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A Girl's Got To Breathe

Name: A Girl's Got To Breathe
Author: Donald Spoto

The Life of Teresa Wright

Donald Spoto

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A Girl's Got To Breathe

The Life of Teresa Wright

Donald Spoto

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About This Book

The actress Teresa Wright (1918–2005) lived a rich, complex, magnificent life against the backdrop of Golden Age Hollywood, Broadway and television. There was no indication, from her astonishingly difficult—indeed, horrifying—childhood, of the success that would follow, nor of the universal acclaim and admiration that accompanied her everywhere. Her two marriages—to the writers Niven Busch ( The Postman Always Rings Twice; Duel in the Sun ) and Robert Anderson ( Tea and Sympathy; I Never Sang for My Father )—provide a good deal of the drama, warmth, poignancy and heartbreak of her life story. "I never wanted to be a star, " she told the noted biographer Donald Spoto at dinner in 1978. "I wanted only to be an actress." She began acting on the stage in summer stock and repertory at the age of eighteen. When Thornton Wilder and Jed Harris saw her in an ingénue role, she was chosen to understudy the part of Emily in the original production of Our Town (1938), which she then played in touring productions. Samuel Goldwyn saw her first starring role on Broadway—in the historic production of Life with Father —and at once he offered her a long contract. She was the only actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for her first three pictures ( The Little Foxes; The Pride of the Yankees; and Mrs. Miniver ), and she won for the third film. Movie fans and scholars to this day admire her performance in the classics Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives. The circumstances of her tenure at Goldwyn, and the drama of her breaking that contract, forever changed the treatment of stars. Wright's family and heirs appointed Spoto as her authorized biographer and offered him exclusive access to her letters and papers. Major supporting players in this story include Robert Anderson, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Karl Malden, Elia Kazan, Jean Simmons, Dorothy McGuire, Bette Davis, George Cukor, Marlon Brando, George C. Scott, the artist Al Hirschfeld, Stella Adler, and more.

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Information

Publisher

University Press of Mississippi

Year

2016

ISBN

9781628460469

Topic

Media & Performing Arts

Subtopic

Film History & Criticism

CHAPTER ONE

March 4, 1943

ON THIS DATE, MORE THAN A THOUSAND GUESTS WERE SEATED AT dinner tables in the Ambassador Hotel, located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. Rechristened the Cocoanut Grove soon after the hotel opened in 1921, the former Grand Ballroom had become, hands down, the hottest nightclub in town—which it certainly was that evening.

Everything about the Grove, as frequent patrons called it, was immense; not a millimeter of space was unadorned or unpainted or left unembellished. It might have been a microcosm of Hearst’s San Simeon as Orson Welles reimagined that grand folly in Citizen Kane. Or it might have been a prototype of Disneyland, an explosion of fantasy that required another dozen years before it became, in 1955, a variant on reality right there in the Southern California desert.

The Grove’s floors were expensively tiled. In great hearths made of Italian marble, fires roared even on warm Los Angeles evenings. The elevated ceiling was awash with twinkling bulbs. The scent of night-blooming jasmine, hyacinths, lilac and orange blossoms drifted in from a tropical courtyard. A waterfall splashed down one wall. Mechanical monkeys with glowing eyes glared down from artificial palm trees saved from the set of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 movie The Sheik. The Ambassador was an extravagant testimony to Jazz Age excess, a Mediterranean-Revival palace whose private rooms, public spaces and clients defined Hollywood hedonism.

During the hotel’s first decade, Joan Crawford regularly showed up for the Charleston contests and, it was said, took home the winner’s cup almost every time. Charles Chaplin was a frequent customer, escorting this or that compliant starlet. Howard Hughes ambled in alone but strutted out with a female companion, usually a hopeful aspirant to stardom. Clara Bow made her way among the tables, winking, crooking a finger and daring some man she fancied to follow her outside or upstairs or only the bellman knew where. Sometimes on the arm of her producer and lover Joseph P. Kennedy, Gloria Swanson nodded regally to her admirers. The list of regulars was long, the names glistened from the page of the maître d’s engagement book and the gossip columns of the newspapers.

These notables were among the countless Hollywood folks who just had to be seen at the Grove. In the 1930s, regular patrons included Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers and Gary Cooper. Miss Harlow lived for a time at the Ambassador, as did John Barrymore and a score of other celebrities. On at least one occasion, Barrymore brought some live monkeys to the Grove, but they were annoying and messy—especially when they scampered up the palm trees toward their mechanical cousins and dislodged plaster cocoanuts onto the heads of such as Lucille Ball, Loretta Young, Spencer Tracy and Norma Shearer. Unlike Barrymore, these guests were not amused.

At precisely six o’clock on that evening of March 4, 1943, a platoon of waiters emerged from the hotel’s vast kitchens, balancing trays of chicken croquettes, French fried potatoes and peas. The meal was consumed with unusual haste while dozens of newspaper reporters and photographers snaked along the walls of the Grove, their pads and pencils at the ready and flashbulbs in prodigious supply.

But there was more important activity than the usual dining, dancing, flirting and business schmoozing. Patrons were not there for the food, or to hear the crooners or the dance band. By formal invitation from the Hollywood producer Walter Wanger, president of the majestically named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the crowd had gathered for the sixth time at the Cocoanut Grove, for the fifteenth annual presentation of the Oscar statuettes, honoring exceptional achievements in acting and the various technical and artistic departments of film production in 1942.¹ (For news of Oscar night, the public had to depend on newspaper reports until 1944, when the evening was first broadcast on radio; television transmission of the event began in 1953.)

Among the most lucrative movies released in 1942 were Bambi, Casablanca, The Pride of the Yankees, Mrs. Miniver, The Road to Morocco and Yankee Doodle Dandy. The most profitable male stars were Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Mickey Rooney and Bob Hope; for the fourth time, Hope was also the host of the evening’s festivities, a role he eventually undertook or shared a total of nineteen times. Betty Grable and Greer Garson headed the shorter list of bankable female stars.

The most famously photographed “pinups” were Miss Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. Gene Tierney was the Hollywood fashion icon, thanks to her dark, elusive beauty and the talents of her husband, costume designer Oleg Cassini.

During 1942, over 500 feature films were released in the United States—the greatest number ever; seventy years later, that number had dropped to fewer than 200. When the average price of a ticket to the movies at the height of World War II was 25 cents and the nation’s population was 136 million, more than 75 million Americans went to see Walt Disney’s animated feature, Bambi. Impressive though that was, Disney had hoped to match the runaway success of Gone With the Wind, which 227 million people had seen in its first release. Moviegoers were lining up two and three times to hear Vivien Leigh’s opening salvo as Scarlett O’Hara, bored with the talk of “War, war, war …” and Rhett Butler, walking into the mist as he declares his indifference to Scarlett’s future, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”—surely one of the most famous lines in book and film history.

Movies were the primary form of mass entertainment until the arrival of television sets in postwar American households. In 1943, the Office of War Information, on the alert for treasonous, subversive or even a vague critique of the government, began to censor every American movie retroactively to 1942—a massive task, since about 1,500 titles (including imports) were released in a two-year period. This remarkable if misguided scrutiny was perhaps unnecessary, as Hollywood was producing a staggering number of patriotic movies, created to inspire and support. Among these were the documentaries Memphis Belle and Why We Fight; and the features Yankee Doodle Dandy, Wake Island, Bombs Over Burma, Mrs. Miniver, Winged Victory, A Yank in the R.A.F. and Disney’s animated Technicolor feature, Victory Through Air Power. This pattern of sometimes jingoistic photoplays in fact paralleled the completion and dedication of two great national buildings in 1943, the Pentagon and the Jefferson Memorial—achievements resoundingly celebrated in movie house newsreels.

At the peak of the war effort, the average cost of a new home in America was $3,600 (the equivalent of $50,000 in 2015); the average national wage was $1,880 ($28,000 in 2015). A gallon of gas cost 15 cents, a bottle of Coca-Cola 5 cents, a new car $920 ($12,000), a first-class stamp 3 cents. For the first time, the government levied withholding taxes on wages and salaries from paychecks: the enormous cost of World War II made this Revenue Act necessary.

The war brought food rationing to America in March: there were already limits on gasoline, and now there were strict controls (by means of allocated coupons) on the amount of beef, pork, lamb, butter, cheese and canned fish that a family could purchase; the sale of poultry was not affected. This moderation imposed on the American household did not seem to affect the denizens of the Cocoanut Grove or of nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Mocambo—these and such places as the Brown Derby Restaurant were full each night.

There were more democratic forms of amusement than California nightspots. On December 31, 1942, a vast mob of hysterical teenagers jammed New York’s Times Square and blocked city traffic for hours—not for New Year’s Eve revelry, but because a twenty-seven-year-old singer named Frank Sinatra, America’s first teen idol, held forth at the Paramount Theatre. Fourteen blocks north, at the venerable Carnegie Hall, Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed in January for a sold-out audience, raising money for war relief.

In the same venue, a few months later, the sudden illness of the New York Philharmonic’s conductor required a last-minute substitution. To the rescue came a relatively unknown twenty-five-year-old musician named Leonard Bernstein, who at once became the darling of New York’s classical music scene. The Times noted that the audience was “wildly demonstrative” by the end of the evening, and that Bernstein gave “a thrillingly good performance” that made for “a good American success story … a triumph that filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves.”

Across the country, Americans in record numbers were reading hardcover books: best-selling novels of 1943 included Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy and Vera Caspary’s Laura—all of which were quickly turned into polished and popular motion pictures. Poets and philosophers found wide readerships, too—among them, Reinhold Niebuhr and Jean-Paul Sartre, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Stephen Vincent Benét, Archibald MacLeish and Edna St. Vincent Millay. On Broadway, theatregoers had a choice of seventy-three shows running in 1943—among them Life With Father, a popular holdover since 1939 that endured until 1947; Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March and Montgomery Clift; and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s innovative musical drama Oklahoma!

In 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his eleventh year in the White House, became the first president to travel by airplane: in January, he went to Morocco to discuss the progress of World War II with England’s prime minister, Winston Churchill.

On America’s home front, there were pitched battles of another sort. In Mobile, Alabama, twelve African-American workers were given promotions in their jobs at a shipyard—an action that triggered a violent protest by Southern white laborers. Race riots also occurred in California, New York, Michigan, Texas—wherever a number of non-Caucasian manual workers were promoted or sometimes merely hired.

The Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News blamed the national riots on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts toward racial equality: “In Detroit, a city noted for the growing impudence and insolence of its Negro population, an attempt was made to put your preachments [about racial integration] into practice, Mrs. Roosevelt!”

Similarly, Representative Martin Dies of Texas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, absurdly assigned blame for the Michigan riots on Japanese-Americans. It was these citizens, said Dies, “who had infiltrated Detroit’s Negro population to spread hatred of the white man and disrupt the war effort.” His committee had already gone on record stating unequivocally that they had information on an English writer named Christopher Marlowe, who was now apparently at work in America as a member of the Communist Party. Never mind that Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright, had died in 1593.

Furthermore, according to the committee, a nefarious Greek writer named Mr. Euripides was preaching class warfare right here in America. The committee briefly considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so: as that proud racist Senator John E. Rankin of Mississippi said, “After all, the KKK is an old American institution!” Such was the startling moral intelligence of a powerful government organization, seeking whom it might devour for decades to come.

Things fared better in the nation’s medical laboratories. Penicillin had first been given to an American patient in 1942, when the drug was imported from England. (Alexander Fleming had developed it there in 1928.) Clinical trials of penicillin began in the United States in 1943, when it was proven to be an effective antibacterial agent. By the end of the year, production was greatly increased and made available for Allied troops fighting in Europe; infections had to be treated with multiple injections of the drug, and two million doses were rushed to soldiers wounded during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The general population in the United States had access to penicillin from March 1945.

Daily, the atrocities of World War II continued. As the movie business was celebrating itself that evening in March 1943, more than 1,000 French Jews were being deported to Maidanek, where only three people survived, and 34,000 Dutch Jews were shipped to Mauthausen and to Auschwitz (where Dr. Josef Mengele performed atrocious tortures, his “medical experiments” on doomed victims). Very few lived to see the end of the war. In the Ukraine, 23,000 Jews who had been expelled from Hungary were executed by machine-gunfire or by being buried alive. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Greece was arrested and subsequently eradicated at Auschwitz.

There was dissent. Hitler ordered the deportation and execution of Jews in Occupied Denmark, but his orders were ineffective: many Danish Christians risked their lives by secretly transporting endangered Jews at night by rowboat to neutral Sweden. Within Germany, members of the student anti-Nazi resistance movement in Munich floated banners urging “Down With Hitler!” and “Long Live Freedom!” For their acts of moral outrage, all the young people were apprehended and beheaded within days. In Berlin, Hitler gleefully watched the lynching of captured Allied pilots.

Catholic bishops in Belgium excommunicated Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. But perhaps the most effective and influential protest against the ideology was lodged—from the earliest days of the tyranny right through to the end of World War II—by the German nobleman, Count Clemens August von Galen. A highly respected prelate, he used his position as a Roman Catholic cardinal and a member of one of Germany’s oldest aristocratic families to oppose openly every program of the Nazi party and the SS right up to open confrontation with the highest German leaders.

Von Galen’s thunderous weekly anti-Nazi sermons in Münster Cathedral were printed and circulated throughout the country, where they inspired countless protest movements. But Hitler could not touch the cardinal: von Galen was a revered member of the historic German nobility, born in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and linked to a heroic and distinguished family. He was also the living and beloved symbol of the old province of Westphalia, which the Führer could not risk alienating.

The air forces of the British and American armies escalated their attacks, bombing noncombatant locations as well as military targets in Germany. In two hours, Britain’s Royal Air Force killed 45,000 civilians living in Hamburg, while among the targeted cities, Kassel, Pforzheim and Mainz were almost obliterated.

The United States...