Franchot Tone: Group Theatre and other loves

Franchot Tone's mother Gertrude Franchot was one of the four children of Stanislas Pascal Franchot II and his wife Annie Powers Eells of Richwood, KY. In 1895, Franchot Tone's grandfather moved to Niagara Falls, New York, where he organized The National Electrolytic Company, a producer of industrial chemicals. In 1906 he was elected to the New York state government as a Republican Senator representing Niagara and Orleans Counties. His daughter Gertrude married Frank Jerome Tone: they had two sons, Frank Jerome Tone Jr. and Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone (Franchot Tone). Franchot was also a distant relative of Wolfe Tone: the "father of Irish Republicanism". Franchot was of French Canadian, Irish, English and Basque ancestry.

Tall, handsome, always well dressed, this affluent young Cornell graduate seemed out of place in a company founded to present radical plays. But Tone had a serious side not evident to those who saw him squiring beautiful women around New York nightclubs. His lively interest in social and economic issues had steered him toward New Playwrights and made him receptive to Clurman’s ardent formulations.

Harold Clurman had spotted Franchot Tone in a New Playwrights production of John Howard Lawson’s The International in January 1928. Morris Carnovsky shared Tone’s intellectual nature, though his background was more akin to Clurman’s and Strasberg’s. After Strasberg’s return, they finally settled on twenty seven actors, including Stella Adler, Margaret Barker, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Bill Challee, Bobby Lewis, Sandy Meisner, Ruth Nelson, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Patten, Eunice Stoddard, and Franchot Tone.

Franchot and Stella Adler were the actors most openly and agonizingly conflicted about their relationship with the Group. Like her, Tone was not a mixer. The convivial discussions that kept Morris Carnovsky, Joe Bromberg, and Lewis Leverett up late at night in the living room were not for him.

In the years since he’d first worked with Strasberg and Clurman on New Year’s Eve, he’d become a sought-after leading man; conventional Broadway stardom still tempted him. He found fault with Strasberg and the rehearsals, as if looking for flaws in the Group ideal that might justify his abandoning it. He staged minor rebellions against Group discipline. He went out of his way to provoke people, infuriating Carnovsky on the Fourth of July by setting off batches of firecrackers outside the main building and drowning out the tranquil strains of Mozart within.

When Carnovsky protested the noise, Tone shouted, “I can’t stand your noise!” and slammed into his car for a visit to New York and less elevated entertainments. Possibly their new social consciousness encouraged a confrontational manner toward the bourgeois world, and none more so than Franchot Tone. His manner was aloof and his behavior disruptive. After a few sessions he refused to attend Tamiris’ classes, and he took no part in the experimental work. He drove onto the lawn after late-night drinking sessions and destroyed the garden furniture; he went hunting and shot off guns dangerously close to the rehearsal rooms.

Tone left camp for days on end to see his current flame, the film actress Lilyan Tashman, who had not been made welcome by the Group. Strasberg gave an angry speech saying that Tone might be one of the finest actors in America, but he lacked the dedication the Group demanded; several actresses wept as the director said he no longer wanted Tone in the company.

Bud Bohnen read his part in 'Success Story,' and it seemed Tone’s association with the Group was over. It was a painful moment for the Group. Only one other member had ever resigned, and Mary Morris hadn’t been as integral a part of the collective. Tone was one of the earliest Group believers, a participant in the 1928 sessions on Riverside Drive, and their principal leading man. If his difficult temperament made him less than the most popular member of the company, everyone respected his acting ability and was shocked that he’d decided to squander his talents in the movies. Tone’s departure wounded the Group’s confidence. It would heal, but the scar remained.

In Group mythology Tone’s defection became the original sin, the shocking deed that forced them to face the fact that idealism could fade and worldly success mean more than artistic integrity. He stayed with 'Success Story' two months longer than initially planned, raising the hope that he might have a change of heart and rededicate himself to the Group. Finally, he left for the West Coast to fulfill his MGM contract. Tone wept over his farewell drink with Clurman in a 52nd Street speakeasy.

[When] in dire need of funds to commission more plays, Clurman appealed to Franchot Tone, who had written that he missed the Group but intended to stay in Hollywood because he’d fallen in love with Joan Crawford. Tone promptly sent a check to tide them over. Group moral indignation against the actors who had deserted to the movies earlier lapsed, and they had friendly dinners with Joe Bromberg and Alan Baxter. Sundays with Franchot Tone and his wife, Joan Crawford, became a weekly Group get-together.

Sylvia Sidney, who was romantically involved with Luther Adler, had been a stage actress before she came to Hollywood; she was an ardent admirer of the Group’s ensemble acting. Franchot Tone would be rejoining the Group for the 1938–1939 season. In his nearly six years in Hollywood, Tone had made more than thirty pictures, most of them thoroughly undistinguished; he looked east to the achievements of his old friends with nostalgia and an increasing desire to be part of their work.

His marriage to Joan Crawford was on the rocks, his contract with MGM would be up soon, there seemed no reason to stay. Just how strong an attachment the Group could prompt was evident in the words of Franchot Tone shortly after he arrived in New York on December 11, 1939 to begin rehearsals of The Gentle People. “I’d better not get started on the Group Theatre,” he told an audience at a Town Hall Club lunch, “because I know I’ll get too emotional about it and then I won’t be able to talk at all.”

The Gentle People as a play was cause for concern. Tone played the gangster who shakes the people down for protection money, then seduces the lens grinder’s daughter (Sidney) and demands their life’s savings, which he intends to use to take the daughter to Havana. Sidney angrily concluded that the Group cared about her and Tone only as box-office draws, whereas she had come to them sincerely as an artist wanting to grow. Tone himself was disappointed in Clurman’s direction, although he didn’t say so until after the production opened; he wanted very much to believe in the Group.

Reviewers weren’t quite as impressed as the fans. They liked the acting well enough: many thought Sidney gave her best stage performance ever; Tone’s return to the theatre was hailed; It was increasingly obvious that he was disillusioned with the Group and shared Sidney’s suspicion that they were using him for his drawing power as a star. Irwin Shaw warned Clurman that the Group had treated Tone tactlessly; although Tone had invested $22,000 in The Gentle People, he hadn’t been invited to Council meetings during rehearsals to discuss its progress.

Tone might not have been so annoyed by the Group’s ineptitude in business matters had he been more satisfied artistically, but he’d convinced himself that he was miscast as a gangster, that Clurman hadn’t given him enough guidance, that he’d really wanted to act in the Odets play with his old Group friends Carnovsky, Adler, and Smith —in short, that he’d been mistreated and exploited. -"Real life drama: the Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940" (2013) by Wendy Smith

Jean Wallace was a gorgeous, blonde California number -tall, slim, but voluptuous like Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall. Howard Hughes was one of her many torrid liaisons. Legend has it that when Franchot Tone first saw Jean at the Cocoanut Grove, he asked her over his table, he proposed to her, and tied the knot two days later. One of the shortest courtships in history. It sounds implausible, but Jean could bring out that kind of mating urge in most any man. Jean, unfortunately, started drinking and having produced two lovely sons with Franchot Tone, they divorced. She then married Cornel Wilde and they traveled the world. Jean was a tortured soul who carried herself well.

Barbara Payton had grown with alcoholic parents in Odessa (Texas), where her father's motel failed despite the influx of workers to the oil boom town. Barbara's brief marriage to Franchot Tone was a nightmare. She explained they came from different worlds: "Franchot Tone had more class in his baby finger than anyone I know. I am not a great actress, Franchot was. You had to be 'real' with Franchot." Tom Neal offered a different kind of reality. She returned to Tom because "he made me feel like a real whore." Neal would slap her around while having sex. -"Hollywood Gomorrah" (2014) by Skip E. Lowe

The crime film They All Came Out, lensed in 1939 by the masterful horror and film noir director Jacques Tourneur, cast Tom Neal in a lead role as a tough gang member rehabilitated by both his stay in federal prison and the love of a gun moll (Rita Johnson).

As a result of his fine work in this film, Tom was handed the male lead in another crime drama, Within the Law, co-starring Ruth Hussey. “During this time, Tom was carrying on with both Joan Crawford and a studio executive’s wife,” claims Walter Burr, “and when Crawford learned he was two-timing her, she did her own complaining to Mayer, who wound up blasting Tom.” Angered by both the lackluster film roles being handed to him, as well as Mayer’s lecturing him on behalf of a jilted Joan Crawford, Neal reportedly ranted at the tyrannical executive in front of several studio employees. An irate Mayer immediately retaliated by banishing Tom from the lot and releasing him from his contract after just one year.

One night in mid-1950, Barbara Payton entered a Charleston contest on the Sunset Strip, and not only walked away with first prize, but with Franchot Tone (one of the judges) as a new admirer. An International News Service story reported: "Barbara Payton, the girl in green with the chandelier earrings hanging to her shoulders, had everyone screaming for her to win the Charleston contest at the Mocambo, and she did. Many people did not recognize her except to say that she looks 'like a cross between Jean Harlow and Carol Channing'." Franchot apparently was impressed that night with a lot more than Barbara’s dancing. It was later said that their eyes locked across the nightclub’s dance floor, and that with one glance at the flaxen-haired temptress, the stylish sophisticate, and inveterate connoisseur of female beauty, was instantly hooked. Lisa Burks: "Franchot had the desire to help young Hollywood hopefuls with his experience and his flair for mentoring, and Barbara was an ambitious and willing student. He encouraged her, as he encouraged all the women in his life."

Also in 1956, Franchot married his fourth wife, former Warner Bros. starlet Dolores Dorn (Phantom of the Rue Morgue), a beautiful, 22-year-old woman whose blonde and blue-eyed countenance was, not surprisingly, highly reminiscent of both Barbara Payton and Jean Wallace.

"Although Dolores Dorn-Heft is blonde, lissome and worthy of all this attention, she is no mere posturing pea-hen. She makes real her confession that her marriage to her aged spouse was well-meant at first but is now a boring mockery. Miss Dorn-Heft (Mrs. Tone in private life) is guilty of some lapses but her delivery is, in most cases, genuine and forceful.

Franchot Tone in Chekhov Drama 'Uncle Vanya' (1958): Mr. Tone, as the middle-aged country doctor torn by the discovery of his love for the beauteous young wife of the garrulous and pompous aged professor and his hate of the wastefulness of his compatriots, contributes a thoughtful, sensitive and wholly striking portrayal. Although he knows it is the fate of intelligent men to be called 'odd,' he is lucid and straight about his approach to truth. It is a subdued but shining performance that registers just as clearly as Chekhov's words. Franchot Tone and his fellow players and associates have contributed a solid and genuine legacy to the arts and devotees of theatre everywhere." Source: www.nytimes.com

A lifelong smoker, Franchot was living at the time in a magnificent townhouse on Manhattan’s East 62nd Street, where his ex-wife, Joan Crawford, frequently visited him during his illness. “They had remained close friends after their divorce,” reveals Lisa Burks. “Franchot and Joan Crawford enjoyed an affectionate friendship until the day he died, and the same can be said for his relationships with Jean Wallace and Dolores Dorn.”

After a torturous three-year battle with cancer, Franchot finally succumbed to the illness on September 18, 1968, at the age of 63.  Lisa Burks reports that all three of his surviving ex-wives attended his funeral. “Franchot left his family well provided for,” she says, “in light of the fact that this was money he had earned over his lifetime and not reflective of any family wealth he had inherited.” -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

Siodmak's Phantom Lady: Dark Psychosis

Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain pull you in with pitch-perfect dialogue and a way of describing the world that makes readers smile and aspiring writers cry. So with the summer reading season upon us, there’s no better time to take a walk down rain-dampened city streets with lovers, killers, sharp private detectives, shadowy figures in fedoras and smart dames with plenty of ulterior motives. Source: www.concordmonitor.com

Produced by Joan Harrison for Universal, Siodmak’s 'Phantom Lady' premiered at Loew’s State Theater in New York City on February 17, 1944. The film’s plot was based on a 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich, but it changed both the novel’s original story line and character motivation in significant ways. With the figure of the psychotic artist Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a fascist modernist in thin disguise, Siodmak’s Phantom Lady added a dimension to Woolrich’s original conception that not only permitted new narrative possibilities but also struck the political nerve of the time. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward praise Phantom Lady for Siodmak’s exquisite manipulation of mise-en-scène. The film’s atmospheric images of New York streets and jazz clubs, of jails and apartment interiors, of desire and excess, they argue, recall the iconography of Weimar cinema.

Assisted by his cinematographer, Woody Bredell, Siodmak, in particular in the jazz club sequence, “brilliantly interweaves expressionistic decor with American idiom. If watched without sound, the scene could be from one of the classic German films of the 1920s.” Whether one considers the film’s use of canted angles, disjointed continuity, expressive close-ups, visual allegory or synecdoche, spotlights, or chiaroscuro effects; whether one brings into focus the film’s iconography of schizophrenia, hysteria, paranoia, or sexual stimulation —all might be understood as part of a performative recollection of Weimar expressionism authored by a non-expressionist exile-stranded in Hollywood.

Thomas Gomez, Ella Raines and Franchot Tone in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

For Jack Marlow, modern technology signifies the root of all evil. Insisting on the authority of the original, the here and now of the genius work, Marlow considers modern machines of reproduction to be catalysts of aesthetic banality; they enable an ominous dominance of Zivilisation over Kultur. Nazi cinema privileged conductors of explicitly “masculine” music such as Bach and Beethoven. Excessive masculinity, driven to the point of murderous paranoia, is also at the core of Marlow’s aesthetic project. Marlow’s New York studio, brightly lit and hygienically cleansed of all traces of modern civilization, is populated by a variety of sculptures that clearly recall the monumental work of Nazi artists such as Arno Breker and Joseph Thorak. For Marlow authentic art, just like politics, expresses the will to power and form. Liberalism’s valorization of justice, equality, and freedom thwart the political calling of authentic art. It causes Marlow to launch a double attack on modern life, one against the postaesthetic rule of mass art and diversion and one against liberal democracy and the equalizing rationality of social engineering.

As if temporarily slipping into the role of the film’s director, Marlow seems to manipulate for his own purposes what the film at other moments employed in order to unmask Marlow’s jargon of authenticity. After Marlow and Kansas finally discover the phantom lady, Marlow—panicked by the unraveling of the case—pretends to call Inspector Burgess and inform him about Henderson’s innocence. To do so, he positions himself behind the windowpane of a gas station, tinkering with a public telephone without properly dialing. The camera alternates between Kansas’s point of view, who is situated in the car outside and observes Marlow’s gestures as if projected onto a big screen.

Siodmak’s Phantom Lady recognizes lack and fragmentation as the modern hallmark of subjectivity and human reciprocity. Instead of signifying an ominous intrusion of the uncanny, the splitting of sounds and sights can offer antidotes to Marlow’s deadly aesthetics of closure, uniqueness, and total presence. The gas station sequence, in this sense, testifies to the contradictory ways in which Marlow—like his fascist predecessors in 1930s and 1940s Europe—seeks to incorporate modern tools and experiences into a vitalistic rejection of civil society and modern liberalism. Switching back and forth between Kansas’s space of viewership and Marlow’s cinema of simulated speech, camera and editing expose Marlow as a dexterous forger of authenticity and existential resolution. Marlow’s mise-en-scène, as seen by Kansas, is a counterfeit in multiple ways. What in Kansas’s perspective appears to be a silent cinema generating powerful sounds of redemption is revealed by the film’s alternating shots as a sound cinema producing vicious silence.

Film noir thus projects male lack and paranoia —that which he cannot tolerate in himself— onto the female other as deformation, fragmentation, and impediment. As Silverman summarizes: “The female voice, like the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration.” -"The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood" (2002) by Lutz Koepnick

Carol confers with the condemned Scott in silhouette shots in a dark prison room that seems like nothing from real life. An unadorned set for a lonely elevated rail station becomes as threatening as a haunted house. What makes 'Phantom Lady' noir is the unhappy, unhinged underworld that Carol's investigations uncover. Characters suffer from depression or are psychotic. Otherwise decent citizens are easily bribed to condemn an innocent man. Only Carol's refusal to give up stands in the way of Scott's execution. Joan Harrison built on this early success to continue producing with and without Alfred Hitchcock, eventually working on over two hundred TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Source: www.dvdtalk.com

Private Hell: Barbara Payton & Franchot Tone

Even her detractors acknowledged her potential, but in the early Fifties, with Hollywood striving for a wholesome family image, the odds of professional survival for "Glitterville's top tramp" were nil. Barbara, at the height of her allure, had captivated Franchot Tone, who found unstable women irresistible. Barbara Stanwyck declared after reading Payton's memories "I'm Not Ashamed" (1962): "She jolly well should be!" Source: www.issuu.com

Dave Keenan was working as an associate theatrical agent on Outpost Drive when he spotted Barbara Payton climbing out of the Roosevelt pool. Soaking wet, she shook herself like a blonde dog, splashing water on Dave, who laughed and said, “You know who you remind me of?” She said no, who? He said, “You look like Lana Turner.” She laughed. “I'm not kidding,” he said, “but you've got her beat in the body. Can you act?”

“By the time Barbara got to me,” says agent Philip Feldman, “she'd bounced off a few others who'd run her through Paramount and MGM. I was partly responsible for getting her a contract at Universal. She was a hard and nervy girl underneath her special prettiness, and could speak soft, like they say, but carry a big stick. A million-dollar glamour-puss, with a sharp edge to a complex personality. She'd been a good girl, she'd say. She'd gone to church every Sunday. So they asked where she'd grabbed the aggressive attitude that gave you the idea she didn't give a hoot what you thought, she was going for your balls anyway.”

“I've always been told I'm pretty and ought to be in movies,” she'd say. Feldman says, “She had the blonde goddess shine that can't be described as anything but a radiance that makes a movie star. What she had was an immediate sense about her you couldn't overlook. She was Grade A goods.” Stupidly, according to Feldman, he had a brief fling with Barbara but confesses he has few good memories of it. “I got myself drawn in to her and I shouldn't have. I still feel a pity for her but she left scars. She scared the crap out of me and I don't mind saying it.’”

Later in Hollywood, Barbara told bitplayer and call girl Lila Leeds, “Bob Hope's sure as shit no great lover like he wants everyone to believe.” She said he had her prancing around in a half-assed strip show while he lay, “guzzling and laughing his ass off at nothing that was funny. He said, ‘Oh, look what you're doing to this poor guy,’ meaning his prick he was showing. He's saying, ‘This poor guy needs company!’ Well,” Barbara told Lila, “about five minutes later while I'm just getting the heater going, Hope's already turning cold as a dead duck.” She'd been hoping he was going to give her “like a red Cadillac convertible,” she said. But instead, Hope gave Barbara three jars of jam, she told Lila Leeds. “Some jam made in Arizona from a cactus. Supposed to be a gourmet jam. I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with three jars of jam?’ and he said, ‘Well, honey, you eat jam. You put it on your toast…’”

Jean Wallace with Franchot Tone, 1941. After a whirlwind romance and seven years of rocky marriage -and, ultimately, divorce- she attempted suicide in 1946 with sleeping pills, and in 1949 with a self inflicted knife wound. During the acrimonious divorce proceedings that followed, Jean alleged extreme jealousy and an affair with peroxide blond siren Barbara Payton, while Tone claimed that his wife had been involved with gangster Johnny Stompanato, bodyguard of infamous L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen.

Beneath his smooth veneer of poise and refinement, his nightclub savvy, Franchot Tone was a troubled man in search of disaster. As he plunged himself into Barbara's effervescent, ricocheting chaos, he would say, “I have discovered my nemesis.” In Tone's purple velvet view of the world, Barbara would be the one to make him pay for every “dark and dirty deed and thought” the actor had carried in his soul like a dose of nerve gas.

Barbara Payton and Franchot Tone depart LaGuardia Airport (New York) after Payton's arrival (January 15, 1952)

Though he'd received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in 'Mutiny on the Bounty', Tone would say, “None of that really matters. Fame always failed to reach beneath my skin.” Franchot told Barbara's agent, “This girl has struck a deep chord in me. I identify with her and I've never fallen for someone so hard or so fast in all of my life. My prayers have been answered.” The agent said, “Just don't lose your head.”

What Tone didn't know but suspected, enough to thrust himself through episodes of anguish, was the extent of Barbara's ‘playing the field,’ as he put it. Tone tortured over her past, dwelling on whatever vague episodes she could dredge up, digging and coaxing her to divulge details that he'd use to fuel his obsession and pain. Tone told seasoned actress Connie Gilchrist while filming 'Here Comes the Groom,' “Barbara has aroused in me the idea of gathering her into my life completely. She is unpredictable and radiates the idea that she cannot be tamed anymore than one could break a tigress.”

I asked him why he was going to marry her and with that incredulous look he can give, he said, ‘Of course, I am in love with her and want her to be my wife.’ But he confessed he wasn't sure she felt the same. He said that it hardly mattered. I asked why he said it didn't matter. ‘She needs me,’ he said. She was incapable of seeing the situation she was in, from without, he said. She needed his guidance, his tutorship. He said she needed him to manage her way through ‘this jungle of illusion each and every one of us are living in.’

Barbara and Franchot emerged from the Beverly Hills hotel room, shining and smiling after two hours, Barbara would say, “of sex that'd raise the dead Lazarus with a hard-on.” They showed up at Ciro's, “cozy and affectionate,” as one columnist observed. Barbara was asked, “I understood you were marrying Tom Neal today? Or is it tomorrow? Or is it off?” It was past one o'clock in the morning when Tone and Barbara returned to her apartment. Tom, half-plastered, watched as Barbara deliberately gave Franchot a long kiss, lips smearing, her tongue going into Tone's mouth. Tom's red eyes, bleary from booze, grew hot as a bull's fixed on a cape. “Walking right in together like they'd just climbed out of the sack,” Tom would say. “Both loaded and her with that foggy look she'd get when she'd been pumped for an hour. Standing there frenching the bastard right in front of me.” Tom claims, I said, ‘Barbara and I are supposed to get married,’ and he says, ‘Nobody's marrying you, Neal, at least no one that's present company.’

Columnist Florbel Muir wrote, “What always puzzled me about this romantic trio is how Tone, who has a very trained mind, could play around in a league of daffy dillies and muscle developers.” A producer at Warners said, “Payton has made herself world famous as a ‘daffy dilly,’ and she's a jinx to anyone giving her a second glance.” Barbara called agent Feldman. He says, “She begged me to see her, and I met her in a bar on Sunset. We talked and she wanted help and was saying, ‘What can you do to help me?’ I said I couldn't do anything. ‘I take you on,’ I said, ‘and link my name with yours and I get a strike against me.’I said she needed to talk to someone, she needed some personal counseling. I told her she needed some mental help, and she gave me a dirty look. ‘You've got problems that're going to cause you grief and nobody in Hollywood's got any interest in somebody's problems unless they show a profit. With all the bad publicity you've gone out of your way to drum up, they think they're going to lose money on you.’

Barbara said, “Franchot never talked the same again, after the fight. He was a sweet man, had a sweet side to him, but he had a bad masochistic streak in his personality. He wanted something beautiful for its own sake, not for what it did for him… I was gorgeous and young and fit the bill in his private hell. He wanted me to be what I was, so he said at the start.

With Tom, there was basic chemistry. We couldn't stay out of bed. It was simmering and cooking all the time. I could see in Franchot this purist's obsession for a thing of beauty, and sometimes just parts of a body could satisfy him —legs, breasts, your hind end.…” Barbara's marriage to Franchot lasted for fifty-three days. A defeated, deflated Tone said, “She can't get Neal out of her hair. I am disillusioned and heartsick and there's nothing before us but divorce and hardship.”

Bill Watson of the Hollywood Citizen-News: "The town had washed its hands of Barbara Payton, though the public still showed a kind of morbid interest. Half the movie business had laid out a red carpet for her, and she threw it all back in their faces. She wasn't a star—not a star that the great mass wants to see and love or identify with. Payton was a tramp, yet she hadn't done it alone. She'd had a lot of help." Bill Watson says, “The Hollywood Citizen wanted a piece chalking off the deep water marks to which Payton was sinking and I covered it. I might add reluctantly. She broke down in the corridor like it suddenly hit her she'd lost her kid. “Another press conference,” says Watson. “Only a few showed up —including me. It had been about two years since I'd seen her at the child custody slaughter and I heard she looked awful and was falling apart. But she actually looked pretty good. She appeared trim and tanned and was dressed in a tailored suit.

She sat on the edge of a table with her legs crossed, giving us a treat, or so she thought, but we were more there out of curiosity —bizarre curiosity— watching her play the sex doll to the hilt as she told us she was divorcing the joker she was married to and was resuming her movie career. We all laughed when she said, ‘The ants in my pants are crawlin' again!’ Big joke! I can still see her sitting there and laughing like she's Betty Grable, thinking she's still a hot star. But from that moment on it was all downhill to a hard, merciless bottom.” -"L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times" (2011) by John Gilmore