At the Toluca Lake house, Frank Sinatra, his wife Nancy, and their friends used to stage little Christmas Eve revues, running for an hour and more, complete with scenery, costumes, props, original score by Sammy Cahn and Julie Stein, sketches and performances to pitch in. One sketch set its sights on Dean Martin, a celebrated party-goer from the day he arrived in Hollywood and an actor whose performances in some pictures would scarcely show up under a microscope. When the bigwigs at Columbia heard about the shows, they asked Sinatra to put on a similar affair at Harry Cohn’s house to celebrate his birthday. The guest list included Rita Hayworth, José Iturbi, Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and the Sinatra regulars. The studios couldn’t afford to have Louella Parsons out of action. She was too useful to them. They knew how to handle her, where I was a tougher nut to crack. If she laid hold of a scandal, she didn't not print it unless the studio involved was willing. When scandal came in range of my telescope, I’ll print it so long as it’s news and true. Press agents can’t stand it; the business they’re in should be called suppress agentry. My taste runs closer to that of Dema Harshbarger, whom I have known since she first put me on radio. “I have three friends in the world, and I don’t want any more. The average Hollywood friendship today wouldn’t buy you a ham sandwich.”
Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein. “I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?” “You’re right, that Einstein was a dummy,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. Dean said: “I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, Martin has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm. I regard him as a supreme egotist, for want of a better term. He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income, can’t be dragged to a benefit. Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees. [Dean Martin was a father of eight children]
Breaking a contract is a refined art, which skillful performers like Dick Powell conduct with the finesse of a brain surgeon. Powell had an odd choice of partners, specially 30's wisecracking gal Joan Blondell. She left him for ruthless Broadway producer Mike Todd. I still remember one night dining in a restaurant, with Mike Todd complaining about how hard he’d worked already and us (Marlene Dietrich and I) not listening to him. Before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis could start work for Hal Wallis in movies, they had some more night-club dates to fill, including one in Philadelphia. They were joined in that City of Brotherly Love by the wives of two of our more respected Hollywood personalities, one of them a perky blonde who had dragged her patient husband to Slapsie Maxie’s night after night to ogle Dean. If you can prevent catastrophe, you’re bound to give it a try. So when I found out what was going on in Philadelphia, I went to see Hal Wallis. “Unless you nip this in the bud,” I said, “you’re going to start your first Martin and Lewis picture with a couple of divorces to contend with.” Hal was petrified. “What can I do?” he pleaded. “Stop it before the news gets out.” He called his partner, Joe Hazen, in for consultation.
“How would you handle the situation?” they both asked. “Telephone the boys right now. Tell them that unless those women get out of Philadelphia immediately, you’ll cancel the contract. And tell them why.” Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia to New York. I advised one of the husbands [Powell]: “When you meet him, you should punch him right in the nose.” He knew who I was talking about. There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup, Jerry Lewis was visiting New York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa, drawing such crowds that they waited outside in lines that stretched halfway around the block.
The cause of glamour, for which I’ve been fighting for years, is a losing battle. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now. Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants. The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl next door, go next door. In its rosier days, Hollywood Boulevard saw glamour by the carload on Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide across the sidewalk like some splendid race of the beautiful and the blessed; gowns swishing, hairdos immaculate, diamonds gleaming together. Just watching them walk in was as good as a ticket to a world’s fair.
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During World War II the women of Hollywood let the producers talk them into surrendering every shred of glamour even on Oscar nights. “If you go out, you mustn’t be well dressed,” the front-office men argued, “or else the public will be offended. What you’ve got to do is to look austere.” I knew this was malarkey. From the mail that poured in, it was as plain as a pikestaff that servicemen were starving for glamour. They wanted pin-up pictures of glamorous girls. I sent out ten thousand of them, until the studios rebelled and pretended they couldn’t afford any more. Marilyn Monroe's fame and misery were always mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an overly trusting creature whose career was professionally and emotionally complicated. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as Marilyn did. In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress had edges sharp as razor blades. She was a nervous, amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself. She was simultaneously a lovely and pathetic woman, but she kept her sense of humor.
The most gullible of all was Mary Martin, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil and, by a miracle, lives by it and through it. Mary was the daughter of a Texan lawyer (Preston Martin), and she was friendly as a kitten when she drove her bright, new, yellow convertible to Hollywood in 1936 from Weatherford, Texas, which boasted a population of 5000 people at the time. She’d always been the girl who sang the sweetest in church, stood out in school plays, and worked the most enthusiastically in civic causes. Her father gave her $500 as stake money on the strict understanding that as soon as that was gone, she’d come back home. He also saddled her with her five-year-old son, Larry, who resulted when Mary eloped from finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee, with a boy from Fort Worth. That marriage was dissolved after five years. “Larry’s your responsibility and you’ve got to take him along,” her father insisted, figuring this was a fair means of keeping his wide-eyed darling out of new romances and would bring her back home quicker.
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Around the studios they got to calling her “Audition Mary.” She sang for everybody, and everybody turned thumbs down. “Nice voice, fair figure, but impossible to photograph that face,” was the verdict. She sang for Oscar Hammerstein II—remember South Pacific?—at his house on Benedict Canyon at the end of my dead-end street. He knew she wasn’t ready. Years later Mary told me Oscar Hammerstein taught her how to phrase a song, how to read lines, how to move. “In fact,” said she, “I learned show business from Oscar Hammerstein.” When he thought she was ready, he and Richard Rodgers adapted a play called Green Grow the Lilacs, and she was offered the leading role. At the same time, she had also been offered a lead in a play produced by Vinton Freedley, who’d given Mary her first Broadway chance in Leave It to Me. “I was torn between the two offers. Talking to Hammerstein over the phone, I said: ‘Will you give me a minute?’ I tossed a coin and Freedley won. The play was a success in Boston, but I felt certain it’d never reach Broadway—it didn’t.” Green Grow the Lilacs also failed and later was rewritten in a new version called Oklahoma!
When her $500 had melted away, she picked up what jobs she could find. She sang for $60 at a little night spot. She taught slew-footed stars how to get through dancing scenes. Her voice was dubbed on sound tracks for tin-eared girls who couldn’t sing. Then she managed to get signed by a producer named Lawrence Schwab for a Broadway musical he had in mind. When she got to New York, she found that plans for the show had come to nothing, but Schwab lent her to another producer, Vinton Freedley, for Leave It to Me. It had a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” by Cole Porter, which Sophie Tucker encouraged Mary to sing with the innocence of a lamb. Soon she was singing on radio, then back in Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. Her father Preston Martin went to his grave believing that “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was written especially for him.
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But making movies is a cold-blooded, impersonal, highly technical business. Some performers slowly freeze inside when they work for staring cameras instead of for human beings sitting in a theater waiting to burst into applause. Mary was like that. “I beat my brains out,” she says, “and I like to hear the echo.” She didn’t cotton to Hollywood. Helpfully, her contract stipulated that she could leave the studio every Thursday to attend rehearsals and broadcasts of Dick Powell’s Good News radio program, for which she was earning $1,000 per show. Happy Go Lucky (1943), Martin’s eighth picture, was a Technicolor movie musical in which she plays Marjory Stewart, a Texan “cigarette girl” and falls in love with Dick Powell. Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in curls and ruffles. Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in that!” The thought itself puts a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her lips, making her just what she fancies herself to be.
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I only once saw Mainbocher cringe at the sight of his pride and joy. That was in New Orleans, when we sat together watching Mary’s opening in Kind Sir, produced by her longtime friend and Connecticut neighbor, Joshua Logan. I smelled a fiasco during her rehearsals, but I did whatever was possible to boost her morale. She poured out her gratitude in a telegram: ONCE BEFORE ANOTHER GREAT WOMAN SOPHIE TUCKER HELPED ME IN MY VERY FIRST SHOW STOP NOW YOU BY SOME MIRACLE WERE SENT TO ME GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS—MARY. But nothing helped Kind Sir. On opening night, when the last-act curtain fell, even the flowers that were pushed into her arms were tired. In the seat next to me, Mainbocher, who’d done her costumes, slid down almost out of sight so he wouldn’t be asked to take a bow. But he took it with a smile like all the rest. I almost made an enemy of Josh Logan by nagging him to use Mary in the movie of South Pacific instead of Mitzi Gaynor.
“There are make-up men today who’ll make Mary look like a young girl,” I told him. “Mitzi’s a fine entertainer, but she’ll be only a carbon copy of Mary as Nellie Forbush.” Josh wrote me a twelve-page letter explaining why I was wrong. South Pacific turned out to be only a modest success as a movie, earned around $5,000,000, but it would have done better if Mary Martin had starred in it. She played Nellie in London, of course, and reported rapturously, in red ink yet: “Dear Hedda: Look where we are! Exactly where you said we’d be! And—oh!—it has been just as wonderful as I had hoped and dreamed it would be. All of it has been unbelievably perfect.” When she came home she was bone-weary. She and her husband, Richard Halliday, had booked passage on a slow boat to South America. Then Leland Hayward told her: “I’m going to do a big TV spectacular, and I can’t do it without you.” She begged off and started on the cruise. When they reached Brazil, Adrian talked her into buying land near the house he and Janet Gaynor built in the middle of the jungle that he loved. Mary had as much need for a Brazilian hideaway as for two heads, but she can’t go on saying no to anybody. She and Richard, who was the only big reward she won in Hollywood, discovered that the first jungle real estate they bought was sold to them by a woman who didn’t own it. The local authorities hushed that up since they couldn’t afford to have the news leak back to the United States. So Mary, $40,000 poorer, sank another $50,000 into some other property, which the surrounding, giant-sized greenery constantly threatens to steal back from her.
When Leland Hayward heard about her proposed rest cure in Brazil, he flew down ahead of the Hallidays and was waiting for them as they landed. Brushing aside her pleas of fatigue, he told her: “Ethel Merman says she’ll do my TV show if you will.” Mary, as ever, couldn’t say no. After the two of them made television history that season, she asked Ethel casually one day: “How did Leland get you to do it?” “At first I told him to go to hell,” said Ethel, “but then he said you’d do it if I would, and I couldn’t refuse.” Mary hasn’t a clue as to the size of her bank account, and I’ll guarantee she never looks inside a checkbook. She waded trustingly into theatrical ventures where she found herself up to her ears in problems. “But that’s all ended,” she declares.
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