Summer Under the Stars: Unfaithfully Rex

When Rex Harrison came to Hollywood in 1945 to make a movie, he was 37 years old, had already been on the stage in England for 22 years and had been making films there since 1930. Orson Welles later claimed it was on his recommendation that Harrison was given his first American role, a part that Welles himself turned down, that of the King in the 1946 production of Anna and the King of Siam. Welles told his friend, director Henry Jaglom, over one of their now famous lunches, “I suggested him. Rex made pictures that only played in England, teacup comedies and things. No one in Hollywood knew who he was.” Welles had refused the role, he said, because he didn’t want to work with Irene Dunne, who had already been cast as Anna. And so, Rex Harrison made his American film debut.

Anna and the King of Siam

At the time he arrived in Hollywood, Harrison was married to his second wife, German actress Lilli Palmer. She also began making movies in the U.S. and started by co-starring with Gary Cooper in Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Daggerin 1946. Both Mr. and Mrs. Harrison starred in 1947 classics - for Rex, the first and best of his three films for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with Gene Tierney; for Lilli, Robert Rosen’s Body and Soul, opposite John Garfield. Rex also starred in The Foxes of Harrow in 1947; Lilli would star in My Girl Tisa in 1948. Then came the scandal that ruined Harrison’s personal reputation and may or may not have brought him the nickname “Sexy Rexy.”

Lilli Palmer

Rex Harrison, it seems, was a ladies’ man. By 1947, he had become involved in a romance with actress Carole Landis. The affair was no secret in Hollywood and was apparently made public by columnist/radio commentator Walter Winchell. On the night of July 4, 1948, after Harrison spent the evening with her at her home, Landis consumed a lethal dose of barbiturates. Ruled a suicide, her death was naturally surrounded by a storm of hearsay and speculation. The rumor mill had it that Landis was despondent because Harrison refused to leave Lilli Palmer and/or because he was soon to depart for New York to star on Broadway in Anne of the Thousand Days. There was even some conjecture that Harrison had murdered the woman and staged the scene to look like suicide.

Carole Landis

A few months before Landis’ death, Harrison had completed production on a film for legendary writer/director Preston Sturges. It would be the one-time wunderkind’s final cinematic gem, a darkest-black comedy titled – perhaps unfortunately – Unfaithfully Yours (1948). The lurid and lingering Landis tragedy would have an impact on the fate of the film. In an attempt to distance it from the scandal, the film’s release date was held up for several months. Additionally, publicity was dialed back - and the marketing campaign changed drastically. It was labeled a murder mystery, it was touted as “six kinds of picture all rolled into one” – confusing and misleading the movie-going public.

Preston Sturges had written a Broadway hit in 1929 and trekked to Hollywood following the play’s adaptation to the screen. He penned several films for Paramount, including Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940). In 1940 he asked for and was given a chance to direct as well as write. The result was his political sendup, The Great McGinty, a break-out hit that brought Sturges an Oscar for his original screenplay. A string of sly and exhilarating classics written and directed by Preston Sturges followed, namely: The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (1944). But Paramount had begun to view its genius-in-residence as next-to-impossible to deal with, and relations between the studio and the man soured. When his split from Paramount finally came, Sturges went into partnership with Howard Hughes on California Pictures Corporation for three disastrous years. Sturges and Hughes parted ways in 1947 and the writer/director soon went to work for Darryl F. Zanuck at 20^th Century Fox. Zanuck was interested in a story Sturges had written years earlier titled Matrix. In the end, Matrix was dropped for lack of interest and a treatment of another early Sturges story - he called it The Symphony Story - was picked up instead and retitled…

 

Preston Sturges

Unfaithfully Yours bears most trademark Sturges elements – it moves at a dizzying pace, overflows with clever dialogue, is peopled with assorted (and well-cast) eccentrics and its plot completely confounds audience expectations. But in this case Sturges ventured into especially dark farce…

The film opens with the return to New York of Sir Alfred de Carter (Harrison), a well-known symphony conductor, who has been in London. He is warmly welcomed by his beautiful young and doting wife, Daphne (Linda Darnell). But soon the mischief begins. It seems that before leaving New York, Sir Alfred had asked his rich but dull brother in law (Rudy Vallee) to keep an eye on Daphne while he was away. The brother in law misinterpreted the request and took it upon himself to hire a private detective to monitor her. And now he has come to deliver the detective’s report. Sir Alfred, initially shocked and outraged at the misunderstanding, eventually manages to read the report and works himself into a frenzy of jealousy and suspicion. While conducting a concert after quarreling with his wife, Sir Alfred begins to fantasize about how to handle what he believes is her infidelity. As he conducts three orchestral pieces, he vividly imagines three different possible scenarios – each played out onscreen. The first fantasy involves murder and a frame-up, in the second Sir Alfred is noble and obliging, in the third he falls victim to his own bravado. When the concert finally comes to an end, Sir Alfred sets out to make one of his fantasies real.

Unfaithfully Yours - fantasy or reality?

Although Sturges wasn’t entirely happy with the film’s final cut (which came courtesy of Mr. Zanuck), he was pleased with the performances – Rex Harrison executes a superb turn as the temperamental artist/bungling schemer. Sturges was also particularly fond of the fantasy segments. He wrote that he tried to construct the three scenarios envisioned by the conductor “as if written and directed by Sir Alfred, who is neither a writer nor a director.” In his fantasies, the conductor imagines his own behavior “vividly” while the other characters are “marionettelike.” Sturges believed this would be “the natural result of Sir Alfred’s ability to have them say and do exactly what he wants them to say and do.”

The film’s themes are dark and, perhaps, for the audience of its time, too much so for “six kinds of picture all rolled into one." Its timing in proximity to the leading man's notorious Hollywood scandal was extremely unlucky. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, Unfaithfully Yours was not a success. In his autobiographical notes Sturges reflected, “Unfaithfully Yours received much critical acclaim and lost a fortune.” That the film failed to find an audience contributed to the steep decline of his increasingly precarious career. He would write and direct only one more Hollywood film (The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend in 1949) and it was a resounding flop.

My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn

Rex Harrison continued to work steadily and successfully on stage, film – and TV – for the rest of his life. He gained worldwide stardom with his performance in George Cukor’s 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady, a long-running Broadway hit in which Harrison originated the role of Henry Higgins and for which he won a Tony Award. For transferring his Henry Higgins from stage to screen, he duly took home an Oscar for Best Actor. Knighted in 1989 at age 81, Sir Rex would, as the producer of The Circle, Harrison’s final Broadway play, put it, very nearly die “with his boots on;” his last stage appearance preceded his death, in 1990 of pancreatic cancer, by only six months. Harrison’s long Hollywood career had brought him two Oscar nominations and one win; his even longer career on Broadway brought him five Tony nominations and three awards as well as a special Drama Desk Award in 1985. He was honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film and one for television.

Kay Kendall

Rex Harrison would also continue to be inconstant in his private life. Sandy Sturges, Preston’s widow, recalled walking in New York with her husband and Harrison in the early 1950s. Suddenly and unexpectedly Rex walked away and left them – he’d spied a lovely young thing on the street and simply followed her. His interest in women, Mrs. Sturges recalled, was “not subtle at all.” Harrison’s marriage to Lilli Palmer continued until 1957, when the two divorced so that he could marry his lover, actress Kay Kendall, who was dying of leukemia. He married Welsh-born, Oscar-nominated, Tony-winning actress Rachel Roberts in 1962. That marriage ended in divorce many years later and, it is said, she reacted by drinking ever more heavily and by finally taking her own life. Harrison was married to the ex-Mrs. Richard Harris, Welsh actress/socialite Elizabeth Rees-Williams, for a time, and his 6^th and final wife was Mercia Tinker, to whom he remained married until the end of his life.

Rachel Roberts and Rex Harrison

Harrison has garnered much praise for his work on stage and screen, but not much admiration for his conduct out of the limelight. One of his biographers, Nicholas Wapshott (Rex Harrison, 1991) met the actor while doing research for a biography on British director Carol Reed. Wapshott considered Harrison a “technical genius” capable of “effortless delivery of difficult prose.” He noted that the actor didn’t make much visible effort, “he was inescapably Rex in everything - but his understanding of the text meant that he hit every note the first time.” On the other hand, the author found Harrison, in person, “a cad of the first order,” and at first hesitated to take on the biography of a man whose “black-hole egotism meant he could not appreciate the worth of others, particularly other men, and his attitude to his string of wives…and lovers was often hard and heartless.” Wapshott blamed Harrison’s involvement in the Carole Landis scandal for the fact that Unfaithfully Yours “languished for years.”

Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert in Aren't We All

Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated actor Frank Langella admired Rex Harrison’s work extravagantly; “He was my idol. I thought him the most accomplished, technically perfect, and totally believable English actor of his time.” Langella managed to meet Harrison twice. Their first meeting occurred in the early ‘70s at a cocktail reception in the older actor’s honor. Langella encountered his idol in the foyer where he was removing his hat and coat. The young actor put out his hand and began to extend a greeting when Harrison flung both his coat and his wife’s over Langella’s arm, as if he was a servant, and made his entrance into the party. The two met again in 1984 when a friend of Langella’s was appearing in Aren’t We All on Broadway with Harrison and Claudette Colbert. Forgoing dinner with his friend and Miss Colbert (who utterly charmed him) in order to try once more to pay his respects to Harrison, Langella found him in his dressing room and finally delivered his heartfelt homage. The old actor heard him out and dismissed him with, “Thank you. Very kind. I’m afraid I can’t ask you to sit down.” Langella was not amused and would remember that his good friend, Harrison’s 5^th wife, Elizabeth, told him of Rex, “He was the only man I ever knew who would send back the wine at his own dinner table.”

Rex Harrison and Preston Sturges on the set

British film critic and historian David Thomson‘s view of Harrison the actor is fairly restrained, seeing in most of his screen roles the personification of the stereotypically empty-headed aristocrat. However, Thomson allows that Unfaithfully Yours is “one of the few films that made use of his grating charm.”

Harrison is in top form in Sturges’ black-humored classic, adapting with surprising ease to the writer/director’s penchant for slapstick. Unfaithfully Yours airs on Saturday, August 31, at 3:00pm Eastern/noon Pacific, part of TCM’s 2013 Summer Under the Stars tribute to Rex Harrison.

This is my entry for the 2013 TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon now in progress and hosted by Jill Blake ofhttp://sittinonabackyardfence.com/ and Michael Nazarewycz of http://scribehardonfilm.wordpress.com/. Visit their sites for more information and links to participating blogs.

Notes: 
My Lunches with Orson by Henry Jaglom and Peter Biskind (Metropolitan Books, 2013) 

Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges adapted by Sandy Sturges (Simon & Schuster, 1990) 
The New York Sun, “Unfaithfully Yours, Rex” by Nicholas Wapshott, March 8, 2008 
Dropped Names, a Memoir by Frank Langella (Harper, 2012) 
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson (Knopf, 2010)

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Tales of Hollywood: The Wild Ride of Preston Sturges

Turner Classic Movies began its salute to Star of the Month Joel McCrea on Wednesday, May 2, with two of his most enjoyable films - and two of the best films from writer/director Preston Sturges: Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story. Sturges was one of Hollywood's brightest lights during the early '40s, writing and directing in quick succession a unique and inspired string of spirited satires: The Great McGinty (1940) for which he won the first Oscar awarded for Best Original Screenplay, Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). His last great gem, the dark, deft Unfaithfully Yours (1948), was made during his fall from grace and was for years overlooked. The world of Preston Sturges was the definition of a "cockeyed caravan"* - onscreen and off...

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Born in Chicago in 1898 and shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Europe as a child by his capricious mother, Sturges served in the Army Air Service toward the end of World War I before making his way to New York in the 1920s. He eventually penned one of Broadway's biggest hits, Strictly Dishonorable, in 1929. The film version, adapted by Gladys Lehman, was released by Universal in 1931. In his memoirs, Sturges recalled his arrival in the dream capital the following year:

In Hollywood I started at the bottom: a bum by the name of Sturgeon who had once written a hit called Strictly Something-or-Other. Carl Laemmle of Universal offered me a contract, with unilateral options exercisable by the studio, to join his team as a writer. My wife had decamped, my fortune was depleted, and even though I was living on coffee and moonlight, my costs of living continued to cost...

Easy Living 1937

Sturges spent his early screenwriting years working in a variety of genres on many films, including The Power and the Glory (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Imitation of Life (1934) and Diamond Jim (1935). He made his name with an adapted screenplay for Easy Living (1937) and an original screenplay for Remember the Night (1940). But he always had multiple irons in the fire and while he grew and prospered as a Hollywood screenwriter, he also invested his time and money in other interests. An inveterate inventor, he launched the Sturges Engineering Company in Los Angeles in 1935, initially building and selling internal combustion machines. In 1936 he helped finance and became a partner in Snyder's Café, a trendy nightspot on Sunset Blvd. (later a location for Wolfgang Puck's Spago). Sturges took great pleasure in playing host at Snyder's and spent most evenings there welcoming guests, buying drinks and singing with cronies around the piano. Neither Sturges nor his partner, Ted Snyder, had a head for business and by the time it closed two years later, the Café was deeply in debt. But Sturges enjoyed the role of restaurateur and had already hatched a plan to open a place of his own.

By the late '30s he was working for Paramount Pictures, where his reputation would soon be made. After the studio renewed his contract at the end of 1937, Sturges spent 1938 toiling over scripts, meeting and marrying his third wife, Louise, and negotiating the purchase of a restaurant site. The coming years would be the most productive of his frenetic life...

One night in 1939 Sturges invited Paramount production chief Bill LeBaron over for dinner and showed him a script he'd been working on for six years. He offered LeBaron a deal. If Paramount would allow Sturges to direct the picture, he would sell the script to the studio for $1. A check in the more generous amount of $10 was cut in August and the picture to be known as The Great McGinty went into production in December. It opened to sensational business the following summer. This advancement from writer to writer/director was precedent-setting and paved the way for every future writer/director from Billy Wilder to Francis Coppola and Woody Allen to the Coen Brothers (the title of their O Brother, Where Art Thou? was appropriated from Sullivan's Travels) and beyond.

Fonda, Sturges, Stanwyck on the set, The Lady Eve

The Mitchell Leisen-directed film of Sturges' screenplay for Remember the Night opened in January 1940 breaking significant box office records, but Sturges was now committed to writing and directing movies. That year he went to work on his next two films, Christmas in July (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941). At the end of the year he signed another contract with Paramount and got the good news that his wife was expecting their first (and his first) child.

Sturges was also deeply engrossed in his new restaurant. When the lease on Snyder's expired in December 1938, he moved furniture, fixtures and equipment to the three-level building he'd purchased at 8225 Sunset Blvd. and began construction on the restaurant/nightclub he would christen The Players. Sturges supervised every facet of the project, from menu planning to designing uniforms, selecting paint and overseeing carpentry. The Players opened quietly in the summer of 1940. It was much larger and, with music and dancing, far more expensive to operate than Snyder's, but Sturges had high hopes.

By the time his son was born in 1941, The Lady Eve was on its way to becoming one of the biggest hits in the history of Paramount, Sturges had two more films in the works and The Players had gained popularity as one of the "smartest places" in Hollywood. According to his wife, Louise, the lure of The Players for Sturges was that it allowed him to "be Grand Pasha after hours - that was the main attraction..." He relished the role of genial supper club proprietor and being at the center of a convivial crowd, dining, drinking and carrying on into the wee hours.

The Players (foreground), Chateau Marmont (right)

The location of The Players, at the top of the Sunset Strip, was ideal for Sturges's purpose, providing a place for movie industry pals to unwind - with him. The fabled Chateau Marmont was perched on the side of the hill directly behind The Players, with only a small lane separating the two. Across Sunset Blvd. was the famed Garden of Allah, the former mansion of silent screen star Alla Nazimova that had been converted into an exotic hotel/apartment complex. Together, the three formed a kind of "Golden Age of Hollywood Triangle" into which many film colony luminaries disappeared.

Chateau Marmont

Chateau Marmont, today a Los Angeles historical/cultural landmark, began life in 1929 as an upscale apartment building. It's fortunes fell with the stock market a few months later and in 1931 the building was sold and turned into a suites hotel. The new owner was Albert E. Smith, co-founder of American Vitagraph (purchased by Warner Bros. in 1925). Smith and his wife furnished the Chateau with pieces found at local estate sales and auctions, giving the hotel what is known as "the Marmont look." Over the years, the Chateau developed a reputation for its discretion in providing guests with maximum privacy. In 1939, Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn famously advised rising stars William Holden and Glenn Ford, "If you must get in trouble, do it at Chateau Marmont." The Chateau's long history is filled with rumors and legends, among them: Clark Gable and Jean Harlow rendezvoused there, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived and wrote there, Vivien Leigh was a guest following her split with Laurence Olivier and covered the walls of her suite with pictures of him, script readings for Rebel Without a Cause were held in one of the hotel bungalows, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward met there...and on and on.

The Garden of Allah, Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

Alla Nazimova built a grand manor (dubbed The Garden of Alla) at 8152 Sunset Blvd. in 1919 when she was an extravagantly well-paid star of the silent screen. In the mid-'20s, as her career faded, she decided to develop the property into a hotel. 25 two-story villas were constructed on the grounds of the 3 1/2 acres surrounding her mansion and in January 1927 The Garden of Allah opened for business. It was an immediate success and was often, like Chateau Marmont, the first place Hollywood's new arrivals called home. The Garden of Allah also boasted a colorful history: Humphrey Bogart lived there first with his third wife Mayo Methot and later with fourth wife Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich had a habit of swimming naked in the pool, Charles Laughton came home for lunch while filming The Hunchback of Notre Dame and stood in the pool careful to keep his face, in full Quasimodo makeup, out of the water. When in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other members of New York's Algonquin "roundtable" lived and partied hard at The Garden of Allah...

Sturges and Lubitsch at The Players

There was never a shortage of famous names and faces in attendance at The Players. Many, like Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Howard Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and the Algonquin set were either staying up the hill at the Chateau or down the street at The Garden of Allah. Good friends of Sturges like William Wyler, Ernst Lubitsch, Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea stopped in - as did friends of friends like Lana Turner (who came to celebrate her birthday as the guest of Howard Hughes). A visiting tourist of the time captured the allure of The Players with a postcard she sent home on which she gushed about dining at "the glamour spot of Hollywood" and sighting both Miriam Hopkins and Boris Karloff while eating "the best raspberry shortcake I ever had."

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini (far right) at The Players

A good part of the enormous income Sturges earned at Paramount was lavished on The Players. The original redesign and reconstruction of the building had been expensive, but out-of-control operating costs along with constant renovations and additions prevented The Players from ever breaking even. In fact, it was such a drain on his finances that Barbara Stanwyck warned Sturges, "That goddamned greasy spoon is ruining you!"  The Players reached its zenith during the war years, with restaurants operating on all three levels and a barbershop on the mezzanine. A dinner theater/dance floor featuring a hydraulic revolving stage was installed and eventually even a hamburger stand was added. And there was the long-standing rumor that Sturges had gone to the trouble of building a tunnel beneath Marmont Lane connecting The Players to the Chateau so celebrities could  slip away discreetly - for clandestine affairs or simply to avoid the press and/or the police.

Filming Hail the Conquering Hero, a smash hit of 1944

Paramount Pictures ended its increasingly contentious relationship with Preston Sturges as 1943 came to a close.  Two of his most successful films, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, were yet to be released but the studio had concluded that its brilliant but headstrong writer/director was more trouble than he was worth. Sturges optimistically and against all advice went on to form California Pictures with Howard Hughes. Following the collapse of that disastrous partnership, Sturges wrote and directed the last of his great films, Unfaithfully Yours, in 1948 for Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox; it was unsuccessful. Sturges later looked back on his years in the movie business with some irony:

The only amazing thing about my career in Hollywood is that I ever had one at all.

Edwin Gillette, assistant to Sturges from 1937 - 1942, recalled that his boss loved to "play around" and "be the great raconteur, but he had to work to get the money to enjoy himself." With or without the money, Sturges was a profligate spender. His engineering company was sold after the war with proceeds going to the IRS. He was able to hold onto The Players until 1953 when the government put a lien on its income, auctioned off its contents and finally sold it to cover taxes and debts. Sturges lived six more years and died just before his 61st birthday while working on his memoirs at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Coincidentally, two months earlier The Garden of Allah in Hollywood had been demolished.

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels

But the site that housed The Players lived on, going through several incarnations in the decades that followed. Beginning in 1953 it was Imperial Gardens, a huge Japanese restaurant with reflecting pools on the upper floors, popular with musicians and actors. Next, in 1989, it re-emerged as The Roxbury, a trendy and notorious nightclub where patrons included Tom Cruise, Prince and Eddie Murphy. In 1997 it changed hands again and became Miyagi, a restaurant/nightclub with 7 sushi bars, 5 regular bars, a Zen garden, a waterfall, a dance floor, pool tables and more. In April 2012, it opened as Pink Taco, part of a Mexican restaurant chain owned by 30-year-old Harry Morton, son of Hard Rock Cafe chain founder Peter Morton and grandson of Arnie Morton, founder of the Morton's restaurant chain.

During the renovation of the property, restaurateur Morton managed to dig deep enough to find not only the revolving stage beneath Sturges' dance floor, but also the entrance to The Players' "legendary VIP tryst tunnel" to Chateau Marmont - apparently sealed off by the city long ago. According to Morton, he dug through layer upon layer of debris, "But when I stripped it all down, incredible things came to light."

Preston Sturges in front of The Players

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* "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan." - John L. "Sully" Sullivan (Joel McCrea), Sullivan's Travels

Sources: Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, Simon & Schuster (1990), Madcap by Donald Spoto, Little, Brown & Co. (1990), Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey, Alfred A. Knopf (1987)

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