At age 6, Karolyn Grimes Wilkerson took permanent possession of one of the most celebrated exit lines in movie history.
In the final scene of the 1946 production ”It`s a Wonderful Life,” with Jimmy Stewart holding her in his arms, Wilkerson hears the tinkling of a Christmas tree ornament.
”Look, Daddy,” Wilkerson says. ”Teacher says every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
To many cinema buffs, those words are as immortal as Humphrey Bogart`s valedictory in ”Casablanca” (”This could be the start of a beautiful friendship”) and Clark Gable`s parting shot in ”Gone With the Wind”
(”Frankly, my dear, I don`t give a damn”).
For millions of people who have never attended a film festival or read a single issue of Cahiers du Cinema, Wilkerson`s remark has become virtually synonymous with Christmas. These days, when the film airs on TV, it serves as a kind of appetizer, after which they and their children sit down for their Yuletide dinner. Indeed, ”Wonderful Life” is one of very few popular-culture icons whose cross-generational appeal has survived into the Age of Rock.
It also still brings Wilkerson star treatment, 40 years after her Hollywood career ended. Not long ago, she attended a tribute for Jimmy Stewart at New York`s Lincoln Center. She went as a fan, and with fond memories of Stewart holding her on his lap during breaks in the filming of ”Wonderful Life.”
”But at the reception, people started bringing their autograph books over to me, saying: `I remember you. You played Zuzu in the movie,` ” recalls Wilkerson, who recently traveled from her home in Kansas City, Mo., to Chicago to visit a friend.
”As the movie`s popularity continues to grow, I hear from fanatical fans who somehow manage to find me, even though I`m long out of the show business limelight.”
Four decades ago, few would have predicted such a thing. ”It`s a Wonderful Life” opened to mixed reviews and so-so audience reception. Reportedly, the original distributor, RKO Radio Pictures, lost money, and the movie was completely shut out at the Academy Awards even though Stewart and Frank Capra, its director, were established stars and previous Oscar winners. ”It`s a Wonderful Life” was Capra`s first feature film after returning to Hollywood from military service during World War II. It grew out of ideas about life and its meaning that had been running around in Capra`s head, highlighted by the wartime suffering and bloodshed he had filmed for a series of Army documentaries designed to boost morale on the home front. After V-J Day, though, the public was in no mood for philosophical messages on the silver screen.
”Right after the war, people went to the movies wanting to laugh, and there was Capra presenting them with a film that asked them to think about some heavy-duty questions,” Wilkerson says. ”My earliest memories are also of it not being that much fun.”
No youngster wants to sit and be quiet while awaiting her turn in front of the cameras, she adds. So a child star`s life isn`t always wonderful. But until adolescence, it was the only life she knew.
Her mother, Wilkerson recalls, was a determined stage parent who had run off to Hollywood from a small town, not unlike the Bedford Falls that is the setting for ”It`s a Wonderful Life.” Even as an infant, Wilkerson says, she was being taken to casting calls, and her mother enrolled her for every possible kind of performing-arts lesson.
A birthday with John Wayne
”I played violin at the age of 3,” she says. ”And though I left Hollywood as a teenager, I`d already been in 15 feature films, plus done TV and modeling work.” Her credits include parts in such movies as ”Pardon My Past” with Fred MacMurray, ”West Point Widow,” ”Albuquerque,” and ”Rio Grande” with John Wayne.
Her acting obligations meant attending a one-room schoolhouse, which the studios provided for young actors, just behind the sound stages. It also meant spending evenings autographing boxloads of publicity photographs, when other children were riding bicycles or hanging out at soda parlors.
”At the time, I didn`t know that`s how kids were supposed to grow up,”
Wilkerson says. ”To me, it seemed perfectly ordinary to have Cary Grant pull me around on a sled when we were on location together. Or to have John Wayne bring a cake and candles on the set for my 10th birthday.”
All that changed when her father and mother died in rapid succession, and a judge decided that the teenage Wilkerson should go to live with relatives in Osceola, Mo. (population 841). Until then, the nearest she had come to a small town was the set of ”It`s a Wonderful Life.” She quickly found that life in a real Middle American hamlet, where the bus stop had the best food in the county, was cultural light-years away from the glitter of the Brown Derby and similar Tinseltown dining spots.
”It felt like I`d been taken off to the very end of the Earth,”
Wilkerson says. ”I`d sit up nights and cry and ask God why I`d ever been born.”
That very same question, Wilkerson points out, is the dramatic device animating ”It`s a Wonderful Life.” The plot revolves around George Bailey
(Jimmy Stewart) who runs a small-town building-and-loan association. One holiday season, through no fault of his own, he finds himself facing financial ruin and public disgrace.
Through the good offices of his guardian angel, Bailey gets the wish he makes in his desperation: All trace of him is erased from Bedford Falls, where he has always sacrificed his own dreams to take care of other people`s needs. On Christmas Eve, Clarence the angel gives Bailey a guided tour of his hometown, showing him how impoverished life there would have been had Bailey never been born.
Finally, Bailey can`t take the pain of his friends and family any longer, and he asks that his wish be rescinded. In turn, his fellow citizens come forth to bail him out, belatedly repaying him for the thousand-and-one good deeds he has performed over the years.
For helping restore Bailey`s faith in human nature, Clarence gets promoted to angel first class, thus setting up the memorable line from Bailey`s daughter Zuzu.
”Bailey`s dilemma is one lots of people face, at one time or another, and that`s why the film eventually became so popular,” Wilkerson says. ”But I personally wasn`t psychologically prepared to wait around for an opportunity to realize the golden side of small-town living.”
Instead, like her mother before her, Wilkerson spent her adolescence looking for a way out of town. Scarcely out of high school, she married-to have an escape partner, she says-and took off for Kansas City, the first sizable community down the road from Osceola. Putting down roots there, she went on to play the roles of Midwestern wife, homemaker and mother, raising seven children and step-children from her two marriages.
”I did what George Bailey always dreams of doing in the movie,”
Wilkerson says. ”That is the remarkable thing about `Wonderful Life.` Capra didn`t create a simple-minded song of praise to the American small town. He wanted to show all the ambiguities of places like Bedford Falls. Even the movie`s hero can`t make up his mind about his hometown, until the very end.
”George Bailey is a wonderfully gentle character,” Wilkerson says.
”There is a remarkable scene in which he comes up to Zuzu`s room; she is sick in bed. Even though George is already scared that the savings and loan is going to be closed for financial irregularities, he takes a moment to fix a flower for Zuzu, who, like a child, is upset because some of its petals are falling.”
Getting the message
From adolescence, Bailey had dreams of faraway places and making it big. He plans to kiss Bedford Falls goodbye the day he sets off for college.
”In one scene, George even tells his father that he`s wasted his life by staying in town and scraping out a living for their family with the savings and loan, which never makes a profit,” Wilkerson says. ”Immediately afterwards, George realizes the insensitivity of what he`s said and apologizes to his dad. But that`s the kind of scene that confused the movie`s first audiences, who didn`t know what to make of a hero who doesn`t want to be a hero.”
One crisis after another conspires to keep Bailey tied to Bedford Falls. All these experiences leave him embittered, until Clarence demonstrates for him that Providence has plans for him, and us, even when we`re most blind to them.
That`s a message, Wilkerson says, that she only belatedly came to appreciate. Being yanked out of Hollywood was painful, but also a blessing in disguise, she says.
A lot of her contemporaries in those backstage schools never did get over the trauma of failing to make the transition from child actor to adult star, Wilkerson says. Some never found anything else to do with their lives.
”Who knows, if I`d stayed on in Hollywood I might have become an alcoholic or tried suicide, like some others did, instead of having a fine life as a wife and mother to a flock of kids of my own,” she says.
”It`s the same with Osceola, my personal Bedford Falls. Growing up there, I wanted to get as far away as possible. But it`s gradually dawned on me that small-town folks have a sense of community and responsibility that is often missing in the big city.
”You know something, if I were to get deathly ill tomorrow, I wouldn`t hesitate for a minute. I`d double right back to Osceola, confident that, after all these years, people there would take care of me in my time of need.”
