner soundstages. Wray provides thought-provoking testimony regarding the experience of working in early Technicolor on sets that had to bathed in light—drenched in light—to suit the Technicolor cameras. Today we’re used to mega-chip HD cameras and cool LED lighting, but in 1932 the lights were incandescents that give off 10 percent of their energy as light and 90 percent as heat, which was “Awful! Awful! … They left the lights on, because a lot of scenes were so sustained that you needed quite a bit of time. But, it was an unhealthy kind of feeling that we all had to go through … it was just a miserable experience.”

Toiling under hot lights and showing some leg in The Mystery of the Wax Museum with co-star Glenda Farrell.

Both Wax Museum and Doctor X and a third scream feature, The Vampire Bat, paired Way with one of Hollywood’s more unusual actors, Lionel Atwill, whom she described as “a profile” and explained that “He knew just how to position his head to get the right angles! He was very conscious of his contour.”

Here was a thoughtful, serious young actress now in her mid-20s making what she considered mindless horror pictures for brutes like Curtiz. And then came Kong. She remembered working in the giant mechanical Kong hand, which was manually manipulated by stage hands, and her fear wasn’t being crushed by the hand of Kong but rather falling out of it because the grip was loose at best. Of the origin of her Kong screams: “I went into the sound room and made an aria of horror sounds.” They were screams directed by … Fay Wray.

Wray discussed the decline of her career and relationships with a succession of talented, high-profile screenwriters, first John Monk Saunders, then Clifford Odets and finally Carole Lombard’s ex-boyfriend, Robert Riskin. Her marriage to Riskin endured through his severe stroke and subsequent death in 1955. During his illness she went back to work in television and movies to pay the medical bills, most of the roles forgettable or downright embarrassing. Her biggest pictures of the time were The Cobweb with Widmark and Bacall and Queen Bee with Joan Crawford. And what a terrific take Wray had on the star: “Joan was not a happy person and she liked showing that. She worked on her fan mail all day long. I just didn’t understand that, but she did. She washed her hands a lot. She washed her arms all the way up past her elbows … She was so worried about herself, I felt. She was a good soul, a good soul. She wanted to be nice to everybody and kind, certainly kind to her fans. She thought about them a lot.”

Wray in a straight role with Gary Cooper in 1933. Coop was stamping out pictures at this time and made three with Fay; two with Carole Lombard.

Like so many actors of her day that disdained the kind of pictures they were in—for example, Olivia de Havilland would not condescend to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood for 20 years after its release—Fay never went to see completed versions of Mystery of the Wax Museum or Doctor X, pictures that are today considered horror classics. She was a year older than Carole Lombard and started in pictures about the same time Lombard did, around 1925, and both made their move in Paramount Pictures in the early 1930s. Both were good-looking women with earthy sexuality, but Wray had none of the Screwball Queen’s savvy for crafting a career, and if it weren’t for the horror pictures, Fay Wray’s name would barely be remembered at all. Instead, she remains a Hollywood icon.

Later in life she became a writer, and I want to read her books and drink in more wisdom like this: “I love films, I love the camera—I love the thought that when you’re in front of the camera, whatever you do can go around the world. Isn’t that a marvelous feeling to have? That’s a beautiful feeling.”

Rick McKay’s full article can be accessed here.

Putting it all in perspective: one small woman and the big ape who immortalized her.

Invaded by Mights

Pardon my grumpiness, but five Errol Flynn pictures played in succession on Turner Classic Movies U.S. on Tuesday evening, hosted by Robert Osborne and guest programmer Rory Flynn, Errol’s daughter. Here are some things I wish they had discussed:

Objective, Burma! should have been one of Flynn’s most popular pictures, but it wasn’t.

Objective, Burma!, the first picture shown, is an action drama set in the latter stages of World War II in Burma. Grim and realistic, it presents a fictional account of U.S. paratroopers dropped into the Burmese jungle to raid a Japanese radar station. They wipe out the Japs just fine but then everything goes to hell and they are 200 miles from help.

Objective, Burma! is most notable as a disaster of the first order for Errol Flynn the actor. It was by far the most rugged picture he had ever made, shot mostly in exterior locations—deserts, jungles, swamps—and he worked his ass off. His performance is highly regarded for a particular tone of understatement, and he fit well in an ensemble cast. He did every single thing right in making Objective, Burma! And what was his reward?

The British government protested that Objective, Burma! showed an American operation in Burma when it was in fact the British who were fighting there. British big cheese Lord Earl Mountbatten was furious and went out of his way to slam Flynn for make-believe heroics, saying that Errol was in effect grinding his heel into the graves of British war dead. As a result, Objective, Burma! played in first release, was never reissued, and became a poison pill for Errol Flynn the actor. Soon he was boozing it up through a string of features and then fled to exile in Europe. It’s a picture that hastened his decline and early death.

Errol Flynn Slept Here by Robert Matzen and Michael Mazzone

Well, boys, this is going to be a big success. What could possibly go wrong?

Another notable talking point is that the plot of Burma was stolen directly from the story of Rogers’ Rangers and a raid during the French and Indian War that was recounted in the historical novel Northwest Passage and depicted in the 1940 motion picture of the same name starring Spencer Tracy as Rogers. The way the studios sometimes operated, scripts were put into a pile and they’d periodically pull a script off the bottom of the pile and redo it. In this way Warner Bros. took the 1945 property Objective, Burma! and adapted it into a 1951 Gary Cooper pic called Distant Drums. This time it’s a pre-Civil War story as Cooper’s men sneak into Florida and destroy a Seminole Indian village before everything goes to hell. Raoul Walsh directed Objective, Burma! Raoul Walsh directed Distant Drums, and used some of the same camera setups in the latter that he had used in the former.

More recently, the same plot was reused in one of my all-time favorite pictures, Predator (1987) starring Arnold Shwarzeneger. This time mercenary commandos go into South America to rescue hostages and wipe out a guerilla stronghold before everything goes to hell, this time because of one nasty alien. The raid is so similar to Errol Flynn’s 1945 radar station incursion that during Objective, Burma! I was quoting Jesse Ventura’s Blain with perfect timing when he says his incredulous, admiring, “What The Fuck?” as Arnold opens the battle in unorthodox fashion. The classic exchange between Poncho and Blain also fit perfectly into the Flynn action:

Poncho: “You’re bleeding!”

Blain: “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

Poncho: “You got time to duck?”

And Poncho launches mortar rounds that blow bad guys out of their machine gun nest overhead. Predator is an homage to Objective, Burma! and the familiarity of this plot through generations of Hollywood filmmaking—good guys stage a raid and then everything goes to hell—is something the TCM hosts might have mentioned on Tuesday.

“I ain’t got time to bleed!” No, wait, that’s from a different (albeit similar) picture.

Second up on Tuesday night was The Adventures of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn’s classic of classics, and I cringed when it was asserted during the intro that tension between Errol and RH director Michael Curtiz resulted from the fact that Curtiz had once been married to Errol’s wife, Lili Damita. Yes, this internet rumor was announced as fact on broadcast television. Unless I have missed some important news, a Curtiz-Damita marriage has never been verified and since so many European paper records were destroyed during World War II, it is doubtful this allegation will ever be confirmed.

Flynn’s most physically demanding picture included this scene shot at Lucky Baldwin’s Ranch in Arcadia, CA.

The hosts might have talked about any number of interesting angles to Robin Hood. They could have discussed the high cost of the production—highest yet for Warner Bros. There might have been discussion of Olivia de Havilland’s growing distaste for playing Errol Flynn’s girl in picture after picture, especially a character she found as two-dimensional as Maid Marian. Mention of the location shoot in Chico, California might have been made as an epidemic of influenza swept through cast and crew. Or of the fact that Basil Rathbone, playing Errol’s rival, was 17 years older than Errol but just as athletic in the climatic duel. Or that Rathbone, who was run through and killed in that duel, was actually a more accomplished fencer. Or that this was an Academy Award-winning film (it won three), or that it was re-released several times and always successfully, or that Flynn owned a 16mm print of the film and watched it often, or that de Havilland refused to go to the premiere and didn’t condescend to watch Robin Hood until 1959—21 years after its initial run.

After you are dead, Errol, I am going to tell everyone how–even at 17 years your senior–I was the better swordsman and could have kicked your ass in a real duel anytime I wanted to, except the script would never let me.

The audience for these pictures might have been enlightened, but they weren’t, although props go to Robert Osborne for stressing repeatedly that Errol Flynn was an underrated actor, which was borne out in all the pictures screened (the others were Gentleman Jim, Rocky Mountain, and Never Say Goodbye). Hopefully, the evening billed as “Starring Errol Flynn” will lead a new audience to seek out more information about one of the most enigmatic personalities of the Twentieth Century. There is plenty of information out there waiting to be accessed in, oh, I don’t know, maybe [insert shameless holiday plug] two outstanding hardcover books loaded with information and photos, Errol Flynn Slept Here: The Flynns, the Hamblens, Rick Nelson, and the Most Notorious House in Hollywood and Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All

I bet you never saw Olivia de Havilland’s last theatrical picture. I bet you didn’t know it was a swashbuckler set around the time of Captain Blood. I bet you didn’t know she played a queen and the key to solving the plot of the film. Do you want to know why you don’t know?

After her Academy Award run of the late 1940s, Livvie tried everything to remain relevant. Screen, stage—nothing went according to plan. Into the 1960s she sought to reinvent herself with the shocker, Lady in a Cage and then she took over Joan Crawford’s role in the follow up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, this one called Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Like all actresses from the Golden Era, she had an ever more difficult time finding good parts in decent pictures, which is what led Miss Bette Davis to make everything from Baby Jane to Return from Witch Mountain—it was a living.

Her biographer, Tony Thomas, would never quite forgive Olivia for showing so much skin in 1970’s The Adventurers.

OdeH lay low from 1964 until the 1970 Harold Robbins Eurotrash feature, The Adventurers. There she became the best thing about the picture, playing a 40-something cougar to young Bosnia/Herzegovina leading man Bekim Fehmiu. If you think about a Bosnia/Herzegovina leading man in a Hollywood picture, the problems with The Adventurers become pretty obvious pretty fast, and speak to the dearth of parts for Miss deH and the questionable judgment she brought to bear when something did come her way. She even showed some flesh this time around, much to the mortification of some of her admirers.

If you weren’t yet born in 1970, you missed a hell of a brouhaha when Airport hit big screens, and by 1972 turnstiles were spinning madly as The Poseidon Adventure capsized its way to box office history. Suddenly, the all-star disaster epic was in vogue. Olivia saw aging Helen Hayes claim an Oscar for Airport and Shelley Winters nearly follow that path for Poseidon. From there, Livvie watched Earthquake shine the spotlight on aging sexpot Ava Gardner and MGM ingénue Monica Lewis, and The Towering Inferno do likewise for Selznick discovery (and wife) Jennifer Jones.

Lots of water–too much water–and not enough substance plagued her appearance in Airport ’77.

Meanwhile, on a separate track, swashbucklers came back in vogue with Richard Lester’s irreverent version of The Three Musketeers, shot in 1973 and released in 1974. Of all people, Raquel Welch scored biggest this time, winning a Golden Globe for her wacky Constance. Livvie had to get in on this gravy train and gain back some relevance. After all, she was then in her youthful 50s with a lot yet to offer the motion picture world. Then she got what seemed to be her break with a role in Airport ’77, sequel to the huge Airport 1975. Yes, work was work, but what a thankless part, with endless reaction shots in her passenger seat aboard an airliner that sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and then a less-than-flattering dunking during the ocean rescue. I’m on your side, Livvie, but, it’s hard to look good with a couple tons of water smacking you in the face.

Oscar nods do not result from death by bees.

Airport ’77 did well, not as well as the previous two, but well enough. By this time Hollywood was groping for disasters with which to imperil all-star casts, and somebody at Livvie’s old studio, Warner Bros., decided that bees hadn’t been done and bees are scary and why don’t we do bees? Hence, The Swarm. This time Olivia shared screen time with Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray, but fans of the great dual Oscar winner had a hard time watching her get stung to death, her face eaten, as the bees rampaged. Never mind that these days killer bees have since been proven to exist, and they really are scary. Way scarier than those depicted by Warners of Burbank. And how strange must it have been for Olivia de Havilland to return to the studio she so desperately sought to sever herself from 35 years earlier? Oh the ghosts she must have brushed past during production since so many of her colleagues had by then passed, including Errol Flynn.

Which brings us to the little-known swashbuckler that became Livvie’s swan song in feature pictures. It must have looked like a godsend in 1976 when the idea first came up. Behind the Iron Mask, based on Alexandre Dumas’ Man in the Iron Mask, would be lensed in Austria by Director of Photography Jack Cardiff and directed by Ken Annakin, veteran of Disney pictures and some all-star hits, including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Behind the Iron Mask would feature 60-year-old former fencing champion and veteran Hollywood heartthrob Cornel Wilde as D’Artagnan, Oscar winner for his Cyrano (a brilliant swordsman) Jose Ferrer as Athos, and Alan Hale Jr. as Porthos. In a 1952 Howard Hughes picture for RKO named Sons of the Musketeers, Cornel Wilde had portrayed the son of D’Artagnan and Alan Hale Jr. had played the son of Porthos. That in itself was a kick because his dad, Alan Hale, had portrayed Porthos in the 1939 version of Man in the Iron Mask.

Sons of the Musketeers was renamed At Sword’s Point for its 1952 release. Here a very young Alan Hale Jr. portrays the son of musketeer Porthos. Next to him is Cornel Wilde as the son of D’Artagnan. The “twist” is offered by Maureen O’Hara as the daughter of Athos. As modest as this RKO B picture was, it feels like Citizen Kane next to The Fifth Musketeer.

So here was Alan Hale Jr. back in a role that had been in the family for 40 years. And into this cast was invited Olivia de Havilland—Alan Hale’s co-star on so many Warner Bros. hits—to portray Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII and mother to wastrel Louis XIV and his good-hearted twin brother, Philippe.

This was not your father’s Man in the Iron Mask. Although I’m pretty sure Dad would have approved–of the European version at least.

How freakin’ great is this? Olivia must have thought, to cavort with a veteran cast that also included Rex Harrison and old Warner Bros. contract player Helmut Dantine. But a funny thing happened on the way to swashbuckling glory. Actually, a series of funny things. The script stank. The key role, that of Louis/Philippe, was given to Beau Bridges, an actor with zero romantic appeal. The director couldn’t figure out how to approach the material. The audio was bad, even by European standards. The producers decided to shoot a European version featuring nudity for the two leading ladies in the picture, Sylvia Kristel of Emmanuelle fame and Ursula Andress, who was ready and willing to show off her still formidable 43-year-old body. Unfortunately, some of the plot was embedded in the nude scenes and so when they were cut for U.S. audiences and a PG rating, the picture didn’t quite make sense. And finally, those same infallible producers changed the name of the picture to cash in on the success of The Three Musketeers and its sequel The Four Musketeers. The picture that was shot in 1977 as Behind the Iron Mask now carried the U.S. title The Fifth Musketeer, which made no sense, and Fifth was launched in limited U.S. release in 1979 after sitting around a good while and sank so far and so fast that if you blinked, you missed it. The run on cable TV was similarly short, and if I hadn’t happened upon a late-night run of Ursula Andress pictures on Turner Classic Movies this past week and DVRed Fifth in its pre-dawn run, I would never have thought of The Fifth Musketeer again.

One more, just because. Sylvia Kristel in the European version of Olivia de Havilland’s last feature picture, The Fifth Musketeer.

I told myself that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I remember. But, oh, my friends, it is. In 1979 I was appalled that the swords were made of obvious plastic, as if from the Marx toy factory, and for the especially dangerous scenes, and I kid you not, the swords were made of rubber so, I guess, to keep the advancing-in-age musketeers from hurting themselves or skewering an Austrian extra. The dubbing sounds just as horrendous today as it did back then, and the musical score is an offense to musicians everywhere.

Livvie shows up in three scenes for a total of about six minutes of screen time, in a nun’s habit. You should probably be aware you’re in for a rough time as an actress when the script calls for you to be amidst a 30-year vow of silence. But she does pipe up to vouch for her son Philippe at the climax of the picture, one of too-few lines for the actress who launched Errol Flynn, became the Maid Marian of all time, brought Jack Warner to his knees, and earned two Oscars in four years and should have claimed a third for her most daring picture of all, The Snake Pit.

So there you have it. Olivia de Havilland ended her screen career in a costume picture, which is how she started it. But it’s a picture with maybe five great moments that remind us how talented these actors were in their prime, and how much they still had to offer in the right hands and the right vehicle, which this most certainly was not.

Plastic swords and costumes that must have been scrounged from Barry Lyndon.

Note: Portions of the European version of Behind the Iron Mask are available on Youtube. Although they are dubbed in French, these segments allow a glimpse into this picture that should have been one for the ages.

Have Profile, Will Travel

Note: In honor of the showing of The Adventures of Robin Hood on TCM/U.S. during the 31 Days of Oscar, I am reprinting a classic 2011 column from my Errol & Olivia blog.

If you comb through the UCLA Warner Bros. Archives in Los Angeles, you see lots of memos about the casting of Warner Bros. pictures, with key roles going to the Warner stable of stars. In The Adventures of Robin Hood, there was no question that Errol Flynn would portray Robin of Locksley once he had become known as an action hero, or that contract player Alan Hale would portray Little John, a role he had already played once in the silent Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks 15 years earlier. When freelancer David Niven wasn’t available for Will Scarlett, contract player Patric Knowles got the part.

For a while contract player Anita Louise had been considered for Maid Marian, but Louise had just appeared with Flynn in a little medical drama called Green Light, and their chemistry had been minimal. But pickings were slim at Warner Bros. in 1937. Joan Blondell was wrong; Margaret Lindsay too. There was “the de Havilland girl,” but Hal Wallis had no confidence in little Livvie for the biggest-budget Warner Bros. picture up to that time, and continued to push for Anita. Jack Warner saw nothing special in 19-year-old de Havilland either, but he recognized the box office appeal of Olivia with Errol that had already paid off in Captain Blood and Charge of the Light Brigade, so the role went Livvie’s way.

Standard practice was to go to the bullpen for freelancers to round out the cast—you needed a rotund male and called in Gene Pallette; you needed a traditional English maid and the call went to Una O’Connor. When you sought an elegant bad guy, the first choice would be South African-born Basil Rathbone, who had cut a swath through 1930s Hollywood in pictures like The Last Days of Pompeii, A Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, and Warners’ own Captain Blood. You could get a Pallette or an O’Connor for a couple grand per picture, but Rathbone was up there around five or six G’s because of his multi-faceted set of talents, including that stunning, classical profile and handsome face, athletic ability that played younger than his 45 years (at the time of Robin Hood), and a baritone voice and approach to dialogue crafted in classical theater.

In the final shooting script for The Adventures of Robin Hood, Basil Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne—arch-rival of Sir Robin—is handicapped from the start. In their first scene together, Robin gets the drop on Sir Guy and holds him at bow-and-arrow point, forcing Guy to ride off with his men in humiliation. Sir Guy’s next sequence, a Saxon celebration in the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle, shows Rathbone’s range as a player, and why the major studios counted on him. He’s comfortable and confident in this setting, except that as written, his character is in love with virginal Maid Marian, and he’s reduced to an idle boast or two within her earshot as he tries to impress her. Then Robin Hood bursts in and spoils the party, and again Sir Guy begins to pale. A reel later, Sir Guy and his entire army are taken prisoner by Robin Hood’s band—with Maid Marian an observer.

The original (and far better) pre-production script for The Adventures of Robin Hood called for a jousting tournament to open the picture, and here Sir Guy would have been introduced more robustly, mounted on a steed and jousting with Robin to establish their rivalry. But just weeks before production commenced, Wallis cut this sequence for budgetary reasons. The new script made the odds against Sir Guy much longer because in almost every encounter, the situation favored Robin Hood. Still, we understood Gisbourne and his human wants and needs, as evidenced by his crush on Marian. At every turn the scriptwriters were stacking the odds against poor Sir Guy, so that by the time (a third of the way into the picture) that Guy boasts of outlaw Robin, “I’ll have him dangling in a week,” the audience stifles a giggle and wonders what picture this poor fellow is watching, because up to now he hasn’t made a dent Robin’s command of every situation. Still, a part of me always pulls for Sir Guy to hold his own, including the time he captures Robin at the archery tournament and almost makes him dangle. Rooting for a bad guy isn’t exactly what you’re supposed to do in an Errol Flynn picture, which to me indicates how good Rathbone was in the prime of his career.

Just a year after finishing The Adventures of Robin Hood, Basil Rathbone would find the role of his lifetime, as Sherlock Holmes in a pair of pictures at Fox. Three years later Universal would pick up both actor and character for a long-running and popular series that he would one day walk away from. For a long time I assumed that Rathbone feared type casting as Holmes, but the real reason he left Holmes and Hollywood behind had to do with marital strife and not career concerns.

Proof of Rathbone’s talent and versatility can be found in the fact that one year after walking out on Baker Street, he earned a Tony for playing Dr. Sloper in the stage version of The Heiress on Broadway. He would remain a busy actor for the remainder of his life and move from suave bad guy parts to mad doctors and crotchety old men while covering the range from horror to comedy and even sand-and-surf musicals. Basil Rathbone kept his name relevent on the big screen, television, radio, and theater. Desperate for money, he went on to tour universities for “an evening with Basil Rathbone” and make a new generation of fans.

In 1949 Basil Rathbone was knighted for services rendered to the British people, to which I say, bravo, Sir Basil! You lived a lot longer than poor Sir Guy’s, and tonight I’ll root for you like always, even though one isn’t supposed to. When you bloody Robin in the climactic duel, I’ll cheer you on and hope that just once you manage to escape the castle to fight another day. But thanks to those meddling Warner scriptwriters, it never seems to happen.