A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Waldo Salt.
Waldo Salt was an American screenwriter who won Academy Awards for both Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home.
Salt was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Winifred (née Porter) and William Haslem Salt, an artist and business executive. He graduated from Stanford University in 1934. The first of the nineteen films he wrote or co-wrote was released in 1937 with the title The Bride Wore Red.
Salt’s career in Hollywood was interrupted when he was blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951. Like many other blacklisted writers, while he was unable to work in Hollywood, Salt wrote under a pseudonym for the British television series The Adventures of Robin Hood.
After the collapse of the blacklist, Salt won Academy Awards for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for his work on Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, as well as earning a nomination for Serpico.
Salt is featured in the extras for the Criterion Collection’s Midnight Cowboy blu-ray release, specifically in an audio interview with Michael Childers; many photos of Waldo Salt can be seen here as he was a collaborator for the screenplay. The documentary, Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey, is also featured on the disc.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Rudolf Hess.
Rudolf Hess was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess held that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom’s exit from the Second World War. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace. He was still serving his life sentence at the time of his suicide in 1987.
Hess enlisted as an infantryman in the Imperial German Army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded several times during the war and was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in 1915. Shortly before the war ended, Hess enrolled to train as an aviator, but he saw no action in that role. He left the armed forces in December 1918 with the rank of Leutnant der Reserve. In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied geopolitics under Karl Haushofer, a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum (‘living space’), which became one of the pillars of Nazi ideology. Hess joined the Nazi Party on July 1, 1920 and was at Hitler’s side on November 8, 1923 for the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to seize control of the government of Bavaria. While serving a prison sentence for this attempted coup, he assisted Hitler with Mein Kampf, which became a foundation of the political platform of the Nazi Party.
After Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Hess was appointed Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party in April. He was elected to the Reichstag in the March elections, was made a Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party in June and in December 1933 he became Minister without Portfolio in Hitler’s cabinet. He was also appointed in 1938 to the Cabinet Council and in August 1939 to the Council of Ministers for Defence of the Reich. Hitler decreed on the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939 that Hermann Göring was his official successor, and named Hess as next in line. In addition to appearing on Hitler’s behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the government’s legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust.
On May 10, 1941, Hess made a solo flight to Scotland, where he hoped to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be a prominent opponent of the British government’s war policy. The British authorities arrested Hess immediately on his arrival and held him in custody until the end of the war, when he was returned to Germany to stand trial at the 1946 Nuremberg trials of major war criminals. During much of his trial, Hess claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but he later admitted to the court that this had been a ruse. The court convicted him of crimes against peace and of conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. He served a life sentence in Spandau Prison; the Soviet Union blocked repeated attempts by family members and prominent politicians to procure his early release. While still in custody as the only prisoner in Spandau, he hanged himself in 1987 at the age of 93.
After his death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. His grave, bearing the inscription “Ich hab’s gewagt” (I dared it), became a site of regular pilgrimage and demonstrations by Neo-Nazis. In 2011, authorities refused to renew the lease on the gravesite, and his remains were exhumed and cremated.
Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, Hess enlisted in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 1st Royal Bavarian Division. His initial posting was against the British on the Somme; he was present at the First Battle of Ypres. On November 9, 1914, Hess transferred to the 1st Infantry Regiment, stationed near Arras. He was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, and promoted to Gefreiter (corporal) in April 1915. After additional training at the Munster Training Area, he was promoted to Vizefeldwebel (senior non-commissioned officer) and received the Bavarian Military Merit Cross. Returning to the front lines in November, he fought in Artois, participating in the battle for the town of Neuville-Saint-Vaast. After two months out of action with a throat infection, Hess served in the Battle of Verdun in May, and was hit by shrapnel in the left hand and arm on June 12, 1916 during fighting near the village of Thiaumont. After a month off to recover, he was sent back to the Verdun area, where he remained until December.
Hess was promoted to platoon leader of the 10th Company of the 18th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, which was serving in Romania. He was wounded on July 23 and again on August 8, 1917; the first injury was a shell splinter to the left arm, which was dressed in the field, but the second was a bullet wound that entered the upper chest near the armpit and exited near his spinal column, leaving a pea-sized entry wound and a cherry stone-sized exit wound on his back.
By August 20, he was well enough to travel, so he was sent to hospital in Hungary and eventually back to Germany, where he recovered in hospital in Meissen. In October he received promotion to Leutnant der Reserve and was recommended for, but did not receive, the Iron Cross, first class. At his father’s request, Hess was transferred to a hospital closer to home, arriving at Alexandersbad on October 25.
While still convalescing, Hess had requested that he be allowed to enroll to train as a pilot, so after Christmas leave with his family, he reported to Munich. He received basic flight training at Oberschleissheim and Lechfeld Air Base from March to June 1918, and advanced training at Valenciennes in France in October. On October 14, he was assigned to Jagdstaffel 35b, a Bavarian fighter squadron equipped with Fokker D.VII biplanes. He saw no action with Jagdstaffel 35b, as the war ended on November 11, 1918, before he had the opportunity.
Hess was discharged from the armed forces in December 1918. The family fortunes had taken a serious downturn, as their business interests in Egypt had been expropriated by the British. Hess joined the Thule Society, an antisemitic right-wing Völkisch group, and the Freikorps of Colonel Ritter von Epp, one of many such volunteer paramilitary organisations active in Germany at the time.
Bavaria witnessed frequent and often bloody conflicts between right-wing groups, the Freikorps, and left-wing forces as they fought for control of the state during this period. Hess was a participant in street battles in early 1919 and led a group that distributed thousands of antisemitic pamphlets in Munich. He later said that Egypt made him a nationalist, the war made him a socialist, and Munich made him an antisemite.
In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied history and economics. His geopolitics professor was Karl Haushofer, a former general in the German Army who was a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum (“living space”), which Haushofer cited to justify the proposal that Germany should forcefully conquer additional territory in Eastern Europe. Hess later introduced this concept to Adolf Hitler, and it became one of the pillars of Nazi Party ideology. Hess became friends with Haushofer and his son Albrecht, a social theorist and lecturer.
Ilse Pröhl, a fellow student at the university, met Hess in April 1920 when they by chance rented rooms in the same boarding house. They married on December 20, 1927 and their only child, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, was born ten years later, on November 18, 1937. His name was, at least in part, to honour Hitler, who often used “Wolf” as a code name. Hess nicknamed the boy “Buz”.
After hearing the Nazi Party leader Hitler speak for the first time in 1920 at a Munich rally, Hess became completely devoted to him. They held a shared belief in the stab-in-the-back myth, the notion that Germany’s loss in World War I was caused by a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks rather than a military defeat. Hess joined the Nazi Party on July 1 as member number 16. As the party continued to grow, holding rallies and meetings in ever larger beer halls in Munich, he focused his attention on fundraising and organizational activities. On November 4, 1921, he was injured while protecting Hitler when a bomb planted by a Marxist group exploded at the Hofbräuhaus during a party event. Hess joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) by 1922 and helped organize and recruit its early membership.
Meanwhile, problems continued with the economy; hyperinflation caused many personal fortunes to be rendered worthless. When the German government failed to meet its reparations payments and French troops marched in to occupy the industrial areas along the Ruhr in January 1923, widespread civil unrest was the result. Hitler decided the time was ripe to attempt to seize control of the government with a coup d’état modelled on Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. Hess was with Hitler on the night of November 8, 1923 when he and the SA stormed a public meeting organized by Bavaria’s de facto ruler, Staatskommissar (state commissioner) Gustav von Kahr, in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in Munich. Brandishing a pistol, Hitler interrupted Kahr’s speech and announced that the national revolution had begun, declaring the formation of a new government with World War I General Erich Ludendorff. The next day, Hitler and several thousand supporters attempted to march to the Ministry of War in the city centre. Gunfire broke out between the Nazis and the police; sixteen marchers and four police officers were killed. Hitler was arrested on November 11.
Hess and some SA men had taken a few of the dignitaries hostage on the night of the 8th, driving them to a house about 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Munich. When Hess left briefly to make a phone call the next day, the hostages convinced the driver to help them escape. Hess, stranded, called Ilse Pröhl, who brought him a bicycle so he could return to Munich. He went to stay with the Haushofers and then fled to Austria, but they convinced him to return. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the attempted coup, which later became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment, and the Nazi Party and SA were both outlawed.
Both men were incarcerated in Landsberg Prison, where Hitler soon began work on his memoir, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), which he dictated to fellow prisoners Hess and Emil Maurice. Edited by publisher Max Amann, Hess and others, the work was published in two parts in 1925 and 1926. It was later released in a single volume, which became a best-seller after 1930. This book, with its message of violent antisemitism, became the foundation of the political platform of the Nazi Party.
Hitler was released on parole on 20 December 1924 and Hess ten days later. The ban on the Nazi Party and SA was lifted in February 1925, and the party grew to 100,000 members in 1928 and 150,000 in 1929. They received only 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 election, but support increased steadily up until the seizure of power in 1933.
Hitler named Hess his private secretary in April 1925 at a salary of 500 Reichsmarks per month, and named him as personal adjutant on July 20, 1929. Hess accompanied Hitler to speaking engagements around the country and became his friend and confidante. Hess was one of the few people who could meet with Hitler at any time without an appointment. His influence in the Party continued to grow. On December 15, 1932 Hess was named head of the Party Liaison Staff and Chairman of the Party Central Political Commission.
Retaining his interest in flying after the end of his active military career, Hess obtained his private pilot’s licence on April 4, 1929. His instructor was World War I flying ace Theodor Croneiss. In 1930 Hess became the owner of a BFW M.23b monoplane sponsored by the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. He acquired two more Messerschmitt aircraft in the early 1930s, logging many flying hours and becoming proficient in the operation of light single-engine aircraft.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, his first step in gaining dictatorial control of Germany. Hess was named Deputy Führer (Stellvertreter des Führers) of the Nazi Party on April 21. On June 2, 1933 he was made one of 16 Reichsleiters in the Party hierarchy. On July 1 he was raised to the rank of Obergruppenführer in the Schutzstaffel (SS). However, by September 20 Hitler decreed that he stop using the titles of Reichsleiter and Obergruppenführer, and use only the title of “Deputy Fuhrer”. This was an acknowledgement of his primus inter pares status in the Party. Hess was appointed to the cabinet as a Reich Minister without Portfolio, on 1 December. With offices in the Brown House in Munich and another in Berlin, Hess was responsible for several departments, including foreign affairs, finance, health, education and law. Hess also was named as a member of Hans Frank’s Academy for German Law. All legislation passed through his office for approval, except that concerning the army, the police and foreign policy, and he wrote and co-signed many of Hitler’s decrees. An organiser of the annual Nuremberg Rallies, he usually gave the opening speech and introduced Hitler. Hess also spoke over the radio and at rallies around the country, so frequently that the speeches were collected into book form in 1938. Hess acted as Hitler’s delegate in negotiations with industrialists and members of the wealthier classes. As Hess had been born abroad, Hitler had him oversee the Nazi Party groups such as the NSDAP/AO that were in charge of party members living in other countries. Hitler instructed Hess to review all court decisions that related to persons deemed enemies of the Party. He was authorised to increase the sentences of anyone he felt got off too lightly in these cases, and was also empowered to take “merciless action” if he saw fit to do so. This often entailed sending the person to a concentration camp or simply ordering the person killed.
In 1933, Hess founded the Volksdeutscher Rat (Council of Ethnic Germans) to handle the Nazi Party’s relations with ethnic German minorities around the world, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. The purpose of the council was to protect the Nazi Party from criticism that it was attempting to extend the process of Gleichschaltung to international ethnic German communities. Despite Hess’s claims to the contrary, the council members were primarily loyal to Germany rather than their current nations. The eight council members, only one of which was a member of the Nazi Party, were responsible only to Hess. All had long been known to either Hess or Haushofer, who was also involved with the council. Members publicly claimed to be uninvolved in the council, which Hess used as proof that the Nazi Party was not trying to interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations. As the council had considerable funds and appeared to be sufficiently independent of the German government to satisfy foreign governments, its activities had some impact on international German communities in the 1930s. Its most notable impact was in the Sudetenland, where in 1933 it promoted Konrad Henlein as the politician with the best hope of building a Nazi-friendly party that would win mass support without being banned by the Czechoslovak government.
The Nazi regime began to persecute Jews soon after the seizure of power. Hess’s office was partly responsible for drafting Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These laws had far-reaching implications for the Jews of Germany, banning marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans and depriving non-Aryans of their German citizenship. Hess’s friend Karl Haushofer and his family were subject to these laws, as Haushofer had married a half-Jewish woman, so Hess issued documents exempting them from this legislation.
Hess did not build a power base or develop a coterie of followers. He was motivated by his loyalty to Hitler and a desire to be useful to him; he did not seek power or prestige or take advantage of his position to accumulate personal wealth. He lived in a modest house in Munich. Hess was devoted to the völkisch ideology and viewed many issues in terms of an alleged Jewish conspiracy against Germany. For example, he said in a speech that “Today’s League of Nations is really only a farce which functions primarily as the basis for the Jews to reach their own aims. You need only to note how many Jews sit in the League.” In a speech in 1937, Hess blamed the Spanish Civil War on “international Jewry”, called the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov a “dirty Jew”, and claimed that without Hitler or Mussolini, “Jewish Asiatic Bolshevism would dominate European culture”.
On August 30, 1939, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Hess was appointed by Hitler to the six-person Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich which was set up to operate as a war cabinet. After the Invasion of Poland and the start of the war on September 1, 1939, Hitler made Hess second in line to succeed him, after Hermann Göring. Around the same time, Hitler appointed Hess’s chief of staff, Martin Bormann, as his personal secretary, a post formerly held by Hess. On October 8, 1939, Hess co-signed the law that annexed the Free City of Danzig, the Polish Corridor, and the part of Upper Silesia lost in 1921 to Germany. On the same day, Hess and Heinrich Himmler ordered that a racial registry be established in these areas and stated that Poles and Jews living in these areas were not to be treated as equals of Germans. A separate legal code for Poles and Jews in the annexed areas was created, imposing draconian punishments. Hess argued that a separate legal code was necessary because “the Pole is less susceptible to the infliction of ordinary punishment”. In another decree, Hess ordered that none of the buildings destroyed in Warsaw during the siege were to be rebuilt as a reminder to the Poles of their “war guilt”.
Hess’s antisemitism markedly increased after the war started, as he was convinced that the war had been caused by Jews. This became a major theme of his wartime speeches. In a speech given on April 20, 1940 to mark Hitler’s 51st birthday, Hess accused “Jews and their fellow travellers” of Germany’s capitulation in November 1918, which he called the most calamitous event in world history. In the same speech, Hess, referring to the Black Horror on the Rhine story, stated the defeat of 1918 was followed by an occupation of the Rhineland by “[n-words]”, which he again blamed on the Jews. Hess concluded his speech by saying that with Hitler in charge, there was no possibility of the current war ending similarly. “How the Jewish hounds will howl when Adolf Hitler stands before them”, he concluded.
Hess was obsessed with his health to the point of hypochondria, consulting many doctors and other practitioners for what he described to his captors in Britain as a long list of ailments involving the kidneys, colon, gall bladder, bowels and heart. Hess was a vegetarian, and he did not smoke or drink. He brought his own food to the Berghof, claiming it was biologically dynamic, but Hitler did not approve of this practice, so he discontinued taking meals with the Führer.
Hess was interested in music, enjoyed reading and loved to spend time hiking and climbing in the mountains with his wife, Ilse. He and his friend Albrecht Haushofer shared an interest in astrology, and Hess also was keen on clairvoyance and the occult. Hess continued to be interested in aviation. He won an air race in 1934, flying a BFW M.35 in a circuit around Zugspitze Mountain and returning to the airfield at Munich with a time of 29 minutes. He placed sixth of 29 participants in a similar race held the following year. With the outbreak of World War II, Hess asked Hitler to be allowed to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, but Hitler forbade it, and ordered him to stop flying for the duration of the war. Hess convinced him to reduce the ban to one year
As the war progressed, Hitler’s attention became focused on foreign affairs and the conduct of the war. Hess, who was not directly engaged in the war, became increasingly sidelined from the affairs of the nation and from Hitler’s attention; Bormann had successfully supplanted Hess in many of his duties and had taken Hess’s position at Hitler’s side. Hess was concerned that Germany would face a war on two fronts as plans progressed for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled to take place in 1941. Hess decided to attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself to seek meetings with the British government.
On August 31, 1940, Hess met with Karl Haushofer. Haushofer told Hess that he believed that King George VI was opposed to Churchill and would dismiss him and send him to Canada at the first opportunity. Haushofer spoke of his belief that it was possible to make contact with the king via either General Ian Hamilton or the Duke of Hamilton. Hess decided they should contact his fellow aviator the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had never met. Hess chose Hamilton in the mistaken belief that he was one of the leaders of a party opposed to war with Germany, and because Hamilton was a friend of Haushofer. On Hess’s instructions, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in September 1940, but the letter was intercepted by MI5 and Hamilton did not see it until March 1941.
A letter Hess wrote to his wife dated November 4, 1940 shows that in spite of not receiving a reply from Hamilton, he intended to proceed with his plan. He began training on the Messerschmitt Bf 110, a two-seater twin-engine aircraft, in October 1940 under instructor Wilhelm Stör, the chief test pilot at Messerschmitt. He continued to practise, including logging many cross-country flights, and found a specific aircraft that handled well—a Bf 110E-1/N—which was from then on held in reserve for his personal use. He asked for a radio compass, modifications to the oxygen delivery system, and large long-range fuel tanks to be installed on this plane, and these requests were granted by March 1941.
After a final check of the weather reports for Germany and the North Sea, Hess took off at 17:45 on May 10, 1941 from the airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten in his specially prepared aircraft. It was the last of several attempts to depart on his mission; previous efforts had to be called off due to mechanical problems or poor weather. Wearing a leather flying suit bearing the rank of captain, he brought along a supply of money and toiletries, a torch, a camera, maps and charts, and a collection of 28 different medicines, as well as dextrose tablets to help ward off fatigue and an assortment of homeopathic remedies.
Initially setting a course towards Bonn, Hess used landmarks on the ground to orient himself and make minor course corrections. When he reached the coast near the Frisian Islands, he turned and flew in an easterly direction for twenty minutes to stay out of range of British radar. He then took a heading of 335 degrees for the trip across the North Sea, initially at low altitude, but travelling for most of the journey at 5,000 feet (1,500 m). At 20:58 he changed his heading to 245 degrees, intending to approach the coast of North East England near the village of Bamburgh, Northumberland. As it was not yet sunset when he initially approached the coast, Hess backtracked, zigzagging back and forth for 40 minutes until it grew dark. Around this time his auxiliary fuel tanks were exhausted, so he released them into the sea. Also around this time, at 22:08, the British Chain Home station at Ottercops Moss near Newcastle upon Tyne detected his presence and informed the Filter Room at Bentley Priory. Soon he was detected by several other stations, and the aircraft was designated as “Raid 42”.
Two Spitfires of No. 72 Squadron RAF, No. 13 Group RAF that were already in the air were sent to attempt an interception, but failed to find the intruder. A third Spitfire sent from Acklington at 22:20 also failed to spot the aircraft; by then it was dark and Hess had dropped to an extremely low altitude, so low that the volunteer on duty at the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) station at Chatton was able to correctly identify it as a Bf 110, and reported its altitude as 50 feet (15 m). Tracked by additional ROC posts, Hess continued his flight into Scotland at high speed and low altitude, but was unable to spot his destination, Dungavel House, so he headed for the west coast to orient himself and then turned back inland. At 22:35 a Boulton Paul Defiant sent from No. 141 Squadron RAF based at Ayr began pursuit. Hess was nearly out of fuel, so he climbed to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) and parachuted out of the plane at 23:06. He injured his foot, either while exiting the aircraft or when he hit the ground. The aircraft crashed at 23:09, about 12 miles (19 km) west of Dungavel House, the Duke of Hamilton’s home. He would have been closer to his destination had he not had trouble exiting the aircraft. Hess considered this achievement to be the proudest moment of his life.
Before his departure from Germany, Hess had given his adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, a letter addressed to Hitler that detailed his plans to initiate peace negotiations with the UK. Hess intended to approach the Duke of Hamilton at his home in Scotland, hoping that the duke might then be willing to advocate for and assist him negotiate peace with Germany on terms that would be acceptable to Hitler. Pintsch delivered the letter to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on May 11. After reading the letter, Hitler let loose a cry heard throughout the entire Berghof and sent for a number of his inner circle, concerned that a putsch might be underway.
Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess’s act as an attempt by Hitler to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. Hitler contacted Mussolini specifically to reassure him otherwise. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterise Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler’s knowledge or authority. Subsequent German newspaper reports described Hess as “deluded, deranged,” indicating that his mental health had been affected by injuries sustained during World War I. Some members of the government, including Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, believed this only made matters worse, because if Hess truly were mentally ill, he should not have held an important government position.
Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer, assigning Hess’s former duties to Bormann, with the title of Head of the Party Chancellery. Bormann used the opportunity afforded by Hess’s departure to secure significant power for himself. Meanwhile, Hitler initiated Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists that took place around June 9. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.
US journalist Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, who had met both Hitler and Hess, speculated that Hitler had sent Hess to deliver a message informing Winston Churchill of the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and offering a negotiated peace or even an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed that Hess’s flight had been engineered by the British. Stalin persisted in this belief as late as 1944, when he mentioned the matter to Churchill, who insisted that they had no advance knowledge of the flight. While some sources reported that Hess had been on an official mission, Churchill later stated in his book The Grand Alliance that in his view, the mission had not been authorized. “He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy”, said Churchill, and referred to Hess’s plan as one of “lunatic benevolence”.
After the war, Albert Speer discussed the rationale for the flight with Hess, who told him that “the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces. We will guarantee England her empire; in return she will give us a free hand in Europe.” While in Spandau prison, Hess told journalist Desmond Zwar that Germany could not win a war on two fronts. “I knew that there was only one way out – and that was certainly not to fight against England. Even though I did not get permission from the Führer to fly I knew that what I had to say would have had his approval. Hitler had great respect for the English people …” Hess wrote that his flight to Scotland was intended to initiate “the fastest way to win the war.
Shortly before midnight on May 10, 1941, Hess landed at Floors Farm, by Waterfoot, south of Glasgow, where he was discovered still struggling with his parachute by local ploughman David McLean. Identifying himself as “Hauptmann Alfred Horn”, Hess said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. McLean helped Hess to his nearby cottage and contacted the local Home Guard unit, who escorted the captive to their headquarters in Busby, East Renfrewshire. He was next taken to the police station at Giffnock, arriving after midnight; he was searched and his possessions confiscated. Hess repeatedly requested to meet with the Duke of Hamilton during questioning undertaken with the aid of an interpreter by Major Graham Donald, the area commandant of Royal Observer Corps. After the interview Hess was taken under guard to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his injuries were treated. By this time some of his captors suspected Hess’s true identity, though he continued to insist his name was Horn.
Hamilton had been on duty as wing commander at RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh when Hess had arrived, and his station had been one of those that had tracked the progress of the flight. He arrived at Maryhill Barracks the next morning, and after examining Hess’s effects, he met alone with the prisoner. Hess immediately admitted his true identity and outlined the reason for his flight. Hamilton told Hess that he hoped to continue the conversation with the aid of an interpreter; Hess could speak English well, but was having trouble understanding Hamilton. He told Hamilton that he was on a “mission of humanity” and that Hitler “wished to stop the fighting” with England.
After the meeting, Hamilton examined the remains of the Messerschmitt in the company of an intelligence officer, then returned to Turnhouse, where he made arrangements through the Foreign Office to meet Churchill, who was at Ditchley for the weekend. They had some preliminary talks that night, and Hamilton accompanied Churchill back to London the next day, where they both met with members of the War Cabinet. Churchill sent Hamilton with foreign affairs expert Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had met Hess previously, to positively identify the prisoner, who had been moved to Buchanan Castle overnight. Hess, who had prepared extensive notes to use during this meeting, spoke to them at length about Hitler’s expansionary plans and the need for Britain to let the Nazis have free rein in Europe, in exchange for Britain being allowed to keep its overseas possessions. Kirkpatrick held two more meetings with Hess over the course of the next few days, while Hamilton returned to his duties. In addition to being disappointed at the apparent failure of his mission, Hess began claiming that his medical treatment was inadequate and that there was a plot afoot to poison him.
Hess’s flight, but not his destination or fate, was first announced by Munich Radio in Germany on the evening of May 12. On May 13, Hitler sent Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to give the news in person to Mussolini, and the British press was permitted to release full information about events that same day. On May 14, Ilse Hess finally learned that her husband had survived the trip when news of his fate was broadcast on German radio.
Two sections of the fuselage of the aircraft were initially hidden by David McLean and later retrieved. One part was sold to the former assistant secretary of the Battle of Britain Association, who gave it to a war museum in the US; this 17.5 by 23 inches (44 by 58 cm) part was later sold by Bonhams at auction. Part of the fuel tank and a strut were offered for sale via Bonhams in 2014. Other wreckage was salvaged by 63 Maintenance Unit between 11 and 16 May 1941 and then taken to Oxford to be stored. The aeroplane had been armed with four machine guns in the nose, but carried no ammunition. One of the engines is on display at the RAF Museum while the Imperial War Museum displays another engine and part of the fuselage.
From Buchanan Castle, Hess was transferred briefly to the Tower of London and then to Mytchett Place in Surrey, a fortified mansion, designated “Camp Z”, where he stayed for the next 13 months. Churchill issued orders that Hess was to be treated well, though he was not allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio. Three intelligence officers were stationed onsite and 150 soldiers were placed on guard. By early June, Hess was allowed to write to his family. He also prepared a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, but it was never delivered, and his repeated requests for further meetings were turned down. Major Frank Foley, the leading German expert in MI6 and former British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, took charge of a year-long abortive debriefing of Hess, according to Foreign Office files released to the National Archives. Henry V. Dicks and John Rawlings Rees, psychiatrists who treated Hess during this period, noted that while he was not insane, he was mentally unstable, with tendencies toward hypochondria and paranoia. Hess repeated his peace proposal to John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon, then serving as Lord Chancellor, in an interview on June 9, 1942. Lord Simon noted that the prisoner’s mental state was not good; Hess claimed he was being poisoned and was being prevented from sleeping. He would insist on swapping his dinner with that of one of his guards, and attempted to get them to send samples of the food out for analysis.
While in Scotland, Hess claimed to have discovered a “secret force” controlling the minds of Churchill and other British leaders, filling them with an irrational hatred of Germany. Hess claimed that the force acted on Hitler’s mind as well, causing him to make poor military decisions. He said that the Jews had psychic powers that allowed them to control the minds of others, including Himmler, and that the Holocaust was part of a Jewish plot to defame Germany.
In the early morning hours of June 16, 1942, Hess rushed his guards and attempted suicide by jumping over the railing of the staircase at Mytchett Place. He fell onto the stone floor below, fracturing the femur of his left leg. The injury required that the leg be kept in traction for 12 weeks, with a further six weeks bed rest before he was permitted to walk with crutches. Captain Munro Johnson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who assessed Hess, noted that another suicide attempt was likely to occur in the near future. Hess began around this time to complain of amnesia. This symptom and some of his increasingly erratic behaviour may have in part been a ruse, because if he were declared mentally ill, he could be repatriated under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
Hess was moved to Maindiff Court Hospital on June 26, 1942, where he remained for the next three years. The facility was chosen for its added security and the need for fewer guards. Hess was allowed walks on the grounds and car trips into the surrounding countryside. He had access to newspapers and other reading materials; he wrote letters and journals. His mental health remained under the care of Dr. Rees. Hess continued to complain on and off of memory loss and made a second suicide attempt on February 4, 1945, when he stabbed himself with a bread knife. The wound was not serious, requiring two stitches. Despondent that Germany was losing the war, he took no food for the next week, only resuming eating when he was threatened with being force-fed.
Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8, 1945. Hess, facing charges as a war criminal, was ordered to appear before the International Military Tribunal and was transported to Nuremberg on October 10, 1945.
The Allies of World War II held a series of military tribunals and trials, beginning with a trial of the major war criminals from November 1945 to October 1946. Hess was tried with this first group of 23 defendants, all of whom were charged with four counts—conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, in violation of international laws governing warfare.
On his arrival in Nuremberg, Hess was reluctant to give up some of his possessions, including samples of food he said had been poisoned by the British; he proposed to use these for his defence during the trial. The commandant of the facility, Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the United States Army, advised him that he would be allowed no special treatment; the samples were sealed and confiscated. Hess’s diaries indicate that he did not acknowledge the validity of the court and felt the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was thin when he arrived, weighing 65 kilograms (143 lb), and had a poor appetite, but was deemed to be in good health. As one defendant, Robert Ley, had managed to hang himself in his cell on October 24, the remaining prisoners were monitored around the clock. Because of his previous suicide attempts, Hess was handcuffed to a guard whenever he was out of his cell.
Almost immediately after his arrival, Hess began exhibiting amnesia, which may have been feigned in the hope of avoiding the death sentence. The chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg, Douglas Kelley of the US Military, gave the opinion that the defendant suffered from “a true psychoneurosis, primarily of the hysterical type, engrafted on a basic paranoid and schizoid personality, with amnesia, partly genuine and partly feigned”, but found him fit to stand trial. Efforts were made to trigger his memory, including bringing in his former secretaries and showing old newsreels, but he persisted in showing no response to these stimuli. When Hess was allowed to make a statement to the tribunal on November 30, he admitted that he had faked memory loss as a tactic.
The prosecution’s case against Hess was presented by Mervyn Griffith-Jones beginning on February 7, 1946. By quoting from Hess’s speeches, he attempted to demonstrate that Hess had been aware of and agreed with Hitler’s plans to conduct a war of aggression in violation of international law. He declared that as Hess had signed important governmental decrees, including the decree requiring mandatory military service, the Nuremberg racial laws, and a decree incorporating the conquered Polish territories into the Reich, he must share responsibility for the acts of the regime. He pointed out that the timing of Hess’s trip to Scotland, only six weeks before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, could only be viewed as an attempt by Hess to keep the British out of the war. Hess resumed showing symptoms of amnesia at the end of February, partway through the prosecution’s case.
The case for Hess’s defence was presented from March 22 to 26 by his lawyer, Dr Alfred Seidl. He noted that while Hess accepted responsibility for the many decrees he had signed, he said these matters were part of the internal workings of a sovereign state and thus outside the purview of a war crimes trial. He called to the stand Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the man who had been head of the NSDAP/AO, to testify on Hess’s behalf. When Griffith-Jones presented questions about the organisation’s spying in several countries, Bohle testified that any warlike activities such as espionage had been done without his permission or knowledge. Seidl called two other witnesses, former mayor of Stuttgart Karl Strölin and Hess’s brother Alfred, both of whom repudiated the allegations that the NSDAP/AO had been spying and fomenting war. Seidl presented a summation of the defence’s case on July 25, in which he attempted to refute the charge of conspiracy by pointing out that Hitler alone had made all the important decisions. He noted that Hess could not be held responsible for any events that took place after he left Germany in May 1941. Meanwhile, Hess mentally detached himself from what was happening, declining visits from his family and refusing to read the newspapers. Hess spoke to the tribunal again on August 31, 1946 during the last day of closing statements, where he made a lengthy statement.
The court deliberated for nearly two months before passing judgement on September 30, with the defendants being individually sentenced on October 1. Hess was found guilty on two counts: crimes against peace (planning and preparing a war of aggression), and conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. He was found not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was given a life sentence, one of seven Nazis to receive prison sentences at the trial. These seven were transported by aircraft to the Allied military prison at Spandau in Berlin on July 18, 1947. The Soviet member of the tribunal, Major-General Iona Nikitchenko, filed a document recording his dissent of Hess’s sentence; he felt the death sentence was warranted.
Spandau was placed under the control of the Allied Control Council, the governing body in charge of the military occupation of Germany, which consisted of representatives from the UK, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Each country supplied prison guards for a month at a time on a rotating basis. After the inmates were given medical examinations—Hess refused his body search, and had to be held down—they were provided with prison garb and assigned the numbers by which they were addressed throughout their stay. Hess was Number 7. The prison had a small library and inmates were allowed to file special requests for additional reading material. Writing materials were limited; each inmate was allowed four pieces of paper per month for letters. They were not allowed to speak to one another without permission and were expected to work in the facility, helping with cleaning and gardening chores. The inmates were taken for outdoor walks around the prison grounds for an hour each day, separated by about 10 yards (9 m). Some of the rules became more relaxed as time went on.
Visitors were allowed to come for half an hour per month, but Hess forbade his family to visit until December 1969, when he was a patient at the British Military Hospital in West Berlin for a perforated ulcer. By this time, Wolf Rüdiger Hess was 32 years old and Ilse 69; they had not seen Hess since his departure from Germany in 1941. After this illness, he allowed his family to visit regularly. His daughter-in-law Andrea, who often brought photos and films of his grandchildren, became a particularly welcome visitor. Hess’s health problems, both mental and physical, were ongoing during his captivity. He cried out in the night, claiming he had stomach pains. He continued to suspect that his food was being poisoned and complained of amnesia. A psychiatrist who examined him in 1957 deemed he was not ill enough to be transferred to a mental hospital. Hess attempted suicide again in 1977.
Other than his stays in hospital, Hess spent the rest of his life in Spandau Prison. His fellow inmates Konstantin von Neurath, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder were released because of poor health in the 1950s; Karl Dönitz, Baldur von Schirach, and Albert Speer served their time and were released; Dönitz left in 1956, Schirach and Speer in 1966. The 600-cell prison continued to be maintained for its lone prisoner from 1966 until Hess’s death in 1987, at an estimated annual cost of DM 800,000. Conditions were far more pleasant in the 1980s than in the early years; Hess was allowed to move more freely around the cell block, setting his own routine and choosing his own activities, which included television, films, reading, and gardening. A lift was installed so he could easily reach the garden, and he was provided with a medical orderly from 1982 onward.
Hess’s lawyer Alfred Seidl launched numerous appeals for his release, beginning as early as 1947. These were denied, mainly because the Soviets repeatedly vetoed the proposal. Spandau was located in West Berlin, and its existence gave the Soviets a foothold in that sector of the city. Additionally, Soviet officials believed Hess must have known in 1941 that an attack on their country was imminent. In 1967, Wolf Rüdiger Hess began a campaign to win his father’s release, garnering support from politicians such as Geoffrey Lawrence in the UK and Willy Brandt in West Germany, but to no avail, in spite of the prisoner’s advanced age and deteriorating health. In 1967, Wolf Hess founded a society that by September had collected 700 signatures on a petition calling for Hess’s release. By 1974, 350,000 people had signed the petition. The American historian Norman Goda wrote that those who campaigned to free Hess routinely exaggerated the harshness of his imprisonment. Goda states that Wolf Hess’s efforts to free his father ultimately backfired as he conflated the question of whether his father deserved release on humanitarian grounds with the question of whether his father was guilty. Wolf argued that his father was unjustly imprisoned to hide the UK’s “war guilt”, arguing that millions of lives could have been saved if only Churchill had accepted Hess’s peace offer in May 1941. In 1973, the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban charged that Hess was not being treated as badly as his champions claimed and that he should serve his full sentence.
In September 1979, medical tests showed that Hess was suffering from potentially fatal prostate cancer. In a letter dated September 8, 1979, Hess announced that he would refuse treatment unless released, saying he deserved freedom as an “unjustly convicted man” and that if he were to die, his death would be on the consciences of the leaders of the UK, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Cyrus Vance wrote: “Far from representing the beginning of irrationality, Hess’s well considered attempt is to use his medical condition to ‘force’ his release”. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, appealed for Hess’s release, but Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko refused on the grounds that Hess had never “shown even a shadow of repentance” and was still claiming innocence. Gromyko also said that many people would take Hess’s release as confirmation of a wrongful conviction. Hess’s appeal to neo-Nazi groups in West Germany further increased the Soviet unwillingness to consider his release.
Hess continued to be an unapologetic Nazi and anti-Semite; this was usually ignored by those championing his release, who portrayed him as a harmless old man. Hess further hindered efforts to get himself released by promising to make no statements to the media if he were released, while repeatedly writing drafts of statements that he planned to make. On June 25, 1986, a Soviet guard caught Charles Gabel, the chaplain at Spandau, attempting to smuggle out a statement by Hess, causing Gabel to be fired. Hess had originally written the document as his opening address at the Nuremberg trial in 1946, which he had been unable to deliver in full after the judges cut him short. Hess tried to mail a copy of the statement to Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1946, but the letter was intercepted by his US guards. Hess’s statement (both the 1946 version and the 1986 version) claimed that Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union was preemptive; he claimed there had been overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Union had planned to attack Germany. He said in the statement that he had decided to make his flight to Scotland without informing Hitler, with the aim of informing the UK of the Soviet danger to “European civilization” and the entire world. He believed his warning would cause the UK to end its war with Germany and join in the fight against the Soviet Union.
Hess was found dead on August 17, 1987, aged 93, in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room; he had hanged himself using an extension cord strung over a window latch. A short note to his family was found in his pocket, thanking them for all that they had done. The Four Powers released a statement on September 17 ruling the death a suicide. He was initially buried at a secret location to avoid media attention or demonstrations by Nazi sympathisers, but his body was re-interred in a family plot at Wunsiedel on March 17,1988; his wife was buried beside him in 1995.
Hess’s lawyer Alfred Seidl felt that he was too old and frail to have managed to kill himself. Wolf Rüdiger Hess repeatedly claimed that his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war. Abdallah Melaouhi served as Hess’s medical orderly from 1982 to 1987; he was dismissed from his position at his local district parliament’s Immigration and Integration Advisory Council after he wrote a self-published book on a similar theme. According to an investigation by the British government in 1989, the available evidence did not back up the claim that Hess was murdered, and Solicitor General Sir Nicholas Lyell saw no grounds for further investigation. The autopsy results supported the conclusion that Hess had killed himself. A report declassified and published in 2012 led to questions again being asked as to whether Hess had been murdered. Historian Peter Padfield wrote that the suicide note found on the body appeared to have been written when Hess was hospitalised in 1969.
Hess’s grave in Wunsiedel became a destination for neo-Nazi pilgrimage and for demonstrations each August on the anniversary of his death. To put a stop to such pilgrimage, the parish council decided not to allow an extension on the grave’s lease when it expired in 2011. With the eventual consent of his family, Hess’s grave was re-opened on July 20, 2011. The remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea by family members. The gravestone, which bore the epitaph “Ich hab’s gewagt” (“I have dared”), was destroyed. Spandau Prison was demolished in 1987 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
A myth that the Spandau prisoner was not actually Hess was disproved in 2019. A study of DNA testing undertaken by Sherman McCall, formerly of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Jan Cemper-Kiesslich of the University of Salzburg demonstrated a 99.99 percent match between the prisoner’s Y chromosome DNA markers and those of a living male Hess relative.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Rouben Mamoulian.
Rouben Mamoulian was an American film and theater director. In 1925, Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama, where Martha Graham was working at the time. Among other performances, together they produced a short, two-color film titled The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly after, and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay. In 1930, Mamoulian became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Child star Jackie Cooper stated in his autobiography that Rouben Mamoulian was his uncle, and this fact helped establish Cooper’s early movie career.
Mamoulian began his Broadway director career with a production of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, which opened on October 10, 1927. He directed Wings Over Europe from late 1928 to 1929. He directed the revival of Porgy in 1929 along with George Gershwin’s operatic treatment Porgy and Bess, which opened on October 10, 1935. Mamoulian was also the first to stage such notable Broadway works as Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and Lost in the Stars (1949).
He directed his first feature film in 1929, Applause, which was one of the early sound films. It was a landmark film owing to Mamoulian’s innovative use of camera movement and sound, and these qualities were carried to his other films released in the 1930s. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) is regularly considered the best version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale; Queen Christina (1933) was the last film Greta Garbo made with John Gilbert; both benefit from being made before the “Hays Code” came into full force. The musical film Love Me Tonight was released in 1932.
He directed the first three-strip Technicolor film Becky Sharp (1935), based on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, as well as the 1937 musical High, Wide, and Handsome. His next two films earned him wide admiration, The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941), both remakes of silent films. Blood and Sand, about bullfighting, was filmed in Technicolor, and used color schemes based on the work of Spanish artists such as Diego Velázquez and El Greco. His foray into screwball comedy in 1942 was a success with Rings on Her Fingers starring Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney.
Mamoulian’s last completed musical film was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1957 film version of the Cole Porter musical Silk Stockings. This was one of Porter’s less successful stage musicals and was based on the 1939 Ninotchka. The film Silk Stockings starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, with Janis Paige and Peter Lorre in supporting roles.
Mamoulian’s film directing career came to an end when he was fired from two consecutive films: Porgy and Bess (1959) and Cleopatra (1963). He previously had been fired as director of Laura (1944). After directing the highly successful original stage productions of Oklahoma! and Carousel, he worked on only a few other theatrical productions, such as St. Louis Woman, which introduced Pearl Bailey to Broadway audiences.
He personally was recruited by Directors Guild of America (DGA) co-founder King Vidor in 1936 to help unionize fellow movie directors. Mamoulian’s lifelong allegiance to the DGA, and more so his general unwillingness to compromise, contributed to his being targeted in the Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s.
He died on December 4, 1987 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital of natural causes at the age of 90 in Woodland Hills, California. The biography Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen by David Luhrssen was published in 2013. Mamoulian is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, whose films were seminal in their genres; On February 9, 1960, Mamoulian received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It has been established in DC Comics that his film The Mark of Zorro is the film that Bruce Wayne and his family saw in the theater before his parents were murdered. Mamoulian’s film The Mark of Zorro is one of the biggest inspirations of the character Batman. The biggest similarities include the cowl, the dark personality, and mystery of his identity. In Batman: The Animated Series, the character Gray Ghost was inspired by Mamoulian’s version of Zorro. He was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981. In 1982 Mamoulian received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America.
In 2019, Mamoulian’s film Becky Sharp was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Robert Preston.
Robert Preston was an American stage and film actor and singer of Broadway and cinema, best known for his collaboration with composer Meredith Willson and originating the role of Professor Harold Hill in the 1957 musical The Music Man and the 1962 film adaptation; the film earned him his first of two Golden Globe Award nominations. Preston collaborated twice with filmmaker Blake Edwards, first in S.O.B. (1981) and again in Victor/Victoria (1982). For portraying Carroll “Toddy” Todd in the latter, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at the 55th Academy Awards.
He appeared in a stock company production of Julius Caesar and a Pasadena Playhouse production of Idiot’s Delight. A Paramount Pictures attorney liked his work and recruited him to the studio. The Los Angeles Times reported that Preston’s mother was employed by Decca Records, Bing Crosby’s label, and was acquainted with Crosby’s brother Everett, a talent agent; she convinced him to watch one of Preston’s performances at the Pasadena Playhouse. The result was a contract with the Crosby agency and a movie deal with Paramount Pictures, Crosby’s studio. Preston made his screen debut in 1938, in the crime dramas King of Alcatraz (1938) and Illegal Traffic.
The studio ordered Preston to stop using his family name of Meservey. As Robert Preston, the name by which he was known for his entire professional career, he appeared in many Hollywood films, predominantly but not exclusively Westerns. He was Digby Geste in the sound remake of Beau Geste (1939) with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland, and he featured in North West Mounted Police (1940), also with Cooper. He played a Los Angeles police detective in the noir This Gun for Hire (1942).
World War II interrupted Preston’s Paramount assignments. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the United States Army Air Forces and served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. 9th Air Force with the 386th Bomb Group (Medium). At the end of the war in Europe, the 386th and Captain Robert Meservey, an S-2 Officer (intelligence), were stationed in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. Meservey’s job had been receiving intelligence reports from 9th Air Force headquarters and briefing the bomber crews on what to expect in accomplishing their missions.
When Preston resumed his movie career in 1947, it was as a freelance character actor, accepting roles for Paramount, RKO, MGM, and various independent producers. Although Preston acted in many movies, he never became a major star. In a 1984 interview, he recalled, “I played the lead in all the B pictures and the villain in all the epics. After a while, it was clear to me I had sort of reached what I was going to be in movies.” Preston found additional roles in 1950s television.
Robert Preston is probably best known for his performance as Professor Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s musical The Music Man (1957). “They’d run through all the musical comedy people before they cast me,” Preston remembered years later. He won a Tony Award for his performance. Preston appeared on the cover of Time on July 21, 1958. He continued in the role until January 1959, when he was replaced by Eddie Albert for 18 months. In June 1960 Preston returned to the role for two weeks, until his successor, Bert Parks, became available. Parks finished the run while Preston was in Hollywood, busy with the film version of the show.
Warner Bros. executive Jack L. Warner wanted to cast James Cagney, Cary Grant, or Frank Sinatra for the lead in the movie. Warner was foiled by author-composer Meredith Willson, who had cast approval written into his contract for the property. Willson threatened to void the contract unless Robert Preston was cast. Warner was forced to comply.
In 1961, Preston was asked to make a recording as part of a program by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness to encourage schoolchildren to do more daily exercise. Copies of the recording of the song, Chicken Fat, written and composed by Meredith Willson, performed by Preston with full orchestral accompaniment, were distributed to elementary schools across the nation and played for students as they performed calisthenics. The song later became a surprise novelty hit and part of many baby-boomers’ childhood memories.
In 1962, Preston played an important supporting role, as wagonmaster Roger Morgan, in MGM’s epic How the West Was Won. That same year he appeared as Pancho Villa in a musical called We Take the Town, which closed during its Philadelphia tryout and never made it to Broadway.
In 1965, he was the male part of a duo-lead musical, I Do! I Do! with Mary Martin, for which he won his second Tony Award. He played the title role in the musical Ben Franklin in Paris, and he originated the role of Henry II in the stage production of The Lion in Winter, whom Peter O’Toole portrayed in the film version, receiving an Academy Award nomination. In 1974, he starred alongside Bernadette Peters in Jerry Herman’s Broadway musical Mack & Mabel as Mack Sennett, the famous silent film director. That same year, the film version of Mame, another famed Jerry Herman musical, was released with Preston starring, alongside Lucille Ball, in the role of Beauregard Burnside. In the film, which was not a box-office success, Preston sang “Loving You”, which Herman wrote especially for Preston’s film portrayal.
In 1978, Preston starred in another musical that didn’t make it to Broadway, The Prince of Grand Street, in which he played a matinee idol of New York’s Yiddish theater who refused to renounce the roles he had played in his youth, despite having aged out of them. With a libretto and songs by Bob Merrill and direction by Gene Saks, the show closed during its Boston tryout.
In 1979, Preston portrayed a snake-handling family patriarch Hadley Chisholm in a CBS Western miniseries, The Chisholms, with Rosemary Harris as his wife, Minerva. The story chronicled the Chisholm family losing their land in Virginia and migrating to the west to begin a new life. When CBS tried to continue the saga as a series the following year, Preston reprised his role, his character dying in the fifth episode. The series, which also featured co-stars Ben Murphy, Brett Cullen, and James Van Patten, lasted only four more episodes after Preston’s departure.
Preston appeared in several other stage and film musicals, including Victor/Victoria (1982), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His other film roles include Ace Bonner in Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner (1972), “Big Ed” Bookman in Semi-Tough (1977), and Dr. Irving Finegarten in Blake Edwards’ 1981 Hollywood satire, S.O.B. His last theatrical film role was in The Last Starfighter (1984) as an interstellar con man/military recruiter called Centauri. He said that he based his approach to the character of Centauri on that which he had taken to Professor Harold Hill. Indeed, the role of Centauri was written for him with his performance as Harold Hill in mind. In 1983, Preston played an aging gunfighter in September Gun, a CBS TV Western film opposite Patty Duke and Christopher Lloyd. He also starred in the well-received HBO 1985 movie Finnegan, Begin Again with Mary Tyler Moore. Preston’s final role was in the television film Outrage! (1986); he portrayed a grief-stricken father who seeks justice for the brutal rape and murder of his daughter.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Rita Hayworth.
Rita Hayworth was an American actress, dancer and producer. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era’s top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term “The Love Goddess” to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
Hayworth is perhaps best known for her performance in the 1946 film noir Gilda, opposite Glenn Ford, in which she played the femme fatale in her first major dramatic role. She is also known for her performances in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Blood and Sand (1941), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Pal Joey (1957), and Separate Tables (1958). Fred Astaire, with whom she made two films, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), once called her his favorite dance partner. She also starred in the Technicolor musical Cover Girl (1944), with Gene Kelly. She is listed as one of the top 25 female motion picture stars of all time in the American Film Institute’s survey, AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars.
In 1980, Hayworth was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, which contributed to her death in 1987 at age 68. The public disclosure and discussion of her illness drew attention to Alzheimer’s, and helped to increase public and private funding for research into the disease.
She attended dance classes every day for a few years in a Carnegie Hall complex, where she was taught by her uncle Angel Cansino. Before her fifth birthday she was one of the Four Cansinos featured in the Broadway production of The Greenwich Village Follies at the Winter Garden Theatre. In 1926, at the age of eight, she was featured in La Fiesta, a short film for Warner Bros.
In 1927, her father took the family to Hollywood. He believed that dancing could be featured in the movies and that his family could be part of it. He established his own dance studio, where he taught such stars as James Cagney and Jean Harlow.
In 1931, Eduardo Cansino partnered with his 12-year-old daughter to form an act called the Dancing Cansinos. Her hair was dyed from brown to black to give her a more mature and “Latin” appearance. Since under California law Margarita was too young to work in nightclubs and bars, her father took her with him to work across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. In the early 1930s, it was a popular tourist spot for people from Los Angeles. Because she was working, Cansino never graduated from high school, but she completed the ninth grade at Hamilton High in Los Angeles.
Cansino took a bit part in the film Cruz Diablo (1934) at age 16, which led to another bit part in the film in Caliente (1935) with the Mexican actress Dolores del Río. She danced with her father in such nightspots as the Foreign and the Caliente clubs. Winfield Sheehan, the head of the Fox Film Corporation, saw her dancing at the Caliente Club and quickly arranged for Hayworth to do a screen test a week later. Impressed by her screen persona, Sheehan signed her for a short-term, six-month contract at Fox, under the name Rita Cansino, the first of two name changes during her film career.
During her time at Fox, Hayworth was billed as Rita Cansino and appeared in unremarkable roles, often cast as the exotic foreigner. In late 1934, aged 16, she performed a dance sequence in the Spencer Tracy film Dante’s Inferno (1935), and was put under contract in February 1935. She had her first speaking role as an Argentinian girl in Under the Pampas Moon (1935). She played an Egyptian girl in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), and a Russian dancer in Paddy O’Day (1935). Sheehan was grooming her for the lead in the 1936 Technicolor film Ramona, hoping to establish her as Fox Film’s new Dolores del Río.
By the end of her six-month contract, Fox had merged into 20th Century Fox, with Darryl F. Zanuck serving as the executive producer. Dismissing Sheehan’s interest in her and giving Loretta Young the lead in Ramona, Zanuck did not renew Cansino’s contract. Sensing her screen potential, salesman and promoter Edward C. Judson, with whom she would elope in 1937, got freelance work for her in several small-studio films and a part in the Columbia Pictures feature Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). Studio head Harry Cohn signed her to a seven-year contract and tried her out in small roles.
Cohn argued that her image was too Mediterranean, which limited her to being cast in “exotic” roles that were fewer in number. He was heard to say her last name sounded too Spanish. Judson acted on Cohn’s advice: Rita Cansino became Rita Hayworth when she adopted her mother’s maiden name, to the consternation of her father. With a name that emphasized Irish-American ancestry, people were more likely to regard her as a classic “American”.
With Cohn and Judson’s encouragement, Hayworth changed her hair color to dark red and had electrolysis to raise her hairline and broaden the appearance of her forehead.
Hayworth appeared in five minor Columbia pictures and three minor independent movies in 1937. The following year, she appeared in five Columbia B movies. In 1939, Cohn pressured director Howard Hawks to use Hayworth for a small, but important, role as a man-trap in the aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings, in which she played opposite Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.
Cohn began to build up Hayworth in 1940 in features such as Music in My Heart, The Lady in Question, and Angels Over Broadway. That year, she was first featured in a Life magazine cover story. While on loan to Warner Bros., Hayworth appeared as the second female lead in The Strawberry Blonde (1941), opposite James Cagney.
She returned in triumph to Columbia Pictures, and was cast in the musical You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) opposite Fred Astaire in one of the highest-budgeted films Columbia had ever made. The picture was so successful, the studio produced and released another Astaire-Hayworth picture the following year, You Were Never Lovelier. Astaire’s biographer Peter Levinson writes that the dancing combination of Astaire and Hayworth was “absolute magnetism on the screen”. Although Astaire made 10 films with Ginger Rogers, his other main dancing partner, Hayworth’s sensuality surpassed Rogers’s cool technical expertise. “Rita’s youthful exuberance meshed perfectly with Fred’s maturity and elegance”, says Levinson.
When Astaire was asked who his favorite dance partner was, he tried not answering the question, but later admitted it was Hayworth: “All right, I’ll give you a name”, he said. “But if you ever let it out, I’ll swear I lied. It was Rita Hayworth.” Astaire commented that “Rita danced with trained perfection and individuality … She was better when she was ‘on’ than at rehearsal.” Biographer Charlie Reinhart describes the effect she had on Astaire’s style:
“There was a kind of reserve about Fred. It was charming. It carried over to his dancing. With Hayworth there was no reserve. She was very explosive. And that’s why I think they really complemented each other.”
In August 1941, Hayworth was featured in an iconic Life photo in which she posed in a negligee with a black lace bodice. Bob Landry’s photo made Hayworth one of the top two pin-up girls of the World War II years; the other was Betty Grable, in a 1943 photograph. For two years, Hayworth’s photograph was the most requested pin-up photograph in circulation. In 2002, the satin nightgown Hayworth wore for the photo sold for $26,888.
In March 1942, Hayworth visited Brazil as a cultural ambassador for the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy, under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. During the 1940s Hayworth also contributed to the OCIAA’s cultural diplomacy initiatives in support of Pan-Americanism through her broadcasts to South America on the CBS “Cadena de las Américas” radio network.
Hayworth had top billing in one of her best-known films, the Technicolor musical Cover Girl, released in 1944. The film established her as Columbia’s top star of the 1940s, and it gave her the distinction of being the first of only six women to dance on screen with both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. “I guess the only jewels of my life”, Hayworth said in 1970, “were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire … And Cover Girl, too.”
For three consecutive years, starting in 1944, Hayworth was named one of the top movie box-office attractions in the world. She was adept in ballet, tap, ballroom, and Spanish routines. Cohn continued to showcase Hayworth’s dance talents. Columbia featured her in the Technicolor films Tonight and Every Night (1945) with Lee Bowman and Down to Earth (1947) with Larry Parks.
Her sexy, glamorous appeal was most noted in Charles Vidor’s film noir Gilda (1946) with Glenn Ford, which caused censors some consternation. The role, in which Hayworth wore black satin and performed a legendary one-glove striptease, “Put The Blame On Mame”, made her into a cultural icon as a femme fatale.
While Gilda was in release, it was widely reported that an atomic bomb which was scheduled to be tested at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands would bear an image of Hayworth, a reference to her bombshell status. Although the gesture was undoubtedly meant as a compliment, Hayworth was deeply offended. Orson Welles, then married to Hayworth, recalled her anger in an interview with biographer Barbara Leaming: “Rita used to fly into terrible rages all the time, but the angriest was when she found out that they’d put her on the atom bomb. Rita almost went insane, she was so angry. … She wanted to go to Washington to hold a press conference, but Harry Cohn wouldn’t let her because it would be unpatriotic.” Welles tried to persuade Hayworth that the whole business was not a publicity stunt on Cohn’s part, that it was simply homage to her from the flight crew.
On the June 30, 1946, broadcast of Orson Welles Commentaries, Welles said of the imminent test, “I want my daughter to be able to tell her daughter that grandmother’s picture was on the last atom bomb ever to explode.”
The fourth atomic bomb ever to be detonated was decorated with a photograph of Hayworth cut from the June 1946 issue of Esquire magazine. Above it was stenciled the device’s nickname, “Gilda”, in two-inch black letters.
Hayworth’s performance in Welles’s 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai was critically acclaimed. The film’s failure at the box office was attributed in part to Hayworth’s famous red hair being cut short and bleached platinum blonde for the role. Cohn had not been consulted and was furious that Hayworth’s image was changed.
Also in 1947, Hayworth was featured in a Life cover story by Winthrop Sargeant that resulted in her being nicknamed “The Love Goddess”. The term was adopted and used later as the title of a biopic and of a biography about her. In a 1980s interview, Hayworth said, “Everybody else does nude scenes, but I don’t. I never made nude movies. I didn’t have to do that. I danced. I was provocative, I guess, in some things. But I was not completely exposed.”
Her next film, The Loves of Carmen (1948) with Glenn Ford, was the first film co-produced by Columbia and Hayworth’s production company, The Beckworth Corporation. It was Columbia’s biggest moneymaker that year. She received a percentage of the profits from this and all her subsequent films until 1954, when she dissolved Beckworth to pay off debts.
In 1948, at the height of her fame, Hayworth traveled to Cannes and was introduced to Prince Aly Khan. They began a year-long courtship, and were married on May 27, 1949. Hayworth left Hollywood and sailed for France, breaking her contract with Columbia.
Because Hayworth was already one of the most well-known celebrities in the world, the courtship and the wedding received enormous press coverage around the world. Because she was still legally married to second husband Orson Welles during the early days of her courtship with the prince, Hayworth also received some negative backlash, causing some American fans to boycott her pictures. Their wedding marked the first time a Hollywood actress became a princess. On December 28, 1949, Hayworth gave birth to the couple’s only child, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan.
Though Hayworth was anxious to start a new life abroad, away from Hollywood, Aly Khan’s flamboyant lifestyle and duties proved too difficult for Hayworth. She struggled to fit in with his friends, and found it difficult to learn French. Aly Khan was also known in circles as a playboy, and it was suspected that he had been unfaithful to Hayworth during the marriage.
In 1951, Hayworth set sail with her two daughters for New York. Although the couple did reconcile for a short time, they divorced in 1953.
After the collapse of her marriage to Khan, Rita Hayworth was forced to return to Hollywood to star in her “comeback” picture, Affair in Trinidad (1952) which again paired her with Glenn Ford. Director Vincent Sherman recalled that Hayworth seemed “rather frightened at the approach of doing another picture”. She continued to clash with Columbia boss Harry Cohn and was placed on suspension during filming. Nevertheless, the picture was highly publicized. The picture ended up grossing $1 million more than her previous blockbuster, Gilda.
She continued to star in a string of successful pictures. In 1953, she had two films released: Salome with Charles Laughton and Stewart Granger, and Miss Sadie Thompson with José Ferrer and Aldo Ray. She was off the big screen for another four years, mainly because of a tumultuous marriage to the singer Dick Haymes. During her marriage to Haymes, she was involved in much negative publicity, which significantly lessened her appeal. By the time she returned to the screen for Fire Down Below (1957) with Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak had become Columbia’s top female star. Her last musical was Pal Joey (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Novak. After this film, Hayworth left Columbia for good.
She received good reviews for her performance in Separate Tables (1958), with Burt Lancaster and David Niven, and The Story on Page One (1960). She continued working throughout the 1960s. In 1962, her planned Broadway debut in Step on a Crack was cancelled for undisclosed health reasons. The Money Trap (1964) paired her, for the last time, with good friend Glenn Ford. She continued to act in films until the early 1970s. She made comedic television appearances on Laugh In and The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s. Her last film was The Wrath of God (1972), a western.
Hayworth had a strained relationship with Columbia Pictures for many years. In 1943, she was suspended without pay for nine weeks because she refused to appear in Once Upon a Time. During this period in Hollywood, contract players could not choose their films; they were on salary rather than receiving a fixed amount per picture.
In 1947, Hayworth’s new contract with Columbia provided a salary of $250,000 plus 50% of films’ profits. In 1951, Columbia alleged it had $800,000 invested in properties for her, including the film she walked out on that year. This is when Hayworth left Hollywood to marry Prince Aly Khan and was suspended for failing to report to work on the film Affair in Trinidad. In 1952, Hayworth refused to report for work because she objected to the script. She said,
“I was in Switzerland when they sent me the script for Affair in Trinidad and I threw it across the room. But I did the picture, and Pal Joey, too. I came back to Columbia because I wanted to work and first, see, I had to finish that goddamn contract, which is how Harry Cohn owned me!”
In 1955, she sued Columbia Pictures to be released from her contract, but asked for her $150,000 salary, alleging that the filming failed to start on Joseph and His Brethren (1961) when agreed, later filmed in 1961 by a foreign company as The Story of Joseph and His Brethren (film). Cohn had a reputation as a taskmaster, but he had his own criticisms of Hayworth. He had invested heavily in her before she began an affair with the married Aly Khan, and it could have caused a backlash against her career and Columbia’s success. For instance, an article in the British periodical The People called for a boycott of Hayworth’s films:
“Hollywood must be told its already tarnished reputation will sink to rock bottom if it restores this reckless woman to a place among its stars.”
Cohn expressed his frustration in a 1957 interview with Time magazine:
“Hayworth might be worth ten million dollars today easily! She owned 25% of the profits with her own company and had hit after hit and she had to get married and had to get out of the business and took a suspension because she fell in love again! In five years, at two pictures a year, at 25%! Think of what she could have made! But she didn’t make pictures! She took two or three suspensions! She got mixed up with different characters! Unpredictable!”
Years after her film career had ended and long after Cohn had died, Hayworth still resented her treatment by both him and Columbia. She spoke bluntly in a 1968 interview:
“I used to have to punch a time clock at Columbia. Every day of my life. That’s what it was like. I was under exclusive contract, like they owned me … I think he had my dressing room bugged … He was very possessive of me as a person, he didn’t want me to go out with anybody, have any friends. No one can live that way. So I fought him … You want to know what I think of Harry Cohn? He was a monster.”
Later on, in 1972 she said:
“Harry Cohn thought of me as one of the people he could exploit, and make a lot of money…And I did make a lot of money for him, but not much for me.”
Hayworth resented the fact that the studio had failed to train her to sing or even to encourage her to learn how to sing. Although she appeared to sing in many of her films, she was usually dubbed. Because the public did not know her secret, she was embarrassed to be asked to sing by troops at USO shows.
I wanted to study singing”, Hayworth complained, “but Harry Cohn kept saying, ‘Who needs it?’ and the studio wouldn’t pay for it. They had me so intimidated that I couldn’t have done it anyway. They always said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t let you do it. There’s no time for that; it has to be done right now!’ I was under contract, and that was it.
Hayworth was a top glamour girl in the 1940s, a pin-up girl for military servicemen and a beauty icon for women. At 5 ft 6 in and 120 lbs, she was tall enough to be a concern for dancing partners such as Fred Astaire. She reportedly changed her hair color eight times in eight movies.
In 1949, Hayworth’s lips were voted best in the world by the Artists League of America. She had a modeling contract with Max Factor to promote its Tru-Color lipsticks and Pan-Stik make-up.
Hayworth confided to Orson Welles that her father began to sexually abuse her as a child, when they were touring together as the Dancing Cansinos. Her biographer, Barbara Leaming, wrote that her mother may have been the only person to know; she slept in the same bed as her daughter to try to protect her from incest. Leaming wrote that the abuse experienced by Hayworth as a young girl contributed to her difficulty in relationships as an adult.
In 1941, Hayworth said she was the antithesis of the characters she played: “I naturally am very shy … and I suffer from an inferiority complex.” Her provocative role in Gilda, in particular, was responsible for people expecting her to be what she was not. Hayworth once said, with some bitterness, “Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me.” She said, “Basically, I am a good, gentle person, but I am attracted to mean personalities.”
Hayworth’s two younger brothers, Eduardo Cansino Jr. and Vernon Cansino, both served in World War II. Vernon left the United States Army in 1946 with several medals, including the Purple Heart, and later married Susan Vail, a dancer. Eduardo Jr. followed Hayworth into acting; he was also under contract with Columbia Pictures. In 1950, he made his screen debut in The Great Adventures of Captain Kidd.
Hayworth was married and divorced five times. She had affairs with several of her leading men, most notably with Victor Mature in 1942, during the filming of My Gal Sal.
She had two grandsons: Marc McKerrow by Rebecca Welles, who married and had children, and Andrew Ali Aga Khan Embiricos by Yasmin Aga Khan, who died unmarried.
Hayworth also had a long-term on-and-off 40-year affair with Glenn Ford, which they started during the filming of Gilda in 1945. Their relationship is documented in the 2011 biography Glenn Ford: A Life by Ford’s son, Peter Ford. Peter revealed in his book that his father got Hayworth pregnant during the filming of The Loves of Carmen; she travelled to France to get an abortion. Ford later moved next door to her in Beverly Hills in 1960, and they continued their relationship for many years until the early 1980s.
In 1937, when Hayworth was 18, she married Edward C. Judson, an oilman turned promoter who was more than twice her age. They married in Las Vegas. He had played a major role in launching her acting career. A shrewd businessman, he was domineering and became her manager for months before he proposed. “He helped me with my career”, Hayworth conceded after they divorced, “and helped himself to my money.” She alleged that Judson compelled her to transfer a considerable amount of her property to him, and she promised to pay him $12,000 under threats that he would do her “great bodily harm”.
She filed for divorce from him on February 24, 1942, with a complaint of cruelty. She noted to the press that his work took him to Oklahoma and Texas while she lived and worked in Hollywood. Judson was as old as her father, who was enraged by the marriage, which caused a rift between Hayworth and her parents until the divorce. Judson had failed to tell Hayworth before they married that he had previously been married twice. When she left him, she had no money; she asked her friend Hermes Pan if she could eat at his home.
Hayworth married Orson Welles on September 7, 1943, during the run of The Mercury Wonder Show. None of her colleagues knew about the planned wedding until she announced it the day before. For the civil ceremony, she wore a beige suit, a ruffled white blouse, and a veil. A few hours after they got married, they returned to work at the studio. They had a daughter, Rebecca, who was born on December 17, 1944, and died at the age of 59 on October 17, 2004. They struggled in their marriage, with Hayworth saying that Welles did not want to be tied down:
“During the entire period of our marriage, he showed no interest in establishing a home. When I suggested purchasing a home, he told me he didn’t want the responsibility. Mr. Welles told me he never should have married in the first place; that it interfered with his freedom in his way of life.”
On November 10, 1947, she was granted a divorce that became final the following year.
In 1948, Hayworth left her film career to marry Prince Aly Khan, a son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the leader of the Ismaili community of Shia Islam. They were married on May 27, 1949. Her bridal trousseau was designed by Jacques Fath.
Aly Khan and his family were heavily involved in horse racing, owning and racing horses. Hayworth had no interest in the sport, but became a member of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club anyway. Her filly, Double Rose, won several races in France and finished second in the 1949 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
In 1951, while still married to Hayworth, Khan was spotted dancing with the actress Joan Fontaine in the nightclub where he and Hayworth had met. Hayworth threatened to divorce him in Reno, Nevada. In early May, Hayworth moved to Nevada to establish legal residence to qualify for a divorce. She stayed at Lake Tahoe with their daughter, saying there was a threat the child would be kidnapped. Hayworth filed for divorce from Khan on September 2, 1951, on the grounds of “extreme cruelty, entirely mental in nature”.
Hayworth once said she might convert to Islam, but did not. During the custody fight over their daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, born December 28, 1949, the prince said he wanted her to be raised as a Muslim; Hayworth wanted the child to be raised as a Christian. Hayworth rejected his offer of $1 million if she would rear Yasmin as a Muslim from age seven and allow her to go to Europe to visit with him for two or three months each year, stating:
“Nothing will make me give up Yasmin’s chance to live here in America among our precious freedoms and habits. While I respect the Moslem faith, and all other faiths, it is my earnest wish that my daughter be raised as a normal, healthy American girl in the Christian faith. There isn’t any amount of money in the entire world for which it is worth sacrificing this child’s privilege of living as a normal Christian girl here in the United States. There just isn’t anything else in the world that can compare with her sacred chance to do that. And I’m going to give it to Yasmin regardless of what it costs.”
In January 1953, Hayworth was granted a divorce from Aly Khan on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty. Her daughter Yasmin, only three years old, played about the court while the case was being heard, finally climbing on to the judge’s lap.
When Hayworth and Dick Haymes first met, he was still married and his singing career was waning. When she showed up at the clubs, he got a larger audience. Haymes was desperate for money because two of his former wives were taking legal action against him for unpaid child support. His financial problems were so bad, he could not return to California without being arrested. On July 7, 1954, his ex-wife Nora Eddington got a bench warrant for his arrest, because he owed her $3,800 in alimony. Less than a week earlier, his other ex-wife, Joanne Dru, also got a bench warrant because she said he owed $4,800 in support payments for their three children. Hayworth ended up paying most of Haymes’s debts.
Haymes was born in Argentina and did not have solid proof of American citizenship. Not long after he met Hayworth, U.S. officials initiated proceedings to have him deported to Argentina for being an illegal alien. He hoped Hayworth could influence the government and keep him in the United States. When she assumed responsibility for his citizenship, a bond was formed that led to marriage. The two were married on September 24, 1953, at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, and their wedding procession went through the casino.
From the start of their marriage, Haymes was deeply in debt to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). When Hayworth took time off from attending his comeback performances in Philadelphia, the audiences sharply declined. Haymes’s $5,000 weekly salary was attached by the IRS to pay a $100,000 bill, and he was unable to pay his pianist. Haymes’s ex-wives demanded money while Hayworth publicly bemoaned her own lack of alimony from Aly Khan. At one point, the couple was effectively imprisoned in a hotel room for 24 hours in Manhattan at the Hotel Madison as sheriff’s deputies waited outside threatening to arrest Haymes for outstanding debts. At the same time, Hayworth was fighting a severe custody battle with Khan, during which she reported death threats against their children. While living in New York, Hayworth sent the children to live with their nanny in Westchester County. They were found and photographed by a reporter from Confidential magazine.
After a tumultuous two years together, Haymes struck Hayworth in the face in 1955 in public at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles. Hayworth packed her bags, walked out, and never returned. The assault and crisis shook her, and her doctor ordered her to remain in bed for several days.
Hayworth was short of money after her marriage to Haymes. She had failed to gain child support from Aly Khan. She sued Orson Welles for back payment of child support which she claimed had never been paid. This effort was unsuccessful and added to her stress.
Hayworth began a relationship with film producer James Hill, whom she went on to marry on February 2, 1958. He put her in one of her last major films, Separate Tables. This film was popular and highly praised, although The Harvard Lampoon named her the worst actress of 1958 for her performance. On September 1, 1961, Hayworth filed for divorce, alleging extreme mental cruelty. Hill later wrote Rita Hayworth: A Memoir, in which he suggested that their marriage collapsed because he wanted Hayworth to continue making movies, while she wanted them both to retire from Hollywood.
In his autobiography, Charlton Heston wrote about Hayworth’s brief marriage to Hill. One night, Heston and his wife Lydia joined the couple for dinner at a restaurant in Spain with the director George Marshall and the actor Rex Harrison, Hayworth’s co-star in The Happy Thieves. Heston wrote that the occasion “turned into the single most embarrassing evening of my life”, describing how Hill heaped “obscene abuse” on Hayworth until she was “reduced to a helpless flood of tears, her face buried in her hands”. Heston wrote that the others sat stunned, witnesses to a “marital massacre”, and, though he was “strongly tempted to slug him”, he left with his wife Lydia after she stood up, almost in tears. Heston wrote, “I’m ashamed of walking away from Miss Hayworth’s humiliation. I never saw her again.”
Orson Welles noted Hayworth’s problem with alcohol during their marriage, but he never believed that her problem was alcoholism. “It certainly imitated alcoholism in every superficial way”, he recalled in 1983. “She’d fly into these rages, never at me, never once, always at Harry Cohn or her father or her mother or her brother. She would break all the furniture and she’d get in a car and I’d have to get in the car and try to control her. She’d drive up in the hills suicidally. Terrible, terrible nights. And I just saw this lovely girl destroying herself. I admire Yasmin so much.”
Yasmin Aga Khan spoke of her mother’s long struggle with alcohol:
“I remember as a child that she had a drinking problem. She had difficulty coping with the ups and downs of the business … As a child, I thought, ‘She has a drinking problem, and she’s an alcoholic.’ That was very clear, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s not much I can do. I can just, sort of, stand by and watch.’ It’s very difficult, seeing your mother, going through her emotional problems and drinking and then behaving in that manner … Her condition became quite bad. It worsened and she did have an alcoholic breakdown and landed in the hospital.”
In 1972, the 54-year-old Hayworth wanted to retire from acting, but she needed money. At the suggestion of Robert Mitchum, she agreed to film The Wrath of God. The experience exposed her poor health and her worsening mental state. Because she could not remember her lines, her scenes were shot one line at a time. In November, she agreed to complete one more movie, the British film Tales That Witness Madness, but because of her worsening health, she left the set and returned to the United States. She never returned to acting.
In March 1974, both of her brothers died within a week of each other, which caused her great sadness and led to heavy drinking. In January 1976, at London’s Heathrow Airport, Hayworth was removed from a TWA flight after having an angry outburst while traveling with her agent. The event attracted much negative publicity; a disturbing photograph was published in newspapers the next day. Hayworth’s alcoholism hid symptoms of what was eventually understood to be Alzheimer’s disease.
Yasmin Aga Khan spoke of her mother’s disease:
“It was the outbursts. She’d fly into a rage. I can’t tell you. I thought it was alcoholism – alcoholic dementia. We all thought that. The papers picked that up, of course. You can’t imagine the relief just in getting a diagnosis. We had a name at last, Alzheimer’s! Of course, that didn’t really come until the last seven or eight years. She wasn’t diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s until 1980. There were two decades of hell before that.”
Biographer Barbara Leaming wrote that Hayworth aged prematurely because of her addiction to alcohol and also because of the many stresses in her life. “Despite the artfully applied make-up and shoulder-length red hair, there was no concealing the ravages of drink and stress”, she wrote of Hayworth’s arrival in New York in May 1956 in order to begin work on Fire Down Below, her first film in three years. “Deep lines had crept around her eyes and mouth, and she appeared worn, exhausted – older than her thirty-eight years.”
Alzheimer’s disease had been largely forgotten by the medical community since its discovery in 1906. Medical historian Barron H. Lerner wrote that when Hayworth’s diagnosis was made public in 1981, she became “the first public face of Alzheimer’s, helping to ensure that future patients did not go undiagnosed … Unbeknownst to her, Hayworth helped to destigmatize a condition that can still embarrass victims and their families.”
In July 1981, Hayworth’s health had deteriorated to the point that a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that she should be placed under the care of her daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan of New York City. Hayworth lived in an apartment at The San Remo on Central Park West adjoining that of her daughter, who arranged for her mother’s care during her final years. When asked how her mother was doing, Yasmin replied, “She’s still beautiful. But it’s a shell.”
In 1983, Rebecca Welles arranged to see her mother for the first time in seven years. Speaking to his lifelong friend Roger Hill, Orson Welles expressed his concern about the visit’s effect on his daughter. “Rita barely knows me now”, Welles said. He recalled seeing Hayworth three years before at an event which the Reagans held for Frank Sinatra. “When it was over, I came over to her table, and I saw that she was very beautiful, very reposed looking, and didn’t know me at first. After about four minutes of speaking, I could see that she realized who I was, and she began to cry quietly.”
In an interview which he gave the evening before his death in 1985, Welles called Hayworth “one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived”.
Hayworth was a lifelong Democrat who was an active member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee and was active in the campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1944 presidential election.
Hayworth was a Catholic whose marriage to Prince Aly Khan was deemed “illicit” by Pope Pius XII.
Rita Hayworth lapsed into a semicoma in February 1987. She died at age 68, from complications associated with Alzheimer’s disease, on May 14, 1987 at her home in Manhattan. President Ronald Reagan, who was one of Hayworth’s contemporaries in Hollywood, issued a statement:
“Rita Hayworth was one of our country’s most beloved stars. Glamorous and talented, she gave us many wonderful moments on stage and screen and delighted audiences from the time she was a young girl. In her later years, Rita became known for her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Her courage and candor, and that of her family, were a great public service in bringing worldwide attention to a disease which we all hope will soon be cured. Nancy and I are saddened by Rita’s death. She was a friend who we will miss. We extend our deep sympathy to her family.”
A funeral service was held on May 18, 1987, at the Church of the Good Shepherd. Pallbearers included actors Ricardo Montalbán, Glenn Ford, Cesar Romero, Anthony Franciosa, choreographer Hermes Pan, and a family friend, Phillip Luchenbill. She was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City. Her headstone includes Yasmin’s sentiment: “To yesterday’s companionship and tomorrow’s reunion.”
Hayworth received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama for her performance in Circus World (1964).
In 1978, at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D. C., Hayworth was presented with the inaugural National Screen Heritage Award of the National Film Society, a group that published American Classic Screen magazine (1976–1984).
In 1999, Hayworth was acknowledged as one of the top-25 greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood cinema in the American Film Institute’s survey, AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars.
The public disclosure and discussion of Hayworth’s illness drew international attention to Alzheimer’s disease, which was little known at the time, and it helped to greatly increase federal funding for Alzheimer’s research.
The Rita Hayworth Gala, a benefit for the Alzheimer’s Association, is held annually in Chicago and New York City. The program was founded in 1985 by Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, in honor of her mother. She is the hostess for the events and a major sponsor of Alzheimer’s disease charities and awareness programs. As of August 2017, a total of more than $72 million had been raised through events in Chicago, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida.
On October 17, 2016, a press release from the Springer Associates Public Relations Agency announced that Rita Hayworth’s former manager and friend, Budd Burton Moss, initiated a campaign to solicit the United States Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp featuring Hayworth. Springer Associates also announced that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would be lobbied in hopes of having an honorary Academy Award issued in memory of Hayworth. The press release added that Hayworth’s daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, the Alzheimer’s Association of Greater Los Angeles, and numerous prominent personalities of stage and screen were supporting the Moss campaign. The press release stated the target date for fulfillment of the stamp and Academy Award to be on October 17, 2018, on what will be the centennial of Hayworth’s birth.
The film I Remember Better When I Paint (2009) describes how Hayworth took up painting while struggling with Alzheimer’s.
In the Baptiste episode “Shell”, Baptiste talks to Kim about Hayworth in an attempt to gain information from her about Natalie after noticing that she has several DVDs of Hayworth’s films; the Dream Room has a poster of Gilda.
Hayworth’s name can be heard on the Madonna hit from 1990 “Vogue”, among other artists from classical Hollywood cinema. Her name is also mentioned in Tom Waits’s song “Invitation to the Blues” from his 1976 album Small Change.
In the Sicilian scenes of the film The Godfather, the bodyguard of Michael Corleone is heard shouting the name “Rita Hayworth” to GI’s passing by in jeeps.
Hayworth is the main topic of the song, “Take, Take, Take” by the White Stripes and also referenced in “White Moon”; both from their Get Behind Me Satan album, released in 2005. In a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone, Jack White says, “Rita Hayworth became an all-encompassing metaphor for everything I was thinking about while making the album.”
The film The Shawshank Redemption was adapted from a Stephen King short story, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, a novella from his 1982 collection, Different Seasons. A poster of Rita Hayworth hides a hole in a jail cell wall in the novella, which was used for the first third of the film, then changed to a poster of Marilyn Monroe for the middle third, then Raquel Welch for the last third. In the film, there is a scene where the prison movie night shows Rita Hayworth’s film Gilda.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Richard Marquand.
Richard Marquand was a British film and television director active in both US and UK film productions, best known for directing the 1983 space opera Return of the Jedi, the final film in the original Star Wars trilogy. He also directed the critically acclaimed 1981 drama film Eye of the Needle, the quiet Paris set romance Until September, and the hit 1985 thriller Jagged Edge.
By the late 1960s, Marquand had begun a career directing television documentaries for the BBC, where he worked on projects such as the 1972 series Search for the Nile and an edition of One Pair of Eyes (1968), about the novelist Margaret Drabble who had been a friend of his at Cambridge. He collaborated with the celebrated foreign correspondent James Cameron on a long-running series called Cameron Country for BBC television and also with John Pilger on a series of films for ITV. In 1979, Marquand incorporated many of his documentary techniques in his biographical television movie Birth of the Beatles. He directed several films specifically for children including the 1977 Emmy winning Big Henry and the Polka Dot Kid.
On the strength of his direction of the 1981 feature, Eye of the Needle, Marquand was hired by writer-producer George Lucas to direct Return of the Jedi. In his commentary track on the DVD, Lucas explains that Marquand “had done some great suspense films and was really good with actors. Eye of the Needle was the film I’d seen that he had done that impressed me the most, it was really nicely done and had a lot of energy and suspense.” For his work on the film, Marquand won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1984.
In 1960, Marquand married screenwriter Josephine Elwyn-Jones, the daughter of Labour MP Elwyn Jones and author and illustrator Pearl Binder. They had two children, Hannah Rachel and James Elwyn, before they divorced in 1970. James Marquand is a film editor who has also worked as a director. In 1981, Marquand married fellow film director Carol Bell, with whom he had another two children, Sam Adair and Molly Joyce. Marquand was a fan of Liverpool Football Club.
According to a 2014 Wales Online interview with his son James, Marquand wrote a screenplay for “a Welsh western” in the late 1970s at the South Wales branch of Pinewood Studios. The screenplay told the story of a young orphan girl in Victorian Mid Wales who enlists two local men to help her wreak revenge on those who killed her father; Marquand used to tell the story to his children when they were on holiday at the family’s cottage near Tregaron. Marquand reportedly pitched it to Hollywood producers who expressed interest in making it into a film; however, Marquand declined the offer because the producers insisted the story be relocated to the Rocky Mountains in the United States. In the interview, James Marquand expressed interest in adapting his father’s screenplay into a film. Marquand was driving his children home when he suffered a stroke brought on by an embolism. He reached the destination before collapsing and died in hospital in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on September 4, 1987 at the age of 49. His last film, Hearts of Fire, starring Bob Dylan, was released posthumously.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Ray Bolger.
Ray Bolger was an American actor, dancer, singer, vaudevillian, and stage performer (particularly musical theater) who started his movie career in the silent-film era.
Bolger was a major Broadway performer in the 1930s and beyond. He is best known for his roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939) as the Scarecrow and in Walt Disney’s holiday musical fantasy Babes in Toyland in 1961 as the villainous Barnaby. Bolger was the host of The Ray Bolger Show on TV from 1953 to 1955, originally titled Where’s Raymond?
His entertainment aspirations evolved from the vaudeville shows of his youth. He began his career in a vaudeville tap show, creating the act “Sanford & Bolger” with his dance partner. In 1926, he danced at New York City’s legendary Palace Theatre, the premier vaudeville theater in the United States. His limber body and improvisational dance movements won him many leading roles on Broadway in the 1930s. Eventually, his career also encompassed film, television, and nightclub work. In 1932 he was elected to the theater club, The Lambs and performed on opening night at Radio City Music Hall in December 1932.
Bolger signed his first cinema contract with MGM in 1936, and although The Wizard of Oz was early in his film career, he appeared in other movies of note. His best known pre-Oz appearance was The Great Ziegfeld (1936), in which he portrayed himself. He also appeared in Sweethearts (1938), the first MGM film in Technicolor, starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He also appeared in the Eleanor Powell vehicle Rosalie (1937), which also starred Eddy and Frank Morgan.
Bolger’s MGM contract stipulated that he would play any part the studio chose. However, he was unhappy when he was originally cast as the Tin Woodman in the studio’s 1939 feature-film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. The role of the Scarecrow had already been assigned to another dancing, studio-contract player, Buddy Ebsen. In time, the roles were shuffled around. Bolger’s face was permanently lined by wearing the Scarecrow’s makeup.
Following The Wizard of Oz, Bolger moved to RKO Pictures. In 1941, he was a featured act at the Paramount Theatre in New York, working with the Harry James Band. He would do tap dance routines, sometimes in a mock-challenge dance with the band’s pianist, Al Lerner. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Bolger’s performance was interrupted by President Roosevelt’s announcement of the news of the attack. Bolger toured in USO shows in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and appeared in the United Artists wartime film Stage Door Canteen (1943).
In 1946, he returned to MGM for a featured role in The Harvey Girls. Also that year, he recorded a children’s album, The Churkendoose, featuring the story of a misfit fowl (“part chicken, turkey, duck, and goose”), which teaches children that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it “all depends on how you look at things”.
Bolger’s Broadway credits included Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), On Your Toes (1936), By Jupiter (1942), All American (1962) and Where’s Charley? (1948), for which he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical and in which he introduced “Once in Love with Amy”, the song often connected with him. He repeated his stage role in the 1952 film version of the musical.
Bolger appeared in his own ABC television sitcom with a variety show theme, Where’s Raymond? (1953–1954), renamed the second year as The Ray Bolger Show (1954–55). He continued to star in several films, including Walt Disney’s remake of Babes in Toyland (1961) and smaller cameos throughout the 1960s and 1970.
Bolger made frequent guest appearances on television, including the episode “Rich Man, Poor Man” of the short-lived The Jean Arthur Show in 1966. In the 1970s, he had a recurring role as Fred Renfrew, the father of Shirley Partridge (Shirley Jones) on The Partridge Family, and appeared in Little House on the Prairie as Toby Noe and also guest-starred on other television series, such as Battlestar Galactica, Fantasy Island, and The Love Boat. In the late 1970s, Bolger played in a commercial for Safeway Supermarket’s “Scotch Buy” brand, in which he popularized the jingle, “Scotch Buy – ‘taint fancy, but its shore is good.” His last television appearance was on Diff’rent Strokes in 1984, three years before his death.
In 1998, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him. In 2016, the City of Boston commissioned a mural in Ray Bolger’s honor in the Codman Square section of the Dorchester neighborhood
In his later years, he danced in a Dr Pepper television commercial, and in 1985, he and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of his Oz costar Judy Garland, starred in That’s Dancing!, a film written by Jack Haley, Jr., the son of Jack Haley, who portrayed the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz.
Bolger was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1986, and at the end of that year, his health deteriorated and he left his Beverly Hills home to live at a nursing home in Los Angeles, where he died on January 15, 1987, five days after his 83rd birthday. He was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City.
At the time of his death, Bolger was the last surviving main credited cast member of The Wizard of Oz. At Judy Garland’s funeral, Bolger was the only one of her Oz co-stars who attended. He joined Harold Arlen, the composer of “Over the Rainbow”, and his wife, Anya Taranda. They were reported as among the last remaining guests at the conclusion of the service.
Whenever asked whether he had received any residuals from telecasts of The Wizard of Oz, Bolger would reply: “No, just immortality. I’ll settle for that.” Bolger’s Scarecrow is ranked among the “most beloved movie characters of all time” by AMC and the American Film Institute.
For his contributions to the film industry, Bolger received a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. It is located at 6788 Hollywood Boulevard.
In 2019, the first comprehensive biography of Bolger, More Than a Scarecrow by Holly Van Leuven, was published.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Randolph Scott.
Randolph Scott was an American film actor whose career spanned the years from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, including social dramas, crime dramas, comedies, musicals (albeit in non-singing and non-dancing roles), adventure tales, war films, and a few horror and fantasy films. However, his most enduring image is that of the tall-in-the-saddle Western hero. Out of his more than 100 film appearances over 60 were in Westerns. According to editor Edward Boscombe, “…Of all the major stars whose name was associated with the Western, Scott [was] most closely identified with it.”
Scott’s more than 30 years as a motion picture actor resulted in his working with many acclaimed screen directors, including Henry King, Rouben Mamoulian, Michael Curtiz, John Cromwell, King Vidor, Allan Dwan, Fritz Lang, Sam Peckinpah, Henry Hathaway (eight times), Ray Enright (seven), Edwin L. Marin (seven), Andre DeToth (six), and most notably, his seven film collaborations with Budd Boetticher. Scott also worked with a diverse array of cinematic leading ladies, from Shirley Temple and Irene Dunne to Mae West and Marlene Dietrich. His profile was incorporated into the original logo of the Las Vegas Raiders.
At 6 ft 2 in (188 cm), lanky, muscular, and handsome, Scott displayed what was seen as an easygoing charm and courtly Southern drawl in his early films that helped offset his limitations as an actor, where he was frequently found to be stiff or “lumbering”. As he matured, however, Scott’s acting was viewed as having improved, while his features became burnished and leathery, allowing him to portray a “strong, silent” type of stoic hero.
During the early 1950s, Scott was a consistent box-office draw. In the annual Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Polls, he ranked 10th in 1950, seventh in 1951, and 10th in both 1952 and 1953. Scott also appeared in Quigley’s Top Ten Money Makers Poll from 1950 to 1953.
Scott’s face was also the model for the pirate in the Las Vegas Raiders logo since 1960 when the Raiders were originally located in Oakland, California.
Although Scott achieved fame as a motion picture actor, he managed to stay fairly low profile with his private life. Offscreen he was a good friend of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. He met Grant on the set of Hot Saturday (1932), and shortly afterwards, they moved in together and shared a beach house in Malibu that became known as “Bachelor Hall”. It is widely rumored, on scant circumstantial evidence, that the two were in a romantic relationship at the time. But both men and their wives and families have repeatedly denied these rumors. In 1944, Scott and Grant stopped living together, but they remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
Scott died of heart and lung ailments in 1987 at the age of 89 in Beverly Hills, California. He was interred at Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte, North Carolina. He and his wife Patricia had been married for 43 years. She died in 2004 and is buried next to her husband. Their mid-century modern home was torn down in 2008. The Randolph Scott papers, which includes photos, scrapbooks, notes, letters, articles and house plans were left to the UCLA Library Special Collections.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Pola Negri.
Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles and was acknowledged as a sex symbol.
Raised in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Negri’s childhood was marked by several personal hardships: After her father was sent to Siberia, she was raised by her single mother in poverty, and suffered tuberculosis as a teenager. Negri recovered, and went on to study ballet and acting in Warsaw, becoming a well-known stage actress there. In 1917, she relocated to Germany, where she began appearing in silent films for the Berlin-based UFA studio. Her film performances for UFA came to the attention of Hollywood executives at Paramount Pictures, who offered her a film contract.
Negri signed with Paramount in 1922, making her the first European actress in history to be contracted in Hollywood. She spent much of the 1920s working in the United States appearing in numerous films for Paramount, establishing herself as one of the most popular actresses in American silent film. In the 1930s, during the emergence of sound film, Negri returned to Europe, where she appeared in multiple films for Pathé Films and UFA, and also began a career as a recording artist. She made only two films after 1940, her last screen credit being in Walt Disney’s The Moon-Spinners (1964).
Negri spent her later life largely outside the public sphere. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951, and spent the remainder of her life living in San Antonio, Texas, where she died of pneumonia secondary to a brain tumor for which she refused treatment, in 1987, aged 90.
“Pola Negri is very temperamental, but she has her temper under tight control. She, like other high-strung actresses such as Norma Talmadge and Anna Q. Nilsson, resorts to tears if anything goes wrong. These three women I rate as the best on the screen today. It is a joy to direct them: they are so sensitive to impressions. But if any of them is asked to portray a character in a way that she thinks is alien to the part, she will not be able to go on”. — Director Herbert Brenon (1880-1958) in Motion Picture Magazine, February 1926.
After Negri returned from the sanatorium, she successfully auditioned at the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts. Alongside her formal schooling at the academy, she took private classes outside with renowned Polish stage actress and professor Honorata Leszczyńska. She made her theatrical debut before her graduation at The Small Theatre in Warsaw on October 2, 1912.
She made her stage debut in 1913 in Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Hannele in Warsaw and appeared the following year in her first film, Niewolnica zmysłów. She continued to perform there while finishing her studies at the academy, graduating in 1914. Her graduating performance was as Hedwig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which resulted in offers to join a number of the prominent theaters in Warsaw.
By the end of World War I, Negri had established herself as a popular stage actress. She made an appearance at the Grand Theatre in Sumurun, as well as in the Small Theatre (Aleksander Fredro’s Śluby panieńskie), and at the Summer Theatre in the Saxon Garden. She debuted in film in 1914 in Slave to her Senses (Niewolnica zmysłów). She appeared in a variety of films made by the Warsaw film industry, including Bestia (Beast, released in the US as The Polish Dancer), Room No. 13 (Pokój nr 13), His Last Gesture (Jego ostatni czyn), Students (Studenci), and The Wife (Żona).
Negri’s popularity in Poland provided her with an opportunity to move to Berlin, Germany in 1917, to appear as the dancing girl in a German revival of Max Reinhardt’s theater production of Sumurun. In this production, she met Ernst Lubitsch, who at the time was producing comedies for the German film studio UFA. Negri was first signed with Saturn Films, making six films with them, including Wenn das Herz in Haß erglüht (If the Heart Burns With Hate, 1917). After this, she signed to UFA’s roster; some of the films that she made with UFA include Mania (1918), Der Gelbe Schein (The Yellow Ticket, also 1918), and Komtesse Doddy (1919).
In 1918, Lubitsch convinced UFA to let him create a large-scale film with Negri as the main character. The result was Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy Ma, 1918), which was a popular success and led to a series of Lubitsch/Negri collaborations, each larger in scale than the previous film. The next was Carmen (1918, reissued in the United States in 1921 as Gypsy Blood), which was followed by Madame DuBarry (1919, released in the U.S. as Passion). Madame DuBarry became a huge international success, brought down the American embargo on German films, and launched a demand that briefly threatened to dislodge Hollywood’s dominance in the international film market. Negri and Lubitsch made three German films together after this, Sumurun (aka One Arabian Night, 1920), Die Bergkatze (aka The Mountain Cat or The Wildcat, 1921), and Die Flamme (The Flame, 1922), and UFA employed Negri for films with other directors, including Vendetta (1919) and Sappho (1921), many of which were purchased by American distributors and shown in the United States.
Hollywood responded to this new threat by buying out key German talent, beginning with the procuration of the services of Lubitsch and Negri. Lubitsch was the first director to be brought to Hollywood, with Mary Pickford calling for his services in her costume film Rosita (1923). Paramount Pictures mogul Jesse Lasky saw the premiere of Madame DuBarry in Berlin in 1919, and Paramount invited Negri to come to Hollywood in 1921. She signed a $3,000 a week contract with Paramount and arrived in New York in a flurry of publicity on September 12, 1922. This made Negri the first-ever Continental star to be imported into Hollywood, setting a precedent for imported European stars that included Vilma Bánky, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, among many others. The Hot Dog, a Cleveland monthly publication, in its own promotional advertisement for Paramount in February 1922 claimed Negri’s true name was Paula Schwartz, and that she was Jewish, which was completely untrue.
Negri ended up becoming one of the most popular Hollywood actresses of the era, and certainly the richest woman of the film industry at the time, living in a mansion in Los Angeles modeled after the White House. While in Hollywood, she started several ladies’ fashion trends, some of which are still fashion staples today, including red painted toenails, fur boots, and turbans. Negri was a frequent photography subject of Hollywood portrait photographer Eugene Robert Richee, and several photographs of her were taken during this period.
Negri’s first two Paramount films were Bella Donna (1923) and The Cheat (1923), both of which were directed by George Fitzmaurice and were remakes of Paramount films from 1915. Her first spectacle film was the Herbert Brenon-directed The Spanish Dancer (1923), based on the Victor Hugo novel Don César de Bazan. The initial screenplay was intended as a vehicle for Rudolph Valentino before he left Paramount and was reworked for Negri. Rosita, Lubitsch’s film with Mary Pickford, was released the same year and happened to be based on Don César de Bazan. According to the book Paramount Pictures and the People Who Made Them, “Critics had a field day comparing the two. The general opinion was that the Pickford film was more polished, but the Negri film was more entertaining.”
Initially Paramount used Negri as a mysterious European femme fatale and a clotheshorse as they had done with Gloria Swanson and staged an ongoing feud between the two actresses, which actor Charlie Chaplin recalled in his autobiography as “a mélange of cooked-up jealousies and quarrels.” Negri was concerned that Paramount was mishandling her career and image and arranged for her former director Ernst Lubitsch to direct her in the critically acclaimed Forbidden Paradise (1924). It was the last time the two worked together in any film. By 1925, Negri’s on-screen continental opulence was starting to wear thin with some segments of the American audience, a situation parodied in the Mal St. Clair-directed comedy A Woman of the World (1925), in which Negri starred.
In 1926, Negri starred in The Crown of Lies and Good and Naughty, the former of which earned an unfavorable review in Photoplay magazine, which deemed it an “impossible Pola Negri vehicle. If you have nothing else to do—see this and suffer with Pola.” Paramount transitioned into casting Negri in international peasant roles the following year in films such as the Mauritz Stiller-directed and Erich Pommer-produced Hotel Imperial (1927), in an apparent effort to give her a more down-to-earth, relatable image. Although Hotel Imperial reportedly fared well at the box office, her next film Barbed Wire (1927), directed by Rowland V. Lee, and a number of subsequent films did not, reportedly due to negative publicity about her behavior at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral (she fainted a few times and cried exaggeratedly) and her rebound marriage to Georgian prince Serge Mdivani, although her films continued to fare well internationally. Negri defended herself, saying: “It is difficult for a foreigner coming to America…I had been told so much what not to do. It was particularly difficult for me, a Slav. My emotion seemed exaggerated to Americans. I cannot help that I haven’t the Anglo-Saxon restraint and tact.”
In 1928 Negri was earning $10,000 a week, and was directed by Rowland V. Lee in another three films (The Secret Hour, Three Sinners, and Loves of an Actress), before making her last film for Paramount Pictures, The Woman from Moscow, with Norman Kerry. Negri claimed in her autobiography she opted not to renew her contract with Paramount, choosing to retire from films and live as a wife at the Château de Rueil-Seraincourt, near Vigny that she owned and where she had married her second husband. The same year, her short volume featuring reflections on art and film, La Vie et Le Rêve au Cinéma (lit. English: Life and Dreams of the Cinema), edited by Albin Michel, was published. By 1929, she had reportedly earned $5 million.
Negri’s initial 1928 retirement turned out to be short-lived. Negri miscarried her pregnancy and later learned that her husband was gambling her fortune away on speculative business ventures, which strained their relationship. She went back to acting when an independent production company offered her work in a British film production that was to be distributed by Gaumont-British. Initially the film was to be a filmed version of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and Shaw offered to alter the play to suit the film. When the rights proved to be too expensive, the company settled on an original story and hired German Kammerspielfilm director Paul Czinner to direct. The resulting film, The Way of Lost Souls (also known as The Woman He Scorned), was released in 1929; it was Negri’s final silent film.
Negri returned to Hollywood in 1931 to begin filming her first talking film, A Woman Commands (1932). The film itself was poorly received, but Negri’s rendition of the song “Paradise”, the centerpiece of the film, became a sizable hit in the sheet music format. The song became a minor standard and was covered by many other performers, including Russ Columbo, Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Negri went on a successful vaudeville tour to promote the song. She then was employed in the leading role of the touring theater production A Trip to Pressburg, which premiered at the Shubert Theatre in New York. However, she collapsed after the final curtain at the production’s stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, due to gallbladder inflammation, and was unable to complete the tour. Negri returned to France to appear in Fanatisme (Fanaticism, 1934), a historical costume film about Napoleon III. The film was directed by the directorial team of Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel and released by Pathé. It was her only French film.
After this, actor-director Willi Forst brought Negri to Germany to appear in the film Mazurka (1935). The film was considered “artistically valuable” (German: künstlerisch wertvoll) by the Reich Film Kammer. Mazurka gained much popularity in Germany and abroad and became one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite films, a fact that, along with her admiring comments about the efficiency of the German film industry, gave birth to a rumor in 1937 of Negri having had an affair with Hitler. Negri sued Pour Vous, the French magazine which had circulated the rumor, for libel, and won. Mazurka was remade (almost shot-for-shot) in the U.S. as Confession (1937), starring Kay Francis.
After the success of Mazurka, Negri’s former studio, the now Joseph Goebbels-controlled UFA, signed Negri to a new contract. Negri lived in France while working for UFA, making five films with the company: Moscow–Shanghai (1936), Madame Bovary, Tango Notturno (both 1937), Die fromme Lüge (“The Secret Lie”, 1938), and Die Nacht der Entscheidung (“The Night of Decision”, 1938).
After the Nazis took over France, Negri fled back to the United States. During her flight, she spent some days in Portugal. She stayed in Monte Estoril, at the Hotel Atlântico, between June 28-30, 1940. The following day she moved to Estoril’s Hotel Palácio. She sailed to New York from Lisbon, Portugal, and initially lived by selling off jewelry. She was hired in a supporting role as the temperamental opera singer Genya Smetana for the 1943 comedy Hi Diddle Diddle. After the success of this film, Negri was offered numerous roles which were essentially rehashes of her role in Hi Diddle Diddle, all of which she turned down as derivative. In 1944, Negri was engaged by booking agent Miles Ingalls for a nationwide vaudeville tour. According to her autobiography, she also appeared in a Boston supper club engagement in 1945 for a repertoire centered around the song “Paradise”, and retired from the entertainment business altogether.
In 1948, director Billy Wilder approached Negri to appear as Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard (1950), after Mae Murray, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Mary Pickford declined the role. Negri reportedly declined the role because she felt that the screenplay was not ready and that Montgomery Clift, who was slated to play the Joe Gillis character at the time, was not a good choice for the character. The role of Gillis eventually went to William Holden, and Gloria Swanson accepted the role of Norma Desmond.
Negri came out of retirement to appear in the Walt Disney film The Moon-Spinners (1964), which starred Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach. Negri’s appearance in the film as eccentric jewel collector Madame Habib was shot in London over the course of two weeks. While she was filming The Moon-Spinners she made a sensation by appearing before the London press at her hotel in the company of a feisty cheetah, which had also appeared in the film, on a steel chain leash. The same year, she received an honorary award from the German film industry for her film work, followed by a Hemis-Film award in San Antonio in 1968. In 1970 she published her autobiography Memoirs of a Star, published by Doubleday. She made an appearance at the Museum of Modern Art on April 30, 1970, for a screening event in her honor, which featured her film A Woman of the World (1925) and selections from her films. Negri was a guest of honor at the 1972 screening of Carmen held at the Witte Museum in San Antonio.
In 1975, director Vincente Minnelli approached Negri to appear as the Contessa Sanziani in A Matter of Time, but Negri did not accept due to poor health. In 1978, Billy Wilder directed Fedora, and although Negri does not appear in the film, the title character was reportedly based largely on her. Her final high-profile coverage in her lifetime was for a “Where Are They Now?” feature on silent film stars, which appeared in Life magazine in 1980.
Pola Negri died on August 1, 1987, aged 90 at the Northeast Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. Her death was caused by pneumonia for which she had been rushed to the hospital a week earlier; however, she was also suffering from a brain tumor, for which she had refused treatment for two years. At her wake at the Porter Loring Funeral Home in San Antonio, her body was placed on view wearing a yellow golden chiffon dress with a golden turban to match. Her death received extensive coverage in her hometown newspapers San Antonio Light, and San Antonio Express-News, and in publications such as Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Variety.
Negri was interred in Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles next to her mother Eleonora, who died in 1954 from pancreatic cancer. As Negri had no children or siblings, she left most of her estate to St. Mary’s University, in Texas, including a collection of memorabilia and several rare prints of her films. St. Mary’s University also set up a scholarship in her name. In addition, a generous portion of her estate was given to the Polish nuns of the Seraphic Order; a large black and white portrait hangs in the small chapel next to Poland’s patron, Our Lady of Częstochowa, in San Antonio.
Negri has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard. She was the 11th star in Hollywood history to place her hand and footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She received a star in Poland’s Walk of Fame in Łódź and Poland’s post office issued a postage stamp honoring her in 1996. The Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles remembered her with the Pola Negri Award, given to outstanding film artists, and the Pola Negri Museum in Lipno gives a Polita award for outstanding artist achievement.
Negri, with Theda Bara and Mae Murray, were the actresses whose eyes were combined to form the Chicago International Film Festival’s logo, a stark, black and white close up of the composite eyes set as repeated frames in a strip of film. It was created by Festival Founder and Artistic Director Michael Kutza.
In 2006, a feature-length documentary about Negri’s life, Pola Negri: Life Is a Dream in Cinema, premiered at the Seventh Annual Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles. The film was directed by Negri’s biographer, Mariusz Kotowski, and includes in-depth interviews with Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach, who starred in Negri’s final film The Moon-Spinners (1964). Pola Negri: Life Is a Dream in Cinema has played at Negri retrospective screenings in Europe and the U.S., most notably at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.
Kotowski wrote a Polish-language biography of Negri titled Pola Negri: Legenda Hollywood (English title: Pola Negri: Hollywood Legend), released in Poland on February 24, 2011, and an English-language biography Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale, published by the University Press of Kentucky on April 8, 2014. Kotowski produced a 3-disc DVD compilation of early Negri films, Pola Negri, The Iconic Collection: The Early Years (2011).
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director and producer. In his youth he played juvenile roles in vaudeville and silent film comedies.
During the 1930s, LeRoy was one of the two great practitioners of economical and effective film directing at Warner Brothers studios, the other being his cohort Michael Curtiz. LeRoy’s most acclaimed films of his tenure at Warners include Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and They Won’t Forget (1937).
LeRoy left Warners and moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1939 to serve as both director and producer. Perhaps his most notable achievement as a producer is the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz.
Selling newspapers near the Alcazar Theatre, LeRoy was spotted by stage star Theodore Roberts. A personable and attractive youth at age fourteen, LeRoy was engaged for a bit part in a 1914 stage production of Barbara Frietchie. Gratified by “that lovely feeling—audience approval”, he performed in productions with the Liberty Theater in Oakland, playing the lead juvenile roles in Tom Sawyer and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
As a 14-year-old, LeRoy carefully observed emerging screen star Charlie Chaplin at a number of film sets in the greater San Francisco area. From these studies, LeRoy devised a burlesque of the comedian, and perfected his imitation on the local amateur circuit. In 1915 he won a competition that hosted almost a thousand Chaplin imitators at the Pantages Theater. His outstanding performance earned him a slot as “The Singing Newsboy” in Sid Grauman’s vaudeville show at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition titled “Chinatown by Night”.
Now a show-business professional, LeRoy left his newsboy job. Pairing with the 16-year-old actor-pianist Clyde Cooper, they formed a vaudeville routine “LeRoy and Cooper: Two Kids and a Piano.” The duo struggled to find engagements, and LeRoy recalled “we would have played toilets if they had offered us some money.” Soon they were discovered by the premier vaudeville circuits – Pantages, Gus Sun and Orpheum – and provided with regular bookings on national tours. LeRoy relished the lifestyle of a vaudevillian, occasionally appearing in shows that featured iconic performers of the era, among them Sarah Bernhardt, Harry Houdini and Jack Benny. After three years, and now “a fairly well-established act” in theater listings, the duo amicably disbanded after an unexpected death in Cooper’s family.
LeRoy joined George Choos’s mostly female troupe in musical comedies, and Gus Edwards act billed “The Nine Country Kids” in 1922. LeRoy’s enthusiasm for the stage gradually waned and he left the troupe in 1923.
LeRoy accepted a bit role in a scene with former The Perils of Pauline (1914) star Pearl White filmed at Fort Lee, New Jersey. LeRoy was “thoroughly intrigued” by the filmmaking process, recalling “I knew I was finished with vaudeville. I knew, just as positively that I wanted to get into the movie business.”
In October 1919 LeRoy, just turned 19, approached his cousin Jesse L. Lasky, a former vaudevillian who was twenty years his senior. Lasky was a partner with rising movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Adolf Zukor at its New York headquarters at Famous Players-Lasky. Lasky furnished LeRoy with a note to the employment department at their Hollywood studios. A week later LeRoy began working in the Wardrobe Unit folding costumes for the American Civil War picture Secret Service (1919), earning $12.50 a week.
According to film historian Kingley Canham, Leroy’s “enthusiasm, energy and push”, in addition to a further appeal to Jesse Lasky, earned LeRoy promotion to lab technician in the film tinting unit.
LeRoy’s next advancement was achieved through his own initiative. Discovering that director William DeMille wished to create an illusion of moonlight shimmering on a lake to produce a romantic effect, LeRoy devised a technique in the lab:
“I had an idea. That night I stayed late in the lab…I got a big wooden box about twelve feet square and lined it with tar paper. Then I filled it with distilled water…I got a spotlight and carefully set it up so the light played upon the surface of the water…I took one of the studio’s Pathé cameras, found a supply of raw film and shot some five-thousand feet of my pseudo-moonlight-on-the-water.”
Despite LeRoy suffering a stern reprimand, DeMille was delighted with the effect and used the footage in the film. LeRoy was immediately promoted to assistant cameraman.
After six months behind the camera, LeRoy experienced a disastrous contretemps when he improperly adjusted the camera focus settings, ruining footage on several scenes on a DeMille production. LeRoy describes it as “a horrible mess” which led to his dismissal in 1921 as cameraman.
LeRoy was soon hired as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic The Ten Commandments. LeRoy credits Cecil B. DeMille, for inspiring him to become a director: “As the top director of the era, DeMille had been the magnet that had drawn me to his set as often as I could go.” LeRoy also credits DeMille for teaching him the directing techniques required to make his own films.
LeRoy worked intermittently in small supporting roles in film during the early 1920s. The youthful and diminutive LeRoy was consistently cast in juvenile roles. Appearing with film stars Wallace Reid, Betty Compson and Gloria Swanson. He performed his last role in The Chorus Lady (1924) as “Duke”.
During the filming of The Ghost Breaker (1922), actor LeRoy suggested a number of humorous skits, which were incorporated into the picture by director Alfred E. Green. Green offered him a position as “gag man”. LeRoy recalled:
“I didn’t have to think twice. That was what I wanted—a chance to be in on the creative aspect of movie-making. It wasn’t directing, but it was getting closer. It was inventing, not interpreting…I abandoned my acting career with no regrets.”
While working at First National Pictures, LeRoy wrote gags for comedienne Colleen Moore in several films including Sally (1925), The Desert Flower (1925), We Moderns (1925) and Ella Cinders (1926). LeRoy served as acting advisor and confidant to Moore. In 1927 her husband John McCormick, studio head at First National in Hollywood, asked LeRoy to direct Moore in a version of Peg O’ My Heart. When the project was canceled studio president Richard A. Rowland, with Moore advocating, authorized LeRoy to direct a comedy, No Place to Go, starring Mary Astor and Lloyd Hughes and launching LeRoy’s filmmaking career at age twenty-seven.
His success with No Place to Go (1927), was followed by “a string of comedies and jazz-baby dramas” that served as vehicles for actress Alice White and allowed LeRoy to hone his skills as director. His prolific output in the final years of the silent film era included the box-office successes Harold Teen with Arthur Lake and Oh, Kay! with Colleen Moore.
Warner Brothers acquired First National in 1925 as a subsidiary studio and producer Jack Warner became a mentor and in-law to LeRoy in subsequent years.
LeRoy eagerly anticipated his first sound picture assignment, Naughty Baby (1929):
“My fifth picture, in 1929, was my first with sound. I had been watching the experiments with talkies with tremendous excitement…As a veteran of stage and vaudeville, I knew the value of the spoken and sung word. I understood dialogue, because I had been an actor…I couldn’t wait until I had a chance to direct a talking picture.”
LeRoy’s early directing efforts at First National were largely limited to comedies. His movies from this period include Gentleman’s Fate (1931) with John Gilbert, Tonight or Never (1931), with Gloria Swanson, High Pressure, a proto-screwball comedy with William Powell and Evelyn Brent, and The Heart of New York (1932) with Joe Smith.
LeRoy embarked on a period of enormous productivity and inventiveness at Warner Studios, creating “some the most polished and ambitious” films of the Thirties. His only rival at Warner’s was fellow director Michael Curtiz. Film historian John Baxter observes:
“Warners films were the most perfectly economical exercises in cinematic mechanics of which Hollywood was capable. There was no fat on them, either as art or entertainment…as a filmmaking tool, it functioned best in the hands of two great directors, Mervyn Leroy and Michael Curtiz.”
In the studio’s competitive crucible produced by the Great Depression demanding profitable entertainment, LeRoy directed 36 pictures during the decade. Baxter adds: “No genius could function without variation under such pressure.” The social perspective of films favored at Warner Brothers was distinct from those of its chief rivals: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, uncontested for its “technical virtuosity” aimed to serve “middle-class tastes” and Paramount studios identified for its “sophisticated dialogue and baroque settings” that catered to European sensibilities. In contrast, Warner Brothers films carried themes appealing to the working classes. Leroy biographer Kingsley Canham wrote:
“The topicality of Warner’s material and its direct appeal to the working classes set it apart from other studios. What their film lacked in gloss in comparison to M-G-M or the sophistication of Paramount was more than adequately compensated for by their presentation of everyday material…the working classes could identify with people, the situations and surroundings…”
LeRoy’s output in the early thirties was prodigious. The director attests to the rate of film production at the studios:
“If the poorer Curtiz films are disappointing, LeRoy’s failures are impossible to watch. When his initial concept was faulty or failed through heavy-handed scripting he could be as banal as Henry King at his worst. It needed a firm central theme to sustain LeRoy, a solid anchor for his speculation, and it was when he had this that his films reached heights at least as lofty as those scaled by Curtiz.”
“…While the world was struggling out of the depression, I turned out film after film after film. It a period of tremendous activity for me—and for Hollywood in general…I threw myself into my work…we had to keep working to stay up with the demand. The public was voracious in its appetite for movies…Neighborhood theaters had double features, and the bill usually changed twice a week. That means they were showing four new pictures a week, 208 a year, and that’s only one theater.”
LeRoy admits in retrospect that “I shot them so often and so fast that they tend to blend together in my memory.”
LeRoy first departed from his comedy-romance themed films with his drama Numbered Men (1930), a character study of convicts shot on location at San Quentin prison. The depiction of criminal elements had enjoyed popularity with Josef von Sternberg’s silent classic Underworld (1927), a fantasy treatment of his lone Byronic gangster “Bull” Weed. The gangster film as a genre was not achieved until LeRoy’s 1930 Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson, the first time that “any real attempt was made by Hollywood to describe the brutal reality of the criminal world.”
LeRoy’s Little Caesar established the iconography of subsequent films on organized crime, emphasizing the hierarchy of family loyalties and the function of violence in advancing criminal careers. LeRoy’s adroit cinematic handling of Robinson’s Rico incrementally shifts initial audience response from revulsion at the character’s homicidal acts to a “grudging admiration” that provides for a measure of sympathy when the gangster meets his sordid death in a back alley. LeRoy recalled the topicality of his subject in 1930: “Al Capone was a household word and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre had happened only a year before.”
LeRoy further demonstrated his talent for delivering fast-paced and competently executed social commentary and entertainment with Five Star Final (1931), an exposé of tabloid journalism, and Two Seconds (1932), a “vicious and disenchanted” cautionary tale of a death row inmate, each starring Robinson.
Warner Brothers’ most explosive social critique of the 1930s appeared with LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, dramatizing the harsh penal codes in Georgia and starring Paul Muni as the hunted fugitive James Allen.
Historian John Baxter observes that “no director has managed to close his film on so cold a note as LeRoy.” Muni’s escaped convict, falsely condemned to hard labor, is reduced to furtive prey: Asked by his estranged sweetheart “how do you get along, how do you live?” he hisses “I steal” and retreats into the night. Muni continued to work effectively with LeRoy in The World Changes (1933) with Aline MacMahon and in Hi, Nellie! (1934) with Glenda Farrell.
The versatile LeRoy portrayed both hard-boiled and clownish characters at Warner Brothers. His Hard to Handle (1933), James Cagney plays a fast-talking and remorselessly unscrupulous con-man, often to comic effect. His 1933 pictures TugboatAnnie, with Marie Dressler and Elmer, theGreat, the final of three pictures that LeRoy made with comic Joe E. Brown stands in contrast with the director’s gangster melodramas.
LeRoy’s socially-themed narrative is evident in his Three on a Match (1932) which follows the fates of three young women: a stenographer, a showgirl and a socialite played by Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak, respectively. His adroit transitions and cross-cutting provide quick and effective insights into his characters’ social rise and fall. The “pitiless milieu of grimy backstreets and cheap motels” serve as an implicit social critique without making this the theme of the picture.
The musical Gold Diggers of 1933 is one of the outstanding examples of the genre released by Warner Brothers in the Thirties. While the dance stagings—”surreal, geometric, often erotically charged” by choreographer Busby Berkeley dominate the picture, Warner’s musicals, according to historian John Baxter “are distinguished enough to be worth considering outside any discussion of Berkeley’s dance direction. The Gold Diggers of 1933 certainly deserves such attention.” Offering more than mere depression era escapism, the musical depicts the mass unemployment of veterans of World War I and alludes to the recent Washington D.C. Bonus Army protests, violently suppressed by police and U.S. Army units. The movie closes with the “dark and pessimistic” number “Remember My Forgotten Man”.
LeRoy’s control of the comedic elements and his direction of a cast endowed with “hard-boiled” heroines Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon and Ginger Rogers, would provide stand alone entertainment even if unencumbered by Berkeley’s choreographed numbers. MacMahon, who plays the “ruthless” Trixie was later cast in the lead for LeRoy’s dramatic Heat Lightning (1934) as a murderess. a picture which prefigures director Archie Mayo’s The Petrified Forest (1936).
LeRoy followed with musical-like comedies for Warners in 1934 Happiness Ahead with Dick Powell and Josephine Hutchinson, about a society heiress who woos a window washer.
Oil for the Lamps of China, an adaption of the Alice Tisdale Hobart novel, is an examination of an American oil company in China, centering on its paternalistic and humiliating treatment of an ambitious company man played by Pat O’Brien. Josephine Hutchinson portrays his long-suffering wife. LeRoy effectively employed cinematic techniques of montage, structural parallels in settings, chiaroscuro lighting and musical leitmotifs to develop atmosphere and convey O’Brien’s struggle, ending in his vindication.
LeRoy returned to light comedy and romance in 1935 with a film adaption of the 1929 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II stage production of the same name starring Irene Dunne and a Marion Davies vehicle Page Miss Glory and I Found Stella Parish, with a sentimental “tour-de-force” performance by Kay Francis.
Based on the popular twelve-hundred page historical romance by Hervey Allen, Warner’s Anthony Adverse (1936) was LeRoy’s most prestigious undertaking to date. Only two-thirds of the vast and unwieldy picaresque tale, set during the Napoleonic era, is depicted on screen. The sheer scale of the project remains impressive, and Leroy’s ability to handle a film with high production values that possessed a “Metro-like glossiness” recommended him to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a prospective executive producer.
The “lively performances” from a large cast including Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Anita Louise and Gale Sondergaard, as well as LeRoy’s “technical excellence” was rewarded with five Academy Award nominations.
LeRoy reports in his 1974 memoir that “by the time 1936 arrived, I was slowing my pace somewhat. Gone were the assembly-line tactics, the grinding-them-out methods of a few years before…I was working slower, trying to achieve more beauty on film, looking for cinematic perfection.”
In 1936, Warners began tasking LeRoy with both directing and producing assignments. LeRoy served as producer-director on Three Men on a Horse (1936), a “madcap” comedy starring Frank McHugh and a screenplay co-written by Groucho Marx. This was followed in 1937 with The King and the Chorus Girl, starring French actor Fernand Gravet. Both films costarred Joan Blondell.
Leroy also produced director James Whale’s The Great Garrick (1937), a historical comedy with Brian Aherne who plays the renowned English actor.
Film historian John Baxter stated, “LeRoy’s Thirties reputation rests today on two films: They Won’t Forget (1937), and Edward G. Robinson vehicle Little Caesar (1931).”
LeRoy’s penultimate film for Warners was They Won’t Forget (1937), a harsh indictment of lynch law based on the Ward Greene novel, Death in the Deep South (1936). According to critic Kingsley Canham, LeRoy’s handling of tracking and low-angle shots, overhead composition, close-ups and dissolves possess a “visual power” that “retains its impact for modern audiences.” LeRoy’s unmitigated condemnation of lynching rejects misanthropy and adopts a tone of “righteous anger”, in which there “is no forgiveness” for the instigators of mob law.
LeRoy was poised to move to M-G-M as head of production in 1938, with the fulsome support of the studio’s Louis B. Mayer where “[LeRoy] would establish himself as a major force in Forties cinema.” Before departing Warners, Leroy directed and produced his final film Fools for Scandal (1938), the studio’s second – and failed attempt – to launch the American film career of French actor Fernand Gravet.
LeRoy arrived at M-G-M fully expecting to finish his career as the studio’s chief production executive. His first assignments were modest:
Dramatic School (1938) directed by Robert B. Sinclair: A romantic drama starring Luise Rainer and Paulette Goddard and LeRoy’s first picture at M-G-M. Biographer John Baxter attributes Rainer’s “coherent, moving and truthful” performance to producer LeRoy and “a fitting to [the filmmakers] rich Thirties career.”
Stand Up and Fight (1938), directed by W. S. Van Dyke: A Wallace Beery vehicle, with costars Robert Taylor and Florence Rice. The screenplay was co-written by crime fiction writer James M. Cain, and Jane Murfin, who wrote the adaption of Booth Tarkington’s novel the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Alice Adams (1935).
LeRoy had long desired to adapt the Frank Baum books to film and reminisced that “the dream remained merely a dream until I found myself at M-G-M and Louis B. Mayer asked me what I wanted to make.” “The Wizard of Oz,” I said.
He didn’t look pained or upset or anything. “Okay,” he said. “Do it.”
In 1938, LeRoy proposed a film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Louis B. Mayer purchased the rights to the property from Samuel Goldwyn for $50,000. Mayer limited LeRoy’s role to producer and ultimately Victor Fleming was enlisted as credited director. LeRoy recalled the scope of the project:
“The preparations were enormous. Nothing like it had ever been done before… [art directors] Cedric Gibbons [and] William A. Horning built a model of the set that was one-fourth life size…it took months to finish that alone, and some of the statistics boggle the mind…when the full set was built it covered 25 acres of the studio backlot…we had 65 different sets in the picture, and each of them was concocted out of whole cloth and hard work.”
LeRoy added that “it took six months to prepare the picture, six months to shoot it, and then a lengthy post-production schedule for editing and scoring. Altogether The Wizard of Oz was many months in the making…”
Though LeRoy was earning $3000 week ($600,000 per year), after completing The Wizard of Oz, he requested a release from his contract so as to return to directing, and Mayer complied:
“…I quickly became disenchanted with my new job [as producer]… I found myself chafing at the executive’s desk. It didn’t take long to realize that the fun of the movie business was in the actual directing…About a year after getting to [M-G-M] I went to Mayer and said I wanted out.”
LeRoy accepted a cut in salary to $4000 a week as a director at M-G-M and “never again functioned only as a producer.”
The onset of war in Europe in 1939 created anxiety in the Hollywood film industry as the overseas movie market contracted and currency restrictions mounted in Great Britain. Hollywood studios implemented salary reductions and limits on film content were imposed, particularly at M-G-M. Film historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg describe these developments persisting “almost to the end of the decade”:
“At Metro, the idea was to concentrate on nice people involved in heartbreak, finding their happiness at last in each other’s arms, and all in settings of an idealized and antiseptic beauty: an England full of sunshine and chintz and doves, an America full of white fences and rambler roses around the door. Hagiographies of inventors and reformers glowed with optimistic charm…”
Critic Andrew Sarris disparages the “sentimental piety and conformist cant” that characterized M-G-M studios, as well as Warner Brothers in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
LeRoy limited himself to directing features at M-G-M for the next 9 years, delivering 11 pictures. The quality of his output during this period is generally viewed as a decline creatively compared to his early work at Warner Brothers during the Thirties.
He resumed directorial duties with an adaption of Robert E. Sherwood’s romantic play Waterloo Bridge (1930).
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased the rights to Waterloo Bridge from Universal Studios, which had produced an adaption filmed in 1931 by James Whale and starring Mae Clarke as the fallen woman, Myra.
LeRoy’s Waterloo Bridge (1940), served as a vehicle to capitalize upon the meteoric rise of Vivien Leigh, heroine of David O. Selznick’s epic Gone with the Wind (1939). In a period when foreign markets were in jeopardy, profitable films were at a premium.
A silent film era technician and director in his early Hollywood career, LeRoy utilized silent film methods to film a key nightclub love scene with Leigh and co-star Robert Taylor. LeRoy describes his epiphany:
“No dialogue!…No dialogue at all!…I realized at that moment what all silent directors had always known…in great emotional moments, there are no words. A look, a gesture, a touch can convey much more meaning than spoken sentences [and] that’s the way we played the scene…”
LeRoy directed Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer and Conrad Veidt in the 1940 film Escape, the first of a number of anti-Nazi features suppressed by Hitler and which ultimately led to the banning of all M-G-M pictures in Germany.
LeRoy completed four features with English actress Greer Garson, an enormously profitable property cultivated by M-G-M to appeal to their British markets during WWII.
Blossoms in the Dust (1941): The screenplay by Anita Loos portrays the struggle by social reformer Edna Gladney to redeem children stigmatized by illegitimacy. Termed “highly romanticized” and “shamelessly sentimental” by film historian Kingley Canham, LeRoy defended the picture as virtuous and socially significant:
“Blossoms in the Dust began my association with Greer Garson…the picture made an immediate and profound contribution to the world we live in. Between it and Fugitive, I think I have contributed toward making this a better country.”
The pairing of Garson with Walter Pidgeon proved particularly appealing to their fans. They would appear together in a number of pictures, including LeRoy’s 1943 biopic of Madame Curie.
As Leroy’s first color film, Blossoms in the Dust demonstrates an aesthetically pleasing and an adroit handling of the new Technicolor technology.
Random Harvest (1942): Leroy and producer Sydney Franklin paired Garson with fellow Briton Ronald Colman in a romance that dramatizes clinical amnesia suffered by a WWI combat veteran. Garson’s genteel and largely desexualized screen image – “M-G-M’s First Lady of Saintly Virtue” – favored by Louis B. Mayer, is countered by LeRoy’s less inhibited Garson as the “impulsive Scottish lass” Paula.
LeRoy’s leisurely narrative pace, the lavishness of the settings, the fulsome musical score and the balanced editing demonstrate his embrace of M-G-M production values and distinguishing the stylish Random Harvest from his work at Warner Brothers.
Madame Curie (1943): Apropos LeRoy’s “lavish and lengthy biography” portraying the Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, critics Higham and Greenberg make these observations:
“With money rolling in and attendance at all-time highs, studios in the Forties could afford to indulge in ‘prestige productions’ as never before. Lives of the great and famous proved, as always, tempting material: authors, saints, politicians, scientists, inventors and tycoons received solid if none too accurate tributes…”
LeRoy and producer Sydney Franklin made a genuine effort to make the “highbrow” subject of the film – the heroic discovery of radium isotopes – engaging to the public, resorting to romanticizing and simplifying the topic.
Madame Curie was one of nine pictures in which Garson was cast with leading man Pidgeon. Married to Buddy Fogelson, Garson earned the title “the daytime Mrs. Pidgeon” on M-G-M sets.
Desire Me (1946): LeRoy attempted to reshoot an uncompleted George Cukor project starring Garson and Robert Mitchum, Desire Me, but abandoned the film, disparaging the “rotten script, a script that made absolutely no sense.”. Neither Cukor nor LeRoy appeared in the credits.
Strange Lady in Town (1955): LeRoy’s first film after returning to Warner Brothers studios as a director-producer. Garson, passed over by M-G-M to star as opera diva Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955), signed with Warners to make Strange Lady in Town, a western set in Santa Fe, New Mexico and endowed to Garson’s satisfaction “with horses and sunsets.” Dana Andrews co-stars.
In the final years of World War II, LeRoy directed propaganda films dramatizing the American war efforts at home and overseas.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) recounts the 1942 U.S. bombing mission over Tokyo by sixteen B-25s, coordinated by Lieutenant-Colonel James H. Doolittle. LeRoy employs flashbacks in an effort to present the personal lives of the airmen and their spouses, including an emotionally wrought scene in which the wounded Lieutenant Ted W. Lawson has his leg amputated.
Conceived as a morale-builder for the home-front, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, with a script written by Dalton Trumbo “lacks the scope and organization” and compares unfavorably to director John Cromwell’s 1943 Since You Went Away according to critic Kingsley Canham. The rescue sequences of the downed American flyers’ by Chinese guerrillas was designed “to foster closer relations ‘between the American People and their courageous Chinese allies'” and includes a scene with Chinese children at a mission hospital honoring the airmen with a rendition of Katherine Lee Bates’ patriotic anthem America the Beautiful.
The House I Live In (1945), Documentary short: LeRoy reports in his memoir Take One that Frank Sinatra approached him in 1945 with the idea of making a short movie version based on the song by Abel Meeropol The House I Live In. LeRoy thought it a worthy project and “a good thing to do during the wartime years.” The script was written by Albert Maltz and produced by Frank Ross and Leroy, who also directed.
The House I Live In garnered LeRoy a special Oscar for his role as producer in the short film, the only Academy Award he would ever receive. In appreciation for LeRoy’s contributions to The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra presented him with a medallion bearing the Jewish Star of David on one side and a Saint Christopher medal on the obverse.
The Hollywood film industry reached its zenith in productivity, profitability, and popularity at the end of World War II. The studios collectively enjoyed their most lucrative year in 1946, with gross earnings reaching 1.75 billion dollars. In the closing years of the decade, organized labor won wage increases of 25% through protracted strikes. Overseas markets imposed substantial taxes on Hollywood films. Studios reacted by cutting expenses on film production and ordering mass layoffs. Historians Higham and Greenberg describe the qualitative impact on Hollywood films:
“Sudden economy waves threw thousands out of work. Budgets were cut, crowd scenes minimized, epics involving large and expensive sets abandoned in favor of stories emphasizing ‘story’ and ‘realism’ rather than lavish production values…efficiency was the keynote everywhere…”
The formerly “glossy” productions were often replaced with lower budget black-and-white films, employing smaller casts and using indoor stages, rather than expensive on location sites.
Compounding the financial crisis was the Red Scare launched against purported Communist influence in Hollywood. The leading studio executives expelled many of the most talented figures in collaboration with House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Accused of introducing Communist content into productions, the departure of Leftist screenwriters, directors and actors removed a creative element that had for years contributed to the high caliber and profitability of Hollywood pictures. These purgings were considered, in some financial circles and the anti-Communist establishment, a necessary corrective to labor militancy in the industry: “To some observers, [the blacklist] represented a long overdue house cleaning process; to others it meant the beginning of an era of fear, betrayal and witch-hunting hysteria.”
“I am strongly pro-American and I had come to recognize that some Communist propaganda was creeping into movies. I felt it was a good thing to root that out, but I deplored that excesses that went into the rooting-out process…there were writers who were supposedly on the Hollywood blacklist that I trusted…I had used Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, as writer on Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo in 1945. He turned out to be a great American story for me, and it had not the slightest hint of anything subversive in it… [The Red Scare] was a sorry period for human relations. Out of fear and self-preservation, men and women informed on their friends, even on their husbands or wives.”
By the close of the Forties, the drain of artistic talent, the emerging television industry, and litigation that led to the weakening of studio monopolies destabilized the film industry, initiating a decline in the heretofore unlimited power and profitability of the Hollywood movie empire.
Without Reservations (1946): LeRoy’s post-war pictures began with a Claudette Colbert vehicle (reminiscent of her role in It Happened One Night (1934)), with John Wayne as “Rusty” in an uncharacteristic romantic-comedic role. Colbert, as “Kit”, utters the memorable and mildly impious phrase “Thanks, God. I’ll take it from here”. This is also the title of the book, by Jane Allen and Mae Livingston on which the movie is based.
Homecoming (1948): Like director William Wyler’s 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives, LeRoy’s Homecoming dramatizes an ex-servicemen’s readjustment to civilian life. The gravity of the treatment is established in the title of Sidney Kingsley novel on which the film is based, The Homecoming of Ulysses (1944), invoking Homer’s ancient Greek epic. Clark Gable plays Ulysses “Lee” Johnson, a recently discharged war surgeon whose self-complacency is shaken by his personal and professional combat experiences, softening his misanthropy and easing a nexus with his estranged wife. Anne Baxter. In the third of her three film pairings with Gable, Lana Turner plays an “uncharacteristically unglamorous” Lt. Jane “Snapshot” McCall.
Little Women: One of several film adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War era literary classic. The M-G-M Technicolor production offers “a picture postcard prettiness” in lieu of credible performances by June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret O’Brien.
Any Number Can Play (1949): Based on an Edward Harris Heth novel, the film describes the personal and professional crisis of a casino owner of high rectitude Clark Gable who also plays for high stakes, with his family relations in the balance. LeRoy was perplexed that the compelling screenplay by Richard Brooks and excellent performances delivered by Gable and Alexis Smith did not register at the box-office. LeRoy reflected on the picture: “I don’t know what went wrong. You start out with what you think is a good script and you get a good cast…[but] you end up with a film that is less than you expect. Something happened or, more likely, something didn’t happen – the chemistry didn’t work and the emotions didn’t explode. Whatever the reason, Any Number Can Play was a disappointment to me.”
East Side, West Side (1949): A “dramatic social melodrama”, the east-side, west-side refers to the class differences that define and divide the “superlative cast” in this M-G-M “high gloss” production. Barbara Stanwyck, plays the betrayed spouse, supported by co-stars James Mason, Ava Gardner and Van Heflin.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Quo Vadis (1950) dramatizes an episode in the apocrypha Acts of Peter. The Latin title translates as “Where are you going?”, adapted from a novel by Nobel Laureate author Henryk Sienkiewicz.
LeRoy’s recognized that the Hollywood film industry would be best served by “accommodating” the emerging popularity of television, envisioning a division of mass entertainment function: TV would do small scale, low-budget productions dealing with “intimate things”, while the motion picture studios would provide “the bigger, broader type of film.” LeRoy’s turn to “gigantic spectacle” coincided with the early onset of Hollywood’s relative decline, as described by film historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg:
“At the close of the Forties, something vital seemed to be ebbing away ever more swiftly from the films of Hollywood, a process accelerating in the early Fifties, reaching a climax with the introduction of CinemaScope…the Forties may now be seen as the apotheosis of the U.S. feature film, its last great show of confidence and skill before it succumbed artistically to the paralyzing effects of bigger and bigger screens and the collapse of the star system.”
Cecil B. DeMille, director of the silent film The Ten Commandments, counseled LeRoy on the worthiness of cinematic biblical epics:
“I’ll tell you Mervyn, the Bible has been a best-seller for centuries. Why let two thousand years of publicity go to waste?”
Logistically, Quo Vadis presented an “enormity.” Filmed at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome, the production required the mobilization of tens-of thousands of extras, over nine months of shooting and an immense financial risk for M-G-M.
The huge investment in time and money paid off: Second only to Gone with the Wind (1939) in gross earnings, Quo Vadis garnered eight Academy Award nominations in 1952.
Leroy welcomed the services of an American Jesuit priest assigned to act as a technical advisor on the production. The director was granted a personal audience with Pope Pius XII and upon LeRoy’s request, the Pope blessed the script of Quo Vadis.
In the aftermath of his successful epic Quo Vadis, LeRoy turned away from spectacles to lighter productions:
Lovely to Look At (1952): A re-make of the 1935 Astaire-Rogers musical scored by Jerome Kern, Roberta, directed by William A. Seiter. Vincente Minnelli organized the extravagant fashion show finale, with costumes by Adrian
Million Dollar Mermaid (1952): An aquatic-themed biopic loosely based on the life of Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman, portrayed by Esther Williams and aided by LeRoy’s “competent direction.” Busby Berkeley stages his lavishly produced underwater Oyster ballet.
Latin Lovers (1953): A romantic musical comedy starring Lana Turner and Ricardo Montalbán.
Rose Marie (1954): An adaption of a stage operetta by Otto Harbach and previously filmed by M-G-M in silent and sound versions, the Leroy adaption starred Ann Blyth and Howard Keel. His final effort with M-G-M before he returned to Warner Brothers.
LeRoy attributes his disaffection from M-G-M to a professional incompatibility with Dore Schary, who had recently replaced Louis B. Mayer as head of production: “[Schary] and I never really did see eye-to-eye on most things…since he was then running the studio, it didn’t seem to make much sense for me to stick around.”
After completing his last production featuring Greer Garson in Strange Lady in Town (1955), LeRoy turned largely to adapting Broadway successes, serving as producer and director and often enlisting casts from the original stage productions.
Warners tasked LeRoy and Joshua Logan with completing Mister Roberts after the original director John Ford was hospitalized with a gallbladder disorder and removed from the production. Ford’s departure and substitution proved to be fortuitous. Henry Fonda, who played the lead character, was a screen star in several Ford pictures as well as the lead actor in the highly acclaimed Mister Roberts 1948 Broadway production, was at odds with Ford’s film adaptation: the two engaged in a demoralizing contretemps that threatened to undermine the project.
Mister Roberts enjoyed immense popular and financial film success for Warners and earned supporting actor Jack Lemmon his first Oscar.
LeRoy assumed the dual role of director-producer in the late Fifties and Sixties- the declining period of the Hollywood Golden Age, primarily serving at Warner Studios, but also 20th Century Fox, Columbia and Universal. Critic Kingsley Canham offers the following appraisal of LeRoy’s work in this period:
“Leroy’s work in the later half of the Fifties and Sixties has been largely confined to adaptations of stage successes, interspersed with the odd drama such as The FBI Story (1959), The Devil at 4 O’Clock (1961) and Moment to Moment (1966). Many of the former displayed an unhappy tendency toward excessive length or they padded out a basically funny situation beyond its endurance (e.g. A Majority of One [1961] and Wake Me When it’s Over [1960]), tending to make one feel that LeRoy was better off in the Thirties when he had to work in the more restricted confines of the old Hollywood system when it was at its peak…whereas [the] Fifties signaled the death knell of the Old Hollywood, leaving directors like LeRoy to struggle with unsuitable material, assigned to them by virtue of their past reputations.”
Despite these developments, LeRoy remained a profitable asset in the film industry.
The Bad Seed (1956): The film is based on a story by William March about a disturbed eleven-year-old girl whose murderous behavior is credited to her genetic heritage: she is the granddaughter of a notorious serial killer. Maxwell Anderson’s 1954 stage production enjoyed success and Leroy imported most of the cast for his film adaption, including child actor Patty McCormick. The Motion Picture Production Code required that the child murderess perish for her crimes, and LeRoy dispatches her with a lightning bolt. Leroy recounts his struggle with censors:
“I couldn’t budge the Johnston Office people…In those days, long before the rating system, there was no halfway about it…You either got a seal of approval or you didn’t, and Jack Warner wasn’t about to release the film without that seal. So we had to change the ending. John Lee Mahin dreamed up the idea of having the child killed by a bolt of lightning. The Johnson Office gave us their blessing when we showed them the revised script.”
The highly profitable Bad Seed garnered Academy Award nominations for several of the principal cast and cinematographer Harold Rosson.
Toward the Unknown (1956): A sympathetic dramatization post-Korean War of a former Korean war POW William Holden, who struggles to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and return to service as a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
No Time for Sergeants (1958): Novelist Mac Hyman’s hillbilly protagonist Will Stockdale gained popularity in comic book form and was adapted to the stage by Ira Levin. Andy Griffith played the lead and Nick Adams his sidekick in LeRoy’s film adaption.
Home Before Dark (1958): Based on a story and screenplay by Robert and Eileen Bassing, LeRoy examines the struggle of a former mental patient to normalize her relationships with her husband who she suspects of having an affair with her half-sister.
The FBI Story (1959): A hagiographic review of federal law enforcement figure Chip Hardesty, vetted by the LeRoy’s close personal friend and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and starring James Stewart. For his services in directing and producing The FBI Story, the agency honored LeRoy with its Distinguished Service Award.
Wake Me When It’s Over (1960), 20th Century Fox: A comedy-of-errors involving the appropriation of post-WWII era army surplus to build a resort on a remote Japanese island occupied by US troops. Starring Ernie Kovacs and Dick Shawn.
The Devil at 4 O’Clock (1961), Columbia Pictures: A priest and a convict join forces to rescue children from a leper colony when a volcano eruption threatens their Polynesian island.
A Majority of One (1961): Warner Brothers: An adaption of the successful Leonard Spigelgass play directed by Dore Schary. Stage actors Gertrude Berg and Cedric Hardwicke were replaced by producer Jack L. Warner with film stars Rosalind Russell and Alec Guinness as the romantic leads, set in Japan.
Gypsy (1962), Warner Brothers: LeRoy returned to musicals with a portrayal of the young Gypsy Rose Lee in her early career as a burlesque stripper, played by Natalie Wood and Rosalind Russell as her domineering stage mother.
Moment to Moment (1965), Universal: LeRoy’s last credited directorial effort, Moment to Moment starring Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman.
Following Moment to Moment, disputes with Universal production head Edward Muhl over studio-proposed screenplays led to Leroy’s return to Warner Brothers under Jack Warner’s auspices. There he embarked on several projects, including pre-production for an adaption of James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks, a tale that Leroy believed “had the makings of another The Wizard of Oz.” When Warners was purchased by The McKinney Company, executives canceled the project and Leroy quit the studio.
LeRoy served for over five months as an uncredited advisor on the 1968 The Green Berets, co-directed by Ray Kellogg and John Wayne and based on Robin Moore’s 1965 collection of short stories.
The studio producing The Green Berets, Seven Arts, after recently acquiring Warners, were concerned that Wayne’s dual role as actor-director was beyond his abilities. LeRoy describes his enlistment in the project and the suggests the extent of his contribution:
“Eliot Hyman [head of Seven Stars operations] told me that I had a free hand with the picture. I could do anything I wanted – even close it down if I felt it should be shut down…When I got to Fort Benning, Duke [Wayne] and I had a long talk and straightened out the question as to how I could help him. Then I took over and assisted Duke with the directing whenever he thought he needed me…”
Leroy added that he “was on the picture for five and a half months…I didn’t do it for nothing of course, but I wouldn’t let them put my name on it, as I didn’t think that would be fair to Duke.” LeRoy retired from Warners-Seven Arts shortly after completing The Green Berets, representing his directorial swan song.
LeRoy received an honorary Oscar in 1946 for The House I Live In, “for tolerance short subject”, and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1976.
A total of eight movies Mervyn LeRoy directed or co-directed were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, one of the highest numbers among all directors.
On February 8, 1960, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street, for his contributions to the motion pictures industry.
LeRoy has been credited with launching or advancing the careers of numerous actors in Hollywood films when he served as director or producer at Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Biographer Kingsley Canham makes these observations:
“LeRoy’s undoubted talent as a producer and a star-maker, and his knack for recognizing potential [in actors], made him an outstanding success, both critically and financially… …in the competitive and highly-charged atmosphere [in the old Hollywood system], LeRoy spotted stars like Lana Turner, Jane Wyman, Loretta Young, Audrey Hepburn and the Dead End Kids…[and] was able to promote them in scripts that suited their personalities.”
LeRoy’s discovery of Loretta Young (then Gretchen Young) presents at least two distinct origin tales: Ronald L. Bowers in Film Review [April 1969]) reported that Leroy had directly solicited the 13-year-old Young in 1926 to play a juvenile part in Naughty but Nice (1927), a Colleen Moore vehicle for which Young received $80.00.
LeRoy, in his memoir Take One, offers a variation of this origin story: In 1930, Leroy reports that he recruited Young through the auspices of her mother. Leroy needed a leading lady to play opposite Grant Withers in Too Young to Marry (1931). Young’s older half-sister was engaged on another film, and her mother offered the younger daughter, Gretchen, as a substitute. LeRoy agreed, but changed her name to Loretta.
Warner Brothers studio cast Edward G. Robinson in the role of gangster Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1930), but Leroy was anxious to cast the part of racketeer Joe Masara. Rejecting Warners offer of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., LeRoy spotted Gable in a touring production of The Last Mile at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles in the role of Killer Mears, and arranged a screen test with the stage actor. Pleased with the results, LeRoy championed Gable to producers Darryl Zanuck and Jack L. Warner for the part: they emphatically rejected the prospect, objecting to his relatively large ears. LeRoy declined the opportunity to sign Gable in a personal contract, which he would later regret. Despite this, Gable credited LeRoy for elevating his prospects in Hollywood: “He always gave me credit for discovering him.” As Leroy shared in an interview with John Gillett in 1970: “I always tried to help young players- Clark Gable would have been in Little Caesar, but the front office thought his ears were too big.”
LeRoy claims Jane Wyman as one of his discoveries, though she had already been signed by Jack L. Warner at the age of 16, though not yet cast in a production. She was selected by LeRoy to play a bit part in his 1933 Elmer, the Great. LeRoy recalled his first encounter with the actress:
“…I found [Wyman] on the [Warners] lot. Although Jack Warner had signed her, he hadn’t used her in anything. I saw her walking around the lot one day in a yellow polo coat—I decided she’d be right for Elmer and put her in it. She did a beautiful job, and her career was launched.”
At age fifteen, the then Judy Turner was auditioned by LeRoy in his effort to cast an actor to play Mary Clay in the 1937 social drama They Won’t Forget. According to LeRoy’s recollections, Turner was introduced to him as a prospect by Warner Brothers casting director Solly Baianno. LeRoy changed her name to Lana Turner and personally groomed Turner for stardom. Leroy would also direct Turner in his 1948 Homecoming co-starring Clark Gable.
During casting for M-G-M’s 1950 biblical epic Quo Vadis LeRoy sought an unknown actress for the role of Lygia, the young Christian loved by centurion Marcus Vinicius, played by (Robert Taylor). Audrey Hepburn was among hundreds of aspirants who were tested for the part. LeRoy reports in his memoir that he personally championed Hepburn as a “sensational” pick for the role, but the studio declined.
LeRoy singled out 27-year-old Robert Mitchum among the extras during the shooting of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), casting him to play one of the crew of the “Ruptured Duck”, a B-25 bomber. This was Mitchum’s first role on screen, but M-G-M declined to sign him, despite LeRoy’s urging. Mitchum starred with Greer Garson in Desire Me (1947), for which LeRoy’s directorial contribution went uncredited.
According to LeRoy, actress Sophia Loren credits him with launching her film career. LeRoy had noticed the 16-year-old Loren among the extras assembled for a crowd scene in Quo Vadis, placing her in a prominent position where his cameras would “pick up this tall, Italian dark-eyed beauty.” Years later, Loren personally thanked him: “My Mother and I needed the money and you hired us. None of [my film career] would have happened except for you.”
LeRoy married three times and had many relationships with Hollywood actresses. He was first married to Elizabeth Edna Murphy in 1927, which ended in divorce in 1933. During their separation, LeRoy dated Ginger Rogers, but they ended the relationship and stayed lifelong friends. In 1934, he married Doris Warner, the daughter of Warner Bros. founder, Harry Warner. The couple had one son, Warner LeRoy and one daughter, Linda LeRoy Janklow, who is married to Morton L. Janklow. His son, Warner LeRoy, became a restaurateur. The marriage ended in divorce in 1942. In 1946, he married Kathryn “Kitty” Priest Rand, who had been previously married to Sidney M. Spiegel; and restaurateur Ernie Byfield. They remained married until his death. LeRoy also sold his Bel Air, Los Angeles, home to Johnny Carson.
A fan of thoroughbred horse racing, Mervyn LeRoy was a founding member of the Hollywood Turf Club, operator of the Hollywood Park Racetrack and a member of the track’s board of directors from 1941 until his death in 1987. In partnership with father-in-law, Harry Warner, he operated a racing stable, W-L Ranch Co., during the 1940s/50s.
After being bedridden for six months, LeRoy died of heart issues complicated by Alzheimer’s disease in Beverly Hills, California on September 13, 1987, at the age of 86. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
SCREEN TIME WITH SAM 