Part 23

God bless you, most darling Darling. Be gentle with yourself. Allow yourself happiness. There is no paying life in advance for what it will do to you. It asks of one’s unarmored heart, and one must give it. There is no other way.... When you find happiness, take it. Don’t question it too much.

Goodbye, my Clark. I love you as I always shall.

You may wonder why I am using this. Millicent gave me a copy of this letter to read and asked if I thought she should send it to Clark. I said: “By all means.” She never heard from him again, but I think it is one of the most beautiful love letters I have ever read.

Millicent Rogers found nobody else, never married again. Clark, on the other hand, got as far as proposing to another woman, Dolly O’Brien, which was rare with him. Julius Fleischmann, with his yeast fortune, stayed in love with his wife Dolly after she fell into the deep end for handsome, polo-playing Jay O’Brien. When he agreed to a divorce, he settled $6,000,000 on her. “I want you to be comfortable,” he said. One year later Julius fell from his pony and died on the polo field, leaving an estate of $66,000,000, which could have been the former Mrs. Fleischmann’s if she hadn’t been in such a hurry.

Dolly, blond, blue-eyed, and full of fun, lived in style. She wouldn’t go on a train without taking along her own bottled water, silk sheets, and bedding. She was a lot like Carole Lombard, and Clark was searching for another Carole. When Dolly met him a few years after Jay’s death, he thought he’d found the woman he wanted as his wife. But Dolly turned him down. “We live in two different worlds,” she told him. “You’re a rich actor, I’m a rich woman. You like the outdoors, hunting and fishing, but I’m a luxury-loving baby. Your life, frankly, would bore me to death.”

The aging male enjoys a far better time than the average aging female. If he’s a big enough star, the producers throw him into picture after picture playing opposite girls young enough to be his daughters. Coop, Gable, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne--they all were pitched into these June-and-December screen romances, and the public finally rebelled. But Duke Wayne was the first with sense enough to cry halt and insist on

## acting his age.

Too often the wives of both stars and producers haven’t enough to do to keep them content and out of mischief. Their husbands go to the studio and spend their day working with beautiful girls. The girls, wanting better parts in pictures, will do virtually anything they can to please them. Reality and normal values got lost. The men live with both feet off the ground. They can have any girl they try for, as easy as plucking a peach off a tree.

When they arrive home, they often find waiting a wife who can’t compare with the studio girls in looks. She may be complaining--I’ve heard it a thousand times--that she’s been stuck at home with only the children and servants for company. “Why don’t you take me out more? Why didn’t you tell me there was a party last night? Why do you have to work so late so often?”

It can get irksome. I am certain one reason for the flight of movie making from Hollywood to Europe has been the pressing desire for producers, writers, directors, and top-money stars to escape from nagging wives. The wives, if they’re lucky, may be given a week or so in Paris or Rome or London in the course of production. Then back they go to the house and the children while the husbands live it up for months on end. It’s a pattern that has set Hollywood on its ear. And it’s crowded our divorce courts.

Louis B. Mayer married his first wife, Margaret Shenberg, daughter of a Boston synagogue cantor, when he was nineteen and earning a meager living as a scrap-metal dealer. He worked like a stevedore, breaking into the entertainment business with a nickelodeon in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Margaret served behind the wicket selling tickets.

Then he got into the production end of movies. He dealt now not in old iron but glamour. He was the boss of gorgeous girls, the kind he could only have dreamed about before. Margaret stayed home, the _Hausfrau_, unable to keep pace with him. This was a Jewish family with strong ties of faith and custom, and Louis waited a long time before he flew the coop. But the outcome was inevitable.

Once in New York, before the final break came, he asked me, since I wore smart clothes and was on his payroll, to take Margaret out and make sure she bought some decent clothes. We shopped all day, while she tried on dress after dress, always finding some fault, usually the size of the price tag. When we’d finished, she had just one package to show for our pains: a new girdle, which I insisted upon.

She tried her best to hold him, but it was a million miles from being good enough. She fell ill, and he put her into a sanitarium, but she refused to stay. “This has come on me because I dieted,” she told me. “Louis likes slim girls, and it’s left me like this.” She took a suite in a New York hotel, with a sitting room overlooking Central Park. Her behavior there grew more and more erratic. Her memory wandered. She’d start a sentence, then break off and go on to something else.

After a year she moved back to Hollywood, into an apartment daughter Edie found for her. Louis wasn’t living with her by this time. He had other social interests. One was a singer. Another was a woman with a child for whom he bought a house in Westwood. Yet another was a lovely chorus girl who hitchhiked from Texas and joined the Ziegfeld Follies.

Louis fell hard for her. His courtship coincided with her romance with a big agent, though Mayer didn’t know about that at first. His suspicions were aroused shortly before he was due to leave on a trip to Europe, where she was to join him in Paris. Before he left he put a detective on her trail. The private eye’s sealed report crossed the Atlantic ahead of the girl, but Louis restrained himself from opening the envelope until the next morning after she had joined him. The battle royal that broke out then exploded Louis’ plans to marry her, so she married the agent.

Mayer’s revenge was to bar the bridegroom from MGM and persuade some of his pals at other studios to follow suit. The bridegroom had a hard time of it for quite a few years. Then Louis met Lorena Danker, an ex-dancer thirty years younger than he was and the widow of an account executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He had already divorced Margaret, which cleared the way for Mrs. Danker to become the second Mrs. Louis B. Mayer. Now she’s Mrs. Michael Nidorf. After she married Mayer, he adopted the daughter she’d borne Danny Danker; Louis left her half a million dollars in his will.

Other producers and big shots habitually took their cue from Louis, who carried a lot of weight in our town. He was the emperor who set the social pattern. So long as he stuck by Margaret Mayer, they stuck by their wives, too. But Louis’ divorce, after forty years of marriage, let them loose. In the next few months there were more top-level divorces than there’d been for years before.

Divorce has made sensational headlines and spicy dinner-table gossip from the days when a former Denver bellhop catapulted into fame with a sword in his hand and dagger in his teeth as Douglas Fairbanks. His first wife, Beth, was the daughter of Daniel Sully, otherwise known as the Cotton King of Wall Street. As a wedding present, her father gave her a beautiful string of pearls, which kept the Fairbankses going year after year, when Doug was a struggling Broadway actor.

When the larder was bare, she’d pawn the pearls and redeem them again as soon as Doug got into another play. Those pearls also paid for many a trip to Europe. The Fairbankses lived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, which bulged with actors, from Jade Barrymore to John Drew. Included among the residents was Hedda Hopper with the only husband she ever had. In the lobby I used to stop to chat with a little boy with a frightened manner, kept forever under the wing of his mother or his nurse--Douglas, Jr., whom his father had determined should never get into show business.

Beth found the Hoppers their first Hollywood house when we followed the Fairbankses out to that never-never-land where it seemed that the rainbow had finally come to earth and deposited a crock of gold for everybody. Some years after that a brisk little blonde named Mary Pickford got herself a bungalow in a Beverly Hills canyon. Doug, Sr., was a gentleman caller. Beth and I used to walk past the place, but she didn’t know who was inside. I did. One day my heart turned somersaults when she peered through a window. She saw nothing amiss. But after that I steered our walks in a different direction. Beth was ever unsuspecting about sex. Her own blood ran cool. She claimed Doug spent too much time practicing handsprings and jumping over barns to be an effective lover.

They argued for months over the divorce he wanted. He was willing to pay her a quarter of his earnings for life as alimony. She demanded every nickel he earned. The sad climax came in a suite in New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In my presence she turned on him in a fury. “Get out, you Jew!” she said.

Doug’s face was a mask. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” I exclaimed. “You’re out of your mind.”

“I do, and he knows it. He’s a Jew.”

He said not a word and dragged himself from the room. He couldn’t argue about his background. His father’s name was Ulman. Doug’s mother was married five times, and had children by other husbands, one of whom was named Fairbanks. Beth knew all about it. It had been a secret, wry joke to her that, through her father’s contacts, she had been able to make her husband a member of New York’s best men’s clubs, where anti-Semitism was an article of faith. She collected her money from Doug--$650,000 in cash and securities that his brother and business manager, John Fairbanks, carried in a suitcase from Los Angeles to New York.

Young Doug adored his father, but stayed with his mother after the breakup. He didn’t emerge as a man until he married Joan Crawford. An experienced woman can teach a lot to a youngster like Douglas, Jr. He learned much about women and the world from Joan, though she wasn’t accepted by her in-laws until Lord and Lady Mountbatten, honeymooning at Pickfair, asked if they could meet her. The first time she set foot inside the front door was the night she was invited to a ball to meet Dickie Mountbatten and his bride.

The senior Fairbankses drifted apart after Mary Pickford made _My Best Girl_ with Buddy Rogers. In London, Doug got to know Lady Sylvia Ashley very well, but he had little thought of marrying her. He made a special trip home to try to patch things up with Mary. But she insisted that he beg for a reconciliation, and he was too proud to beg for anything. He decided to sail back to England. For seven hours on the eve of his sailing Mary tried to reach him by telephone to tell him she was ready to save their marriage. But she missed him. She was too late. Sylvia was married on the rebound to Doug, who by the merest coincidence chanced to be a millionaire.

There was nobody quite like Doug. He loved everyone, and that sun-tanned charm of his made everyone love him. He would rather leap over the moon than go to the greatest party in the world, though he started drinking his way through the nonstop round of parties and night clubbing to which Sylvia introduced him. Vanity was one weakness of his. When the two daughters of his brother, John, who was born Fairbanks, wanted to go into pictures, Doug warned them: “You’ll have to change your names, you know; there can only be one Fairbanks.”

He had a handsome head on his shoulders, but it was no head for figures. I’m reminded of that every time I look out of my office window at a towering gas storage tank a dozen blocks away that looms over the old United Artists studio which Doug, Mary, and Charles Chaplin built in 1918. Doug or any of them could have bought it then for $50,000 and demolished it. But they saved their money--and it cost their company at least $3,000,000 over the years to shoot around it to avoid having the tank show up in every movie United Artists made. After many lawsuits the studio is now owned by Sam Goldwyn. It nets Frances and Sam a mighty juicy yearly income. The three stars who created it receive nothing.

Sylvia’s best friend and next-door neighbor in Santa Monica was Norma Shearer, who decided one day to give the Fairbankses a party, inviting Doug’s closest friends. At 7 P.M. that evening Sylvia telephoned Norma: “I’m terribly sorry but we can’t come. Douglas was taken ill this afternoon, and he’s much worse now.”

Their two place cards had been removed from the table when the other guests sat down to dine at nine o’clock. During the first course her butler whispered a message to Norma. She turned pale for a moment, but the dinner went on into dancing, some party games, and all kinds of fun until things broke up at 3 A.M. By that time Douglas Fairbanks had been dead five and a half hours. Later I asked Norma: “How could you do it? Your guests were Doug’s best friends.”

She answered: “What could I do? I couldn’t say anything. It would have spoiled the party.”

Not all Doug’s money was left to Sylvia. Douglas, Jr., was more than comfortably off when he married Mary Lee Epling, divorced wife of financier Huntington Hartford. They live in old-world style in a small London town house with their three daughters. Douglas, Jr., does not stray from the hearthstone. They are extremely social, with British and European royalty and ambassadors of all nations, including one of our own, Winthrop Aldrich, who had a penchant at parties for pinching old ladies in the Latin fashion. They absolutely adored it--no one had paid them such attention for years.

Hollywood has all the excuses you find anywhere for divorce--boredom, egotism, emotional immaturity, and the rest. It also has some special reasons of its own--press agents who can get bigger headlines with a scandal than with a happy home life; producers who resent a husband or wife “interfering” in a star’s business; managers who stop at nothing to hold onto their percentages. Elsewhere in the world, children are usually a bond that holds parents through many a squabble. But that’s not always the case in the Empire of Guff, which was one of Gene Fowler’s labels for us.

This is a hard, rocky place for a child to grow up in. Some of them don’t know who their fathers really are because they’ve had so many in the family. They’re brought up by nurses, cooks, and chauffeurs instead of parents because mother and father are too busy to give them any time. All the children can be spared is money, which is a stone to suck on when a child needs love.

Eddie Robinson, Jr., was spoiled. His mother, Gladys--the first Mrs. Robinson, Sr.--was never allowed by her husband to lay a hand on the boy. At thirteen he “borrowed” other people’s cars without asking. He has been in one automobile accident after another. Now he has a wife and child, whom Gladys helps support. Edward G. Robinson couldn’t be accused of being stingy toward his son, however, since he continued to make Junior an allowance of $1000 a month.

Dixie Lee Crosby brought up her four sons strictly but well. Bing somehow found other things he had to do, so the children didn’t see a lot of their father. Dixie had problems in her pregnancies, when she virtually was forced on to brandy to survive. She had to stay home, sick, when Bing sailed off to Paris at the time Queen Elizabeth was crowned, taking Lindsay with him and having a gay old time. The boy went to London to see the coronation and stayed with the Alan Ladd family at the Dorchester. Bing was having too much fun in Paris to leave. Lindsay was the youngest and sweetest of the four sons. Like Gary, Philip, and Dennis, he started whooping it up the minute Dixie’s restraint was lifted.

Henry Ginsberg for a while attempted to be a kind of foster father to the Crosby boys, inviting them to use his apartment as a second home while Bing was courting Kathy Grant. Finally Henry got tired of their drinking and other night-owl habits which brought them to his door at two and three o’clock in the morning. “I like you, but I can’t put up with it any longer,” he said, and the door was closed to them.

I have seen the frightening looks given to her mother, Lana Turner, by Cheryl Crane, who was found guilty of stabbing Lana’s good friend, the hoodlum muscle man, Johnny Stompanato. I’ve argued with Joan Crawford after she told the oldest girl of her four adopted children that she had to leave home. “This at a time when she needs love and protection most?”

“She’s a wild girl with no respect for anything,” snapped Joan.

I know one young girl, the daughter of one of our most married stars, who fell madly in love with her mother’s fourth husband and made up her mind to steal him away by hook or crook. She went to her mother and said: “He tried to make love to me.”

This was a lie, but the woman believed her daughter. “Get out of my house!” she raged at her husband. “How dare you do such a vile thing?”

“Did she tell you that?” he said, appalled. “Are you willing to take her word against mine? You remember how old she is, don’t you? She’s fourteen.”

“I believe her.”

“Then I’ll go. But I’ll tell you this--you’re going to have more sorrow through that girl than you’ve believed possible in this world. You’ll see.” He proved to be an accurate prophet.

Divorce is often an inherited affliction, passed on from mother to daughter, father to son, like hemophilia among the Hapsburgs. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Doris Day, and a dozen more came from broken homes. Their own chances of success as wives may well have been blighted. The children of Hollywood’s broken marriages inherit a tradition of trouble. As an example, take a look at the Fonda family tree.

I used to wonder how Henry Fonda could so much as cut his meat when he sat at the table next to mine when we were fellow passengers aboard the boat sailing from Southampton to New York. His table mate was Mrs. Frances Seymour Brokaw, whom he’d met in London, and she was so stuck on him that I doubt she let go of his hands for more than five minutes at a time all the way across the Atlantic.

Hank had already tried marriage once, and so had she. Mr. Brokaw had been the husband of Clare Boothe before she married Henry Luce, the founder of _Time_ and _Life_. Hank had been the husband for two years of Margaret Sullavan.

Frances Brokaw was the second Mrs. Fonda--the knot was tied in 1936--and the mother of two children: Jane, born in 1937; and Peter, who arrived in 1940.

There is a darker inheritance than divorce. As man and wife, the Fondas were seemingly happy for years. But Frances was increasingly possessive, and though no divorce suit ever was filed, Hank wanted his freedom to marry Susan Blanchard. In April 1950, Frances took her life in a Beacon, New York, sanitarium, after cutting Hank completely out of her $500,000 will.

The first Mrs. Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, went on to three other marriages; to director William Wyler in 1934; to producer Leland Hayward in 1936, to whom she bore three children, Brooke, Bridget, and Bill; to financier Kenneth Wagg, who had four children already. Margaret’s life ended in tragedy, too. She was depressed by an ever-increasing deafness, which had crept up on her unnoticed at first. We discussed it together. I spoke about possible treatments, but she dismissed them. “I’ve discovered it too late,” she said.

Then she was set for a New Haven opening of a play which she was tackling after a long absence from the stage and which she didn’t much care for. Her death from sleeping pills was called suicide and blamed on the fact that she didn’t want to open, while Equity rules insisted that she should. Cathleen Nesbitt, who had helped her in the part, could not accept that verdict. “I am as sure as I sit here,” she told me later, “that it was an accident for Maggie.”

But there was no doubt that the second daughter, Bridget, whom Margaret bore Leland Hayward, died of her own choice.

In December 1950, Henry Fonda took his third wife, Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II and mother of Hank’s third child, Amy. The divorce came five years later. In 1957 he married for the fourth time. We see very little of his wife, the former Baroness Afdera Franchetti. She doesn’t particularly care for Hollywood.

One more bit of tragedy hovers over Hank. His best part in years was in _Mr. Roberts_, whose author, Thomas Heggen, he knew and liked. Thomas Heggen decided life was not worth living, too, after the play was a great success.

What her family means to Jane Fonda, only she could tell. She saw very little of her mother, was brought up by her grandmother, whom she adored. Jane went to the Actors’ Studio to study, tackled her own movie career like a she-wolf. She claimed, understandably perhaps, that marriage had no part in her plans. She could manage very well, she told me, without love in her life. When I wrote a column about her, her father telephoned. “I have no control over my daughter,” he said. “But when the right fellow comes along, she’ll marry him. She’s a very smart girl and likes to make headlines.”

One smart girl used to bring documents to me from the J. Walter Thompson agency in Los Angeles not long ago. I hadn’t heard her name until she said: “I don’t think you know it, but I’m John Gilbert’s daughter. I didn’t know my father--he died before I could remember him.”