Lunch with Lizabeth Scott: The Dark Queen

The origins of the adage 'Never meet your idols' can be traced to 1865, when Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary: “You should never touch your idols: a little of the gold always rubs off.” Unlike our peers who were more concerned with sports, drugs and sex, we’d use our collective resources to drive to the neighboring Montclair Cinema or Fox Theater in Pomona for any double feature. At Claremont High School, we were coming of age and becoming increasingly interested in art, especially cinema, the seventh art, which we were taking seriously. Lauren Bacall was a true presence and had the carriage and bearing of a great lady. It was like seeing Mount Rushmore. So famous and so iconic. Her steely countenance revealed nothing, not even the hint of a smile at having just nailed a scene in one take. Her attitude and body language were clear, she wasn’t doing a second take. Everyone seemed fearful of her and kept telling her how great she was. Imperiously ignoring them, the scene was officially over when she crossed the lobby and left the building. Hitchcock, another American institution, was born English but had become a U.S. citizen in 1955. It was clear that foreign filmmakers agreed with him when he said, “I’ve always been American in my heart, ever since my mother took me to the movies.” 

To finally be able to see all of the Busby Berkeley movies I knew everything about but had never seen a frame of, up there on the big screen, was like finding the best drug in the universe. It took me days to come down from a Busby Berkeley film. I enrolled in more classes with Andrew Sarris as well as classes with erudite film scholars like Robert Belton and Richard Koszarski. It all introduced me to the broader scope of global cinema, it gave me a new respect for Hollywood, and introduced me to this magical genre called “film noir.” Film noir captivated me from the start. It was so American. So all or nothing, so black and white, so glamorous and depraved. Amazing movie stars, who had escaped me until then, began to appear in my collective Hollywood consciousness—luminaries of great beauty and complexity like Robert Mitchum and Gene Tierney. 

My first major star obsession was Veronica Lake. After seeing her in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941), a great film by Preston Sturges, I was hooked. I read everything I could about her, deducing that she was a film noir star when teamed with Alan Ladd in fantastic titles like THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942) or THE GLASS KEY (1942). Veronica’s noirs were elusive, but her photographs were pervasive. I started collecting them: her exquisite face framed by her platinum peek-a-boo hairdo captured by George Hurrell, the classic one-eye on a bear rug, a charming publicity still from I MARRIED A WITCH (1942). THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947), directed by Orson Welles, became what still might be my favorite movie of all time. I saw it three times in a row. I was watching DEAD RECKONING (1946) and she had not even appeared onscreen, but she had Bogart’s attention, and mine. And then, the greatest movie star introduction of all time. The camera begins on the manicured feet of open-toed shoes of the as-yet-unseen mystery woman. Acting as the eyes of Bogie’s character “Rip Murdock,” the camera looks up and gently admires a leg peeking from the slit of a black evening gown. It rests for a moment on her fingers extricating a cigarette from a silver case, and then follows the cigarette up to the lips of a face in profile surrounded by fluffy billows of platinum hair. This must be the dame. Bogart’s hand reaches in with a lit match for her smoke. She turns to the camera and for the first time I saw the face of Lizabeth Scott. The black and white print of the film was flawless, and except for the absence of color, it was as if I were there in the room with her. Her face was luminescent. Thick, darkly drawn eyebrows over profound crystalline-blue eyes. Cascading folds of blonde hair gently bounced around her unimpressed face. “Thanks,” she says as she takes a deep drag. “Very much.” With a husky voice.

Her voice was even lower than Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall combined. Her diction was pronounced and unique. Almost strange. Was it an accent? Bogie then impeccably sums her up. “Cinderella with a husky voice.” She shoots back, “Where have we met?” “In another man’s dream.” They don’t write them like that anymore. I helplessly stared at this specter and asked myself why I had never seen or even heard of this magnificent creature before? I mean, there she was co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in a big budget A-picture for Columbia. Lizabeth Scott’s character, Coral Chandler, sings a song called “Either It’s Love or It Isn’t.” It was love for me. This movie was to be Rita Hayworth’s follow up to the international success of GILDA. Instead, Rita had cut and bleached her hair to make LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Rita Hayworth was replaced by Lizabeth Scott, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures’ producer Hal Wallis. Scott was promoted as “The Threat,” and was often compared to Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, as both were former models and had deep, sultry voices. 

DEAD RECKONING was cinema at its best, complete illusion from fascinating actors with personal faces and voices, and exquisite cinematography by Leo Tover who later shot the gorgeous THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951); everything that has been lost in the digital revolution of perfect computer-generated images combined with the modern fondness for mumbling actors in lieu of true movie stars. I may have been stoned but my rapture was real. Some say men have the capacity to fall in love at first sight since they are smitten with the look of someone, whereas women need to fall in love while in a relationship. This is what it was for me. Love at first sight. The lights came up and a magnificent obsession was born. British film critic Leslie Halliwell’s description of Lizabeth Scott (A sultry American leading lady of the forties, a concoction of blonde hair, defiant expression and immobile upper lip) incensed me and immediately reminded me of his equally dismissive commentary about the remarkable actress Kim Novak.

I was feeling that rapture with Lizabeth Scott and couldn’t understand how Mr. Halliwell could be so cruel to these great stars of Hollywood’s golden era in his so-called film encyclopedia. Knowing this “authority” was just wrong and being subjectively cruel to Kim Novak, who was uniquely brilliant, made me positive he was wrong about Lizabeth Scott too. Let me get this straight. Lizabeth Scott co-starred with Bogart, Mitchum, Powell, Lancaster, Heston, even Elvis Presley... and still a movie geek like me had no inkling that this star had once burned bright in the galaxy of Hollywood. I felt incomplete. My inquiring mind wanted to know. Needed to know everything. An elaborate scavenger hunt of sorts thus commenced. Its treasure would change the course of my life. There was no better time or place to have an obsession than New York City in the 1980s. I don’t know how I discovered Movie Star News at 134 W. 18th Street, but walking in there was a major breadcrumb. Paula Klaw, daughter of photographer Irving Klaw (the man who discovered and made an icon out of Bettie Page), ran this enormous warehouse of memorabilia for sale, the bulk of it being 8x10 photographs that were indexed away in endless rows of filing cabinets. The cavernous space reeked of photo chemicals, and amidst a sea of glamorous male and female faces, there was Lizabeth Scott. 

I excitedly asked Paula if she knew her. She said not personally, but that Lizabeth had autographed that photo herself when she visited the store in the 70s. I couldn’t believe I was meeting someone who had actually met her. I couldn’t believe Lizabeth was a real person. I asked her what she was like. “She was very nice, they all are.” Paula had met many Hollywood actors and was as enthusiastic as I was. I asked if she had any more photos of Lizabeth. She asked how much time I had. I proceeded to spend the next several hours carefully examining Paula’s seemingly endless collection of photographs and negatives of Lizabeth. Her unmannered projection of the tough girl was direct and vibrant, elevating it from the confines of its times. Paula always cut me a deal and I would take away as many as I could. I was able to create a class load at Columbia that was completely contained on Tuesday and Thursday. That left me three days a week to work, which I gladly did to feed this growing habit. The second major breadcrumb was a book. 

The Paramount Pretties by James Robert Parish was first published in 1972. I discovered that, unlike her predecessors at Paramount, Lizabeth Scott was not contracted to the studio but to the company’s leading independent producer, Hal B. Wallis, who, like David O. Selznick before him, made a lucrative business of loaning his contractees to other producers with substantial profit. This breakdown of the omnipotent studio’s star system worked to Lizabeth’s disadvantage. Paramount was disinclined to promote a free-lance player who was so tenuous as part of its set-up. Compounding her plight was her rebellious individuality. Lizabeth had little use for the conventional homage movie stars usually paid to the establishment in the film industry, and she rarely kowtowed to the ranking institutions or powerful gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. 

With rare exceptions, Lizabeth was stereotyped on the screen as the temptress who had no desire or will to change and was doomed to find a worthwhile good guy to love her only when she had already passed the point of redemption. By the mid-1950s, Lizabeth’s screen career had tapered off altogether, not so much by an expose of her personal life in Confidential magazine as by poor professional management. I found out that Lizabeth got her start on Broadway in Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth with Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift. Lizabeth had been Bankhead’s understudy and James Robert Parish intimates that the plot of the classic film ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) was inspired by the relationship between Lizabeth and Tallulah. 

One evening, a random friend of a friend happened to be over and noticed my budding shrine. “Hey, that’s Lizabeth Scott!” My jaw dropped in disbelief that someone other than myself correctly identified her. Not only did he recognize her, but he knew her! He was a few years older than me and had just moved to New York from Los Angeles to be a Broadway dancer. He explained that he had been her aerobic teacher from 1983 to 1986, at a studio on La Cienega Boulevard. Lizabeth drove a green Jaguar, shopped at Quinn’s market (a health food emporium), and did aerobic dance three times a week. He had no personal information or contact for her, but it was enough information to set my brain spinning. If I were in Hollywood, could I locate her? Could I find her apartment on Hollywood Boulevard? “8277 Hollywood Boulevard.” By my calculations using FILM NOIR An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, I determined that Lizabeth had appeared in more noir films than any other actress, so publicly I declared her the “Queen of Film Noir.” Living in Silver Lake, our phone exchange was the now-defunct Normandie or 666 code. I hoped that wouldn’t freak her out. 

One day in February I came home from work and my phone answering machine was blinking. “This message is for Todd. This is Mrs. McCormick, Lizabeth Scott’s secretary. She would like to meet you this Friday for lunch at Musso & Frank.” Between 1946 and 1954, the prime years for the genre, Lizabeth Scott headlined in thirteen features that have been deemed film noir from the golden age of Hollywood. Her debut YOU CAME ALONG (1945) was one of her own favorites of all her 22 films. The screenplay was written by fellow Hal Wallis contractee, Ayn Rand, who had just scored a major success two years earlier with her novel The Fountainhead. Lizabeth was smitten with Ayn and her Objectivism theory which, aside from her devotion to Catholicism, intrigued and colored her own beliefs. They became lifelong friends. The character Rand wrote for Lizabeth in You Came Along, Ivy Hotchkiss, is very close to Lizabeth, the real person: full of life and wit, kind and supportive, always ready with a smile or a laugh to lighten the load. In the seminal 1973 essay The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Molly Haskell identifies Lizabeth Scott as “a kind of blonde Joan Crawford in the noir arena of female characters,” who wasn’t necessarily evil herself, but whose very presence seemed to invite evil. “Every time she appeared, the atmosphere became heavy, and we knew that trouble, big trouble, was ahead,” wrote Haskell.

In THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946), Lizabeth Scott goes head to head with Barbara Stanwyck, who had already staked her claim as a noir queen with her iconic Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). These two wonderful actresses have an exciting, slightly sensual stand-off in their only meeting on camera. Lizabeth has the last laugh in the end when she drives into the horizon with leading man Van Heflin. Across town, Stanwyck empties her gun into Kirk Douglas and then herself. Lizabeth told me the last time she saw Stanwyck at Chasen’s restaurant, they hugged each other. 

It only took until her third film and second noir, DEAD RECKONING (1947), for Lizabeth to develop a screen persona so jaded and disillusioned with post-war America, the whole raison d’être for film noir, that she emerges the quintessential noir queen—the impeccable ice blond sexual minx, rendering men useless with her poker-faced lies, and a warm gun in her purse. Lizabeth is the femme fatale who inhabits the dark city, although she's not always malevolent. Dead Reckoning was the film that made me fall in love with her, inevitably drawn to her character Coral Chandler who could kiss me or kill me at any moment. Her acting style has been recently described as “dreamwalking,” incorporating a numbness, a frozen quality necessary to move forward in a world filled with disappointment. As an actress, Lizabeth Scott was defining the noir archetypes that would mirror our own fears.

Her next film put her in a league of her own, both as an actress and as a noir icon, the exquisite PITFALL (1948). Lizabeth creates Mona Stevens as a character that resonates by not being a particularly good or bad girl. She’s adrift, taking the best deal she can cut. She accepts the advances of the attractive and bored married man John Forbes (Dick Powell), avoids the advances of a psychopathic stalker (Raymond Burr) while waiting for the advances of her boyfriend Bill Smiley (Byron Barr) who is in jail for stealing a boat he seduced Mona with. The dualism of Mona's morally ambiguous actions and her relationship with a married man is the yin and yang of American idealism and greed. PITFALL is probably Lizabeth’s greatest performance, and as such the film resonates as a morality tale. 

We both root for “marriage” and “goodness” to survive while we empathize with Mona’s uncertain future and lack of fair choices for herself. Her chemistry with Dick Powell is remarkable, yet with sad undertones, very different from her temptress with Bogart in DEAD RECKONING. Lizabeth seemed intrigued by Bogart and Powell and her personal fascination with both men translated to the screen. She'd comment about Powell: “I shall never forget his eyes, so beautiful, so trusting. I’d just stare into his blue eyes and completely lose myself.” 

TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949) emerged as a crowd-pleasing staple of noir festivals film and contains Lizabeth’s most popular performance. Director Guillermo del Toro said of Lizabeth Scott in Too Late For Tears, “She is perfect in this movie.” Her character Jane Palmer that Lizabeth creates is the ultimate “femme fatale” in the annals of cinema. A self-absorbed narcissist, her rage at her bourgeois existence bubbles over when she accidentally gets her hands on some easy money. With escape from the doldrums in her grasp, she loses her cool, sparing nothing and no one in her quest to keep the loot, always one step ahead of everyone else. Dan Duryea was one of film noir’s most dependable smarmy louts. However, in TOO LATE FOR TEARS his character cracks under Lizabeth’s unbridled evil. She eventually reduces this depressive tough guy to a quivering bowl of jelly before the big kiss off. Will women stop at nothing? you can almost hear the audience ask, as Lizabeth’s character takes everything she’s fought for down with her in her untimely demise. When she gets her inevitable comeuppance, you really feel bad for her even though she is rotten to the core. 

That was the magic of Lizabeth Scott. Lizabeth and Dan Duryea both won the prestigious Photoplay Award for best performance of the month in June of 1949. I was beginning to question how this woman could be a lesbian. She hadn’t given me anything but insight into her seemingly heterosexual libido. When she'd opened the glamorous carte of her Musso’s menu to make her luncheon selection, she looked up with a grin and proclaimed, “Fish!” We both laughed and I felt sure it was her way of tipping me off about that delicate subject. Working at the AFI I had personal interactions with film critics Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin, which meant so much to me. I would find out later Martin Scorsese was also a Lizabeth Scott fan. My confidence growing, and with her birthday approaching, I wrote to ask if I might take her to lunch at Musso & Frank again, to celebrate her birthday and show her The Lizabeth Scott Compendium on my laptop. She replied yes. 

She was ahead of the curve with her sex positive attitude and I loved her even more for it. She confessed: “I had a fantastic romance with Hal Wallis. He was like a father and mother and lover all in one. From the time I was twenty-three he sponsored my career and we stayed friends until he passed ten years ago, making me a richer woman than I already was, by the way.” In 1966, Lizabeth found a new love and was engaged to a glamorous Texas oil millionaire tycoon in a whirlwind romance worthy of Liz and Dick. William Lafayette Dugger swept Lizabeth off her feet with a promise of a jump start to her career producing dramatic films for her in Europe. Fate spoke, and her beloved fiancé died the night before the wedding in 1969 following complications from an abdominal surgery. She was inconsolable for years. Though Casablanca was the film of which Wallis was most proud, the films he watched repeatedly were those starring Lizabeth Scott. Even during his second marriage with Martha Hyer, Wallis continued to screen Scott's night after night, over and over, in his home theater. Wallis never got over her sheer physical beauty, her voice and her greatest grace, charm. Clearly, there was something about that dame. The phone rang. “Todd, it’s Lizabeth Scott. I’ll do the Cinematheque meeting as long as Eddie Muller is not in the building.” 

She associated me with her newly rising popularity. She had almost been mobbed at the Egyptian and the Cinematheque, that had instigated new policies. I was elated for the rare occasion that she did open up about her career. “Andre DeToth was my favorite director! That was an extraordinary film and a marvelous group of people. Up to this time Hal Wallis productions were very regimented, they knew exactly what they wanted—the script was ready, the director, everything was synchronized to perfection. Now, when I was borrowed to do that film, I worked for an independent company, not for Hal Wallis Productions. Dick Powell was my leading man, and he was delightful.” There is one scene in particular, right before she and Dick Powell make love, that captures that excitement of a first kiss so effortlessly, unlike the formal presentation you normally get from Hollywood. Her nuanced performance and the excellent script should have qualified Lizabeth Scott for an Oscar nomination. 

James Ellroy made a reference to Lizabeth Scott in "Crime Wave" (1999), a collection of short works of fiction. Danny Getchell, the reporter in Crime Wave, seems to have a boner over a hot lesbian actress (Liz Scott) who tells him with a sneer: "I wouldn't date you even if you had a sex change and you appeared as Rita Hayworth." In real life, Ellroy didn’t fact check or, more likely, didn’t care about hurting an actual person and made mincemeat out of Lizabeth Scott. “Loin-lapping Liz Scott” is discovered at a gay bar that is a “Mecca for mannish muff-munchers” and “rapacious diesel dykes.” Of course in late 1990s, Ellroy had developed a reputation as a notorious asshole. And I could always tell when people were fibbing about her if they called her Liz or Lizzie. She abhorred those names and only went by Lizabeth. Barbara Stanwyck once said that her dear bisexual friend Joan Crawford would be fine with her daughter Christina Crawford spilling the dirt, but the lesbian accusation in her tell-all book Mommie Dearest would have killed her and she was probably rolling over in her grave. I reached out and proposed that we take Lizabeth to dinner at the restaurant in the Sunset Tower, a classic Hollywood landmark, an art deco doozie built in 1929 that had the added allure of a film noir. 

Its first literary mention was in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940). The film version of that novel, MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) with Dick Powell, was its first screen reference. Not only did she take the bait, but she also invited us to have a drink at her house first. Ms. Scott did not complain about anything and even deemed the evening a smashing success. She refused an escort to drop her back at her house, although we watched until she was inside and the lights came on. I realized how far I had come. I used to think her world was something I could never be a part of. Yet somehow, I had become a part of it. I felt a part of Hollywood and it felt wonderful. One night I had phoned her and told her I loved her. She'd admonished me: "Todd, go to bed and hang up." I had worshiped her for the first time after having seen her in Dead Reckoning, while I was studying in Paris, and I believed she was just a black and white screen goddess. I had loved Lizabeth Scott so much that eventually I manifested her into my reality. Now I say "Forget the rules. Always meet your idols. And be nice." –"Lunch with Lizabeth Scott" (2022) by by Todd Hughes