Haywire (31 page)

When the season in Baltimore was over, the Fondas moved up to New York. Mother was under contract to the Shuberts. She claimed that they put her in seven consecutive flops. A contemporary account of her initial meeting with Lee Shubert went like this:

A Shubert scout saw her [as understudy for Elizabeth Love in
Strictly Dishonorable
] and she was eventually haled into the presence of the great Lee Shubert himself. At the moment she was suffering so greatly from a heavy cold that she really cared very little whether she saw the great Lee Shubert or not.

“Who are you, and what sorts of parts do you want, and all that sort of thing?” asked the great man.

She told him.

“You’re hired,” said the great Mr. Shubert, getting up and reaching for his derby.

“What do you mean—hired? You haven’t even heard me read a part.”

“You have a voice like Helen Morgan, a voice like Ethel Barrymore,” said the great Mr. Shubert.

“What I have is a bad case of laryngitis,” said Miss Sullavan.

“Laryngitis or no laryngitis,” replied the great Mr. Shubert, “you have a voice like Ethel Barrymore and you’re hired. Report on Wednesday to Elmer Harris.”

Which is how Mother had come to star in her first show on Broadway,
A Modern Virgin
. (She used to tell us, half jokingly, that after that interview with Mr. Shubert she coddled her laryngitis into a permanent hoarseness by standing in every available draft.)

Dinner at Eight
was Mother’s first real success. Suddenly Universal wanted her for a movie,
Only Yesterday
. Even then she
was hard to get. In 1931, she’d signed up with the American Play Company. She was quoted at the time as saying, “I didn’t want a manager, but I signed up with a fellow just so I could tell the others I had somebody.” The fellow who talked her into signing the agency contract was Father. By the time Universal was interested in her, she had already directed him to turn down offers from Paramount and Columbia for five-year contracts. It took all of Father’s skills to negotiate, on behalf of his recalcitrant client, a deal satisfactory to both her and the studio.

She wrote her brother, Sonny, whose college education in Virginia she was proudly financing with her various short-lived theatre salaries:

And, leaving behind her youthful ideals, her car, and her marriage to Hank, she arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933—her twenty-fourth birthday.

The Universal make-up department and Mother went to war immediately. Make-up wanted to remove a wart and to extract a snaggletooth; also, in line with prevailing fashion, to thin her eyebrows and bleach her hair. Make-up won on the eyebrows and wart, Mother on the tooth and hair. The studio heads conceded that a girl with brown hair might be a novelty. They took test after test, all of them disappointing. They changed the lights and took some more. The strain wilted the subject and frustrated the experts. They ran off the film with its monotonous close-ups of Mother’s face.

Suddenly John Stahl, the top director at Universal, in whose hands the movie rested, called out, “That’s it! Stop the projector! That’s the way we want her!”

It was a profile. For that split second she looked marvelous.
Eight different cameramen tried to recapture that second and failed. The ninth got it.

Mother wrote of the incident:

It seems that the trouble was my shallow chin. It wasn’t long enough, and threw my face out of balance. The ninth cameraman set lights higher than my head and put others down low, directed at my chin, and there I was at last, a beautiful girl with a nice long chin, so the experts said
.

“You’ll be a star when this picture is over,” predicted John Stahl one day, after shooting sixty-seven takes of a tiny scene.

“Stop kidding me,” replied Mother.

But he was right. “
THIS GIRL’S NAME
will be as famous as any star’s on the screen when she makes her debut in
JOHN M. STAHL’S
‘
ONLY YESTERDAY
,’ ” blurbed a full-page advertisement. “
A NEW STAR WILL ARRIVE
!” proclaimed another. “
BOW—GAYNOR—DIETRICH—GARBO—HEPBURN—NOW IT’S MARGARET SULLAVAN.
”

Much more interesting to Bridget and me were some of the magazine articles.

Colliers
, March 17, 1934:

What will eventually drive the press department of the Universal Film Corporation of Universal City, California, entirely insane is the news that Margaret Sullavan, on the eve of the opening of her new Super-Super-Super Special, has been discovered acting the lead in a stock company [with Henry Fonda, as it happened] playing the American Legion Hall at South Amboy, New Jersey. Upon the opening of her first picture,
Only Yesterday
, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, an honor of some importance in the amusement world, she was home trying to finish a jig-saw puzzle. She won’t make personal appearances, she won’t show up on opening nights when the flashlights are booming, and when she is in New York, she spends most of her evenings barging up and down on a Third Avenue streetcar, dressed in something which looks as if it had been discarded by the Salvation Army.… Just now she is back in Hollywood acting in
Little Man, What Now? …

Radie Harris:

ORIGINAL
! One-word description of the new screen sensation, Margaret Sullavan. Here’s the only interview she has granted since her smash hit in
Only Yesterday
.… I had already been warned that this
littlest rebel hated Hollywood … “They call this picture
Only Yesterday
, but it’s insane!” she exclaimed. “We’ve been on it for almost four months now and I’ve had exactly one day’s vacation—and that I spent in jail for smoking a cigarette in a forest region.” As she sat opposite me in a pair of blue slacks, looking for all the world like Huck Finn’s younger sister, it was hard to realize that this pert infant was a brilliant actress, who in her very first screen effort was being “supported” by such luminaries as John Boles and Billie Burke. Orchidaceous. Glamorous. Sextacular. None of the usual Hollywood labels catalogue her. In a land of carbons, she is as original as the “a” in the spelling of her last name.…

Her second film was
Little Man, What Now?
The third,
The Good Fairy
, was the setting for that short-lived marriage with Willie Wyler.
Next Time We Love
, with Jimmy Stewart (“
HOLLYWOOD’S NEW LEADING MAN
”), was next. It was the first of their four films together.

According to a movie magazine of the time:

When there was trouble finding a leading man to cast opposite her in
Next Time We Love
, Peggy went to the casting director and said, “Why not test Jimmy Stewart?”

“Jimmy Stewart?” He scratched his head. “Who’s he?”

Peggy (that’s what Jimmy calls her) became quite indignant. “Haven’t you seen Jimmy Stewart in pictures yet?” she exclaimed incredulously. “Well, he’s a great actor from the New York stage. He’s had years of experience and he recently came out to Hollywood, where they’ve been trying him out in small parts first. Did you see
Rose Marie
?” Somehow Peggy made that bit in
Rose Marie
sound quite wonderful.…

After making the picture, Mother returned to Broadway to appear in Edna Ferber’s
Stage Door
. I particularly liked the idea that, on my account, the run of the play was imperiled.

Louella Parsons:

STAGE STAR REPORTED “EXPECTING”—MARGARET
SULLAVAN’S HUSBAND DROPS HINT ON
COAST

Margaret Sullavan is going to have a baby! At least we hear a strong
rumor that says so. Her husband, Leland Hayward, has just been in town and the proud father-to-be just couldn’t keep from dropping a hint. Margaret will leave the
Stage Door
company in a short time to prepare for the blessed event. The baby will cause a lot of upsets in plans, for Universal would like Margaret to have made another Universal picture, and soon.

Following my birth, Mother made three films, the first of which,
So Red the Rose
, was a Civil War drama that presaged
Gone With the Wind
. King Vidor directed. Recently he told me:

“I was just thrilled with her. I think I would have done any picture if she was going to be in it; I wouldn’t have even read the script.…

“She’d taken up motorcycle riding while she was married to Willie Wyler, and she rode her motorcycle to work every day. Blue jeans were not the ‘in’ thing then, but that’s what she usually wore. She was playing a Southern belle, and of course all the dresses of the period had full skirts and petticoats; so when she had close-ups, she’d come onto the set with her hair all done and her blue jeans on. It was hilarious.”

About Hollywood rumors that she was difficult and willful, E. B. Griffiths, who had been her director on
Next Time We Love
, had another perspective:

“Margaret Sullavan is far too intelligent not to understand the value of cooperation. She is rather carefree and independent by nature, but she does not lack self-discipline in her work. All during the weeks of production, she arrived on the sets nearly an hour ahead of time, and even on the days when certain scenes not requiring her presence were shot, she preferred to come to the studio and sit for hours quietly watching the work of the other players, in order to correlate it to her own
.

“Between sequences I frequently observed her, high up in the rafters with the electricians, discussing the lighting of the next scenes. She was interested in everything concerning the picture, and
though she is firm in her conviction of how she interprets a part, she never refuses to listen to another’s point of view if she feels something constructive is being offered. Much of this bosh about her being ‘high hat’ is merely the result of her not conforming to Hollywood’s prescribed formulas for the conduct of its celebrities. She doesn’t happen to care about dashing from party to party, or putting on an act after the cameras have ceased grinding.…”

After
So Red the Rose
came a comedy,
The Moon’s Our Home
, the most important fact about which, to Bridget and me, was that Mother starred in it with Henry Fonda. This reunion was celebrated by more than the usual number of stills of them together, both looking achingly beautiful.

Margaret Sullavan’s leading man in her new Paramount picture,
The Moon’s Our Home
, is none other than her ex-husband Henry Fonda. And in the story she falls desperately in love with him, marries him, becomes estranged from him, and is re-united with him at the end.

Hollywood gossips wondered whether acting together in these circumstances would embarrass Margaret and Mr. Fonda, but they took it as being all in a day’s work.…

However, many years later, Hank told me:

“While we were on location, the romance sort of bloomed again. When we got back, we talked about marrying again, even looked at property to build a home on. And then, suddenly, it was off. I wouldn’t be able to explain what it was about the combination of the two of us that didn’t work. I guess it was our temperaments. We must have been ill-fated lovers.…”

Then came
Three Comrades
, for which Mother received a 1939 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the New York Film Critics’ Award, and a telegram from Father:

CONTRARY TO GENERAL LEGEND LOCAL PAPER FILLED WITH STALE NEWS. FOR INSTANCE THIS MORNING EVERYBODY SCREAMING YOU ARE SUPERBLY GREAT ACTRESS. WHAT KIND OF NEWS DO THEY THINK THAT IS? HOPE YOU’RE MISSING ME—GUESS WHO
.

Also, in 1939, Bridget made her entrance:

DAUGHTER BORN TO MARGARET SULLAVAN
—Stork Brings Second Child to Screen Star in Hospital Here.…

By 1941, she’d made
So Ends Our Night
, with Fredric March;
Back Street
, with Charles Boyer;
The Shopworn Angel
, with Jimmy Stewart (directed by Hank Potter and produced by Joseph Mankiewicz);
The Mortal Storm
, with Jimmy Stewart; and Ernst Lubitsch’s
The Shop Around the Corner
, again with Jimmy Stewart.

From their four-time collaboration, Jimmy Stewart remembers:

“Humor. She had great humor. It wasn’t mechanical with her. It was a part of her. This was one of the things that made her great. When you’d play a scene with her, you were never quite sure, although she was always letter perfect in her lines, what was going to happen. She had you just a little bit off guard and also the director. I’ve always called what your mother would do planned improvisation—she could do just moments that would hit you, maybe a look or a line or two, but they would hit like flashes or earthquakes; everybody’d sort of feel it at the same time. It’s a very rare thing. Your mother hated talk. Lots of times your mother said, ‘We’re all talking too much, we don’t need all this talk.’ She would never sit down and discuss a scene. Lubitsch would say, ‘Now we’ll do it,’ and your mother would say, ‘Yes, all right, let’s do it.’

“The longest number of takes I ever did in the movies was forty-eight takes with your mother in
The Shop Around the Corner.
We were in a little restaurant and I had a line: ‘I will come out on the street and I will roll my trousers up to my knees.’ For some reason I couldn’t say the line. Your mother was furious. She said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous.’ There I was, standing with my trousers rolled up to the knee, very conscious of my skinny legs, and I said, ‘I don’t want to act today; get a fellow with decent legs and just show them.’ Your mother said, ‘Then I absolutely refuse to be in the picture.’ So we did more takes.”