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NATALIE WOOD – SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL – 1964
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DESIGNING WOMAN – LOS ANGELES – 1957
“Designing Woman” playing at the State on Broadway – 1957:
“Designing Woman” – directed by Vincente Minnelli – starring Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck:
A lovely apartment in the city, New York City, for fashion designer Bacall and new husband, sports reporter, Peck… It was a box office success, and I think — a really uneven romantic comedy — but the beginning of the movie on the West Coast makes it worth watching.
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You Don’t Own Me, by Vickie Lester – Chapter 2 – As Time Goes By
As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.
1948 Key Largo
YOU DON’T OWN ME
by Vickie Lester
2. AS TIME GOES BY
That summer Dave Taylor was in a film shooting onstage at Warner Brothers in Burbank – about 35 minutes from Beverly Hills. He thought it would be a nice idea if Billie trotted the kids over to see him working. His love interest was an actress who was co-starring in a series of romantic comedies with ambiguous endings – it was a late seventies, early eighties, thing. The plot usually had to do with a dull domineering husband, an empathetic lover, and a woman gaining a sense of empowerment by rejecting them both.
Billie and the children found Mr. Taylor on New York Street (the empathetic lover), dressed in a Burberry raincoat strolling by his co-star in similar attire as they huddled together under an umbrella as the rain towers showered down, a camera on dolly track followed after them, and a tightly coordinated knot of Assistant Directors and P.A.s sent groups of people by to splash in and out of frame in a fairly decent facsimile of a storm. Except, the giant white scrims stretched like sails above the set couldn’t entirely filter out the Southern California sun. Billie was noticing it smelled like dampened desert and sage, the kids were being unnaturally quiet, and that they weren’t standing far from a parched range of hills when someone shouted, “That’s lunch!”
The rain towers stopped showering. Two middle-aged men with big belt buckles collected umbrellas. Coats were shrugged off and handed to hovering wardrobe assistants. Then Dave Taylor was by their side with his co-star. He had his hand in the small of her back. “Jess, I want you to meet my kids, Isabel and Andrew, and this is Ms. Billie Price who’s taking time off from her college studies to spend the summer with us.” That was a pleasant way of putting it.
Lunch took place in the Executive Dining Room at the studio commissary. Dave Taylor let the kids gorge themselves on ice cream sundaes and spent his one free hour telling Billie all about Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. You see Bacall was nineteen when she met Bogie, who was easily forty, on the set of “To Have and Have Not”. It was love at first sight. They were a perfect couple. Well, that’s the nostalgic yarn Billie’s employer was spinning. He didn’t mention the fact that Bogart was married at the time and he and his older wife were known for their alcohol-fueled brawls, which often resulted in mutual black eyes. Lauren Bacall must have seemed like daffodils and Easter bunnies and smooth sailing all tied up with a silken ribbon. Not only had she attracted the attention of Bogart, but he was vying for her favor with their director, Howard Hawks, also married, also a brawler, also in his forties.
Billie – over the years developed several theories about the laws of attraction, something having to do with men and young fertile women with long hair – then, she started rousting the kids from their seats for their imminent departure when Dave stood up, looked the nineteen year old au pair in the eyes, chucked her on the chin, and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Instead of thinking here was a guy speeding toward a huge midlife crisis looking to validate himself sexually by sleeping with a younger (much younger) woman who was by no means his social, intellectual, or experiential equal – her immediate thought was that she was glad she had packed her diaphragm.
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© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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You Don’t Own Me, by Vickie Lester – Chapter 2 – As Time Goes By (continued)
As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.
YOU DON’T OWN ME
by Vickie Lester
2. AS TIME GOES BY – continued
Shall we discuss diaphragms? Sorry. Rhetorical question. We’re going to. According to the student clinic in Cambridge they were the birth control method of choice. They didn’t tamper with your hormones. They were 98% effective if used as directed. As directed… That’s where things got slippery. The damn thing was about the size of the screw-on-top of a large pickle jar. The flesh tone latex diaphragm was shaped like a shallow cup and the rim was spring-loaded. The cup was filled with a contraceptive cream, squeezed from a tube, that best resembled the marshmallow whip Billie was accustomed to spreading on peanut butter sandwiches. This spring-loaded concoction was then meant to be folded, inserted, and placed over the cervix. The thought caused Billie some distress, she couldn’t tell you how many times it sprang out of her hand and landed in a sticky fluffy mess on the bathroom floor – 98% effective if you didn’t factor in operator error or the impatience of teen lust. Star wattage, at nineteen it was hard to ignore.
That night, after Isabel and Andrew were in bed, using the staff line in the kitchen, Billie called Polly at her employer’s beach house in Malibu. Having been raised on the east coast Billie couldn’t understand how people were allowed to build houses just above the high tide mark. Beaches were meant to be public, wide open, not crowded by damp overpriced housing. Polly answered on the first ring. After some conversational meandering Billie got to the point. “I think my boss likes me.”
“Gabrielle Taylor likes you? That’s nice.”
“No,” Billie responded. “Not Mrs. Taylor, Mr. Taylor.”
“Isn’t he at work, like, twelve hours a day? What do you mean he likes you?”
Billie explained the field trip to the studio and the pointed references to Bogart and Bacall. She could hear Polly sucking in smoke from a smoldering cigarette. “Okay. Definitely not nice. That is sleazy. The last girl he liked like that got fired. You wanna get fired?”
Frankly, Billie hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Why would I get fired?”
“You would get fired if that tired pick up routine of his worked on a star struck little sap from Swampscott like you…”
“Gloucester.”
“Whatever. Gloucester. Just don’t sleep with him.” Said Polly.
“You think he was really coming on to me? He doesn’t want to sleep with me. I’m… He…” Billie did a quick calculation. “He’s nineteen years older than I am. I’m only ten years older than Andrew. Maybe he just likes being around young people.” She was saying one thing and thinking another. Billie was thinking it was cool to have somebody handsome, rich, and famous cozying up to her.
“Right.” Said Polly. “That’s why the previous nanny lasted three weeks. Dave Taylor just loves young people. Ask Mrs. Taylor.”
“I bet he’s just flirting. Don’t you think actors flirt with everybody?”
Polly snorted into the phone. “Either be smart, Billie, or start packing to go home. That man is a walking erection.”
“I don’t want to go home. I am not ready to go home.” Billie worried out loud.
“Be smart, Billie!” Polly re-stated.
“Okay. It’s probably nothing anyway.” She said.
“Yup, nothing. That’s why you called me. Just a whole lot of nothing.”
Billie was hunched on a stool at the breakfast bar playing with the bouncy rubberized cord of the telephone, listening to Polly with the earpiece clutched to her head when the kitchen door swung open and in walked Dave Taylor and Earvin Effay Johnson, Jr. (Commonly know as Magic.) She didn’t mean to but she squealed into the phone, “Polly, I gotta go! See you tomorrow!” Harvard had a basketball team, but they were a joke. Here was the point guard from Michigan State, just two years older than she was, already a college legend and now playing for the Lakers.
Please note Billie’s response. Magic was about seven feet tall, had muscles for days, and the most beautiful smile imaginable. He looked like a cherub on growth hormones. Dave Taylor was surveying Billie from a much lesser height with a funny cockeyed smile. In comparison he looked like a dwarf.
“Billie, Magic. Magic, Billie,” he introduced the pair.
Billie’s hand disappeared into Magic’s. “Hi, Billie.”
“Hi, Magic.” She felt warm all over. Billie glanced over at her boss and felt something, something odd: it was pity. Yes – hard to feel sorry for a movie star. And, on that surging wave of Magic’s charisma Billie got dumped out, water stinging up her nose, chin scraping on sand, right on Dave Taylor’s sorry little beach. It was her first encounter with sympathy as an aphrodisiac.
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© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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You Don’t Own Me, by Vickie Lester – Chapter 2 – As Time Goes By (completed)
As you might have gleaned by now, when there’s a story to tell about Hollywood, I’m inclined to change the names and mix it up a bit to protect the innocent. What follows is mostly true, except what’s not.
YOU DON’T OWN ME
by Vickie Lester
2. AS TIME GOES BY – completed
It’s not common knowledge, but most leading men are short. They have big heads in relation to their slight bodies, large symmetrical features, especially eyes, and straight expertly manscaped brows. They photograph well. The camera loves them and in order to make them appear tall in the frame they often emote perched up on a flat wooden platform called an apple box – a left over term from the silent era when California’s main export was produce and anything on hand, like a shipping crate, was incorporated as a movie tool.
Dave Taylor was listed as five feet ten inches tall on the page of measurements his agents distributed to costume designers, but in reality he was more like five six. That’s not to say most leading men aren’t riveting, but being blown up to movie screen size usually does more than increase the world’s perception of your stature, it usually has strange effects on your ego as well. Okay. Let’s not generalize. Dave Taylor, specifically, was strangely influenced by his screen presence. He constantly had to prove he deserved his fame and he was an untidy mix of bombast and self-doubt. For a brief period when he and Billie were separated he continued to find comfort in the adoring eyes of age inappropriate women, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Where were we? Oh, yes. Billie was age inappropriate, and for a girl who had gotten into an Ivy League University, maybe a little bit dense. “Book smart, street stupid,” according to Polly. “Lots of guile and juvenile plans, but charming, really charming and disarming – in the beginning,” said Natalie. “Pure heart, aspiring spirit, a feckin’ innocent, if ya ask me, but, I think deep down, very angry. Don’t you think we’re all ultimately driven by our anger?” was Darla’s addition. “Oh god, just a great gal,” this from Jane. It’s hard to find a pattern in these statements, but even with the qualifiers, they all loved the girl. Billie got people going – it didn’t hurt that she was stunning to look at.
Okay, moving on, we’ll dispense with the graphic depictions of the wooing and groping and dissembling Dave and Billie engaged in before he was divorced and Billie became his second wife. It was all pretty typical. At the time she thought nothing like this had ever happened before to anybody. But, Billie was horribly immature and almost oblivious to the wholesale emotional destruction she was inflicting on Gabrielle Taylor and her children. A decade later it embarrassed Billie to remember saying (but she absolutely did), “As long as we love each other everything will be fine,” as Darla and Jane nodded their support, Polly pressed her lips together to keep from saying something unkind, and Natalie just shook her head and left their palpably earnest, palpably sincere, company. She remembered, vividly, when her own father had cheated on her mother for a woman in her early twenties – the product of that deceit being her young sister – the one she was fiercely protective of. She considered that between her father, who she perceived of as being married to his career and Anne’s mother, who she dismissed out of hand, Natalie felt she was interceding with wolves on behalf of her only sibling.
As she walked out of the park Natalie Brown turned back for a moment and called out, “At least he’s marrying you,” and then she was gone. For nearly ten years she was gone.
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© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material (text) without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Technicolor – Lauren Bacall
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Technicolor – Anne Baxter
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Technicolor – Lucille Ball
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The American Menu: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
The American Menu: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
This Blogger (click on the red letters above) is FASCINATING. And, Clifton Webb knew how to throw one hell of a party. Wait until you read the guest list…
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Bogey and Bacall married at Malabar Farms in Ohio – Happy Thanksgiving
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TRAVILLA: COSTUME DESIGNER, HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE
I was looking at those wardrobe sketches in the previous post… And I think they look like the costumes in 1953′s “How to Marry a Millionaire.”
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Premiere:
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Hollywood turns out for the premiere of — A Star Is Born (September, 1954)
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A Star Is Born, directed by George Cukor, designed by Gene Allen
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On set with Judy Garland — A Star Is Born
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Lauren Bacall, lighting up
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Rita Hayworth, incendiary
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Marlene Dietrich, inhales
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George Hurrell shoots Corinne Calvet, 1948
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The angels will be proud. “I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.” Lauren Bacall (1924-2014)
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I’ve noticed a lot of people looking for this HD scan of Lauren Bacall in her first role…To Have And Have Not
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