Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Chapter 12. The Last Picture Shows

CHAPTER 12 201 By the early 1950s, Claudette had reached that stage in her career when she was expected to weave that old black magic and turn dross into silk; or as Ezra Pound put it, acorns into lilies. The magic was intact, but the scripts that came her way only allowed her to play a version of what she once had been. There was still the signature hairdo, the vitality, and the age-defying appearance. Even if you knew her birth date, you would ignore chronology and marvel at a face that never seemed to have undergone cosmetic surgery , although she did admit to “a tiny face lift” to make it less obvious that she had a short neck. Whatever the surgeon accomplished was not enough for Claudette, who continued to fret about her neck, which, like the right side of her face, was more apparent to herself than to the public. It was one thing if financial security were Claudette’s main reason for continuing in a business that bore little resemblance to the one in which she had started; but it wasn’t. There was television, on which she began appearing in the early 1950s, and the stage, to which she returned around the same time. But she was still a movie star and had every intention of remaining one until she was no longer in demand, or until she felt that what she was being The Last Picture Shows offered was unworthy of her. She was scheduled to appear in RKO’s One Minute to Zero (1952), but a bout of pneumonia resulted in her being replaced by Ann Blyth, which meant that the part had to be rewritten for an actress twenty-five years younger than Claudette. Actresses from Hollywood’s golden age, which has been variously dated (the mid 1920s to the early 1960s being the least arguable), arrived at a point (somewhere in their early or mid forties) where one role would always be available to them: the imperiled heroine. Age did not matter. Ethel Barrymore played one in Kind Lady (1951) when she was in her early seventies. It was also an attention-getting kind of role. At forty, Barbara Stanwyck received an Oscar nomination for her performance in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) as a bedridden psychosomatic who overhears a conversation about a planned murder and gradually figures out that she is the victim. That same year, Claudette appeared in Sleep, My Love, playing a wife systematically driven mad by a husband who hopes to inherit her fortune so he can marry his mistress . Later, Loretta Young encountered her share of peril in Cause for Alarm (1951); Joan Crawford was terrorized by a vindictive playwright in Sudden Fear (1952); Ida Lupino, who could intimidate as well as be intimidated, traveled the panic route in Woman in Hiding (1949) and Beware, My Lovely (1952). Stanwyck reprised her terrorized heroine in Jeopardy (1953) and Witness to Murder (1954). Bette Davis had too formidable a persona for such roles; instead, she terrorized her rival, Joan Crawford, in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Fortunately, Claudette never had to play a grotesque, as Davis did in Baby Jane, yet she made two victimized women films, Sleep, My Love and The Secret Fury. Both provided her with excellent parts and generated their share of suspense; however, like most movies of this sort, they are best enjoyed for the moment, since they cannot withstand analysis—The Secret Fury, especially. It was inevitable that Claudette, now pushing fifty (but still looking in her early thirties), would bid adieu to romantic comedy. Irene Dunne and Loretta Young had already done so in It Grows on Trees (1952) and It Happens 202 THE LAST PICTURE SHOWS Every Thursday (1953), respectively. With Carole Lombard’s death in 1942 and Jean Arthur’s retirement from the screen until she came back one last time in a beautifully acted but totally uncharacteristic role in Shane (1953), Claudette was the surviving queen of romantic comedy, provided it was a comedy in which she could play a character close to her age—not just a mother but a recent, and gorgeous, grandmother. Since there were still moviegoers who remembered when Claudette started in pictures, there was no point in her appearing as either a career woman or a compliant wife. In Let’s Make It Legal (Fox, 1951), a comedy of remarriage, she was...