George Cukor: A Double Life

Chapter Six

C H A P T E R S I X he filming of Camille was clouded by two events: the deaths of Cukor's mother and Irving Thalberg. Helen Gross Cukor succumbed after complications that arose from surgery for stomach cancer in June of 1936. Her decline was swift, and Cukor was devastated by the loss. He telephoned Stella Bloch on the day of his mother's death and asked to go over and visit with her. Cukor arrived alone and stayed for several hours, unusually subdued. "For him to call up and ask to come over, by himself, without his entourage," said Stella Bloch, "indicated to me how deeply grieved he was by his mother's death." His love for his mother could never be matched by his feelings for anyone else. Ironically, his life was filled with women-—actresses and others—whom he doted on, telephoned daily, and helped out financially or otherwise. Because of his mother, perhaps, he was quite capable of love for women—not of physical love but profound caring and compassion. Whereas she spoiled him for men, whom he seemed only to like. Somehow Cukor would recycle everything, even his mother's death, into work. He liked to say that some part of himself was always acting the director—observing, storing away information and detail that he would put to use as grist for scenes in films. "I use 129 t everything" he would say. "My mind is always taking notes." Many times, he told interviewers the story of how, the last time he visited his mother on her deathbed, she looked at him and whimpered pathetically, something he had never seen her do. Then she turned her head toward the wall, as if willing herself to die and to spare her son any more anguish. It so happened that the scene of Marguerite's death was being filmed shortly after his mother's, and thus the director was shunted from the real to the imagined tragedy. Directing that climactic scene, Cukor liked to tell interviewers, he was overwhelmed with the memory of his last visit with his mother. Somehow he managed to transmit the gist of that experience to Garbo—though in actuality he uttered no words to the actress—so that in the film Marguerite, too, sighed in agony and turned her dying face to the wall.* How could Cukor communicate such a thing without speaking? If this marvelous directorial anecdote seems a little too perfect, it is. A close watching of the film reveals that what Cukor remembered taking place on the set does not, in fact, occur on the screen. It occurred primarily in the director's imagination, so completely did he associate the character of the 'dying Marguerite with his stricken mother. So completely did the self identify with the work. Irving Thalberg died, also, three months before the end of production —on September 14, 1936. He was the same age as Cukor, thirtyseven . Though the MGM producer was spoken of in his own lifetime as sickly and doomed, his passing, from "lobular pneumonia complicated by a cardiac condition," in the words of Variety, seemed nonetheless sudden and shocking. His death proved a hammer blow to Cukor, which would alter the director's future, a death every bit as significant and unfortunate, on a professional level, as his mother's was on a personal one. Only Selznick and Thalberg, at MGM, had a complex appreciation for Cukor's talent. "He [Cukor] had that taste that, aside from Thalberg, nobody at [MGM] understood," said Anita Loos. "And after Thalberg died, I think Cukor was more or less thrown to the wolves." *"My mother had just died, and I had been there during her last conscious moments ," said Cukor in one published interview, "and I suppose I had a special awareness . I may have passed something on to Garbo, almost without realizing it. You don't tell her how to say Tm strong,' but somehow you find yourself creating a climate in which she can say it that way." 130 A staff producer named Bernard Hyman was assigned to watchdog the production of Camille, and he showed up on the set, along with his then-assistant Gottfried Reinhardt. Hyman became the first of many MGM staff producers to come to a standoff with Cukor. One of Mayer's loyalists, Hyman was convinced that Cukor was slow and expensive, and...