May 16, 1911—Margaret Sullavan, who glittered briefly as one of golden-age Hollywood’s finest actresses, then became one of the victims in a family as cursed as any in a Greek tragedy, was born on this date in Norfolk, Va.—or so she would claim.(I wrote “claimed” in the above partly because several Internet references I came across gave her year of birth as 1909. Since a gentleman never asks a lady her age, we’ll take the actress’ word for it.)
There’s a good chance many reading this won’t recall Sullavan’s name—or, if they do, might confuse it with Maureen O’Sullivan (yes, Jane to Tarzan, not to mention Mia Farrow’s mom), who not only possessed a surname that sounded like hers but also was almost exactly the same age (born a day later); labored at the same studio, MGM, in the 1930s as an ingénue; and left in the 1940s to devote herself to her family. Talk about doppelgangers!
If you can distinguish between the two ladies, here’s what you’re likely to know about Margaret:
1) She starred in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a sparkling Ernst Lubitsch comedy whose plot was copied by, among other films, the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime, the Broadway musical She Loves Me, and Nora Ephron’s too-clever-by-half Internet-age version, You’ve Got Mail.
2) Offscreen, her seemingly blessed family life—marriage to magnetic theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward, three bright, attractive kids—collapsed due to her divorce, the children’s mounting depression, and her own suicide—a story recounted in eldest daughter Brooke Heyward’s 1977 bestseller, Haywire.
It’s a measure of the greatness of the Hollywood studio system that, though she worked in it for less than a decade, Sullivan had 16 films to her credit. But it’s a measure of the triviality of the same system that the actress, despairing of “this bizarre place,” refused to sign a long-term contract and left the studio as soon as she could. We do not, then, have the kind of vast, multi-decade filmography left by her MGM rival for roles and men, Katharine Hepburn.
I first became aware of Sullavan through a series held in the 1980s at New York’s late, lamented film revival house, the Regency: “Screen Teams.” I wasn’t surprised at other teams in this series—Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—but I was to find the immortal Jimmy Stewart paired with Sullavan, whom I hadn’t heard of up to that point.
As it happened, Stewart and Sullavan might have made for the most natural team of them all. After all, the two of them, along with Henry Fonda (Stewart’s great friend and Sullavan’s first husband), started out as part of the repertory University Players in Falmouth, Mass.
Sullavan pushed for Stewart to be her co-star after he joined MGM. In all, they made four films together. As for Fonda: though his marriage to Sullavan foundered after only two months, the two stayed on good terms thereafter, and their children became friends.
Children…this might be as good a point as any to deal with the tragedies that finally overwhelmed Sullavan and her family.
The first thing people would want to know is: how could it all go so wrong? How could children--and their parents--who seemed to have everything--a father’s personal plane that he flew everywhere, nannies, Jimmy Stewart for a babysitter, parties with Hollywood’s finest among the invited guests, with the children receiving invitations to pose for the cover of Life Magazine (Brooke) or join the famous Williamstown Theater Festival (younger sister Bridget)--have seen it all fall down?
It started with the parents’ tendencies--a wandering eye (Leland’s) that led to infidelity and divorce; a high-strung temperament (Margaret’s) that had already made most of her directors regard her as a pill and a half, and that only worsened in time. As Margaret advanced into middle age, her hearing difficulties radically worsened. Now that she had pretty much abandoned Hollywood for Broadway (she originated the role of “Sabrina” that went to Audrey Hepburn on the screen), this latter problem was disastrous--she would miss cues.
It all came to an end for Sullavan on New Year’s Day 1960, when she died of a drug overdose. It was eventually ruled accidental, but the coroner’s report was widely understood as a heavily hedged act of mercy to a heartbroken family.
Nor was that the end of the Heywards' problems. Bridget and Bill, each in a mental-health institution at the time of their mother’s death, would also kill themselves: Bridget, 21 years old, only eight months later, and Bill, in 2008, at age 66, with a shot to the heart.
Following Bridget‘s funeral, Brooke Heyward poured out her anguish to family friend Tom Mankiewicz: "I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm 23 and divorced with two kids."
Mankiewicz, looking down from the 10th-floor apartment where the reception was held, laid out her choice in the starkest possible terms: "Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, 'I'm going to live,' because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had. Either you jump out the window or you live."
Hayward’s memoir, a #1 bestseller on its initial appearance, was released again this year, having gained additional poignancy because of the recent death of her brother.
As overwhelmingly sad as the offscreen life of her mother was, I can’t end this post with that tragedy. Had Margaret Sullavan lived the happiest of lives, she still would have been worth writing about because of her shining, if all too briefly glimpsed, talent.
Her fans (notably including Stephen Sondheim), though not quite a cult, note that she had only one indisputable classic, The Shop Around the Corner. But, as Orson Welles (who would certainly know about such things) once noted, “Sometimes one is all you need.” I would argue, though, that there is another unfairly neglected film of hers: Three Comrades (1938), the only film of hers that garnered her an Oscar nomination (also the only screenwriting credit for F. Scott Fitzgerald).
Sullavan was attractive enough to have become a silent-film actress, but the talkies were ready- made for her. It’s not so much her petite frame that everyone always remarked about her, but that voice--husky but supple. Critic Dan Callahan describes its range, with remarkable precision, in a film-by-film assessment in the online film journal Bright Lights:
“When you first hear it, it sounds limited and ephemeral, like Billie Holiday's singing voice. But Lady Day could do just about anything with her voice, and Sullavan's vocal range is limitless too, not hamstrung by particularity, but freed to roam wherever she chooses. She could bring it down low for a big booming growl; she could lift it up high, higher, oh higher!; or she could keep it in a middle register and break it into a thousand tingling laryngitis pieces.”
Shorter--but, like Sullavan herself, more magical--was the description of the same voice provided by the silent film actress turned shrewd observer of the place where she once worked, Louise Brooks: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."
It’s a measure of the greatness of the Hollywood studio system that, though she worked in it for less than a decade, Sullivan had 16 films to her credit. But it’s a measure of the triviality of the same system that the actress, despairing of “this bizarre place,” refused to sign a long-term contract and left the studio as soon as she could. We do not, then, have the kind of vast, multi-decade filmography left by her MGM rival for roles and men, Katharine Hepburn.
I first became aware of Sullavan through a series held in the 1980s at New York’s late, lamented film revival house, the Regency: “Screen Teams.” I wasn’t surprised at other teams in this series—Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—but I was to find the immortal Jimmy Stewart paired with Sullavan, whom I hadn’t heard of up to that point.
As it happened, Stewart and Sullavan might have made for the most natural team of them all. After all, the two of them, along with Henry Fonda (Stewart’s great friend and Sullavan’s first husband), started out as part of the repertory University Players in Falmouth, Mass.
Sullavan pushed for Stewart to be her co-star after he joined MGM. In all, they made four films together. As for Fonda: though his marriage to Sullavan foundered after only two months, the two stayed on good terms thereafter, and their children became friends.
Children…this might be as good a point as any to deal with the tragedies that finally overwhelmed Sullavan and her family.
The first thing people would want to know is: how could it all go so wrong? How could children--and their parents--who seemed to have everything--a father’s personal plane that he flew everywhere, nannies, Jimmy Stewart for a babysitter, parties with Hollywood’s finest among the invited guests, with the children receiving invitations to pose for the cover of Life Magazine (Brooke) or join the famous Williamstown Theater Festival (younger sister Bridget)--have seen it all fall down?
It started with the parents’ tendencies--a wandering eye (Leland’s) that led to infidelity and divorce; a high-strung temperament (Margaret’s) that had already made most of her directors regard her as a pill and a half, and that only worsened in time. As Margaret advanced into middle age, her hearing difficulties radically worsened. Now that she had pretty much abandoned Hollywood for Broadway (she originated the role of “Sabrina” that went to Audrey Hepburn on the screen), this latter problem was disastrous--she would miss cues.
It all came to an end for Sullavan on New Year’s Day 1960, when she died of a drug overdose. It was eventually ruled accidental, but the coroner’s report was widely understood as a heavily hedged act of mercy to a heartbroken family.
Nor was that the end of the Heywards' problems. Bridget and Bill, each in a mental-health institution at the time of their mother’s death, would also kill themselves: Bridget, 21 years old, only eight months later, and Bill, in 2008, at age 66, with a shot to the heart.
Following Bridget‘s funeral, Brooke Heyward poured out her anguish to family friend Tom Mankiewicz: "I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm 23 and divorced with two kids."
Mankiewicz, looking down from the 10th-floor apartment where the reception was held, laid out her choice in the starkest possible terms: "Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, 'I'm going to live,' because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had. Either you jump out the window or you live."
Hayward’s memoir, a #1 bestseller on its initial appearance, was released again this year, having gained additional poignancy because of the recent death of her brother.
As overwhelmingly sad as the offscreen life of her mother was, I can’t end this post with that tragedy. Had Margaret Sullavan lived the happiest of lives, she still would have been worth writing about because of her shining, if all too briefly glimpsed, talent.
Her fans (notably including Stephen Sondheim), though not quite a cult, note that she had only one indisputable classic, The Shop Around the Corner. But, as Orson Welles (who would certainly know about such things) once noted, “Sometimes one is all you need.” I would argue, though, that there is another unfairly neglected film of hers: Three Comrades (1938), the only film of hers that garnered her an Oscar nomination (also the only screenwriting credit for F. Scott Fitzgerald).
Sullavan was attractive enough to have become a silent-film actress, but the talkies were ready- made for her. It’s not so much her petite frame that everyone always remarked about her, but that voice--husky but supple. Critic Dan Callahan describes its range, with remarkable precision, in a film-by-film assessment in the online film journal Bright Lights:
“When you first hear it, it sounds limited and ephemeral, like Billie Holiday's singing voice. But Lady Day could do just about anything with her voice, and Sullavan's vocal range is limitless too, not hamstrung by particularity, but freed to roam wherever she chooses. She could bring it down low for a big booming growl; she could lift it up high, higher, oh higher!; or she could keep it in a middle register and break it into a thousand tingling laryngitis pieces.”
Shorter--but, like Sullavan herself, more magical--was the description of the same voice provided by the silent film actress turned shrewd observer of the place where she once worked, Louise Brooks: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."
