PRINCE POPPYCOCK

...or helped to invent it, anyway. This one is for the Siren's beauty blogger pals at Bois de Jasmin, Beauty Addict, Koneko's (Mostly) Beauty Diary, MonkeyPosh and Now Smell This, but most especially Cavewoman and Annie of Blogdorf Goodman.




The year is 1925, and Astor is filming Don Q, Son of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

Perc and Ern Westmore were handling makeup and hairdressing on Don Q: As I remember, it was the first time these departments had been created. Greasepaint came in a stick--somewhat like a big lipstick. Stein's Pink #2, I remember, was what I used. And it was pink, whitish pink. It was applied in streaks all over the face, then smoothed until it filled every pore. With a towel wrapped turbanlike around the head, you leaned over and using a powder puff loaded with a pinkish powder slapped it all over until the grease had absorbed it. [Sounds sexy, yes? -C.] Really very similar to the method clowns use. Eyebrows disappeared, eyelashes were coated, lips covered. Then it was brushed off nice and smooth.

Lipstick was a dark red. Reds went black on film, but if the tone was too light one's mouth would look white. The men used a lighter lipstick and less base makeup. There was eyebrow shadow, brown, and mascara, black, and then something that was called "cosmetique," a black cake of guck that was melted over a spirit lamp and then applied to the ends of the eyelashes with a match or a toothpick. This was "beading": It accomplished what false eyelashes do today.

As technical improvements made the film faster, the makeup began to look even more masklike and white on the scren. It was no good using darker tones of pink because they tended to "go black" if you moved into a shadow.

One day in the makeup room Perc Westmore and I played around with mixing the Stein's Pink with a just a touch of the brown eyeshadow. We melted it together, and stirred it up and put it on, and there was an ivory cast to the color that had never been used. On the screen it was miraculous. Bones began to show, skin looked natural and the tiny muscles of facial expression that had blanked out before were more evident. It was the beginning of panchromatic makeup. I wish I had held a patent on it!

The above is from Mary Astor's memoirs of her career, A Life on Film, which the Siren has been happily re-reading this week. What a good book it is, full of details other stars leave out. She gives you the nitty-gritty of casting, costumes, what the lighting was like and how it changed, the drudgery of on-set life, the weirdness of seeing yourself on screen and the split most stars make between their real selves and the "product." Astor even emphasized that split by writing her autobiography in two stages--the first, My Story, going into her many personal travails but pretty much leaving the movies untouched, and the second, A Life on Film, covering her professional experiences.

She was quite beautiful, with ethereal looks that never read as blatantly sexual on film, although she was a convincing (and hilarious) nymphomaniac in The Palm Beach Story. As with many actresses before and since, looks were deceiving. Of the two heroines of Red Dust there seems little question that it was Astor, not Jean Harlow, who was steaming up the sheets when the cameras stopped rolling.

That became clear during Astor's custody battle for her daughter, which occurred during the making of Dodsworth, the Siren's favorite Astor performance. Her ex-husband got hold of her diary and introduced it into evidence. Astor found her red-hot affair with George S. Kaufman splashed over the newspapers. If you believe Kenneth Anger the diary was practically pornographic; if you believe Mary the diary was mostly romantic doodlings, no more steamy than a Book-of-the-Month club selection. In any event, the diary was eventually destroyed by the court so we'll never know for sure. Samuel Goldwyn, who was producing Dodsworth, was asked at the time if he would use the morals clause in her contract to fire Astor. To his everlasting credit, he thought about it and said, "A mother fighting for her child? This is good!" Astor stayed in the picture.

Without question her role for the ages was the scheming Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Astor says that to get the breathless quality she wanted when Brigid was about to spin another pathological whopper, she would hyperventilate before takes. The result was that with lines such as "I--I don't know what you mean," Astor's throbbing contralto voice gave lying a uniquely sexual quality. You relish hearing it as much as Bogart does, until he finally kisses her, no doubt to see if there's another way to get her to hyperventilate. Later film noir femmes would try similar tricks, but Astor provided the template.



She was pressed into a film career by her parents, who energetically sponged off her for years until Astor went to court to pull the plug. Perhaps the fact that she didn't choose her own career is part of why Astor often underrates herself in A Life on Film, dismissing something like Beau Brummel, which the Siren thought quite fine. She brought discipline and high standards to her work at all times, but acting evidently never engaged her full intelligence.

She turned to writing novels in later years, and the Siren actually read one of them. As a teenager in Alabama the Siren was the sometime babysitter for a toddler with a quadruple-barreled polysyllabic Southern name that everbody shortened to P.D. His parents were movie buffs and on their shelves were, as the Siren remembers, an early version of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, some David Shipman and a few books of stills. After P.D. was coaxed into bed the Siren would curl up with the books, and one night she discovered A Place Called Saturday. The book, published in 1968, concerns a married woman who is raped, conceives a child and decides to keep and raise it anyway. The Siren doesn't remember much about the quality or the plot of the book, although she did read it all the way through, but she does remember that it opens with a very squirm-inducing scene of the wife in the aftermath of the rape. The book was the last one Astor wrote, and she died in 1987, aged 81, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House.

The first picture shows Mary Astor in the 1920s, the next as she appeared in Don Q. Her hair was auburn and naturally curly, and A Life on Film describes how novelist Elinor Glyn came up with a way to make it look "Spanish" on film. At a dinner party, Glyn pulled Mary over and proceeded to slick her hair back, piece by piece, with the butter from the dining room table. This was before hair gel as well as panchromatic makeup. Astor assures us that they found something less off-putting to use under the blazing hot lights of the time.

The middle picture shows Astor in the 1930s, and the bottom one is from The Maltese Falcon. While looking up Astor the Siren came across this vituperative essay about how she's the worst thing in The Maltese Falcon. Poppycock, says the Siren. But, to echo one of the Siren's favorite blogs, what do you think--allure?

And there she is, bending gracefully over us all and doing a splendid job of boosting the Siren's traffic (thanks, Mr. Wolcott!)--voilà, Vera Zorina, pictured above in her Waternymph costume from The Goldwyn Follies. Another final-round question for Silver Screen Trivial Pursuit (congratulations, Jonathan). One of Samuel Goldwyn's found-and-losts, like the gorgeous, luckless Anna Sten. Until recently the Siren knew Vera primarily as George Balanchine's second wife and the woman whom Ingrid Bergman replaced in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the Fox channel ran one of the ballerina's few starring vehicles, a fluffy thing called I Was an Adventuress. And you know what? Zorina wasn't half bad, even when she wasn't dancing.

She had a refreshingly strong profile and a figure that was sheer perfection--toned beyond belief, more buxom and far less sylph-like than later Balanchine stars like Tanaquil Le Clercq or Suzanne Farrell. (However, upon comparison with the above still, the Siren thinks Zorina was padded quite a bit for Adventuress, a pretty common practice at the time.) Her acting is somewhere around the level of Hedy Lamarr on a really good day--definitely not great, but watchable. She has warmth and presence.

I Was an Adventuress was directed by Gregory Ratoff (hey kids, we all forgot him for Great Comic Character Actors and we shouldn't have). According to IMDB the movie was a remake of an Edwige Feuillère vehicle, J'étais une aventurière, and that's all the site says about the original, except that it was banned in Finland. (Your guess is as good as the Siren's.) Anyway, in the Hollywood version Zorina is the accomplice and lure for two crooks, played with gusto by Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre. Stroheim and Lorre have excellent chemistry, more so than the romantic leads. The two con artists give the same sub rosa sense of a bickering couple that you get from the Sidney Greenstreet/Lorre outings, as the Stroheim character tries to rein in Lorre's kleptomania and Lorre swears he'll learn to restrain himself, then lifts another watch.

Zorina poses as a countess in order to set up the trio's high-born marks, and her dancing is worked in too, somehow--she's one of those prima-ballerina-fake-countess-grifters that were littering Europe at the time. Would it surprise you to learn that she falls in love with one millionaire she's supposed to be conning? that the couple marry, and one big scene of domestic bliss finds her doing a perfect arabesque in the bedroom? (That was kind of unexpected, actually.) How about that von Stroheim and Lorre are determined to return Zorina to her crooked ways?

Well, I'll tell you what would surprise you--the ballet sequence at the end. The Siren was not expecting to see Zorina's dance partner arrive in full armor, and as he stomped onstage in this Renaissance Faire getup the Siren murmured "Oh, dear." But she should have banked more on George Balanchine's genius, because not only does the dance still work, it is also quite dark and startingly sexual, a different take on the tragic close of Swan Lake. There's a marvelous moment when Zorina bends away from her partner, the move shot straight-on so that she seems to peel away from him like the petal of a flower.

So the movie is ridiculous, but at the same time very enjoyable, with Zorina looking lovely, Lorre approaching the prime years of his Hollywood period and the Balanchine ballet to savor at the end. You can't look at the film and think the brevity of Zorina's career was as terrible a loss as Frances Farmer or Dorothy Comingore, but the Siren did think it was a pity the ballerina's star didn't survive long enough to see her forge a real career in musicals. She could certainly act as well as Cyd Charisse, and her dancing was magical.

A little background here on Zorina. One of the most poignant parts of A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn biography comes when he describes the producer's one-sided crush on Zorina, which played out as The Goldwyn Follies was filming in 1938. The ballerina was just 20 years old and, unlikely as it seems when you read about Goldwyn's behavior, she appears genuinely not to have perceived his feelings for her. Zorina had fallen in love with Balanchine, and was consumed with him both personally and professionally.

Goldwyn, meanwhile, threw everything he had into making her debut as memorable as possible, including hiring Vernon Duke to write the music for the Waternymph ballet. He watched Zorina's screen tests over and over, lavished advice and favors on her, snuck over to Balanchine's closed studio to glimpse her rehearsing. Lillian Hellman, on the lot to try and shake some sense into the Follies script, observed one day that Goldwyn always departed the studio minutes after Zorina did. She alerted colleagues and word spread. With malicious enjoyment, the others in the building started a betting pool based on how many minutes would pass between Zorina's exit and Goldwyn's. After a few weeks of this an enterprising writer followed Goldwyn and discovered that the producer's cab was tailing Zorina all the way to her house. Goldwyn would watch Zorina disappear inside, then order the taxi back to his office.

Like everyone else in Hollywood apart from Zorina, Goldwyn's wife Frances had got wind of her husband's behavior, but she became convinced it was an actual affair. One night she telephoned George Cukor, and her old friend arrived to find Frances descending the stairs, every item she owned packed and ready to go. Cukor ordered her back in the house and that, apparently, was that. After the Follies Zorina never made another movie for Goldwyn, although he loaned her to other studios and allowed her to work in theater. For decades Zorina took this as a comment on her talent; Berg writes that "something so far removed from her dancing as the preservation of a marriage had never even occurred to her."

But it wasn't just Goldwyn's withdrawal that doomed Zorina's career. What finished her chances for real stardom was being sacked from For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943. Zorina actually spent three weeks on set with Gary Cooper, only to have Paramount abruptly change its mind and replace her with Ingrid Bergman. Bergman had lobbied frantically for the part and was Hemingway's choice as well. The co-author of Bergman's autobiography, Alan Burgess, says Paramount hired Zorina in the first place largely to save money, on the theory that once upon a time nobody had heard of Vivien Leigh, either. TCM's notes also cite an old rumor that Zorina, whose marriage to Balanchine turned out to be unhappy, was having an affair with somebody important.

Burgess says that when the first rushes came back, the studio told the press that "light was apparently draining off Vera's face when she was photographed from above." The Siren has no idea what that means and poor Zorina didn't, either. Ingrid Bergman had her own theory:

The real trouble was that Vera was a ballerina. Yet she had to run around those mountains like a little wild animal. And Vera was afraid of damaging her legs.

They were to her why my face was to me. If an onrushing train came against me, I would protect my face. Vera would protect her legs. So when they saw the first rushes of the film taken in the mountains this came through quite clearly; and they decided that Vera was unsuitable. They took her off For Whom the Bell Tolls, and gave her another picture.

This is an interesting and rather charming explanation on Bergman's part, but the Siren doesn't buy it and never has. For one thing, what was this other picture? Zorina's next, Follow the Boys, came an entire year later and was made for Universal. This article by Robert Osborne seems far more plausible. Zorina wrote in her memoirs that Paramount couldn't have hated her rushes, since all she ever filmed was one short scene where she carried a loaf of bread. The ballerina believed that filming was deliberately stalled while director Sam Wood and Cooper waited for the actress they really wanted, Bergman, to be finished with Casablanca. Zorina said David O. Selznick, who had Bergman under contract, told her many years later that he had engineered her firing.

So many machinations and bitter feelings over a film whose charm has always eluded the Siren. If any of her readers want to praise For Whom the Bell Tolls the Siren would love to hear it, but she always found it dull at best and risible at worst, with all the politics carefully siphoned off and most of the cast sporting every accent conceivable except Spanish. The Siren wishes Zorina were still around. She'd tell the dancer that, in all honesty, she prefers I Was an Adventuress.

Rehearsals of Marathon Man in New York. Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider are about to rehearse their first scene together. Hoffman has the vehicle role and is the more important of the two, but Scheider, coming off the lead in Jaws, is not chopped liver.

In the story, they play brothers. Hoffman is a graduate student. Scheider, whom he adores and thinks is in the oil business, actually works for the government as a killer and a spy.

Hoffman has just been brutally mugged in the park. He has written this to Scheider. Scheider suspects it was not an accident--bad guys are trying to get at him by threatening his kid brother. So he comes down from Washington to visit.

It's night, and Hoffman is asleep. Suddenly, he realizes he's not alone in his apartment, so he grabs a flashlight from his bed table and points it around the room, trying to catch the intruder. As he does this, he has a line of dialog:

Hoffman:

(very James Cagney)

I got a gun, you make a move, I'll blow your ass to Shanghai.

Okay, rehearsal. A mock set is prepared. Hoffman lies down, closes his eyes. Scheider mimes opening a door, bangs his foot down to indicate the closing of the door, and Hoffman springs awake, mimes getting the flashlight, and says his Shanghai line.

Then rehearsals stop.

Hoffman says to hold it and he turns to the director, John Schlesinger, and tells him that he thinks it is wrong for his character to have a flashlight in his bed table.

Schlesinger tells him we'll get to it later, let's continue rehearsing the scene, please.

Hoffman shakes his head...

A lot of people have flashlights by their bed tables, Schlesinger tries.

Hoffman isn't playing a lot of people, he is playing Babe and Babe wouldn't have a flashlight by his bed table.

Schlesinger makes another attempt: You've just been mugged, you're upset, you're taking precautions.

No sale...

Through all this, silent and waiting, stands Scheider.

And that is probably my strongest memory of the situation--it took an hour, by the way--Scheider, waiting quietly, a perfect gentleman through it all.

--William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

The Siren mourns the passing of perfect gentleman and great actor Roy Scheider. She will treasure his performances as long as she is able to prop herself up in front of a screen, including Marathon Man, The French Connection and the unavoidable, permanent classic Jaws. But her favorite Scheider role will always be Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, the greatest movie musical of the past 30 years.

Edward Copeland has a tribute up. So does Greencine Daily, with accompanying links. Some time ago Bob Westal had a fabulous Bob Fosse blogathon in which he discussed All That Jazz at some length; Bob now has an appreciation up, with a great clip. Nathaniel R also went into great detail on Scheider's fine performance. Kim Morgan also has a tribute post on Scheider, written with her trademark verve and passion. Siren faves Ivan at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear and the Cinephile also have memorials up. And, via the fabulous Sheila, an incredible series of Roy Scheider-themed posters from the 1970s at Harry Moseby Confidential. Finally, a wonderful personal reminiscence by LowerManhattanite at the Group News Blog. And check the comments for another charming story, from Gerald Howard. And one more, the most thorough of all, from Ferdy on Films.

Does this sound familiar? You have stuff to do. Important Stuff. Then you turn on TCM. And a movie is playing that you have seen many times and you think, okay, I don't need to watch this one again. And then comes a scene you love. And then another. One hundred some-odd minutes later, you are sitting there realizing you haven't done a thing you were supposed to, but you don't care.


Body and Soul. The Siren didn't need to see it again, but then again, she did. The first time she saw it, she loved John Garfield. The second through third or fourth time, James Wong Howe's cinematography killed her. Has there ever been a fight sequence better than the finale? Raging Bull quotes its every aspect, ramps up the realism, sends the blood and sweat flying, but still can't touch it.

But this time the Siren watched, and Canada Lee tore her heart out of her chest. Lee's character, Ben, serves as the ethical anchor for Garfield's ambitious fighter. That wasn't a new role for African Americans in the movies; Mammy serves the same purpose in Gone with the Wind. The role of the black angel on the white character's shoulder persists to this day, as a matter of fact. But Lee reaches beyond the character, to meet Garfield as another man, equally yearning for success, equally bitter about his treatment. Ben's description of what it was like to win a fight, to walk down Lenox Avenue and bask in the admiration, becomes a window into the yearnings of all people for respect. What a shot of adrenaline it must have been in 1947, to see a black man form a genuine friendship with a white man on screen.

What the Siren wouldn't give to see Lee's stage performances as Bigger Thomas or Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi.

As a belated Martin Luther King Day post, or early for Black History Month, a bit about the great, tragic Canada Lee. Here is Otto Friedrich:

He became an actor, a passionate actor at a time when blacks were supposed to be amusing...nobody ever forgot seeing him as the punch-drunk fighter in Garfield's Body and Soul. Shortly after that, his name appeared in the mass of hearsay flushed out of the FBI files in the course of the spy trial of Judith Conlon. 'The drivel that has come from the so-called secret files of the FBI,' Lee called it at a press conference in 1949. 'I am not a Communist...I shall continue to help my people gain their rightful place in America.'

That's what they all said. The next time Canada Lee came up for a TV role, he was barred by the sponsor, the American Tobacco Company. Over the next three years, he was barred from about forty shows. 'How long, how long can a man take this kind of unfair treatment?' he asked the editors of Variety.

Friedrich says a dead-broke Lee finally took part in a "public denunciation" of Paul Robeson, but apparently there is some dispute about that. Historian Glenda E. Gill, for example, quotes Lee's wife Frances as saying the actor flatly refused when urged to denounce Robeson (scroll to page 128; the whole excerpt is worth the time). In any event Lee got a part in a British production, Cry, the Beloved Country. He and Sidney Poitier were admitted to South Africa only after director Zoltan Korda applied for permits to bring them along as his indentured servants. Friedrich again:

It was only a temporary reprieve, and the curtain came down again. 'I can't take it any more,' Lee told Walter White of the NAACP after a few more months of unemployment. 'I'm going to get a shoeshine box and sit outside the Astor Theater. My picture is playing to capacity audiences and, my God, I can't get one day's work.' White counseled caution and patience, and Lee, all full of rage and desperation, accepted that counsel. A few months later he was dead, of high blood pressure, at forty-five.

He had such presence--Canada Lee held your gaze, even in a picture like Lifeboat. In that one he is ostentatiously granted a vote on a life-and-death matter, but he refuses to use it, leaving the big choices to the white folks. Playing scenes like that must have stung Lee, a lifelong civil rights activist, but when the camera is on him, he takes back the screen. The scene where he recites the 23rd Psalm could be another of the era's patronizing touches: "Look at the simple spirituality of the Negro--how childlike, how heart-warming." But Lee keeps his head up, his voice calm and sonorous as he becomes, for that moment, the strongest man on the boat. His detractors had one thing right--Lee was a master of subversion.

P.S. A documentary about Canada Lee, featuring interviews with his 86-year-old widow Frances Lee Pearson, is scheduled for release March 8. The Siren hopes it will come to a venue where she can see it.