Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Preface

xiii A film actor’s life is a palimpsest; beneath the porous parchment of facts and dates arranged sequentially or causally—the stuff of obituaries and testimonials —lies another text, a visual one. This is the actor’s true life, his or her creative life, which, finally, is the only life. The facts add up to a chronology; the films, to a legacy. And if the actor has been able to acquire a screen image or persona that is so striking or distinctive that audiences speak of an “Actor X film” or an “Actor X performance,” the actor has achieved the status of icon. Claudette Colbert is such an actor. She began in the theatre, making her Broadway debut in 1923 when she was twenty—a high school graduate with limited stage experience who felt no need to enroll in drama school or work in a stock company. By 1929, she had developed a theatrical style such that a New York Times drama critic described another actress as performing in “the Claudette Colbert manner,” probably meaning that she displayed an irresistible zest for living and a natural ebullience that flowed across the footlights, gladdening hearts and making confirmed pessimists feel better about the world, if only temporarily. If Claudette had worked primarily on the stage, with a few forays into pictures, she would have vied with Broadway’s leading exponent of sophisticated comedy, Ina Claire, who was, initially, her idol. But Claudette left Broadway for Hollywood and returned a quarter of a century after making her talking picture debut in 1929. Her stage magic was intact, and if the plays were not exactly classics, she gave them the semblance of high art. And, for a few hours, you believed they were. As one who saw Claudette in four New York productions, I can vouch for the effervescence and radiance that she exhibited on the stage, which PREFACE found their way into her films, without losing much in transition. Certainly, there was no loss of spontaneity. Study her performance in a comedy classic like Midnight or The Palm Beach Story, and the action seems to be evolving with the same momentum that one finds on the stage. Even with the cuts, fades, and dissolves, her best films have always seemed like plays. Because she also did live television drama, visitors at the Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, with locations in New York and Beverly Hills, can observe the way she approached stage acting, which, frankly, is not that different from the way she approached film. She could easily adapt to the small screen, scaling down what she did on the big screen, just as she modified her stage technique, and eventually her stage makeup, for the movies. Claudette never seemed to be acting. If, as the philosopher Heraclitus believed, there is unity in diversity, the same principle applies to an actor’s gallery of characters. Claudette’s characters are emanations of her persona, so that they all seem different yet similar, in the way that members of a large family are all individuals but with similar characteristics and family resemblances. I have seen all but two of Claudette’s sixty-four (sixty-five, if one includes the French version of Slightly Scarlet, L’enigmatique Monsieur Parkes [1930]) films: her first and only silent, For the Love of Mike (1927) and The Wiser Sex (1932). Because so many of them are unfamiliar, I discuss their plots in greater detail than I would if they were better known. But they are important because they reveal the way Paramount, her home studio for fifteen years, perceived her. She ran the gamut from minx and voluptuary at one end to sufferer and sophisticate at the other; in between were the working professional, lady with a past, gold digger, and careerist. Each character was different, yet each was Claudette. When she played Cleopatra, the queen seemed to be residing either on New York’s Upper East Side or in Beverly Hills. Always Claudette, but always the character. Yet when she had a chance to play against type, as she did in Since You Went Away and Three Came Home, she was strikingly real. There was no persona, just the xiv PREFACE person because the characters—a wife and mother struggling to manage while her husband is away at war, another wife and mother in a Japanese...