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[Above: Jennifer Jones from Love Letters, 1945.]
[Above: Jennifer Jones publicity photo promoting Duel in the Sun, 1946 film from David O Selznick.
Jennifer Jones
Jennifer Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 2, 1919, and died Thursday, December 17, 2009 at her home in Malibu, California at the age of 90. She was the daughter of Phil and Flora Mae Isley, a couple who managed a traveling theatre troupe which toured the Midwest of the United States. Raised chiefly in Oklahoma, her parents wanted her to enter law school, she however convinced them to send her to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1938. A year later she had married the actor Robert Walker, and the pair pursued acting roles in the city, with success coming for Walker in speaking parts in radio program while she earned fees in fashion modeling.
David O. Selznick heard her reading for a part in the Rose Franken play Claudia, and though she failed to secure a role in the production, Selznick nonetheless called her back and eventually signed her to a seven-year contract and changed her name to Jennifer Jones.
Robert Walker and Jones traveled to California and with Selznick's influence she was shortly given the lead role as Bernadette Soubirous in the film The Song of Bernadette (1943) directed by Henry King. She received an Academy Award in 1945 for the role. Soon thereafter Jones and Walker divorced as they had been separated since 1943. In 1949 Jones married to David O. Selznick.
Jones is often given high marks for her two comedy efforts: as a plumber's daughter in Cluny Brown for Ernst Lubitsch in 1946, and for her part as the scheming Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm, a phony British diplomat's wife in Beat the Devil, a 1953 film from John Huston which also featured Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida. The Huston film contained a loossely devised adventure-plot that was more of a grab-bag of ad-libs and unscripted scenes allowing the cast to have some fun with odd-ball characters wrapped up in stealing from each other. As Chelm, Jones was able to indulge in a fun comedic turn completely in tune with the movie's informal attitude.
She appeared in many big-budget Hollywood films, and with David O. Selznick personally managing her career she was able to have the pick of the most publicized and most important film properties that he controlled. She played one of her most famous parts opposite Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun, a 1946 film that was intended to be a kind of cowboy 'Gone With the Wind,' with she and Peck in a tumultuous love story that delved in interracial issues.
Altogether Jones had five Academy Award nominations: The Song of Bernadette Bernadette (1943) as Soubirous; Since You Went Away (1944) as Jane Deborah Hilton; Love Letters (1945) as Singleton/Victoria Morland; Duel in the Sun (1946) as Pearl Chavez; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1954), as Dr. Han Suyin.
After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones rarely appeared in films, the most notable exception being her brief part as Fred Astaire's dancing partner in The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1971 she had married wealthy art collector Norton Simon, and she participated in building his art collection which eventually became the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. After his death in 1993, she continued as Trustee Emeritusat the museum.
From the New York Times obituary from December 17, 2009: “After that first big role (Song of Bernadette Bernadette), there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer:
“When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”
New Jean Harlow book
I've not seen a copy of the book yet, but simply put, the Vieira Hollywood picture-books are the best albums on Hollywood, bar none, for well over a decade now. No one puts as much attention to the production aspects, design, picture choices, and then ladles the whole affair with affection and admiration in the text. Classic Hollywood has not had a modern explainer and admirer like Vieira for decades now, and the taste and skill brought to bear on his books make them both readable-fun and collectible (some of his past books are out of print and instead of dropping down to the remainder pricing so many used Hollywood books seem to end up at, his instead get harder to find and buy).
Book is by Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira, 240 pages, Angel City Press. Available from amazon.com
New Book: Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars
This is a collection of 23 original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each.
Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins and Gladys Walton.
About the Author Michael G. Ankerich is a writer whose work focuses on the silent film era of Hollywood. A former newspaper reporter, he has written extensively for Classic Images, Films of the Golden Age, and Hollywood Studio Magazine, which featured his interview with Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) on the 50th anniversary of the release of Gone With The Wind.
Book is 319 pages, McFarland. Available from amazon.com
New Busby Berkeley book
Maybe the most revered of musical directors was the extreme-stylist of the golden era of Hollywood movies, Busby Berkeley, a man who changed what a stage-production meant on film by taking the camera and making it move like a winged-eye that could see the motion of actors from every angle. Whether they were underwater, behind glass, or below a skyward lense, Berkeley made synchronized motion more than a filmed reproduction of a Broadway play.
Book is by Jeffrey Spivak, 408 pages, University Press of Kentucky. Available from amazon.com