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Praise for Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel

“Screen and stage star Miriam Hopkins has long deserved a full-length biography covering her extensive career. This meticulously researched book does the actress complete justice. The author presents a vivid study of a high-strung talent who, professionally and romantically, was often her own worst enemy. A great read!” —James Robert Parish, author of Hollywood Divas: The Good, The Bad, and The Fabulous

“Allan Ellenberger’s thorough, empathetic biography captures the passionate, full-blooded story of celebrated actress Miriam Hopkins, revealing the remarkable life of one of Hollywood’s most intelligent women.” —Mary Mallory, coauthor of Hollywood at Play: The Lives of the Stars between Takes

“Tennessee Williams called her a ‘magnificent bitch.’ There’s probably no better label to sum up the force of nature known as Miriam Hopkins, whose professional achievements both on Broadway and in Hollywood were as notable as her feuds with Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Samuel Goldwyn, Warner Bros. head Jack Warner, and other luminaries of the studio era. Allan Ellenberger’s Miriam Hopkins is a must-read for those interested in getting to know this complex, contradictory, and immensely talented twentieth-century personage who dared to rebel against conventional ‘women’s roles’ both on- and offscreen.” —André Soares, author of Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro

Miriam Hopkins

Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel

Allan R. Ellenberger Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results.

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

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Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author’s collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ellenberger, Allan R., 1956– author. Title: Miriam Hopkins : life and films of a Hollywood rebel / Allan R. Ellenberger. Description: Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, [2018] | Series: Screen classics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017042898| ISBN 9780813174310 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813174327 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813174334 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hopkins, Miriam, 1902–1972. | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC PN2287.D315 E45 2018 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B] — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042898

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses To Michael Hopkins (1932–2010) Christiane Carreno Hopkins (1931–2016)

Contents

Prologue 1 1. “From a Fine Old Family” 5 2. Broadway Bound 17 3. Billy 34 4. Of Paramount Importance 46 5. Hollywood 57 6. “An Expensive Leading Woman” 67 7. The Lubitsch Touch 87 8. Sutton Place 96 9. Goldwyn 111 10. Tola 128 11. West Hollywood to Burbank 144 12. “Perfect Little Bitches” 154 13. All This, Jack Warner, and Bette Davis, Too 167 14. Angels Battle in Boston 185 15. “This Is Pure Hopkins” 194 16. To New York and Back 204 17. “A Little Off-Center” 217 18. “They Are Sure Reds” 225 19. “How Many Times Can You Come Back?” 236 20. The Final Years 254 21. “If I Had to Do It Over Again” 264 Epilogue 273 Acknowledgments 279 Appendix 283 Notes 295 Bibliography 333 Index 337

Illustrations follow page 174

Prologue

One fall afternoon in 1940, stage and screen actress Miriam Hopkins opened the door to her suite at New York’s Ambassador Hotel. Standing before her was a short young man wearing thick glasses, a threadbare cor- duroy jacket, and muddy riding boots. A southerner like herself, they had met once at the opening of her recent play The Guardsman, in Upstate New York. The prestigious Theatre Guild was producing the young man’s first play, and he was here to give Hopkins his script, hoping she would portray the play’s central character: a lonely, disillusioned Mississippi Delta housewife trapped in an unfor- tunate marriage. The fledgling playwright was Tennessee Williams, and the play was Battle of Angels. Another southern actress, Tallulah Bankhead, had turned it down, claiming sex and religion didn’t mix onstage—or so she said. Hopkins read the script and thought it needed work, but she agreed to do it and willingly invested her own money. Now, in that second, more intimate, setting, Williams was nervous. After a champagne dinner, Hopkins “raised the roof” about her part. She construed Williams’s anxious behavior as indifference, and that annoyed her. Then, her tone became more heated, and Williams, having had enough, prefaced his response with, “As far as I can gather from all this hysteria.” Hopkins was speechless. Such conduct from a gentleman was— un-southern. But what appeared as conceit and arrogance on Williams’ part was sheer panic.1 Their sparring continued through rehearsals on Battle of Angels, right up to its opening in Boston, where the critics and the city council called the play, among other things, “dirty.” Hopkins jumped to Williams’s defense. She called a press conference and told reporters that their reviews were “an insult to the fine young man who wrote it.” The play was “not dirty,” she insisted. The “dirt” was in the minds of the beholders. After all, she wasn’t at a place in her career where she had “to appear in dirty plays.”2

1 Miriam Hopkins

Hopkins endeared herself to the playwright, and they became close allies for the rest of her life. Throughout their long friendship, Tennes- see Williams accepted Hopkins’s contradictory extremes, describing her sometimes as “morning mail and morning coffee” and at others as “like a hat-pin jabbed in your stomach. The quintessence of the female, a really magnificent bitch.”3 Hopkins was smart. A woman ahead of her time, she never let anyone find out how smart she was until it was too late. After years of research, I was amazed by her intellect and temperament, which flared up unex- pectedly and disappearing as quickly. Sometimes her demanding mother would trigger it, but usually she was fighting for her career—or so she thought. Throughout the 1930s, the freewheeling Hopkins was a unique case, remaining a top Hollywood star at no less than four studios: Paramount, RKO, Goldwyn, and Warner Bros. And no matter where she worked, in her quest for better opportunities, Hopkins fearlessly tackled the studios’ powers-that-be, from the venerated Samuel Goldwyn to the irascible Jack Warner. Whatever drove her—ambition, insecurity, or something altogether different—she created conflict with her costars. She was either loved or hated; rarely was there an in-between. Having said that, whenever she trusted her director and costars, she was an ideal team player; but if she did not, life for them wasn’t worth living. If rewriting screenplays, directing her fellow actors and her directors, and fighting with producers and the studio’s front office were necessary, so be it. Yet, in Hopkins’s mind, she was not difficult, not temperamental. “Proof of that is that I made four pictures with Willie Wyler, who is a very demanding director,” she once insisted. “I made two with Rouben Mamoulian, who is the same. Three with Ernst Lubitsch, such a dear man. When you are asked to work again with such directors, you cannot be temperamental.”4 But Tennessee Williams thought differently: “Difficult? I guess so. But not with me. She was every Southern divinity you could imagine. Smart and funny and elegant, and I kept looking for her in Joanne [Woodward], and Carrie Nye and Diane Ladd, but there was no one like her. No one. I will hear nothing bad of Miriam Hopkins.”5 Ironically, I started Miriam Hopkins’s life story because of Bette

2 Prologue

Davis, who was always a favorite of mine. I enjoyed watching Hopkins clash with the indomitable Warner Bros. star in their two films together: The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance. There were stories about their dynamic real-life feud and, later, the image of a gaunt, poststroke Davis ranting on television about how difficult her former costar could be. Hopkins denied the bad blood between them. That intrigued me. She would say, “Yes, I know the legend is that Bette Davis and I were supposed to have had a feud. Utter rubbish. Bette and I got along fine. I’d love to make another picture with her.”6 Even more rubbish! I watched Hopkins’s films on which she collaborated withL ubitsch, Mamoulian, and Wyler and her lesser-known Paramount fare. I dis- covered a Miriam Hopkins in command of her sexuality. Whether as a dance-hall prostitute in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a participant in a ménage à trois in Design for Living, or a rape victim in the scandalous The Story of Temple Drake, she proved sex was more than a three-letter word: At times, it could be raw and terrifying; at others, it could be sensual, sophis- ticated fun. She received her Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Becky Sharp, the first Technicolor feature film. She was Thackeray’s Becky in the flesh. Hopkins had featured roles in thirty-five films and forty stage plays and made guest appearances in the early days of television, not to men- tion on countless radio shows. In these media, she worked with Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, Jane Fonda, Edgar Bergen, Bing Crosby, William Powell, Sally Field, Henry Fonda, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Olivia de Havilland, Peter Lorre, Merle Oberon, Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland, Elizabeth Montgomery, Coleen Dewhurst, Robert Redford, and dozens more. Her friendships were as celebrated, but instead of actors, she hung around with writers and intellectuals such as Theodore Dreiser, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and, of course, Tennessee Williams. In her love life, she was independent-minded and discriminating. She had four husbands and dozens of lovers. Most were writers, such as Ben- nett Cerf, William Saroyan, and John Gunther. She was an avid reader, a writer herself, a lover of poetry, and a patron of the arts. Over the years, her political beliefs vacillated from the far right to the far left, and she held positions in political organizations that had the FBI tracking her for three decades.

3 Miriam Hopkins

Hopkins was one of Hollywood’s brainiest women, yet she was absurdly superstitious. A believer in the occult, she would not accept roles, move to a new home, or take long trips without consulting a psychic. Despite her faults and idiosyncrasies, Hopkins proved she was a capable performer who happened to have both her own set of rules and her own personal demons. Although she was aware that she was a part of film history—how could Margaret Mitchell’s choice to play Scarlett O’Hara not have been?—she was not sentimental about her existence or her career. She kept no scrapbooks, clippings, or photographs; it was irrel- evant to document or discuss her past. But no matter. Once you read about the complex, ambiguous, larger- than-life character that was Miriam Hopkins, you may agree with Ten- nessee Williams that she truly was a “magnificent bitch.”