You're Much Too Modest

It is a complicated business, and we are very insecure, we actors. We all feel--and fear--we are going to be found out at any moment. Someone is going to point and say, 'You are really not very good, are you?'
--Julie Christie

The Siren, as she's often said, likes and admires actors, more perhaps than some of the profession's members like themselves. Like all artists, the good ones usually have an accurate sense of their own work. But over her years of obsessive reading, the Siren has seen cases where something throws off the radar.

Not always, of course. Katharine Hepburn rued the reception of Sylvia Scarlet but was clear-headed enough to tell people, much later, that the film was simply ahead of its time. Peter Ustinov acknowledged the reverence accorded Lola Montes, but added in Dear Me that "there were precious few signs of this destiny during filming." Joan Fontaine had a lousy time making Rebecca but has said more than once that she knows it will always be her most celebrated role. Others, like Barbara Stanwyck, were too coolly professional to run down their own work.

Now and again, though, you'll come across an actor dismissing something that was good to great. The Siren is fascinated by these instances, not from smug hindsight, but because it goes against the common perception of stars as egomaniacs. You can speculate about the reasons, beyond genuine variance in taste, why an actor might be too hard on his own work. Maybe the actor hated making the movie. Maybe the movie was a box-office bomb, and the actor figured the public and the critics at the time were the best judge. Maybe the movie didn't fit with the image the actor wanted to project. Some, like Norma Shearer, never warmed to a great film (in her case, The Women, an unhappy experience for her) and instead venerated a lesser one; Shearer was fond of her performance in Romeo and Juliet, an opinion not widely shared these days.

And sometimes the actor just had, or learned to have, contempt for the entire business.

Here's a small collection, then, of actors being more critical of themselves and their movies than the Siren, and in most cases plenty of others, would say is warranted.

According to the reference books which consider it worthwhile collating such trivia, I have made about seventy films. Glancing down the list, I find I made things like Action in Arabia, Lured, and The Scarlet Coat. I can only assume that I was paid handsomely for them, but I am at a complete loss as to what action there was in Arabia, or who was lured where, and why. As to the scarlet coat, did I wear it, and if not who did?

George Sanders, in Memoirs of a Professional Cad, shrugging off Lured, an excellent thriller from the great Douglas Sirk that features our man George at his rakish best. The other two the Siren hasn't seen. The Scarlet Coat--a drama about Benedict Arnold in which Sanders, by some dreadful misjudgment, was NOT cast as the infamous traitor--was directed by John Sturges, and the Siren is willing to bet it's better than the actor says. Action in Arabia--well, he may have us there, but look at the synopsis and tell me you're not intrigued.

The worst picture, bar none, that I ever made.

Mary Pickford's tribute to Rosita in Sunshine and Shadow. While the collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch seems to have been happy at the time, Pickford later claimed the film gave her no end of trouble. She carried a grudge against Rosita for the rest of her life, not including it in the films she later handed over for preservation. It was extremely well-reviewed, however, and Scott Eyman has good words for it in his Lubitsch bio. The Siren hasn't seen Rosita (hard to track down) but come on, it's Lubitsch. How bad can it be?

She was in the middle of complaining about what a piece of crap the film was, and how lucky Rita Hayworth was because she turned it down…

Ava Gardner encounters Farley Granger in Rome during the filming of The Barefoot Contessa, as told in Granger's Include Me Out. Gardner, bless her, had little good to say about her entire career, as can be seen in her famous interview with Rex Reed. True, not everyone feels the love for The Barefoot Contessa, but the Siren has some heavyweights on her side.

You liked that?

Bette Davis' incredulous response to Whitney Stine's praise for Beyond the Forest. Davis spent years telling everyone the picture stank. The Siren says this King Vidor is a lot better than Duel in the Sun. Molly Haskell called it Davis' "wildest and most uncompromising film;' Kim Morgan admires it, too.

Kitsch.

In Maximilian Schell's documentary, that's Marlene Dietrich's word for most of her Hollywood work, including the glorious execution scene in Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored and, if memory serves, The Blue Angel. Whether or not Dietrich, at that point in her life, truly believed it was all mostly kitsch is an open question, but say it she did, with the full force of the German pronunciation.

Movies bore me, especially my own.

Robert Mitchum discusses his career. In contrast to Dietrich, the Siren believes Mitchum meant this, to the extent that he ever meant anything he said. Although Mitchum always did have good things to say about The Night of the Hunter. Which brings us to...

I played in the movie, which was about the battle between good and evil. Parts of the film were excellent, but it was not fully sustained because Mr. Laughton did not want to 'ruin' Robert Mitchum's image by having him a play a thoroughly wicked man. In the earlier days of films, it would have been considered a triumph to play evil convincingly.

That, along with a terse paragraph about Charles Laughton's admiration for D.W. Griffith, constitutes Lillian Gish's entire tribute to The Night of the Hunter in The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. She did express similar thoughts to her director during filming, but Laughton biographer Simon Callow maintains that Laughton's allusion to Mitchum's image was basically a joke. Gish's curt assessment, and weird critique of Mitchum's seductively chilling work, may have owed something to dissatisfaction with her billing. The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties quotes her agent as saying that when Gish saw the movie poster, with only Mitchum and Shelley Winters advertised, she "blew her top."

Ridiculous. I made the picture because I couldn't afford a suspension--not with a daughter, a husband and a household to support.

Maureen O'Hara's verdict on Sinbad the Sailor, maybe not a pinnacle of art but an absolutely corking movie the Siren has adored since childhood. For the record, O'Hara is delightful in it. O'Hara also disliked Forbidden Street, another one the Siren thought quite fine. This Land Is Mine gets passing reference in two sentences, neither of which mention the director. Then again, good movies that actors neglect in their memoirs could be a whole different post. E.g.…

The four pictures I made at Warner Brothers were not great pictures, but they were very good pictures and excellent entertainment. In their category I do not see their like being as well made today.

The Siren's perennial crush, Basil Rathbone, gives backhanded praise to Tovarich, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Dawn Patrol. Those four movies, all of them lovable and three of them eternal classics, take up just under two (2) pages of Rathbone's charmingly off-topic autobiography. Rathbone allows as how Errol Flynn was "monstrously lazy and self-indulgent," albeit genial, and Olivia de Havilland was very pretty. On the other hand, you do get quite a bit about Rathbone's dogs.

For its time, Side Street was a good-looking, well-made film that was not able to rise above the banality of its story.

Farley Granger again. The Siren says Granger, a smart man, underrated this excellent Anthony Mann noir. At least Granger gave himself credit for Strangers on a Train and Senso. Another actor with the same last name was much more cutting about his own career.

I've never done a film that I'm proud of.

Stewart Granger's oft-quoted line wasn't strictly true, as he did admit liking a few roles, such as Saraband for Dead Lovers, but he never thought much of his own abilities.

I don't want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures.

Greta Garbo. Of course. When the Siren first encountered that remark she thought Garbo kind of had a point, until she found out the star was talking about the splendid Flesh and the Devil.

Mediocre.

Montgomery Clift's summation of his work as Matt Garth in Red River. He was no huge fan of the overall film, either, particularly the end, and on that aspect he has some critical company. But when Clift watched it in a cinema, he knew Red River would make him a star. And so, according to biographer Patricia Bosworth, Clift went on one last pre-fame drinking binge, applying himself to the task with such intensity that he wound up in a New Orleans jail.

A crock of shit.

Humphrey Bogart offers his opinion of Billy Wilder's beloved Sabrina to a reporter on set. If he ever revised that evaluation, the Siren has not located where.

I did things like Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. I don't know what those films were about. The women I played in them were not very empowered.

Julie Christie. We can debate Heaven Can Wait--the Siren enjoys it--but surely most of us hope she's changed her mind about Shampoo.

The picture was a big hit in spite of my wooden performance. I have only kept one review during my life. It is of Dodsworth and appeared in the Detroit Free Press. 'In this picture we were privileged to see the great Samuel Goldwyn's latest discovery--all we can say about this actor? Is that he is tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.' It has the place of honor in my lavatory.

Thanks to William Wyler's unvarnished manner and multiple takes, David Niven hated making Dodsworth. But he's very good, better than he was as Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights, during which shoot William Wyler made Niven equally miserable a few years later.

There was the first of several visits to Italy to act for various aspiring Fellinis and Antonionis, among them Dario Argento, in Profondo Rosso, a.k.a. Deep Red; Deep Red Hatchet Murders; Dripping Deep Red; The Hatchet Murders and (why?) The Sabre Tooth Tiger. It could be said that there is often a connection between the absence of quality in a film and the number of its aliases.

David Hemmings on one of his more famous movies, from his 2004 memoirs. The Siren adds that when Glenn Kenny encountered Hemmings in Toronto just after 9/11, the actor was not so harsh.

Well, that wasn't much.

Joan Bennett, overheard as she left a 1981 tribute screening of The Reckless Moment. Given the present-day reputation of Max Ophuls' film, and Bennett's superlative performance, this is probably the biggest jaw-dropper of the bunch. It was not an opinion Bennett reached only in crotchety old age; Brian Kellow's biography records her saying years before that The Reckless Moment was "nothing exceptional…not like The Woman in the Window or Scarlet Street." Argento fans can also take note of Kellow's observation, about Suspiria's later cult status, that "it is unlikely that Joan knew or cared."

Intimacy at the Movies

A couple of weeks ago I was two-thirds done with the New York Film Festival. Certified Copy and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives were mind-blowing, especially the former, I loved Another Year, and my favorite, Mysteries of Lisbon, was so good I'd sit through all four-and-a-half hours again. (The camerawork reminded me of Ophuls. I am still trying to write that one up.) It was glorious, it was rejuvenating.

But my old-movie habit wasn't being fed. Sometime around the two-week mark the withdrawal became too much and I posted on Facebook and Twitter that I was going to dig up a pre-1960 movie and watch it to the last frame. Maybe some followers thought I was being cute about how much I needed to do this. I was as serious as All Quiet on the Western Front.

And I watched Ivy. And it was good. So good I started to wonder if this was simple addiction. It did feel uncomfortably like I was one of those people who went to sleep in Shreveport and woke up in Abilene. "Come on, Oscar nominee from 1934, let's you and me get drunk." But surely nobody ever wound up in rehab because they couldn't stop quoting Bette Davis movies. I can, in fact, stop anytime I like. Don't look at me like that. I have a Netflix copy of Zodiac right there on my dressing table, you just can't see it because it's under the eyeshadow palette. I've had it three weeks and haven't watched it yet, but I'm telling you I could watch it right now if I felt like it and if my daughter weren't already downstairs watching the 1940 Blue Bird. I just don't want to. I'll watch Zodiac this weekend. Right now I need to keep watching old movies, I have too much else going on to quit something that isn't harming me anyway. Hey, did anybody else notice some benevolent soul has posted Hold Back the Dawn on Youtube?

I'm not going to quit--I don't have a problem--but I often have stretches of wondering why I do this, aside from the prestige of attending swank parties and announcing that I blog about movies a lot of people have never heard of, let alone seen. And I have had a small moment of clarity.

When I find a blog I like, I often read through the archives, and I was going through Tom Shone's blog, Taking Barack to the Movies. He writes mostly about contemporary movies and some politics, in his graceful and very witty style, and I love it even when he's making me feel guilty for not watching Zodiac. I found a post called "Best Films of the 1930s." Not that I am necessarily more interested in that topic than Sam Rockwell or anything, but I read it, and pulled up right here:

The films I most prize are the ones that look normal, and sound normal, and feel normal, but unfurl with the sinuous, sneaky logic of a dream. Movies that cast a spell. I don't mean surrealism — not a fan. I mean a big-budget studio picture that despite the involvement of hundreds of people, from money-grubbing producers to eagle-eyed costumiers, seems to have bloomed from the unconscious of a drowsy Keats...I recently had a spirited debate with my friend Nat about my theory that one cannot know and enjoy a picture made before you were born with quite the same casual intimacy of a film made in your lifetime. That older film can be 100 times better but it still doesn't breathe the same air you do in the same way that even a cruddy picture produced yesterday can.

Interesting. Absolutely bloody fascinating, in fact, because it's the precise opposite of the way I react to new versus old movies. It is this:


Some contemporary films do cast a marvelous spell for me; Avatar, the aforementioned NYFF films. I want to see more that can do the same. But if I want a film to speak to my most secret Siren soul, something to forget my life and the venue and possibly even the day of the week and whoever is sitting next to me, I'm looking at immensely better odds if I go pre-1960. Casual intimacy for me usually comes in black and white or Technicolor. Or sepia. Or Color by Deluxe. I've been intimate with sepia and Deluxe.

I don't want to argue (much), I want to attach an endnote. Clearly, it's true for Tom. Today we had coffee and I told him I was thinking about writing this and he's already got a lovely, lucid response right here. (This has got to be a personal best in terms of slow composition. I am now so slow that someone responds before I post.) His observation is probably true for most moviegoers. A chart based on the moviewatching feelings of the public as a whole might look like this:

Item 1. Percentage of People Who Feel Casual Intimacy With a Cruddy Picture Produced Yesterday

Item 2. Percentage of People Who Feel Casual Intimacy With a Movie That's 100 Times Better But Is Older Than They Are

Item 3. Percentage of People Who Feel Casual Intimacy With Anything That Was Shot Before 1960 and/or Has Bette Davis

But the Siren is smack in the middle of Item 3, with most of her patient readers, god love 'em.

What is with us?

There is a certain Charlie Brown impulse at work for me, definitely. The Social Network is all over the Web, so I don't feel a need to write it up when every major critic and at least a dozen highly talented bloggers got there first. But see this one over here, gathering dust on IMDB with just two cursory external reviews? Not enough people are watching it. This movie needs me, Linus.

I hope nobody brings up nostalgia. I realize I am touchy on this issue, but gad I hate having that word attached to my movie tastes. Here's the moment from my girlhood when I realized nostalgia was bunk. I had just watched some damp-eyed TV documentary about this great swingin' party that I missed called the 1960s. And I said something to Mom along the lines of "Gee, you must have loved the 1960s, it looks like so much more fun than right now." And Mom (she might not even remember this) looked me in the eye and said, "What I remember about the '60s is that every time I got to liking a musician he died. And every time I got to thinking here's a person who can make the world a better place, somebody went out and shot him."

Nostalgia is for people who don't read much history, I think.

I could blame my parents, and have, like when Dennis brought up early viewing a few months back. They left me alone with the TV and gateway drugs like Busby Berkeley and John Ford and Vincente Minnelli and Shirley Temple (is Alida done with that one yet? OK, she's still watching). I could watch anything I wanted if it was old, but if I wanted to go to a current movie, my mother in particular was convinced that explicit sex or excessive screen violence would warp my mental development. See Raging Bull at too tender an age and the next thing you know I'd be under the patio torturing chipmunks or something. I need hardly add that this wasn't ironclad reasoning by my mother. I would watch the original Scarface or Busby Berkeley pushing the camera under the chorus girls' legs and believe me, I got it. My father was a great deal more laissez-faire; when I was about 12 years old he caught me carefully dog-earing the dirty parts of Lady Chatterley's Lover and all I got was a couple of raised eyebrows and "Time for dinner." But when they were deciding what I could go see at the local cinema he deferred to Mom. I'm pretty sure that I am one of the only film writers in captivity who didn't see an R-rated movie until they were actually, chronologically 17 years old.

Result was that I grew up watching old movies and thinking this was the way movies were supposed to look, lush or spare, shadowy or sparkling, the camera lingering or gliding and no such thing as acne or pores. And this was how a movie was supposed to sound, resonant, highly individual voices speaking wonderful dialogue against the gentle sonic hiss of the soundtrack, a score trailing the action like a cloud of perfume. Without those things, I can still be enthralled. But sometimes the lack of them is a small barrier to intimacy. "I see you have pores. Gosh no darling, of course it doesn't matter. I've seen them before. Is that a lamp on the side table, sweetness? You know, if we switch it on, we'll have light coming from three points…"

As usual, I wind up going to my commenters for the real insight. There's the friend who said simply, "There's something in the rhythms of these movies that's in tune with your own." There's David Ehrenstein, who maintains that "the 30s, not the 70s, was the great period for American commercial filmmaking," citing James Whale, Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor as directors doing genuinely experimental work. And there's Arthur S., who once remarked here that it isn't nostalgia if what you're watching is actually more daring and more radical than what's playing at the multiplex. There's an overarching style to classic cinema, but within it you can see astonishing variation and innovation, like poets ringing changes on sonnets or terza rima.

It is, essentially, an aesthetic preference like any other, one that was probably imprinted early by the circumstances of my childhood. Which brings me to my own children, now safely asleep. They watch a lot of Pixar, which is fine--Up and Wall*E? Brilliant. Spell-casters for sure. And heavily influenced by classic Hollywood. I haven't watched that many old movies with my kids. At ages seven and four they are already more in tune with popular culture than Mom. That's good in a lot of ways. Dragging Astaire and Rogers into everyday conversation didn't exactly make me queen of the Alabama schoolyard. Maybe I should just let my brood continue like that.

Fat chance. I'm ordering Chaplin at Keystone for them, and then I'm going to bed.

"You Don't Wanna Know About How Frank She Was:" A Conversation with Marylyn Roh About Her Mother, Mary Astor

About two weeks ago, the Siren logged into her email and found a note from one Marylyn Roh of Utah. Subject heading: Mary Astor.

I just crossed your blog postings about my mother, Mary Astor. Yes, I am that child of custody you mentioned, Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe (Roh). (6/15/32)

That got the Siren’s attention, all right.

…Always I learn more things each time I read something about Mom, knowing that much must be taken with a grain of salt.It was fun reading. I don't blog or Facebook, but if you'd like to know stuff about her, that you don't already know, I'll be glad to add my two bits. I just received a bio book of Ann Harding by Scott O'Brien which I helped him with a bit in that way. Mom and Ann did Holiday together - she was expecting me during the making of that picture.

I'm always surprised that Mom still has so many fans all over the world - she died 9/1987.

The Siren wrote back immediately to say that in our corner of the Web, the name Mary Astor still means a great deal. Last week, for example, the Siren watched Meet Me in St. Louis with her daughter and was entranced all over again with one of Mary Astor's small moments. It's the scene where the father tells them they are moving to New York and then, in a quintessentially male gesture, tries to ameliorate this catastrophe by making them eat cake. He cuts a huge piece for Astor; she makes a weary face, takes her fork, cuts off one finger-size sliver and slides it onto her plate. There is so much in that little cake maneuver--her unhappiness over the move, her resignation that she isn't going to change her husband's mind, her still wanting him to know she's upset. Watching Mary Astor in even the least of her many movies always yields such a moment, and it's why so many cinephiles treasure her memory.

Well, Marylyn turned out to be a joy, and she was happy to give some sharp, forthcoming answers to the Siren’s questions about her mother and her own life as a child of Golden Age Hollywood.

Cobbled together from several different emails, here is what we talked about.

For background on my discussion with Marylyn, you can check my old post, as well as this beautiful Slant Magazine essay by the awesome Dan Callahan. One of Marylyn's grandchildren, Andrew Yang, has a blog where he writes of his famous great-grandmother from time to time, and if you click through you can see a wonderful, rare photo of Astor with James Dean. See also this great L.A. Times blog post, about the custody battle for Marylyn, by the ever-excellent writer (and Siren Facebook pal) Larry Harnisch.

Your mother is one of the few Golden Age actresses, aside from her friend Bette Davis, who talked extensively in her memoirs about technique and preparing for roles. Did you ever see any of these preparations, or did she talk to you about them?

No, the only prep I witnessed was how she memorized her scripts. She took ten matches and counted how many times she took to memorize a paragraph or scene. With her gone from 5:30 am to midnight or so, I didn't see any preparation, even when I was on set.

Did you ever spend time on her sets? Was it fun, or a chore?
Yes, many hours on the set when the nanny was off. I met many stars over the years. But if you knew me, you'd know I have never been hooked on celebrity. They were not the people they were on film. They were just doing their job. I had a crush at age nine on Bogie. Heh heh. On Meet Me in St. Louis, I met Judy and the rest of the cast. She was darling in those years. Little Women gave me the chance to have lunch at the commissary with Liz Taylor. Lavender-eyed beauty, always late on the set. Mom was ALWAYS on time--which she gave to me. Fun most of the time, but tedious when all you really do is sit around and wait for the cue to get up and "act." Even though I had acting talent, I am grateful to have stayed clear of that kind of life.

Have to tell you this "funny" before leaving this question. We were in the mountain location for Brigham Young, Frontiersman in Big Bear, Calif., (1939?) and it was hot and out in the fields with horses and equipment all around. There had been an unbearably long silence. This seven-year-old could stand it no longer. Apparently, the cast was doing their lines out of my hearing range, and M was a part of it. I yelled out, "IS SHE WORKING YET?” They had to do the whole scene entirely over again. Bux bux bux. $$

Are you laughing yet? M was really sore at me.

I am laughing, because I can hear one of my seven-year-olds doing the same thing. When I wrote about her before, I said it was evident to me that acting never engaged Astor's full intelligence. Do you agree? What sort of intellectual outlets did she rely on--books, current events, socializing with like-minded people?
She was a rabid reader of heavy-duty history books mostly. She was definitely multitalented. She did put her all into her roles, for sure. She was a legend. A very unique personality. You either loved her or couldn't stand her! Years ago during World War II she knitted socks for the service men. She enjoyed playing the piano, and was an avid classical music fan. Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Gershwin, et al. Read in her first book of how she stopped singing.

Brilliant mind; she was self-taught because she left school after 8th grade. Remember that her dad, Otto Langhanke, had $$ in his eyes once she entered the beauty contest. She didn't win, but he hauled her off to Jesse Lasky's office for an interview. She was deeply scarred by ol' Otto. What greed!




As for socializing--her 3rd husband, Mike Del Campo, was a playboy and they did some heavy-duty nightclubbing. But she hated it because she was the one who had to get up to get to the studio. Mike was gorgeous, and at age seven what does a little girl (me) know about playboys, nightlife, the hot-and-heavy and seedy side of the industry. My mother divorced him because of his not being dependable, not a “husband,” which she couldn't maintain anyway with her career--and he was in the RCAF in England. He was a lush and an opportunist. Nice enough, and I really liked him a lot, if and when I saw him. After their split, Mom and I lived in a huge Georgian mansion with my baby brother, and servants. She threw parties; Bogie and I chatted for a bit. He was nice.




Although she never says so explicitly in her two autobiographies, it seems that John Barrymore was the real love of your mother's life, and that he had a huge influence on her acting as well. By far the most heartbreaking passage in A Life on Film is her encounter with him shortly before he died; you can see how protective she was of his memory. Did you have the same impression? Did she ever speak of him to you?

Oh my yes. Again ol' Otto got in the way. [Note: Astor said Langhanke’s influence made Barrymore despair of the relationship with her, and Barrymore moved on to Dolores Costello.] Yet here was a non husband-type that might have been my father. She had to make a choice. Otto was a toughie. No thanks. JB taught her elocution for two years when sound came along and actors dropped away like flies because of their lousy speaking voices, and M, as you know, had a perfect speaking voice, without her Midwest twang. She told me a lot about "Jack" Barrymore, but probably not much more than you know from your sources. Yes, that was a sad encounter. They looked fabulous onscreen together, viz. Beau Brummel.

Astor was also very frank, in a way most actresses aren't, about the psychological difficulty of making the transition to “mother” roles when she was still under 40 and attractive. Did you see any impact from that at home?

You don't wanna know about how frank she was. I’m sometimes accused of the same behavior and I shrink with horror at the idea.

I didn’t see the difficulty especially. I think she felt the fall from more specialized roles. She was an active alcoholic, and the 40s were especially hard on her. Although the change to TV appearances took its toll on her, it encouraged her to finally begin writing as she always wanted to. She didn't feel glamorous any more. It was too much trouble to be dressed up, to go to the set. Both my brother and I were in boarding schools; she was married off and on. What kind of life is that?



I don’t want to pry too much…
Pry away girl!

All right then. When did you see her alcoholism come into full force? Did she quit drinking permanently, or take it up again later?

Let's put it this way. I imagine M had been drinking fairly heavily a long time before I noticed it. When I was a teen coming home on weekends from boarding school, my stepfather [fourth husband Thomas Gordon Wheelock] and she were heavy at it. They always had weekend drinking friends over and it would get louder and louder--one guy was a songwriter and another played whore-house piano. HA! My sainted mother gave me rum and cokes (deadly) to drink during my 14th summer. Eek! While I drank with my husband years later, I only remember one time I was actually out of it! Never came near being addicted. I haven't had anything heavy since 1972.

I know she at one time got so bad she did a job on her wrists in the bathtub, my sister-in-law found her, and my brother was booked for questioning. I know that in her young New York theatre years, she'd party with drug-lit people. I imagine she did her share of heavy everything. She had the reputation of never drinking on the set.

Did you want to know this much?! There was actually a two-year stretch when she was writing she was dry. But then she was back to square one when her Siamese kitty was killed by a German shepherd before her eyes. So yes, she took it up then--and until about 1985--because she had to stay in the Motion Picture Country Hospital. She was there until her death. Emphysema, heart disease. And, obviously, she HAD to quit smoking--at last!

There have been many instances of children of stars who grew up bitter and maladjusted. You, however, seem to have turned out secure and happy, with a genuine admiration for your mother--this after being the subject of one of Hollywood's most famous custody disputes. Do you have any observations about life as the child of a star?
Well, I'll tell you, I don't know about being all that secure, or "unmaladjusted!" I have chronic anxiety, for one thing. I was married for 57 years to Frank Roh. We had four children, then 33 grand and great-grand children. I think about schoolmate Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brian, who were deadly doted on by their parents on the set. I'm glad I never got into the business.

I loved my mother, but was usually scared of her. I never won. She was always right. I was always “Mary Astor's daughter,” which in a way was a burden, being only recognized as such. I was her "shadow" for years--not good! (Boring! Are you asleep yet?)



My favorite Mary Astor performance (and that of many other film writers) is her superb work in Dodsworth, the movie she was making during the legal battle over you.

Of course! It was also her favorite of them all.

Which of her movies are your favorites? Are there any relatively obscure movies that you think people should seek out?
I think Red Dust is pretty sultry. I love The Maltese Falcon over and over, and Little Women and Meet Me in St. Louis. I'm a silents fan, so any of those are fun. (I'm also a Chaplin fan.)



There isn't a lot of material out there about your mother's waning years. Can you fill in any of the blanks?

She wanted it that way, just to kind of blend in with the scenery when she worked mostly in television; those years aren't covered in her two books. I can’t really fill things in. I didn't see her much in those years; I was married in 1950 and in my own world of a teen mother.

Was novel-writing a large source of contentment for her?
She loved it, but her subject matter was a bit too lurid for me. And boring. A Life on Film and Mary Astor: My Story were readable and were best sellers for a short time. My favorite chapter in ALOF: "What It’s Like to Kiss Clark Gable." Heh heh.

I read A Place Called Saturday, which I guess fulfills your adjective "lurid," as it's about a woman who is raped, conceives a child and refuses to have an abortion.

You know, Farran, frankly I had to force myself to read two of her novels, beside the bios. She definitely had a talent and a way with words, but to me, they were just boring. She probably took snippets of her life as an abused child and experiences. She had a great imagination as well. That's what made her good at her crafts of writing and acting. She couldn't speak in front of people without a script though. No teleprompters in those days!

She had talent, alright. She also was an avid reader of anything she could get her hands on, even the medicine bottles around her. (She told me that she always looked around for something to read. That's pretty desperate. Ha!) With me, it's crosswords. It infuriated her that I couldn't read like she could; I had astigmatism as a child and now. She also played the piano, (The Great Lie), painted and sculpted, and was an avid "birder." She loved nature. She didn't really like people very much. She was pretty much "on stage" at any one time, i.e., the center of attention.




How often did you visit her at the Motion Picture Country House? Was she happy there?

M lived about 10 years at the MPCH. She had her own little cottage with her personal belongings. She ate her meals in the common dining room, she had her own little table, so she wouldn’t have to listen to the "old folks" and their "organ recitals"--my kidney this, my bladder did that, my eyes this, my heart that. Organs! (Was she funny or not!) She was happy enough there where she could do her writing away from “people.” She couldn't “stand all those old people,” she told me. She also claimed it was hard for her to see her peers at the place leave the planet before her. “Why can't I go too,” she'd say. She made it to 81, in spite of how badly she treated her body.

Yes, I visited her as often as I could, but I had children, and she couldn't stand them for more than 15 minutes. I also lived at a distance--the final years, a three-hour drive from the mountains--ironically, back in Big Bear, Calif. We had a set-to my last visit, where she simply told me to GO! I went, and never saw her alive again. She died four months after.


What made her a unique actress?

I believe it's the various painful experiences she suffered throughout her life. Abuse, early widowhood, four husbands, her own temperament, alcoholism, and her own drive for perfection! She was scarred by a lot of it, yet she was indomitable, picked herself up and carried on, in spite of three tries at suicide.

You knew all that though, right?


Many thanks, Marylyn, for giving so generously of your time and memories.

Say hi to your readers and tell them I appreciate their support for Mary. She would have loved it, and would have written a few comments with her own special wit.


(Except for the stills from Beau Brummel, Dodsworth and Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, all pictures are courtesy of Marylyn Roh. From top: Marylyn's favorite picture of her mother and herself. Next: "This is Mom and her green 1934 (?) Cadillac LaSalle in front of the house where I was a new baby. It was a wonderful Spanish home in the area of a lot of stars' homes in Toluca Lake, Calif. Bing and Bob were just down the street. Harold Arlen lived across the little manmade lake from us." Next, a publicity shot of a young and gorgeous Astor. Finally, Marylyn as a young mother, aged 20.)

Women's Costumes at the Movies: Faux Fashion Blogger Edition

My final defeat, which made me cry real tears, came at the end of [Pandora's Box], when [G.W. Pabst] went through my trunks to select a dress to be 'aged' for Lulu's murder as a streetwalker in the arms of Jack the Ripper. With his instinctive understanding of my tastes, he decided on the blouse and skirt of my very favorite suit. I was anguished. "Why can't you buy some cheap little dress to be ruined? Why does it have to be my dress?" To these questions I got no answer till the next morning, when my once lovely clothes were returned to me in the studio dressing room. They were torn and foul with grease stains. Not some indifferent rags from the wardrobe department but my own suit, which only last Sunday I had worn to lunch at the Adlon Hotel! Josifine hooked up my skirt, I slipped the blouse over my head, and I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn't care what happened to me...

I did not realize until I saw Pandora's Box in 1956 how marvelously Mr. Pabst's perfect costume sense symbolized Lulu's character and her destruction. There is not a single spot of blood on the pure-white bridal stain in which she kills her husband. Making love to her wearing the clean white peignoir, Alva asks, "Do you love me, Lulu?" "I? Never a soul!" It is in the worn and filthy garments of the streetwalker that she feels passion for the first time--come to life so that she may die.
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The Siren was recently designated a fashion blogger by a European site called Wikio, an honor that left her equal parts amused, flattered and puzzled. Aside from her annual rant about the costume awards at the Oscars, a tribute to Mary Astor's makeup and a brief series of posts about perfume, the Siren can't recall saying much about fashion here at her Web outpost, although certainly clothing and makeup rank high on her list of semi-private obsessions. Yet there she is, right next to the black-belt shoppers of Fashionista and seven notches below the cool gaze of the Sartorialist, who would probably stop the Siren in the street right around the same time Dorothy Lamour showed up in hell with a platter of Mai Tais.

Still, the unexpected accolade made the Siren start thinking about costumes in film. The period stuff does get most of the attention, but sometimes deservedly so, as with Walter Plunkett's incredible designs for Gone with the Wind. Those dresses are so brilliantly in tune with Scarlett's character and the events of the movie that you would swear they all must be in the book. The drapery dress is, but just about none of the others are. William Pratt points out that if Plunkett had followed Margaret Mitchell's descriptions to the letter, Scarlett would have spent 9/10ths of the movie wearing green, the author's favorite color. The "scarlet woman" dress that Rhett throws at Scarlett before Ashley's birthday party, for example, was entirely Plunkett's doing. And the Siren has always wanted a better look at the cloudlike indigo gown Scarlett wears in a brief scene of her New Orleans honeymoon. Look closely and you'll see it's adorned with nine stuffed birds--a witty commentary on the once-starving Scarlett stuffing herself with the finest in Louisiana cuisine.

Other great moments in period costume would have to include Marie Antoinette; Jezebel (that red dress was actually bronze, the better to photograph in black-and-white); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland spends most of the movie with her hair completely covered, so when she shows up in her bedroom with her hair down in braids, it's a potent sign of sexual yearning); and Queen Christina (the moment when Garbo turns so the firelight outlines her form under a man's shirt is one of the most sensual in all of 1930s cinema).

But the Siren is always drawn to contemporary costumes, particularly those for women. Louise Brooks's essay on Pabst contains what is still the best explanation of costume and performance that the Siren has ever read. Robert Avrech recently posted about designer Helen Rose, and in comments we discussed how an actor's clothing influences a performance. Confronted with that, plus her new job description, the Siren's palms began to itch and she got that yen, the one that says, "It's time to make a highly idiosyncratic list of things I like so that everyone can argue with me, politely."

As Yojimboen has pointed out, the ins and outs of costume credits in old movies can be worse than Kremlinology. Some of these were undoubtedly purchased off the rack, but as Annie or Daria could tell you, there's an art to selecting the right clothes, too. The Siren is mostly sticking with the screen credit, but if someone knows the real scoop on who did what, by all means tell us in comments and I'll update.

So, ten great moments in women's costume design. Let's hope this makes whoever clicks over from Wikio more happy and less confused.

1. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Orry-Kelly)

I’ll be wearing my white lace gown tonight. I’d like you to wear your black and white foulard.
--Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle Vale

Cooper has a lot of bitchy moments in Now, Voyager, such as, just to pick one out of a hat, throwing herself down a staircase to ensure her daughter stays chained up as a nursemaid.

But the Siren thinks even trying to order the newly fashionable Charlotte back into this offense to the human eyesight is as evil as it gets. Have you ever seen anything to equal this horror? The hem that hits just the right spot to get that redwood-forest effect every woman wants for her legs. The neckline that rests at her throat only because the climb to the earlobes got too exhausting. The lace at the collar, probably thrown there by Gladys in one of her temper fits. The way the dress droops away from the body, yet clings enough to say, "There is a whole world of lumpy oatmeal under here and brother, you want no part of it." It's a goddamn triumph of costuming. Kim Morgan recently said every woman should have Claude Rains as her psychiatrist, and ain't that the truth--but Dr. Jaquith's one mistake is waiting to talk to Charlotte before they leave together for his cozy sanitorium. The second she entered wearing that monstrosity, he should have said, "Right, we're outta here."

2. Jean Seberg in Breathless (N/A)

Michel: How old are you?
Patricia: A hundred.
Michel: You don't look it.

Throw a rock down any street in America and you will hit a woman wearing tight pants and a t-shirt. And not one of them, no matter how beautiful, will look one infinitesimal fraction as dangerous as Jean Seberg does in Breathless. Seberg wears this getup because it's her job to wear it, but when Godard's camera catches her calling "New York Herald Tribune," you see a warning sign that Belmondo does not. It's more than her beauty. It's the way she walks, not just casual in her clothes, but careless. Another down-market outfit, another wasteful American in Paris, ready to toss things aside for who knows what reason.

3. Audrey Hepburn's suit in Sabrina (screen credit, Edith Head; actual design, Hubert de Givenchy.)

You needn't pick me up at the airport. I'll just take the Long Island Rail Road and you can meet me at the train...If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.

Over at Glenn's place there is a discussion under way about the old saw that Jaws and/or Star Wars "killed the movies." The Siren remarked that the movies were neither dead, nor dying, nor even feeling a bit faint. Here she adds that this kind of chic, however, is deader than vaudeville. Just imagine showing up at the fetid underground bunker that is modern-day Penn Station wearing that suit. You'd get fewer stares wearing a sandwich board. The suit isn't the movie's most famous costume; that's the Sabrina dress, a version of which the Siren has in her own vintage-clothing collection. But this moment, as Wilder's camera gloats over Hepburn from the top of her hat to the little dog at her feet, is one of the most thrilling in the history of film fashion. Sabrina, the lovelorn chaffeur's daughter, has learned poise and confidence, the essential elements of style. Even the least observant visitor to Paris sees that a fashionable Frenchwoman wears chic clothing because she IS self-assured, not because she WANTS to be. This, this is what Paris and a genius designer can do for you!

4. Jean Harlow in China Seas (Adrian)

During my earliest days at Metro, I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them. Temporarily. It was ludicrous. There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I'd be saying disdainfully (and usually with an English accent, I played a lot of Lady Mary roles) to Gable or Bob Montgomery, "How can you spend time with her? She's rahther vulgar, isn't she?"
--Rosalind Russell, Life Is a Banquet

The Siren would love to tell you this little number is a turning point in China Seas, Tay Garnett's lovable strumpet-on-the-high-seas melodrama from 1935. It isn't, although Harlow wears it in a drinking scene with thoroughgoing louse Wallace Beery, and the jeweled straps do suggest a trap. The neckline is almost modest--right up near the collarbone--as long as you ignore Harlow's obvious lack of underwear and those strips of fabric making an oh-so-scalable ladder down the pure-white arms. Russell was right; it is unlikely Gable would even realize there were other women on the ship.


5. Mary Astor & Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth (Omar Kiam)

Edith: My dear...don't.

The British gave us the cruel expression "mutton dressed as lamb," but it's Americans who gave us its best illustration, in Dodsworth. Poor Ruth Chatterton. Her character may turn out to be a harpy, but here the Siren aches for her. That hairpiece, ridiculous on anyone who's out of the schoolroom, hellishly combined with the ill-judged white fabric and the simpering black-velvet bow at the too-low neckline. And, to complete the picture of humiliation, there's Mary Astor, a piece of carved ivory in a perfectly draped evening gown, necklace nestled in a neckline that's even lower than Chatterton's--yet somehow not the slightest bit vulgar. The scene is one of the most poignant in the movie, as Dan Callahan writes so well here, but the costumes take the contrast even further.

6. Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Robert Kalloch & Edward Stevenson)

General Yen: I'm going to convert a missionary.

From the second she dons a spectacular Chinese robe, every aspect of Stanwyck's movement changes. Her arms float away from her body, she takes longer strides around the room, she suddenly seems conscious of having breasts and hips under the fabric. And you sense, too, that the lack of underpinnings makes her feel just that much more vulnerable to the General, even though she is technically as covered up as she was in her missionary garb.

7. Kay Francis in Mandalay (Orry-Kelly)

They call her Spot White. It should be Spot Cash.

Like Harlow's China Seas dress, this one wins for sheer wow factor. Kay Francis, betrayed by the man she loves, winds up as the top earner in a Burmese whorehouse, and shows she won't let the bastard get her down by strutting down a staircase wearing this. She makes that piece of liquid silver seem worth a crash course in male perfidy.

8. Myrna Loy in The Thin Man (Dolly Tree, wardrobe)

Nick: Have you a nice evening gown?
Nora: What's that got to do with it?
Nick: Have you got a nice evening gown?
Nora: Yes, I've got a lulu. Why?
Nick: I'm going to give a party and invite all the suspects.
Nora: The suspects? They won't come.
Nick: Yes, they will.

The Siren can't remember whether the above-referenced "lulu" is the famous one in the above picture, or the halter-necked black gown Loy wears in the last scenes of the movie. No matter; every good husband who asks a question like that should be rewarded by the sight of his wife wearing something like this, even if nobody ever does show. Maybe especially if no one shows.


9. Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Helen Rose, costume and wardrobe department)

Maggie: You've got a nice smell about you. Is your bath water cool?
Brick: No.
Maggie: I know somethin' that would make you feel cool and fresh. Alcohol rub. Cologne.
Brick: No thanks. We'd smell alike. Like a couple of cats in the heat.

In New York City this past week it has been, as Auntie Mame would say, "hot as a crotch." So of course the Siren had to give a nod to Elizabeth Taylor, who set the standard for riding out a heat wave without air conditioning by donning a slip and trying to seduce Paul Newman. The Siren once had the pleasure of relating Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's censorship history to a confused Argentine male who had just watched it and could not get over, indeed seemed personally offended by, Newman's failure to respond to Taylor's come-on: "It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There's Elizabeth Taylor! and she's wearing that slip! Thank god you explained this..."

10. Kasey Rogers in Strangers on a Train (Leah Rhodes, wardrobe)

Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.

Alfred Hitchcock's attention to what his actresses wore gets a lot of press, usually for Rear Window and Vertigo. Here's one that deserves more discussion. Every time the Siren sees this magnificent movie, she's struck again by the brilliance of Miriam's look, how it represents a summit of Hitchcock's oft-stated preference for buttoned-up women. We've already been told about this mantrap who's cuckolding handsome Farley Granger, and we're expecting maybe Linda Darnell. Instead we get a four-eyed tootsie wearing a simple print dress with cap sleeves and a daintily pointed collar, not nearly as tight, body-conscious or as low-cut as you could go in 1951. Miriam probably wore it because it was vaguely pretty and would be easy to clean if she got popcorn butter on it. And the glasses--the Siren can't be the only one mesmerized by Miriam's eyeglasses. Mind you, the glasses are vital to the plot, but Kasey Rogers wields them the way Dietrich wielded a cigarette. This is an everyday black widow we're dealing with, says that costume, the sort of woman who would show up to a backyard pool party in a full-coverage one-piece and a sarong and, given five minutes' opportunity, would still wind up behind the rhododendrons pulling the swimming trunks off the hostess' husband.

There's an awful of lot of sex in this post, isn't there? There are advantages to this whole fashion-blogger gig...

Adultery at the Movies; Or, How to Get Rielle Photos Out of Your Head

The Siren is obsessing over a news story again. Briefly distracted by news that Bernie Madoff got the living hell stomped out of him in prison, she found herself confronted by John Edwards. I've been avoiding the Edwards saga because, frankly, I really liked the jerk's health-care proposals. So once it became obvious that I had thrown my support behind a self-regarding horse's ass, I sort of checked out. Tea Parties, Oscars, the bond market, the Finnish dock workers' strike--I would read anything that got me away from John & Elizabeth & Rielle & Andrew.

This week, however, I tore myself away from the fed-funds rate and read that GQ interview with Rielle Hunter, the one where she proves her dedication to the image of women everywhere by stripping to her scanties and plopping down next to Dora the Explorer. I can explain my madness only by comparing it to the impulse that had me watching The Oscar, although in all fairness The Oscar had better photography and Eleanor Parker looks better half-naked. My brain froze, my eyelids drooped, I started to wonder what was for dinner, and still I read on in search of one sentence that would show some form of self-awareness. There are no words for this woman's vacuity, only images--it's the Pyramids, it's the steppes of Russia, it's the pants on a Roxy usher. And I kept muttering to myself, over and over again, "Jesus wept, John, YOUR TASTE."

So, in order to clear her brain of the stuffed-animal clutter that is "Hello America, My Name Is Rielle Hunter," the Siren started to think about Adultery at the Movies, where love is set to Rachmaninoff, "Un Sospiro" or Max Steiner and not the Dave Matthews Band. Here are images from ten movies where people lie and sneak and cheat on their spouses, but by god, they do it with someone worthy and they do it with style.



1. The Earrings of Madame de...


2. Letter From an Unknown Woman


3. Children of Paradise


4. Brief Encounter


5. Now, Voyager


6. The Postman Always Rings Twice


7. A Summer Place


8. That Hamilton Woman


9. Strangers When We Meet


10. Deception