Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell

Chapter 10: Mother Mame

CHAPTER 10 Mother Mame 213 Ten years after her film debut, Rosalind—then the screen’s definitive career woman—took on her first mother role. The film was Roughly Speaking (1945), in which her character was a combination mother-entrepreneur, who went from one business to another and managed to raise five children at the same time, all of whom became patriotic Americans. Roughly Speaking prefigured the kind of mothers Rosalind would later portray: women whose children were their careers. Actually, Rosalind was at her most maternal in two films that had nothing to do with motherhood: Sister Kenny, in which she treated the polio patients as if they were her own children, and Auntie Mame (the movie only), where she behaved more like Patrick’s mother than his aunt. While Auntie Mame may prove to be her most popular film (or at least the one with which she is identified), it also limited her, just as playing Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) limited Anthony Perkins. Audiences seemed to want more of Mame—but Mame the madcap, not Mame the mentor. The problem was the roles, which came increasingly from the theater. Except for the two Angels films, The Trouble with Angels (1966) and Where Angels Go . . . Trouble Follows (1968), all of Rosalind’s 1960s films derived from the theater, suggesting that, until she could return to Broadway, stage adaptations would have to suffice. After Auntie Mame, Rosalind played a succession of mothers in film versions of three successful Broadway plays, A Majority of One, Five Finger Exercise, and Gypsy; one off-Broadway hit, Oh, Dad, Poor, Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad; and one Broadway failure, A Very Rich Woman, retitled Rosie! for the screen. These were roles created by actresses with totally different performance styles, none of which matched Rosalind’s: Gertrude Berg, radio and television’s Molly Goldberg (Majority); Jessica Tandy, the original Blanche du Bois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Five Finger Exercise); Ethel Merman, whose voice conductor Arturo Toscanini compared to a musical instrument (Gypsy); Jo van Fleet, who could combine Method acting with bravura when necessary (Oh, Dad); and Ruth Gordon (Rich Woman), the loveable eccentric who, in her prime, had even done Chekhov’s The Three Sisters with Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson in a production now considered legendary. Although A Majority of One was released first, the movie version of Five Finger Exercise, Peter Shaffer’s psychological drama about a German tutor’s effect on a British family, had been planned as a vehicle for Rosalind shortly after the play opened on Broadway in December 1959. That the play enjoyed a run of 337 performances was something of an achievement for a five-character chamber drama, in which a four-member household, whose emotional needs are hidden behind a decorous facade, is augmented by a newcomer—a tutor, who becomes their pet, confidant, and, finally, scapegoat . Although Frederick co-produced the play on Broadway in conjunction with the Playwrights’ Company, the film version was made through an arrangement between his own production company, Sonnis, and Columbia Pictures, which distributed it. The film might have replicated the original’s contrapuntal structure, had the characters not been Americanized. The names were retained, except for the son’s, and the plot remained relatively intact. However, the tension that mounted steadily on the stage, as the tutor’s presence caused each family member to confront his or her private self, dissipated on the screen, with domestic wrangling and posturing replacing Shaffer’s calibrated cycle of confession and betrayal. Equally damaging was the change of setting—from Suffolk, England, to Carmel, California, where Stanley and Louise Harrington, a self-made 214 MOTHER MAME furniture manufacturer (Jack Hawkins) and his culture maven wife (Rosalind), have taken a summer place that looks more like a mansion than the usual rental. Determined to enroll Pamela, their teenage daughter, in a private school, Louise hires a German tutor, Walter Langer (Maximillian Schell), to give her French lessons. (Why the tutor refuses to teach his native language is one of several revelations.) In Walter, Louise finds relief from her husband’s provincialism; in Louise, Walter discovers a maternalism he has never known, unaware that the warmth she dispenses so freely turns to coldness when she is challenged. Walter’s intimation that her son, Phillip...