Those Jones Girlsby Alyce Canfield
(Motion Picture, June 1956)
(Note: An article on Shirley Jones appeared alongside this one, thus the explanation for the title)
Twelve years ago, Jennifer Jones and I had lunch together. She bubbled enthusiastically about herself, her career, her family, her children. She was the most extrovert young actress I had met in a long time. She thought fan magazines were fun. She was easy to interview. She wasn't afraid of reporters then because the great event in her life hadn't happened yet. This is the story of that event.
Jennifer Jones was doomed to personal unhappiness and professional mediocrity until a brilliant man gave up everything in order to mastermind her career. What it cost them both is proof that love is a many-splendored thing - a thing of sacrifice and denial, dedication, hope and sensitivity.
The man is her husband, David O. Selznick.
Five years after she had won the Academy Award for the role of Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette, she became totally unavailable to the press. At the time, statements were released by a careful publicity department that she believed a good actress didn't need a good press. As with Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Greta Garbo and others, she was proven right. Except for one thing. The others had the luck to be cast in great pictures and in memorable roles. Jennifer had the luck to meet David Selznick.
Much has been printed about Jennifer's early life with Robert Walker, her late ex-husband. They had moved from New York to Hollywood intending to set the world on fire. Neither was able to make a dent in the town. Jennifer was in horse operas, and no one who mattered saw her performances. At that time, she was eager to cooperate with the press, but the press wasn't interested in her. She and Bob returned to New York, convinced that Hollywood was too tough for them.
They had met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He was a small-time radio announcer who wanted to become an actor. Jennifer was gay and impulsive; Bob was an introvert and not easy to know. Yet, together, the two of them had something they did not have separately - a sort of gay banter, an amused way to looking at life and at themselves. They were good for each other.
For a while, just for the Bohemian hell of it, they have lived in a Greenwich Village apartment, not a tenement, as has been reported. As soon as Bob started to click on radio, they moved to Long Island. Jennifer had a part-time maid, a lovely home, her husband and her children. Now and then, she would go to auditions just to keep up with things, but her heart was in her home.
It was while they were living in Long Island that she got a call from her New York agent that David O. Selznick was auditioning for a girl to play the title role in Claudia. Jennifer knew the play and loved it. When the phone call came, she had just washed her hair and there was no time to dry it. When she walked into the audition with the famous Mr. Selznick, she didn't look like the polished, well-groomed actresses who had been reading for the part. She didn't look New York-ish. She was, by virtue of her wildly unkempt hair, young, fresh, different. Although she didn't get the role of Claudia, Selznick put her under personal contract.
Jennifer was a married woman with two children. David Selznick's wife, Irene, was the daughter of Louis B. Mayer. When Jennifer and David first met, they felt an enormous mutual attraction, but they rationalized it as admiration for talent. Long after Jennifer came to Hollywood, she was still calling him Mr. Selznick.
When I asked her what advice she could give other young actresses who wanted to succeed, she told me artlessly, "Get a man like Mr. Selznick to guide your career."
She talked of her children. They were more important to her than her career, she said - "The first thing I thought of when I stepped off the train was, won't California be wonderful for the children?" She was delighted that both she and Robert Walker had been paged by Hollywood. In 1943, he was recognized as Hollywood's brightest young actor with his laugh-provoking See Here Private Hargrove. In 1943, Jennifer won the Academy Award for The Song of Bernadette.
Jennifer had always been very modest. Henry Willson, who was Selznick's chief assistant in those days, said that she had talent galore, but no ego. When she was nominated for the Academy Award for the best performance of 1943, Henry was her escort. On the way to the Awards, he asked her if she had a speech prepared.
"But I won't win!" she exclaimed. "Ingrid Bergman will win!"
"You have one chance out of five," Henry reminded her.
She tried to compose a little acceptance speech in the car, but the idea was so beyond her that she couldn't think of anything. "This is ridiculous," she said, finally. "I've never even been to a premiere. Just going to the Awards is a privilege."
She won, of course, and afterward she was detained by the press. She was interviewed and her picture was taken, and it was for that reason that she was late to a party given by David Selznick at Mocambo. When she and Henry finally arrived, the orchestra leader rapped for attention. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "I give you the first lady of Hollywood."
Everyone in the star-studded place rose to his feet. Jennifer stood there with tears in her eyes. It was a memorable night.
It was common knowledge that Selznick was watching over her much more closely than his other stars. For example, he checked every still picture of her sent out by the publicity department, something he does to this day. I remember one afternoon when Jennifer spent five hours in the still gallery being photographed with bangs. When Selznick saw the pictures, he didn’t like the bangs and killed the whole batch. He read script after script, determined to find great parts for her. After she won the Oscar for The Song of Bernadette, he said, “We’re through with Bernadette. You have to become Jennifer Jones again. As it is now, you walk down the street and people say, ‘There’s Bernadette, not ‘There’s Jennifer Jones.’”
With this in mind, he selected varied scripts for her to help her mature as a dramatic actress. She told me, “I want to improve and develop. I’m going to concentrate on the job, not on the glory. I want to grow as a person as well as in my work.”
By this time, however, Jennifer was not easy to reach. She had called a halt to interviews. She had decided against further comment on her recent separation from Robert Walker. The reason was that Bernadette had not yet runs its course. The returns from the foreign market had yet to come in. A lot of money was at stake. Jennifer had portrayed the life of a saint, and mention of divorce would jeopardize the success of the film.
Bob Walker knew there would never be a reconciliation. His answer to the situation was drink. He was seen everywhere with a glass in his hand. “What can I do?” he asked me over his sixth drink. “Jennifer is in love with Svengali, and Pygmalion is in love with the statue he brought to life.”
Yet Jennifer and Bob did not feel any enmity toward each other. Theirs was one of Hollywood’s friendliest separations. They talked about the children every day on the phone. They decided together which schools they should attend, if they should see the dentist, whether it was time for winter clothes – everything. “I want them to have his influence all their lives,” Jennifer said. “I’d be frightened to death if I thought I had to bring them up all by myself.”
But Bob could not adjust to this arrangement. He felt that people were talking. He was anchorless. He had been strictly a family man, rarely making friends, and now he had to find a substitute for family life.
If someone on the set asked him to drop by for a drink on the way home, Bob stopped by. Alone, the nights were long. There was talk that he was seeing Judy Garland, but this was a sometime thing. More and more often, he found that a drink was his friend. He had been mixed up as a boy, anti-social and difficult to deal with. As an adult, he had achieved recognition and success, a feeling of security. Losing Jennifer was not part of his long-range plan. He had run away as a boy. Now, he ran away as a man.
During their separation, Robert Walker consulted a psychoanalyst. He told the doctor all about his insecure childhood, how he had been sent through school by a wealthy aunt, how he had run away from discipline. He told how he couldn’t get used to the X-ray eye of success, and he told about Jennifer. It took six months of treatment just to put him back on his feet. He was off the screen for a year.
In 1945, Jennifer and Bob were divorced. It happens every day in Hollywood that a married woman falls in love with a married man, and it’s not news. The news is that David Selznick risked his own career to further Jennifer’s. Hollywood is a clannish town and he was married to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter. He could have been frozen out of the business with one wrong move. It took finesse and courage to arrange that divorce. Jennifer didn’t break up David’s marriage, and he didn’t break up hers, even though the implication was there.
As for Bob, he was walking a mental tightrope. One push, and he would fall. Even after psychoanalysis and with great pictures such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo under his belt, he still went into periods of hysteria and depression.
During one of these periods, he called his doctors to come and knock him out with sodium pentothal. It’s a routine injection, given quite often when people have minor surgery or must be kept quiet. It is not considered dangerous., and it had been administered to Bob many times before. But this fatal night, Bob had taken other sedation before the injection. Minutes after the doctor had given him the sodium pentothal, Bob Walker was dead.
Jennifer collapsed from shock and grief. She didn’t have the strength to go to his funeral and she wouldn’t let his children go. She said, “I want them to remember him as he was.”
By 1949, her triumphs had been many. Never had a young actress been groomed so carefully. David Selznick had some of the brightest stars in Hollywood under his wing. He had Joseph Cotton and Dorothy McGuire and Ingrid Bergman and Joan Fontaine. He had guided their careers for years as remarkably as he had guided hers. He was a financial wizard and would loan out his stars for fantastic prices. David made money on his stars. In return, he handled them with wonderful insight and understanding. The difference between them and Jennifer was that David was in love with Jennifer.
Because of that love, because he wanted to concentrate professionally as well as personally on Jennifer, David liquidated his tremendous empire and they went abroad. He had produced Gone With the Wind, Duel in the Sun, The Paradine Case and Since You Went Away. He had discovered Hollywood’s brightest stars, all of them eventual Academy Award contenders. Yet he sold out and went to Europe with Jennifer.
That’s when those of us who thought she had married to further her career discovered we were very wrong. She was wildly jealous of David, and he was equally possessive and jealous of her. Loving each other so much, rarely trusting one another out of sight, it was only natural that the day would come when her career and his would be joined to the exclusion of everything else.
When they returned from Europe, Jennifer signed many picture deals – each one masterminded by David.
David O. Selznick, the once-powerful motion picture magnate, is now Jennifer Jones’ agent. He became an agent because of his love for her.
This is off-the-record material, but it is not meant unkindly. On the contrary, it is meant to reveal the depth and stature of Jennifer and David Selznick.
Her friends will tell you she is unexpectedly kind and generous. She seems remote from everyday problems, yet she is the one who quietly sees that the hospital bills get paid when the electrician is taken ill. The friends she had when she first came to Hollywood are still the same today. Although she lives in a magnificent estate, she doesn’t live by the Hollywood caste system. Her friends come from all walks of life.
She doesn’t talk about herself or her work. She has a disturbing humility. At 36, she looks 20. There isn’t a line in her face. I saw her with David recently. He’s 54 now, but he has a vigorous magnetism that lifts him out of any particular age bracket.
Theirs is an odd union. When she was unknown, David saw in her an actress who had the potential of greatness. He took it upon himself to develop that potential. He succeeded – at the sacrifice of his own interests. He and he alone created the Jennifer Jones we know today.
What makes Jennifer tick? David Selznick. It’s as simple as that.
