Conversations with Classic Film Stars

Interviews from Hollywood’s Golden Era

James Bawden, Ron Miller

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813174389, 9780813167107
• eBook ISBN: 9780813167114
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

James Bawden: Seeing the way people behave when they're around you, is it still fun being Cary Grant?

Cary Grant: I don't like to disappoint people. Because he's a completely made-up character and I'm playing a part. It's a part I've been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant. A friend told me once, "I always wanted to be Cary Grant." And I said, "So did I."—from the book

In Conversations with Classic Film Stars, retired journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller present an astonishing collection of rare interviews with the greatest celebrities of Hollywood's golden age. Conducted over the course of more than fifty years, they recount intimate conversations with some of the most famous leading men and women of the era, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Joan Fontaine, Loretta Young, Kirk Douglas, and many more.

Each interview takes readers behind the scenes with some of cinema's most iconic stars. The actors convey unforgettable stories, from Maureen O'Hara discussing Charles Laughton's request that she change her last name, to Bob Hope candidly commenting on the presidential honors bestowed upon him. Humorous, enlightening, and poignant, Conversations with Classic Film Stars is essential reading for anyone who loves classic movies.

III

The Leading Ladies

Anne Baxter

Interview by James Bawden and Ron Miller

Anne Baxter was a prodigious acting talent from a prestige-heavy family—her grandfather was America’s leading architect, Frank Lloyd Wright—and always seemed destined for greatness. She began acting at age eleven and went on to study with Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya and America’s Stella Adler. She made her Broadway debut in Seen, but Not Heard in her early teens and her movie debut at seventeen. While still a teen, she worked with Orson Welles in his 1942 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons.

Baxter will always be remembered as the conniving Eve Harrington in the 1950 All about Eve, for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but she already had won a 1946 Supporting Actress Oscar as the sad alcoholic in The Razor’s Edge.

Baxter also wrote a best-selling memoir, Intermission: A True Story (1976), which detailed her unsuccessful attempt to live in the Australian outback with second husband, Randolph Galt.

In her sixties, Baxter replaced Bette Davis in the role of the hotel-owning matron in TV’s Hotel series and made no appearances in feature films after that.

Setting the Scene

Both of us conducted separate interviews with Anne Baxter over the years. We have combined them for this presentation, but offer our individual memories of the circumstances of those interviews.

BAWDEN: I first interviewed Anne Baxter during a long afternoon in 1974 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Southern California’s Century City. Then I interviewed her again in the late 1970s when she was making a TV movie, Nero Wolfe, that took years to actually get on the network schedule. (The film’s star, Thayer David, had died.) When she was promoting her book Intermission in Toronto, we met again. And I visited her on the set of Hotel a year before her unexpected death.

Anne Baxter, a teen newcomer to Hollywood in 1940. Photo by Frank Powolny; courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.

MILLER: I had a long interview with Baxter in a chic West Hollywood restaurant in 1983. While filming episodes of Hotel, she was living in a nearby apartment and had walked to the interview, which was done without a network publicist present at her request. She was radiant, the picture of health. In those days, she was commuting by air weekly to her permanent home in Connecticut. She struck me as industrious and involved, a woman who probably found it hard to ever completely relax. But she was very engaging and extremely nice. I’ll never forget her brisk, purposeful stride as she headed back to her apartment after we’d said our good-byes. She looked like a very vigorous woman with a long life ahead of her.

The Interview

BAWDEN: Let’s go back to your first film, Twenty Mule Team [1940].

BAXTER: Oh, let’s not. I’d been on the stage since I was fifteen in New York. My teacher was that old sourpuss Maria Ouspenskaya. Then in 1938 David Selznick asked me, along with Montgomery Clift, to read for Tom Sawyer. Monty had bad acne right then. David had me open my mouth and examined my teeth like I was a prize horse. And both of us flunked our tests.

Two years later David asked me again to come out and read for Rebecca and [the film’s director] Alfred Hitchcock said I had made the best test but the lead at that time was going to be Ronald Colman and he was thirty-one years older. That would make the story seem to be one of robbing the cradle, so I lost again. But the test went the rounds and I had definite offers from MGM and Fox. I simply chose Fox because it was for more money. My parents were worried until it was arranged I’d room with a family friend, Nigel Bruce, and his wife. They were very strict, which is what I needed.

Then MGM asked to borrow me for Twenty Mule Team, a Wally Beery western, after Ann Rutherford was too busy, and I made my debut there. Wally Beery had very busy hands and Marjorie Rambeau said she’d protect me—and she did, very nicely. Stepped right in and would snort, “Back off, you old sea horse!” Acting with him was impossible. He’d paraphrase everything and told me to “jump right in when I stop talking.”

MILLER: You were so young then. What did you look like in 1940?

BAXTER: I had a body like a mini Mack truck and a face that looked like it was storing nuts for the winter. I was very naïve. I had been very well brought up and I was very well educated. I was precocious, I’m sure.

MILLER: Is it true that you actually were fired from the Broadway cast of The Philadelphia Story before you went to Hollywood?

BAXTER: Yes. I was fourteen and was already too busty to play an eleven-year-old.

MILLER: Even if you were pretty well developed for a young girl, it seems a testament to your acting ability that Hitchcock even considered you for the leading lady in Rebecca. Tell me about the audition.

BAXTER: They had me in a rubber girdle, laced up practically under my bosom. My knees were knocking. It was awful.

BAWDEN: After your debut at Fox, you were in one of John Barrymore’s last films, The Great Profile [1940]. Legend has it he was pretty well juiced in his final films. How did that go?

BAXTER: I was the stock ingenue. Did my first take with him and I was flailing away and Barrymore turned to director Walter Lang and said, “Does she have to swim?” He was in terrible shape. In the morning, he was so wasted that his man would have to carry him in and set him down in an easy chair. Then he’d pour Barrymore a Coke. No response. Then he’d shake in some rum flavoring and this great actor would suddenly spring to life. Amazing. Once we were waiting for a take and I asked him why he read his lines from chalkboards. Couldn’t he remember his lines? And he stood up and recited a Hamlet soliloquy. He never made a pass at me, but it was hard going for our resident vamp, Mary Beth Hughes. She bent over once to fix her stockings and he instantly leapt up to pinch her behind. If you’d asked the public of the day the greatest actor, they would have instantly responded, “John Barrymore.”

MILLER: You say you were pretty naïve back then, but can you give me an example?

BAXTER: Well, Walter Lang rushed over to apologize to me once when Barrymore cut loose with a barrage of foul language, but I didn’t even know he was swearing. The way I was raised, I didn’t even hear a four-letter word until I was eighteen. I mean that.

Here’s another example: I was autographing photos of me for fans once and my mother looked over my shoulder with a stricken look on her face and said, “What are you writing?” So I told her: “Good luck always, Anne Baxter.” Then she told me, “Your ‘L’ looks just like an ‘F,’ and that’s a very dirty word!” But the truth is I’d never heard that word before and hadn’t a clue what it meant.

MILLER: What did Fox have in mind for you? Did they see you as a romantic lead? A girl next door?

BAXTER: I wasn’t pretty enough to be used for cutesy parts. At my very best, I was attractive. I was not a face, so I never got into that rut. I was also constantly dieting to get rid of my baby fat. I was having a hard time with that and think I probably had a mild case of bulimia.

MILLER: Explain that.

BAXTER: I became a foodaholic. I loved rhubarb pies. There used to be this little place on Ventura Boulevard that made wonderful rhubarb pies. I’d buy one, drive my car onto a side road, eat the whole thing, and then spit it back into the box. I’d buy whole containers of ice cream and spit it into the disposal. It was disgusting!

BAWDEN: How did you get the lead in Jean Renoir’s Swamp Water [1941]?

BAXTER: I read for Renoir, the great French director, and he had to choose a studio girl, so he chose me.

MILLER: I imagine it helped that you spoke fluent French.

BAXTER: That, too.

BAWDEN: How did you get along with Renoir?

BAXTER: Adored him, but he was a lost soul. Kept saying, “They don’t make films here like we do in France, n’est-ce pas?” For one thing he had a pesty producer in Irving Pichel, who usually directed. He reported back to [studio boss Darryl F.] Zanuck every day on the number of minutes Jean had gotten, the number of takes, the constant tea and coffee breaks.

The movie may have been set in the Okefenokee Swamp, but all the second unit had already been done. [It was mostly filmed on the studio back lot, but a second camera crew shot some footage from the real swamp, which was interpolated into the film.] We filmed indoors on a studio stage with a re-created swamp. Jean could only clasp his arms and look horrified. He was limited in camera angles because of the transparency screens—a movement of inches and the screens would be exposed. And his English was learned from books. In conversations, he was terrible. One day he told a little girl extra to “Make some water.” He meant get her dress damp because she’d just been pulled from the swamp. Her mother was horrified, thinking he’d asked her to tinkle—and slapped his face.

I mean, he had Walter Brennan and Walter Huston running loose and just daring him to try and tone down their outrageous mugging. Then Ward Bond and Guinn Williams would wrestle to break the tension. I was on my own, frantically overdoing it, and I got bad notices that stung me.

BAWDEN: When did you know you’d been loaned to RKO for The Magnificent Ambersons?

BAXTER: When it went out as a press release. It was a straight trade: Fox got Vic Mature, I think, and he subsequently joined the studio fulltime. I’d talked with and tested for Orson Welles, but he said his heart was set on Jeanne Crain, who he’d met in the RKO commissary. Jeanne was prettier than I was but hadn’t acted as yet. RKO studio head George Schaefer made the call, much to Orson’s displeasure. His days as the studio golden boy ended when Citizen Kane failed to return a profit.

By the time I arrived, those huge sets were up—the main house was a fully functioning house built on a soundstage—everything worked, including the gas lighting. But the walls couldn’t be moved to accommodate cinematographer Stanley Cortez. No wonder he stormed around all the time.

It was a reunion with Joe Cotten, who played my father and was perfectly cast. We’d been in the tryouts of The Philadelphia Story in 1939 when Kate Hepburn had me fired because she charged I was getting big laughs. Joe had made it a point to come to my dressing room and assure me I had a future.

Dolores Costello was so motherly to me. I couldn’t believe she’d once been married to John Barrymore. She was so demure. And I had Tim Holt as my suitor, George, cast right to type. He was that way offstage.

I was nineteen at the time, new to this game. I remember we shot scenes in an icehouse so our breath would be visible. That impressed me.

I wasn’t around when Agnes Moorehead tried the scene on the staircase five different ways and each way worked. To his credit Orson always asked us for acting solutions, to try something a different way. And yes, he did make the obligatory pass at me and I made the obligatory refusal.

I saw a print in a screening room at RKO that was very long—maybe almost two hours—and it seemed draggy to me. But Orson had left on his next film adventure to Brazil when the studio head ordered Bob Wise to cut it down to 88 minutes and ship it out. I think it’s a great film, but how it would have run at 120 minutes I’m not sure—that was too long for most features in those days.

BAWDEN: In the war years you always seemed to play the girl left behind.

BAXTER: Over and over. I did get to Paramount again on loan for Five Graves to Cairo [1943], where Erich von Stroheim up and told me I’d be perfect for a sound remake of Greed! Sounds crazy—and it was—but I believed everything he said. Once he was in bed for a scene and he asked me, “How are my little babies doing?” He meant his protuberant tummy and breasts and that just broke me up. But back at Fox I did Crash Dive [1943], Sunday Dinner for a Soldier [1944], The Sullivans [1944]. I was gettin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. The Silent Era
• II. The Leading Men
• III. The Leading Ladies
• IV. The Queens of the Bs
• V. The Singing Cowboys
• VI. A Giant of Comedy
• VII. Four Very Special Stars
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index