New York Close-Up - Jennifer Jones - Camera Shyby Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg
(New York Herald Tribune, May 18, 1952)
"She even walks like a half-breed!" That's what the cowhands and camp-followers on location for "Duel in the Sun" said when they watched Jennifer Jones walk in front of the cameras for her role. Anita Colby, America's most publicized cover girl, was "keeper" for Selznick's stable of stars in those days; she remembers how this shy girl worked to master the role:
"She walked very erect... almost as though she had a week's washing or a big jug of water on her head... her bosom carried high...her hips swinging free. And why not: For a week before we began shooting, Jennifer packed herself off to a reservation near the Mexican border, and watched the half-breed Indian women walk with their work on their heads...until she could do it instinctively."
Because Anita Colby knew Jennifer's tricks so well, she was not long surprised when a phone call from Miss Jones the other day sounded like Tallulah Bankhead auditioning for "Gone With The Wind":
"Hey-e-e theah, Colby, mus' be ages since ah've seen you and youah mothaw - how you all been?"
Not surprised, still Colby was puzzled: "Jennifer! What's happened to you now?"
"Nothin' dahlin', Ah'm jus' testin."
The "test" this time was for a new role as Ruby Gentry, a Carolina mountain girl whose accuracy with a gun impressed rich Yankees down for the shooting season - a sharp change of pace from the witch-girl she plays in "The Wild Heart".
In her career, Jennifer has talked like Cluny Brown, Madame Bovary and Joan of Lorraine. To prepare for the role of Ruby, Jennifer packed a sweater, a skirt, a pair of blue jeans, and took a train for Southport, N.C. She registered at the Southport Inn under her maiden name and made fast friends with the lady innkeeper - "she seemed to have a lot of qualities in common with Ruby Gentry, which made things much easier."
With the innkeeper's five-year-old daughter, Jennifer "went visitin'" around the town, met people, took all their meals at a local diner:
"It was so wonderful - though I met loads of people and asked a thousand questions, nobody, not even the innkeeper, asked me a lot of questions. And nobody once asked me, "Aren't you Jennifer Jones?"
A few days later, checking stories with David Selznick, her husband, we got a postscript on the innkeeper:
"Jennifer has to shoot and hunt in this next picture. No, she doesn't know how to handle a gun, but she will before she leaves for California...she invited the innkeeper up from Carolina and they've gone off shooting together on Long Island."
There was a time when this girl who fears cameras and recognition so much now, had a marksman's eager, searching eye on Broadway. For months last winter, she studied the classics, including Shakespeare with Constance Collier, and from her won this praise:
"If Jennifer had stuck by the stage and not gone to California, I know she would have been at the top in the theater now. And much needed! We have many good character actresses right now - but less than a handful of good straight romantic actresses. Jennifer could be a great leading lady, in the full sense of the word. She is one of our very few actresses capable of playing within her own personality."
When we talked with Jennifer, the papers were full of bad reviews for the performance of another Hollywood star in "Candida" - winner of two Oscars, Olivia de Havilland got no medals from New York critics for her second attempt to reach Broadway. We wondered if Jennifer could survive such a double massacre:
"I think I know what would happen. I would be absolutely shattered - I would dissolve into tears - be miserable for days, weeks, maybe months. And then I'd turn right around and do another play! I believe it was Ethel Barrymore who said that in this profession, you have to have the hide of an elephant. When I started, I didn't have such a hide - I do now. I can take it."
Just as wise politicians know that the most effective speeches are those made to one person at a time, so Jennifer's greatest role was played to individual audiences in Korea - she doesn't sing, dance, tell jokes, but the therapy of her visits to wounded GIs brought a greater magic than medicine to hospital wards. From an eyewitness, we got the best review she'll ever read:
"This didn't happen in Korea - it happened in a Stateside hospital during the last Big War...Jennifer went into one ward just to talk to a kid who'd buried his head under a pillow and couldn't seem to stop crying - his feet were shot off. Before Jennifer left him, she had him smiling and laughing...something even his own mother hadn't been able to do."
