Of the thousands of still photographs taken of Susan Hayward during her long movie career, one particularly interested her. In it, she wasn`t glamorous or even young. A harsh, three-quarter face looks out toward oblivion. A trail of cigarette smoke heads upward. The eyes are steel-cold. The overall quizzical expression seems to say, among other things, ”My God!
What next?”
The photograph became an obsession. Wherever she went, the photograph went with her. But she was never comfortable about how it was presented or where it was. She slipped it in and out of at least six different frames. She would put it by her bed, then hang it in her bathroom, then remove it to her dressing room. It was with her in Carrollton, Ga., during her idyllic nine-year marriage to Eaton Floyd Chalkley; with her in Ft. Lauderdale while she drank her life away; in the house in Los Angeles where she struggled unendingly against the specter of death.
She said of the picture, ”It`s the only photo I`ve got that shows the real me.” It was snapped during the early stages of the making of ”I Want to Live!” After 20 years of movie-making, she still wanted the Oscar for Best Actress, and believed ”I Want to Live!” would help her achieve it. She became absorbed in her work, wished to be distracted by nothing.
But the tension of the early takes did cause a minor misunderstanding with her husband, Eaton. For a few days, they stopped having relations. That disturbed her. At the same time, her mother was hospitalized with heart trouble. Another distraction. One morning, Eaton, who had moved out of his and Susan`s hotel room in a huff, came on the set. Susan was already in prison garb, working on a scene. Eaton went to the director, Robert Wise, to ask him to stop filming, then walked over to Susan to tell her that her mother had died.
”We have to deal with this,” he said. Then he left. She sat and had a cigarette. In those seconds, while she seemed only to be irritated at Eaton`s interruption, a photographer, who didn`t know that she had just learned of her mother`s death, took that photograph.
It had great significance, for it represented a magical interplay of her own character with the events of her life. She talked about the photograph and knew, better than anyone, the terrible tale it told about her. In the quizzical ”Oh, God! What next?” face was the geography of ambition and love delayed, though not wholly denied.
All of her life, Susan had paid for her successes with the pain of lovelessness, only to scramble, when it was nearly too late, for the peace of love and friendship. She believed that the one person who, beyond all, should have loved her, her mother, had rejected her early in life. She believed that, in return, she could not love her mother.
And so the pattern played out in most of Susan`s relationships, bringing her several times to the brink of her life utterly afraid of leaving it without love. At the very end, while tumors grew in her brain, during the interminable suffering, she called out for her dead mother to come and help her.
She was a great and compelling star. In three crowded decades of work, she had made 56 films, ranging from the insouciance of her Paramount roles, to the elaborate sagas of her 20th Century-Fox movies, to those suffering biographies of the `50s and merely workmanlike vehicles of the `60s. If she had made no other films but ”I`ll Cry Tomorrow” and ”I Want to Live!”
millions of people would still remember her as one of the most powerful players of the period.
On the screen, she took on superb dimensions. Her movie voice, totally self-created, was low, slow and deeper than the voices of other women. Her body language, for the camera, was as carefully choreographed as any on-screen dance by Rita Hayworth: she employed, with great effect, sudden sharp movements of the arms and torso to suggest the orgasm, much as Spanish dancers do. Her eyes were as sincere as Garbo`s, except that instead of hiding mysteries, they often revealed great suffering.
The Hollywood community preferred to see the Susan Hayward of the photograph. Indeed, to other players she was one of the coldest of the legendary cold stars. Robert Preston, who made three movies with her, once said to an interview request: ”Anything I have to say about Susan Hayward you couldn`t print.” Robert Cummings found her depressing to work with. Her first studio bosses disliked her attitude so much that they deliberately kept her in second-rate movies, even though she was an obvious money-maker.
The reason for her coldness wasn`t only that she was a girl from a slum who feared revealing herself in a superficial environment. In time, that reaction alone would have disappeared. There was ancient anger in her. The coldness, the withdrawal from others went deep into her being, first seen when she was a struggling child in Brooklyn. She acted to dissipate it. She saw analysts about it, received explanations, eventually found a way to transform it, but could never cure it.
Compounding the tragedy, Susan always knew who the woman in the photograph was. She could step outside it, recognize it, put her finger on the coldness, see what had brought it about. But what Susan couldn`t see that can be perceived so clearly years after her death was how magnificent she really was. Through her work, her icy rigidity had metamorphosed to cinematic majesty. Her anger had become memorable sincerity. She had paid all her dues tenfold and then some. She had made of herself, like the fabled merchant, one pearl of great worth from a tangle of shortcomings.
Everything was, in 1943, in a state of flux in the Marrenner family. Susan was a rising star. Her sister Florence had returned to Brooklyn in a huff to marry pilot Udo Zaenglin. Her brother Wally was in the Army. For a while, Susan had no family in Hollywood but her mother, and, after a fashion, Benny Medford, her agent. Instead of buying a house with a swimming pool that he had wanted her to, Susan moved her mother to a duplex apartment at Pico and La Cienega, then a fine neighborhood, and took a tiny flat for herself in The Townhouse, a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in the Rampart area.
The small flat in the Wilshire Boulevard hotel was Susan`s first place of her own. She decorated it with her own paintings, which Benny says were quite good, but he can`t remember much about them except that they were of people. Like all the other players in Hollywood, she did her part in the war effort.
In November, 1943, she began spending evenings at the Hollywood Canteen, serving coffee and being nice to the servicemen on leave, as did dozens of other supporting players from the studios.
One night while Susan served at the Canteen, a Columbia Pictures blond supporting player named Jess Barker, 6 feet tall and appealing to women, was on the Hollywood Canteen stage introducing performances by MGM people, such as singer Ginny Simms and comic Red Skelton; Harry James` band played in the background. Susan was so far from the stage that she had to stand on a stool to watch. Young Barker spotted her and later asked her to join him for coffee. Later that night, he tried to kiss her and she smacked him.
Jess was 29, a Southerner (from Greenville, S.C.), more professionally experienced than Susan and in slightly better stead with his own studio than Susan was with Paramount.
Jess was incredibly handsome, and Susan had every reason to be taken with him: She was overdue for love. She had been acting love of every type, usually the abnormal kind, but at the age of 26 she still didn`t know what it was. She and Jess Barker, who both had their own apartments, fell into a liaison.
Susan received warning after warning. Benny warned Susan that Barker was a mistake, that his career would fall far behind hers and there would be serious trouble ahead. For years, Benny had been trying to keep Susan away from the Hollywood wolves and, time and again, had urged her to date successful men that he knew. ”She was cold to them all.”
Ellen Marrenner disapproved of Jess Barker from the start, for, as Florence explains: ”My mother was afraid that he was after all he could get.”
Some of Ellen`s resentment against Barker may have been based on his reputation in Hollywood as a roustabout ladies` man. The columnists had been linking his name to numerous stars and starlets, including Marguerite Chapman, Anne Shirley, Olivia de Havilland, Gloria de Haven, Bonita Granville and Nina Foch, a promising Columbia player to whom he had been practically engaged.
Benny adamantly blames Susan`s mother for what happened. ”She drove Susan out of the house. She was overprotective because she was afraid that Susan was going to get pregnant.” Indeed, almost on schedule, Ellen called Benny around April of 1944 to say: ”Susan`s pregnant.”
Benny asked her, ”Do you want me to bring her to a lockpicker?”
”Yes,” said Ellen.
But Susan didn`t want an abortion and, according to Ben, didn`t want to marry Jess. They were having fights and becoming testy with each other over trivial things. Susan was discovering that Jess had a temper and that she was developing one as well. Now there occurred endless family discussions over what to do. Susan wanted her baby, but wasn`t sure she wanted Jess. She told her studio. The moguls wanted them to marry. Jess was worried about what the marriage would do to his bobby-soxer image. His family, says Florence, thought Susan was a gold digger.
Susan had just finished making ”And Now Tomorrow,” a Paramount soap opera in which Alan Ladd falls in love with deaf socialite Loretta Young while sister Susan worries and falls in love with Loretta`s fiance, Barry Sullivan. After the studio learned about her pregnancy, she was sent on a bond tour and finally allowed to rest at home.
By early July, Susan was almost two months` pregnant and a decision had to be made. Jess wanted to marry her. Susan`s mother would agree to the marriage only on the condition that Susan and Jess sign a pre-nuptial financial agreement in which husband and wife would keep their own earnings in the case of a divorce.
Susan told Jess, ”My mother won`t come to the wedding unless you sign.” Jess finally did sign the agreement, probably because, as Florence suggests, his own mother thought that he would eventually become a star himself, and because, when all was said and done, as Jess Barker has said, ”I really loved the woman.” It`s certain that Susan loved him, too, despite their arguments. More than likely, he was her first lover, and a good and patient one, too–an absolute necessity, for she would later reveal that she had had deep anxieties about lovemaking.
They were married on July 23, 1944, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church and looked perfectly radiant. Susan had not begun to show yet, but probably chose to wear blue, not white, because she was already carrying.
On Feb. 17, 1945, at St. John`s Hospital in Santa Monica, Susan gave birth to fraternal, non-identical twin boys. They came into the world seven minutes apart and were pretty, but as different as imaginable. The younger infant, whom the Barkers called Timothy, after Jess`s family, was blond like his father. The older child, whom Susan named Gregory after her favorite director, Gregory Ratoff, resembled Susan`s family and was a redhead.
Monday: Sleeping pills and gin.
