By Dan Callahan
As the star of three bona fide comedy classics, It Happened One Night (1934), Midnight (1939) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), Claudette Colbert is at least as well-known as contemporaries like Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne, but she was primarily a star for Paramount Studios, which means that many of her films are out of circulation on television. Looking at her filmography, I was surprised to find that there were 22 of her 30s films that I haven’t seen, including interesting-sounding items like Torch Song (1933), where she apparently sings bluesy numbers in her own voice, and The Gilded Lily (1935), where she supposedly does a nightclub act that consists of her admitting that she can’t do a nightclub act. Colbert came across as so worldly and commonsensical that many of her films revolve around how she convincingly talks her way into and out of difficult/unlikely situations, sometimes just for the fun of it. She had a seamless sort of technique which she learned through years on the stage in the twenties, and that technique is what makes her both a bit predictable and finally a little mysterious.
A new biography of the star has just been published, Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty, by Bernard F. Dick, and I read it eagerly; unfortunately, instead of clearing up some of Colbert’s mystery and giving us a sharper picture of her as a person and an actress, this biography creates nothing but confusion. To be fair, Dick is working against two big stumbling blocks. The first is that there’s so little known about Colbert’s childhood in Paris and young adulthood in New York, and presumably there’s no one left to interview about this time of her life, so Dick is reduced to describing the temperature (several times!) on the days when her family crossed the ocean. He goes on for pages about her stage vehicles and her films, but he can’t seem to keep focused on what he’s describing and introduces all kinds of maddeningly irrelevant data, as if he’s trying to fill a word count. This tendency only gets worse as the book goes on: when Colbert receives a Kennedy Center honor along with several other artists, Dick actually describes the entire ceremony.
The second, and more intriguing, stumbling block in this book is the question of Colbert’s sexuality. Digging into a contested subject like this at such a late date is bound to cause trouble for any writer, but Dick refuses to dig much; he accepts all data he can find on this not-insignificant issue at face value. What’s funny, finally, is that the longer he goes on about why she never lived with her first husband, Norman Foster, and why she barely lived with her second husband, Dr. Joel Pressman, the more suspicious he makes these arrangements seem. We are told, through fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, that though Colbert really loved Foster, she allowed her domineering mother to persuade her to abort his child. Dick describes Colbert’s brother (who was her agent) punching Foster at one point, but he just leaves that mystery lying there.
And that’s nothing compared to the bewilderment Dick evinces when dealing with Colbert’s late-fifties relationship with a lesbian artist, Verna Hull, who moved into the same New York building with her, then purchased a house next door to Colbert’s house in Barbados. Dick reveals that Pressman called Hull “the monster,” but he can only come up with vague generalizations about an All About Eve dynamic between Colbert and Hull. Strangest of all is the shadowy figure of Helen O’Hagan, Colbert’s companion for the last twenty years of her life, who unequivocally declares, “Claudette never had a sexual relationship with a woman,” and says that Colbert called the lesbian rumor “the stigma.” It seems like Dick is so completely under O’Hagan’s thumb that he doesn’t dare speculate intelligently on any of this information and what it might mean.
Then there’s the issue of Clark Gable, who starred with Colbert in It Happened One Night. Dick describes two unfunny sounding practical jokes Gable played on Colbert on the set; he dropped a hammer down his pants before a love scene, and then later stuck a tennis racket under a blanket to simulate an erection, with director Frank Capra’s blessing. Colbert’s response? “Aww, you guys!” she cried. Now, I wasn’t there at the time, obviously, and neither was Dick, but he makes it sound like she enjoyed these antics. I get the feeling, though, that she was probably a little irritated, even disgusted, yet she wanted to appear like “one of the boys.” How weird, then, that Colbert later claimed to have slept with Gable, ostensibly to defend his manhood. Again, it doesn’t sound all that likely, which is why it’s exasperating when Dick says that Colbert couldn’t have been a lesbian because she’s so convincing opposite Gable, Joel McCrea and even Don Ameche on screen. Which brings us back to the fact that Colbert had a formidable technique that allowed her to play a wide range of roles.
Notoriously, Colbert always wanted her left profile to be favored in two-shots, and this was a defining obsession. In the eighties, Dick reports that she ruined a Lincoln Center tribute to her work by vetoing any scenes where the right side of her face was visible (her crews called this right profile “the dark side of the moon.”) Once you know this fact about her, it’s impossible to forget it, so that watching her movies, even the best of them, becomes a running gag about trying to see that hated right profile. It really isn’t so different from her left side; Jean Arthur and Norma Shearer, just to name two examples, had more drastically different profiles than Colbert. But she was determined to look her best, and Colbert thought that she knew best about how to present her mobile, Kewpie doll face with its widely spaced eyes and apple cheeks: “I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody,” she said, with the pride of an entrepreneur.
Cecil B. DeMille gave Colbert her first big chance on screen with two of his ludicrous but irresistible epics, The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934). As the Empress Poppaea in Cross, she is introduced bathing in ass’s milk, her trademark bangs done up in dark ringlets on her forehead. Colbert later claimed that she was wearing a white bathing suit for this bath scene, but this isn’t possible: the milk laps around her nipples several times. At one point, Colbert even runs her hands down her breasts, as if she’s enjoying them for us, while her female servants stare at her, intently. Needing information from a gossipy acquaintance, Colbert is take-charge sexy when she growls, “Take off your clothes, get in here and tell me all about it.” Perhaps this is also technique, but a scene like this is at least as convincing as a hint of lesbianism as the often unpleasantly sexist relations she had with frequent male co-stars like Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland in her lesser comedies.
In both of these DeMille films, Colbert is likably knowing and campy, and there are several moments when she looks like she’s about to crack up laughing, especially in her scenes with Charles Laughton’s Nero in Cross. She wouldn’t have to suppress that laughter for much longer: Colbert is at her best in It Happened One Night, the granddaddy of all screwball comedies. She’s especially winning when she’s teasing Gable’s gruff reporter, humoring him in her throaty voice, as when she listens to his theories on hitchhiking before stopping a car by raising her skirt and displaying a shapely leg; her sarcasm with a slightly dim man is perfectly judged and expressed, never too much, like Jean Arthur, or too subtle, like Irene Dunne. Night is still a beautiful movie, at least in its first hour, and Colbert played endless variations on it, as did many of her fellow actresses of the time.
1939 was probably the peak of her career: she had four different films in release. “I’m no frontierswoman!” she whined, in John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, and she wasn’t kidding, for no performer could have been more out of place in Ford’s world. But when Colbert returned to her French roots in George Cukor’s badly neglected Zaza, she seemed wonderfully stimulated by the chance to be a robust music hall coquette: it has to be her most physically demanding and openly sexual performance, and it shows what a really sensitive director could get out of her. In Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight, a fantasy of luxury, Colbert makes her ultimate claim for the beauty of material goods: “You don’t just fall into a tub of butter,” she counsels, “you jump for it.” This is a woman who loved making money, and it was serendipitous that she worked mainly for Paramount, the ritziest of studios. Her blithe avariciousness never seemed hard or unattractive; later on, it’s no mistake that she was great friends with the Reagans, for she lusted after the good life above all else.
Colbert’s Paris/New York upbringing gave her a special kind of diction: “either” would come out as “eit-thah” or “disaster” as “dis-astah.” Such pronunciation made her seem both earthy and high-falutin,’ and it was in such contrasts that she could work her magic. In It’s a Wonderful World, her third 1939 film, Colbert takes an impossible script, which Ben Hecht must have written in a weekend (the film was shot by W.S. Van Dyke in only 12 days), and makes it hilariously funny by both trying too hard and not seeming to try at all, the reward of her totally technical approach to performing. As Edwina Corday, a kidnapped poetess, Colbert gets laugh after laugh by being slightly ditsy, working in a grey area of impulse, essential intelligence and romantic stupidity so that she seems constantly exciting, a triumphant screwball heroine. This heroine, which Colbert essentially created in It Happened One Night, would have a final hurrah in Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, where she delivers his rapid-fire, complex dialogue with all her sophisticated, wry, “so that’s the way it is?” gold-digging humor.
In straight dramatic roles, Colbert was often less successful. She’s totally false when she has to utter conventional pieties, as in John Stahl’s superb, troubling Imitation of Life (1934) or David Selznick’s sentimental Since You Went Away (1944), so totally false, in fact, that she seems to be subversively pointing up just how awful such pieties are. But Dick is correct when he highlights her most unusual performance, in Jean Negulesco’s intense prison camp drama Three Came Home (1950). In that very gritty film, she’s magnificent in her scenes with the Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa), afraid, apprehensive, yet helplessly sarcastic. After being tortured (an upsetting sequence), Colbert calmly listens to Hayakawa when he tells her that his family was killed in Hiroshima. She tells him she’s sorry, and she is, but only Colbert could have conveyed the fact that this woman isn’t particularly sorry for his loss, not after all she’s suffered in his camp. Because she hurt her back in the Three Came Home torture sequence, Colbert missed out on All About Eve, which she regretted for the rest of her life. Frankly, it makes my head hurt to even try to imagine Colbert playing Margo Channing; surely she would have been fine and technically proficient, a bitchy Ina Claire more than a fire-breathing Tallulah Bankhead, but it would not be the classic film that it is today without Bette Davis.
After playing Troy Donahue’s mother in Parrish (1961), Colbert saw the writing on the wall and returned to the stage in light comedy vehicles. Dick actually uses some direct quotes from others, finally, for this period of her life; when they did The Marriage-Go-Round together on Broadway, the normally unflappable Charles Boyer was not a fan of Colbert and her upstaging antics: “Keep that woman away from me,” he told producer Paul Gregory. Having kept tight hold of her money, Colbert built a sort of paradise for herself in Barbados and entertained there regularly, re-emerging one more time on TV in 1987 for the swanky mini-series The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, where she looked eerily close to her old self, as if she were truly ageless. What her romantic life was we will probably never know, though some of her friends are said to have playfully called her “Uncle Claude.” Dick’s book is not worthy of her, but he does relay some useful things: even after she had a stroke, and even on her deathbed, he reports, Colbert insisted on being fully made-up. That’s the gallantry of a beautiful old lady, and that’s a movie star.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Claudette Colbert: The Dark Side of the Moon
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11 comments:
A sensitive reading of an underrated talent. I haven't caught Three Came Home and will be sure to get to it as soon as possible. But I have to disagree re: All About Eve; Colbert's knowingness is less cynical and self-aware than Davis's, but also less brittle. In my imagining, her appraisal of Baxter would sacrifice a bit of wariness but gain a sympathetic hint of, as you put it, "so that's the way it is," which would be an interesting dynamic in its own right.
One question: why--and please forgive the straight guy if he's overlooking something obvious--in inducing the sexuality of deceased figures with circumstantial evidence trending both gay and straight is bisexuality passed over as a possibility? It seems to even be the statistically likely
explanation (p 31).
I think Colbert's Margo Channing would have gained in worldliness, but I can't see her capturing the role's insecurity, or the outsized temperament and anger. I can't picture Colbert doing the big on stage argument with Lloyd Richards, for instance, or Margo's drunk scene at the party.
As far as Colbert's sexuality is concerned, this new book is very confused and confusing. There will probably be no definitive answer, but surely another writer might be able to do better than Dick's weird chapter about it, called "The Stigma," which raises interesting facts, such as the whole Verna Hull affair, and then drops or obscures them. Reading this Colbert book is like listening to someone singing a song off-key and trying to hear the real melody underneath.
Thanks so much for mentioning Three Came Home; it's indeed a fine performance. I found more sympathy from Colbert in that last scene with Hayakawa, but her playing is so layered that I think it's possible to read it a number of different ways.
I find that there are two types of biographers, those who will speculate and those who won't, and it seems Dick is in the latter camp. Although thank god he isn't in the David Bret just-throw-up-every-uncited-rumor-you've-ever-heard camp, which I don't consider biography at all.
I also dislike biographers who throw in any rumor they've ever heard about someone, as if they were facts. Or could be, wink wink. That seems to have been a sleazy 70's trend.
The problem here is that Dick is dealing with facts, but murky, long-ago facts. And at a certain point, you have to draw some conclusions from those facts. And the conclusions Dick draws are never convincing. Doesn't Verna Hull have any remaining friends or relatives who could give their side of the story? Everything having to do with that episode in Colbert's life seems evasive.
The standard of writing for this sort of book is never particularly high, unfortunately, but this one really drove me up the wall with its endless filler and politically correct hectoring about some of her films. Dick completely misses that La Cava's "Private Worlds" is partly ABOUT the Boyer character's male chauvinism, for instance.
How's the Lawrence Quirk book on Colbert? He'd at least have some quotes from people who knew her. I'm sure someone else can do a better book on her at some point.
Gosh, it's been so long since I read the Quirk book on Colbert. I don't remember much of anything about her love life so that indicates to me that he avoided it. Lots on the movies though, as I recall. I really prefer it that way. Sometimes I think I should stick to those old "The Films of ..." Citadel press things where they go through the filmography with stills and quotes from contemporary reviews and that's it. (Actually Quirk wrote some of those too, I think.)
On the other hand, the recent Mann bio of Hepburn did add a lot to understanding her as a person. And while he didn't have much in the way of critical insight, you still left the book feeling that you could separate her image from her movies now, and that alone is a service. But Colbert was so private to begin with there isn't as much to sort through.
I am also glad, by the by, that you addressed the whole one-side-of-her-face issue. Honestly, when she's good I don't notice it at all, any more than I notice Bogart's toupee or Paul Newman's shortness. And as you say, it's curious considering that her "bad" side wasn't that bad at all.
Hm... I actually like Colbert quite a bit in "Since You Went Away."
At the Alternative Film Guide, I've posted a q&a with James Robert Parish, who was considering working on a Claudette Colbert bio until fairly recently. He's done quite a bit of research on her.
While I was working on my Ramon Novarro bio, I remember speaking with a gay couple who had met Colbert. I saw them a number of times, and once they told me about spending some time with her at this millionaire's mansion in Italy. Colbert was accompanied by a young female "friend." According to this gay couple, everyone knew what was going on, but it was something that was never discussed out in the open.
The Jim Parish interview on Colbert can be found here:
http://www.altfg.com/blog/actors/claudette-colbert-parish/
I came across your blog quite by accident.
Claudette Colbert was a very very dear friend, and so for Christmas someone gave me the new book about her by this guy Dick.
This is a VERY peculiar book. And it certainly does not give a full or accurate picture of the person I knew so well.
Happy New Year!!
sincerely,
Douglas Urbanski
I knew her closely for nearly the last 15 years of her life. We had many intimate talks on all kinds of things from her marriages to Gable, Demille and almost every other. We had many heart to heart talks about the most private things--about which she loved to give advice (often excellent)and was always a friendly ear. During the times I visited her in Barbados, we would often go for a late afternoon walk on the beach.
I recall when she had car problems--driving her car to the mechanics, stopping for gas, or simply shopping with her there--we were always talking and always about all kinds of things any biographer would have loved to have known about.
I first went to Barbados to see her in 1982, and visited her there every year until the end, including the years after her stroke. (Contrary to what I have read, she was NOT in full make up after her stroke!) In 1990, Claudette invited my wife and I to honeymoon at her house--which we did.
We talked about careers, Palm Springs, her painting hobby, her jewelry store. You name it. I had dozens of lunches, dinners, many films and many evenings of drinks there. And dozens and dozens of phone calls. At her house I met and became lifelong friends with Slim Keith, Kirk and Anne Douglas and many others.
Never once did she tell me not to take a picture of her! Never once did she tell me what side to photograph!
There is so much to be said about Claudette, and if Mr. Dick had only diged a tad further he would have painted a more accurate and even endearing picture of her.
She was a great friend, and a GREAT hostess. In New York we attended dinner and theatre together. When she visited Los Angeles for the last time, I picked her up at the airport and took her to her friends house.
When the agent, Irv Schwartz, then at the APA talent agency called me because he knew I knew Her, to ask if I thought she might be interested in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, I got into it on her behalf. I negotiated her deal, and even perspnally flew to Barbados from Los Angeles to hand deliver the script to her and single handedly talked her into doing it. When she won her Golden Globe for her performance, the Hollywood Foreign Press sent it to me and I took it to her in Barbados in my carry on luggage. She was paid well for the job, and after this even offered me an opportunity to buy her house from her.
When she won the Keneddy Center honor, she figgured out that I had been single handedly behind a very high level campaign for her to win. The night they let her know, she made a few calls and figured out who was behind it--and when I got home that night there was a long message on my machine from a choked up and tearfull Claudette thanking me for my efforts. How I wish I still had that message!!
I could go on and on with stories about her. There is no doubt that she had been a victim of bad advice concerning estate planning--her lawyer, now long dead, was not really good at much.
She and I spoke of Capra--and indeed she introduced me to him when our production was in Los Angeles.
I remember the day she had her stroke. Helen called from Barbados to tell me, and I was hit in the gut. She then told me that someone wanted to speak to me--as she held the phone to Claudette, who mumbled words I could not understand. I said a few things to her about life and friendship, and she started to cry. Helen then came on the line to say that Claudette was crying, and that she always cried when she spoke to people she loved. That was it for me, and I melted.
We kept on visiting, and we were fortunate to see her just before she died. Even my son, who learned to swim there, remembers her well and fondly even though he was only 5 the last time he saw her. He knew this was someone importnat in daddy's life.
To this day I still visit her grave several times a year always remember her in so many ways!
She was a great friend, a close friend, and even though these are cliche sounding words, she was a great hostess. Indeed EVERYTHING we learnt about entertaining well, we learned from her. We still, on our anuall retreat to Barbados, create the exact menus that Claudette served!
There are odd questions about this book however, and a source of almost oddball myth building---selectively creating a strange and not to accurate picture of Claudette has cropped up. Many of the things that She and I discussed will always remain confidential of course. She did not dusciss publicly her sexuality, and one respects that this was not a topic she wanted discussed--we respect her wishes on this completely. As for Helen, she was a dedicated friend--that would be an understatement in fact. She cared for and nursed Claudette completely, and Claudette was not always entirely easy on Helen. Claudette did enjoy the company of many gay people, men and women, but also the company of many straight people--She was a complete non-judgemental person in that way.
Odly, in the myth making, or "keeping of the flame", there are many other sources who can paint a vastly more accurate picture than Helen O'Hagen, and one would have thought that any serious biographer would seek out those who discussed all of these things in detail with her--which almost certainly Helen did not. I was completely surprised to read the Vanity Fair piece after Claudette went--it was filled with so many inaccuracies--as is this book--and the source for this picture painting always seems to be the same, or at least the same group.
When they had her funeral, I was invited, but could not travel from California at the time.
Once she was gone, we had no further conenction with Helen beyond one weiird conversation--weird in that there was already a developing narrative that deviated from the facts.
If Mr. Dick had done his work, he would have found several of us who could have helped flesh out a fuller picture of this top flight person. Instead, he took the party line from the easiest and most motivated person, and that has helped prevent his book from being both accurate and complete. Alas.
Thank you so much for writing this comment, and for your thoughts on this book. You sound like you were a loyal and devoted friend to Colbert.
I'd be very happy to discuss this further with you; maybe I can even, one day, write something better on her behalf. If you'd like to contact me, I can be reached at dannyboy143@hotmail.com.
Fantastic posts from everyone.
I'm sorry to hear the Parish bio has been scrapped.
Also, I thought the whole "stigma" gay thing came from Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon?" Anger made stuff up whole-hog in that book, and though it's entertaining in its own right (I am an Anger fan), it's not to be taken seriously.
It seems to me that Mr. Urbanski should set the record straight and pen his own bio -- his post was a better lighting of the candle than just about any other I've read.
I just finished reading this book, and while I'd say your criticisms have some merit, I don't believe the book is as bad as all that.
A lot of the topics you mention Dick glossing over -- the Foster marriage, the on-the-set practical jokes of Gable, etc -- were taken from biographies of other people. Dick wasn't making them up, he was quoting from other sources -- sources now dead.
And this part:
"Dick describes two unfunny sounding practical jokes Gable played on Colbert on the set; he dropped a hammer down his pants before a love scene, and then later stuck a tennis racket under a blanket to simulate an erection, with director Frank Capra’s blessing. Colbert’s response? “Aww, you guys!” she cried. Now, I wasn’t there at the time, obviously, and neither was Dick, but he makes it sound like she enjoyed these antics. I get the feeling, though, that she was probably a little irritated, even disgusted, yet she wanted to appear like “one of the boys.”
See, I have the complete opposite view. I think Claudette probably DID laugh at this, and that she laughed genuinely; I don't see how she couldn't have. You seem to have this image of Colbert being this haughty high-brow type, when word is she could curse like a truck-driver when the occasion merited it. I also can't correlate how the same actress could find such a harmless joke "offensive" yet could also appear completely topless, bathing in asses' milk, for a film.
And finally, just as you accuse Dick of going out of his way to "explain away" the "stigma" of Colbert's sexuality, it appears to me that you are doing the same thing, only from an opposite standpoint; just as Dick wants to imply Colbert was heterosexual, you seem to insist that she was not.
To whit: "It seems like Dick is so completely under O’Hagan’s thumb that he doesn’t dare speculate intelligently on any of this information and what it might mean."
Actually, Dick does speculate intelligently on this information -- quoting old press releases, bios, interviews, and accounts of Claudette's acquaintances. His verdict: Claudette was basically declared a lesbian by association, due to her acquaintances with verious gay celebrities. Mind you, he never DOES say one way or the other -- which is what one wants from a good bio. He leaves the entire affair shrouded in mystery, as it should be.
I'm not saying the book is fantastic. As Urbanski posted here on the blog, Dick could've spoken to many other people to provide a better book. I'm just saying the book doesn't deserve the thrashing it's gotten -- Dick is obviously a fan of Colbert, and rhapsodizes over her for page after page. That he fills in the gaps, so to speak, with wistful fantasy (ie "proving" Claudette was attracted to Gable via their onscreen chemistry in "It Happened One Night") only goes to show the power stars have over us -- that we can interpret their acting as "true feelings."
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