Flashback, November 1967: Jennifer Jones’ Suicide Try

In her prime, Jennifer Jones’ affinity for high-strung, depressed women led to an Academy Award and an additional four nominations in the Forties and Fifties. 

Filmgoers did not have an inkling that she brought much of herself to these roles until November 9, 1967, when the actress--after checking into a motel and taking an overdose of pills--was found unconscious at the foot of a 400-foot cliff on Malibu Beach.

Jones survived her suicide attempt, going on to live another 32 years. But it wasn’t her first or last brush with tragedy. Headlong passion continually brought her to the brink in such films as Madame Bovary, Indiscretion of an American Wife, Duel in the Sun, and Ruby Gentry. 

Offscreen, at the height of her fame, she remained deeply private. That instinct—perhaps a mode of self-preservation—may have led her to be all-but-forgotten by Hollywood, but it also enabled her to build a new life for herself, as an advocate for mental health and patron of the arts.

What brought Jones to her desperate act? The event immediately preceding it was the news that Charles Bickford, her friend and co-star in Song of Bernadette and Duel in the Sun, had died earlier in the day.

But in all likelihood, that was simply the latest—and relatively small—blow in a series of increasing personal and professional setbacks. At age 48, she was receiving fewer and fewer film offers—and the death of her husband-Svengali, producer David O. Selznick, two years before, left her without a rudder in this difficult time. 

The producer, looking to re-enact his blockbuster Gone With the Wind success with Jones as leading lady in historic epics, drove directors as fine and varied in temperament as William Wyler, John Huston, and Charles Vidor to distraction with his micromanaging, multi-page memos, then pushed himself to the brink with all kinds of drugs, including benzedrine.

Some years ago—probably 20, 30 years after Jones’ suicide attempt--I was shocked by her appearance as a presenter on the Academy Awards. She looked matronly, heavier than the ingénue of Since You Went Away and Portrait of Jennie. It was similar to how crestfallen I felt when I saw Jones’ contemporary, Deborah Kerr, accepting an honorary Oscar a few years later.

Male stars of these actresses’ time were far less likely to register such an impact on film fans. They were allowed to continue to appear on screen, where they maintained a hold on lead roles well into their 50s, familiarizing audiences with their gradually aging faces. (Plastic surgery, Grecian Formula and toupees can only go so far.) 

In contrast to that long-time tendency for men—as well as a newer trend, in which over-40 actresses such as Annette Bening and Nicole Kidman are finding themselves with choicer parts—Hollywood executives, “so often driven by the ids of 14-year-old boys, used to usher actresses into retirement after they lit their 39th birthday candle,” recalled Rebecca Keegan of the Los Angeles Times two years ago.

Jones, living amid that era, struggled to adapt to this cruel tendency. It didn’t help that the  “women’s weepies” that made her a star had fallen out of fashion, nor that the man whose advice she had consistently followed regarding her career, Selznick, had first lost his sense of the market, then his life.

The Jones film that fascinates me the most is one that I’ve never seen in its entirety: the 1962 adaptation of Tender Is the Night. My interest stems not merely from curiosity of something unglimpsed, but also because I have long wondered how its source material, the haunting F. Scott Fitzgerald novel by that name, translated to the big screen.

Only industry insiders could have realized upon the release of this Henry King-directed film how closely its stars were enacting the fate of their characters offscreen. 

Jason Robards, as alcoholic psychotherapist Dick Diver, was well along the path of similar self-destructive drinking into the Seventies before he turned his life around. 

As for Jones, while she was too old, by nearly 20 years, for the role of Dick’s troubled wife Nicole, her offscreen personality—“clever, insecure, gentle, pathologically shy, passive aggressive,” in the words of blogger The Alphabetician—ensured that she would have had no trouble relating to the character.

Jones’ impulsivity and emotional fragility were both in evidence even early in her career, as her illicit affair with Selznick reached its climax. As her guilt mounted over the dissolution of her first marriage to actor Robert Walker, she attempted suicide. 

Yet the morning after her Oscar win for Song of Bernadette—elated as much by Selznick’s attention at the post-award party as by her victory itself—she had filed for divorce from Walker.

The actress emerged from both her early and late suicide attempts, but her daughter Mary Jennifer was not as fortunate. The girl, not even a teen when her father died, was crushed by his death, and never recovered her psychological balance. 

In 1976, while her mother was visiting her terminally ill father in Oklahoma, Mary Jennifer leaped to her death from a Los Angeles skyscraper.

Norton Simon, the billionaire art collector that the widowed Jones had married in 1971, now had something awful in common with his wife: each had lost a child to suicide. 

Following Mary Jennifer’s death, the two endowed the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health And Education in 1980. In the early 1990s, she even volunteered as a counselor at the Southern California Counseling Center in Beverly Hills. Her longtime therapist Milton Wexler remarked, “Helping others helped Jennifer heal herself.” 

(Following Simon's death in the 1990s, she also became even more involved than before with endowing his major art philanthropy, the Norton Simon Museum.)

Her patronage of mental-health charities was important and welcome. Still, Jones will inevitably continue to be known for her work on film. If you’re a film buff such as myself, you’ll inevitably wonder what would have happened if she had not called it a day after The Towering Inferno in 1974.

What might be called “alternative film history”—i.e., how films might have turned out with different actors or directors—particularly fascinates me. (For instance, Emily Watson was up for the role of Laura Brown that eventually went to Julianne Moore in The Hours.) Two aborted late-life projects involving Jones especially intrigue me.

In 1981, Simon had acquired for Jones the rights to the story of headmistress-murderer Jean Harris. The role of a woman who loses everything in a desperate attempt to hold onto her lover, womanizing diet doctor Herman Tarnower, would have been made to order for the actress. 

But Ellen Burstyn’s appearance in the part in a hurriedly-made TV movie effectively killed interest in that.

The same year, Jones had acquired the rights to Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment, but she withdrew after writer-director James L. Brooks did something that Selznick would rarely if ever tell his wife: i.e., that she was too old for the part. She withdrew, and it must have galled her a couple of years later when Shirley MacLaine won the role--and, ultimately, an Oscar--for it.

The life and career of Jones pose a number of questions: Would she have been discovered without Selznick? Would her career have taken its drastic downturn after A Farewell to Arms and Tender Is the Night without his constant interference with directors? Would she have become a cult figure if she had died rather than lived following her 1967 suicide attempt?

(The photo accompanying this post comes from 1945, at the height of her youthful beauty, in the melodrama Love Letters.)

Chautauqua Journal (Day 4, Wednesday, August 6: “Intermezzo” at the Chautauqua Cinema)

If you want to know my favorite movie showcases, they’re the single-screen types—like the Plaza Theater of my youth in Englewood, N.J. (its marquee, seen briefly in Annie Hall, gave it a form of immortality; nowadays it’s been transformed into the Bergen Performing Arts Center); the recently deceased and lamented Rialto Theater of Ridgefield Park, N.J.; and the still-vigorous Lafayette Theater of Suffern, N.Y.—places with plenty of seating, sightlines that don’t force you to bend your neck at angles that even a chiropractor can’t fix, and a sound system that might even support a piano or organ.

Chautauqua Cinema in upstate New York is a more demure cousin to these. It’s not one of those 24-plex monstrosities that run for much fanfare until the 30-screen cineplex a few miles away opens, at which time the customers desert and the management skips on bathroom maintenance; that contain walls a millimeter thin, so the Surroundsound from an adjacent room with a loud coming attraction drowns out the quiet, character-driven feature you’re watching; or that require a shameful amount of parking that can be used for other, better purposes, such as greenery. (Once you’re on the grounds, you can walk to the show.)

In a way, it’s appropriate that Chautauqua feature films on the grounds; after all, Thomas Edison was here visiting his in-laws when the site of the current Chautauqua Cinema, formerly named Higgins Memorial Hall, opened in 1895. And that 20th-century embodiment of the pure motion that is at the essence of cinema, Theodore Roosevelt, had breakfast at the hall in 1905, just before delivering a speech at the Amphitheater. After being used for other social and educational purposes, the 350-seat building has been used for cinemas since 1916.

I’ve been passing by the Chautauqua for more than a decade, but I did not find out about its history—or the current ownership structure that keeps it going, Uniplex Cinemas--till now. The theater is part of a circuit, but that’s of uniplexes, so as far as I’m concerned it gets a pass.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure how Chautauqua Cinema makes a dime—it’s so far removed from any large population center. At the height of summer—the only season it’s open—it competes for the attention of tourists like myself who have so much to occupy us—on this particular August night, for instance, I had the choice of attending a photography exhibit, a community choir rehearsal, a concert at the Amphitheater, a voice-department opera performance—or, for people so inclined (and there are still many, many such people here who want to leave the world behind), simply sitting on the front porch of their inn, talking or reading a book. A year ago, I had passed up the chance to see Away From Her, with Julie Christie. I didn’t want to miss another fine film.

The uniplex features art-house, independent and classic cinema—fare that many visitors here might not get in their hometowns. During the week I was there, for instance, it played Before the Rains, No Country for Old Men, The Savages, The Great Debaters, and Wall-e.

But what really attracted to Chautauqua Cinemas was the Classic Film Series, hosted by film historian David Zinman. That particular midweek show featured Intermezzo, with Ingrid Bergman in her first American film, and Leslie Howard, who you might have heard of from another movie made in 1939: a little-appreciated, unsung number called Gone With the Wind.

(I was drawn to the event partly by the prospect that I might, with luck, win a free film book, 50 Classic Motion Pictures, by Zinman for my nephew Sean, the youngest film buff in the family. Someone at Carey Cottage Inn, where I was staying, said an audience member had won the prior year in what was, in effect, sheer luck of the draw. So it proved this time—Zinman asked the audience for a number, then walked a certain number of rows and picked a member of the audience who was at the spot. Oh, well—you’ll have to wait till next year on that book, Sean!)

Before I get to Intermezzo, I should discuss the 1932 Oscar-winning Laurel and Hardy comic short that preceded it: The Music Box. It’s a variation on the Myth of Sisyphus, played out, to excruciatingly hilarious effect, on a steep Southern California hillside, as the team attempted to move the piano to the top.

A brief discussion followed the film. Seldom have I seen so many divided opinions on a single feature. Many in the audience (including myself) laughed uproariously throughout, but others were unmoved, including a lady of mature years who announced to the group, in a reedy but unswerving voice: “I saw this movie when it first came out. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now!”

I had really come for Intermezzo, though. For a vintage movie in a vintage year, it doesn’t pop up on TCM or at Blockbuster as much as you might think. In any case, hearing a film historian’s take on the film might prove enlightening. So it proved.

If anything, the movie divided the Chautauqua audience even more sharply than The Music Box. Leslie Howard plays a concert violinist who becomes enraptured by the playing of his daughter’s music teacher, Anita Hoffman (Bergman). It is striking that Howard takes notice of Anita’s virtuoso piano playing before her good looks (some might also call that unrealistic, but we won’t get into that).

What struck everyone about the film was how old-fashioned it was. It took a long time for Howard and Bergman to begin their affair. Naturally, this being the 1930s, that fling was punished, and in the harshest possible way imaginable. Likewise, the self-sacrifice displayed by one of the principals, I believe, could not possibly be understood in our individualistic age.

One aspect of the film that a number of audience members identified as—and I quote—“sleezy” was the age disparity between Howard and Bergman. (At the time of her breakthrough role, Bergman was 23; Howard, 46.) I was a little taken aback by this reaction—not because I disagreed with it, but because it came from a group that, like most other Chautauquans, tend to be non-judgmental and politically progressive.

As for myself, I gave the film a B to B-minus. The direction was not particularly distinguished and the script was conventional. The chief allure of the film—and it remains considerable—lies in the leads.

If you ever see this film, put away any notion you might have had of Howard as the sensitive, world-weary type he played in Gone With the Wind, Of Human Bondage or The Petrified Forest. His violinist’s self-absorption is much closer in spirit to another role that had won him an Oscar nomination the year before—Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. With those long, delicate fingers, however, he sure looked like an aesthete.

(Zinman related a fascinating fact about Howard—he had been gassed and shell-shocked as a British soldier in World War II. Upon his release, he was advised to take up acting as therapy. The lessons took hold pretty well, wouldn’t you say?)

As for Bergman, all the promise of her later great roles is right here. Crucial to the film and her impact, I learned from Zinman’s post-show discussion, was the contribution of cinematographer Gregg Toland (who also performed wonders for directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler).

Intermezzo was originally a Scandinavian film, released in 1936, when Bergman was only 20. Right after seeing it, producer David O. Selznick not only bought the film’s rights but secured the services of its female star so the film could be remade for an American audience—a common enough practice in those days.

At some point in the early rushes, legendary fussbudget that he was, Selznick fired the remake’s first cinematographer. (The man shouldn’t have felt so bad—as I discussed in a prior post, Selznick meted out the same punishment to poor George Cukor on the set of Gone With the Wind.)

He soon expressed his frustration to Toland: Why had Bergman appeared so luminously beautiful in the Scandinavian film and not this one?

Simple, Toland replied: In the American remake, Bergman’s face was being caked with far more makeup. Immediately sensing this was the case, Selznick asked for reshoots without all that makeup, and it turned out to be the case.

As I mentioned, the script – written, if you really must know, by Gosta Stevens and Gustaf Molander—was nothing much to speak of. But Bergman’s natural, makeup-free beauty conveys more than any script could about why Howard’s character could fall so hopelessly in love with her.

This Day in Film History (Selznick Lands Gable as Rhett Butler)

August 25, 1938 – Producer David O. Selznick took the first crucial step on the long road to Tara by signing Clark Gable for the role of Rhett Butler in the adaptation of Gone With the Wind (GWTW). Securing the services of the “King of Hollywood,” however, required giving Gable’s studio, MGM—the same company ruled by Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer—distribution rights and 50% of the profits.

Selznick’s own contract as an independent producer with United Artists required that they had the right to distribute all his films from 1938. This meant, in effect, that principal shooting for GWTW could not begin until 1939. By that time, Selznick would be shepherding three films through one stage of production or another—GWTW, Intermezzo, with the new young Scandinavian star Ingrid Bergman, and Rebecca, with the eccentric but extraordinary new director he’d just hired from England, Alfred Hitchcock.

Imagine that—three high-profile projects, all under the watchful eye of a perfectionist whose memos on every aspect of a production took forever for their recipients to read. To accomplish all of this, you could be a) a master at organization, b) filled with tremendous natural energy, and/or c) really hopped up on drugs.

I don’t think a) comes into play here – anybody who focuses on every tiny detail would not, most management consultants would say, really be well organized. But Selznick was certainly b) and c). He carried Benzedrine, his medication of choice, in his trouser pockets and even passed it around to production assistants.

All of the readers of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel had definite ideas of how the book should be filled. One was silent-film “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, who, off the screen, was far shrewder than the innocent characters she once played. She urged that Selznick sign Margaret Sullivan for Scarlett and Clark Gable for Rhett.

There had been talk bruited about getting Warner Brothers' Errol Flynn for Rhett, but the choice of America’s fans was, overwhelmingly, Gable. You really have to be a habitual watcher of Turner Classic Movies, where you can get an idea of his full output, to understand the hold he had on American moviegoers in the 1930s. If you were on the set of a movie and he liked you, the impression he could set off was palpable. The max exuded sheer magnetism.

But if he didn’t take to you…Woe betide. Frank Capra nearly found this out on the set of It Happened One Night, before he got the star to relax and trust him. George Cukor, the initial director of GWTW, was not so fortunate. Within one week after Gable had arrived on the set, the star’s annoyance began to set in. When Selznick got a look at the dailies, the inevitable clash occurred, and Cukor was out. A pity, too: he and Selznick, though they had worked well together on David Copperfield, would never collaborate on another film again.

In the closing months of 1938, unable to start shooting in any meaningful way, Selznick decided to take the time to concentrate on securing the ideal Scarlett. That story of endless screen tests --and who knows how many hissy fits flying between starlets and their beleaguered agents--is one for the metaphorical tomorrow—which, as we all know by now, is another day.