Irene Dunne - a Famous Actress Who Didn't Look Back

She believes in politeness and God and hard work and the American dream and never demanding something for nothing; and tea is served in the library with fragile cookies. She is a lady of quality - as anachronistic perhaps as the leather-bound volumes of The Waverly Novels that line the shelves of the French chateau she built herself and in which she has lived for 34 of her 39 years in Hollywood.

 

Irene Dunne is also the onyl movie actress besides Greta Garbo who left stardom behind at the time of her own choosing; who turned away - never once looking back - before the laurel wilted and fame turned to grotesquerie.

 

It was, in part, a personal fastidiousness that made her choose to walk away before stardom became a series of "third leads and comebacks." it is almost impossible from this distance to remember how big a star she actually was in the decade between 1935 and 1945. "Roberta" and "The Magnificent Obsession" in 1935 made her a star. In less than a dozen years she held the record for the most movies to play at the Radio City Music Hall. (Playing the Music Hall was the hallmark of excellence to a more innocent and naive Hollywood.)

 

Even at this distance the names of her movies are not strange. "Show Boat," "Theodora Goes Wild," "The Awful Truth," "Love Affair," "My Favorite Wife," "The White Cliffs of Dover," "Anna and the King of Siam." Funny movies, unabashedly romantic movies, outrageously sentimental movies directed by Leo McCarey or George Stevens and costarring Cary Grant or Charles Boyer or Spencer Tracy; movies that should seem indigestible to a generation barely born when she departed from the screen nearly 20 years ago. And yet 2,000 people were turned away from a screening of "Roberta" on the first night of the just-ended County Museum of Art retrospective of her films.

 

She is touched by the tribute at the Museum. And a little bewildered. Her voice breaks in that odd, well-remembered way. "Really? Two thousand people. Oh my. Really?"

She is wearing a powder blue pantsuit and there is a pale blue scarf at her throat and a blue sapphire ring on her finger. Her age seems indeterminate. 

She looks a movie star still, chin high, delicate bones not blurred by extra pounds of flesh. During her first years in Hollywood, her birthdate was given as 1901. Later, it moved to backwards to 1904. It is a measure of the womant that the question is choked back half a dozen times, as though to ask her age would be to break the delicacy of the room as obscenely as to smash the bowl of huge white dahlias of the Dresden shepherdess.

 

Curled on a couch in front of a gas fire (although the Southern California mornings are not yet sunshineless), she seems years younger than remembered as aging Queen Victoria in "The Mudlark" in 1950.

What has she done with the last 20 years?

"When her husband got sick, she just stayed home with him," says one friend. "She sat there in the house with him hour after hour, day after day, year after year."

Her husband, Dr. Francis Griffin, died five years ago. "Five years ago yesterday," she says. "Last night we had a Mass said for him. I was so joyous I still can't believe it. For the first time there was no sorrow, no pain."

She goes to the afternoon Mass at a little chapel in Westwood as often as possible. "I go if I want a perfect day. But, oh dear, when I say that, people will think I'm a fanatic. 'Irene Dunne, she's in church all day.' A Mass takes 25 minutes and it's no sacrifice for me to give that much time to say, 'Praise you, my Lord.' I'm just grateful that I'm well enough to go."

She has reached an age where good health is a gift, not an expectation. "My father died in his early 40s, of a kidney infection. My mother was out looking at Christmas decorations and she had a stroke. She was 60 years old and in perfect health and she was dead before morning. So you see I don't come from a very long-lived family."

 

On weekends she is custodian  for her long-haired, 12-years-old grandson. The rest of the week she lives quietly, with only a servant of two, in the immense house that she and her husband built in 1936. "It's much too big for me now. On the anniversary of his death, I thought, 'I'm still in this house. I must be out of my mind.' And yet... " The thought of moving after 34 years is too overwhelming, and she puts it aside again until tomorrow.

If she lived alone in one room,  she "probably wouldn't eat anything that came from animals - not even eggs. But you can't tell the cook that you'll just have lentils for supper." In Hollywood for 40 years, she is of it less than the newest ingenue on the youngest situation comedy. She is downstairs by 8:30 each morning for orange juice and melon and one thin slice of toast, and she is mildly annoyed by a rumor that "Irene Dunne sleeps until mid-afternoon."

 

"How can I say this so that no one will thing I'm the president of U.S. Steel? My husband was head of some corporations. I was made president whe he died." The corporations were housed in Century City, but she moved the office into her home. "I knew I wasn't about to get up every morning and go to an office." The corporations own real estate in Beverly Hills and shopping centers in Nevada, and "there's always a leak in the roof somewhere."

She is a very rich woman with lush motion picture salaries invested wisely over 30 years, but she thinks that "if I hadn't been married to a doctor, I would be out at the Motion Picture Relief Home by now. A fool and his money are soon parted, you know, and I wouldn't have known what to do with my money."

There is something almost shocking about such ingenuousness and yet there appears to be no false note in it.

 

Her mornings are spent on corporation business. The rest of her time is spent on the California Arts Commission to which Gov. Reagan appointed her a few years ago; fund-raising for St. John's Hospital and half a dozen other charities; and a few - a very few - close friends.

"I budget my comings and goings," she says, "especially in the fall which I think of as the private time of the year. I never, never, never go out to lunch. I'm not very social. But then I never was." (In her early years in Hollywood, when she was invited to a party three weeks in advance, she would refuse with, "I'm sorry, but that night I'm having dinner with mother." If her prospective host was foolish enough to press her harder with, "Your mother lives with you, couldn't you skip dinner with her for one night?," the answer was, politely, "No.")

 

She wears her privacy like a wall. And there is something about her particular privacy - a  sweetness perhaps, a dignity, or the vulnerability of a small child - that makes one reluctant to invade it. 

"She is," says an acquintance, "pleasant, kind, loving, and harder to get to know than anyone I have met in my life." People speak of her "vagueness" and of "that smooth surface without any knobs to turn to let you in." But the vagueness is not always there, and the doors are not always locked.

"It took me years to perfect that vagueness," she says. "Being a little vague is a terribly good defense, a good place to hide."

She does not always hide. She was "foolish enough" to make her staunchly Republican views known long before movie stars dabbled in politics. 

"It wasn't very bright of me, I suppose." As a result of her early and outspoken Republicanism, she has a reputation of being part of Hollywood's right-wing fringe, and association she denies. "President Eisenhower appointed me an alternate delegate to the United Nations. I'm a Nixon Republican, not a Goldwater one. I don't like extremism in any case. The extreme rights do as much harm as the extreme lefts."

 

She considers herself "organized, sincere, compassionate, impatient, a terrible procrastinator, and much more appreciative than I used to be." Sitting among her hydrangeas and her bougainvilleas, she can look backwards on a life as placid and even-tempered as the praries on a hot spring day.

"Nothing that ever happened to me was a wrench or a push or a big surprise."

She can remember backwards to a "vain, thoughtless, studious 16-year-old girl in pretty dresses who had all the beaus she wanted because to be 16 and pretty was to be a big dog in a small town." The small town was Madison, Ind., 50 miles from Cincinnati, 50 miles from Louisville where she had lived until her father died. Her goal in life was to get out of Madison as quickly as possible.

The Chicago College of Music was followed by a few ingenue roles on Broadway; marriage to Griffin, a New York dentist, in 1927; leading roles in road company productions of several Broadway musicals, and the train trip to Hollywood in 1930.

 

She came to Hollywood "where there was a great simpatico feeling between a person under contract and the studio to whom you belonged. You had a great feeling of security." The Hollywood of 1970 is, to her, a more uncomfortable place. She is offended by many current movies. "I get awfully tired of the violence and the shooting and the poor taste." She does not think current trends toward nuditiy and violence will change soon. "The public isn't saturated yet." She sees no answer except to ride the wave out because "I abhor censorhip." To her great surprise "because my friends had told me how lewd, awful, and disgusting it was," she liked "Midnight Cowboy." "I thought the acting was just marvelous."

Dustin Hoffman is among her favorite young actors, Richard Burton and Katherine Hephurn her favorite older ones. "The thing that has appealed to me about Katharine Hepburn over all these years is her intelligence. You need the enrichement of knowledge and education to be a good actress. I was at MGM when Elizabeth Taylor was growing up. It was two hours on the set, then back to her books for 15 minutes. What sort of an education is that? She became a good actress eventually because life has taught her, experience has taught her. But you can't count on that."

 

For many years Irene Dunne's career paralleled Miss Hepburn's. She can remember crying over a movie role once, when she lost the lead in "Holiday" to Miss Hepburn. For "Cimarron," her second picture, she was nominated for an Academy Award. She was nominated four more times but never won. (Like her ofttimes costar, Cary Grant, she was penalized because she made the difficult art of comedy look effortless.) By 1936 she was strong enough or clever enough to free-lance, something almost no other star was able to do in those days of monolithic major studios.

MGM had Norma Shearer and Great Garbo. Warner Bros. had Joan Crawford. Irene Dunne had her pick of roles from Columbia, RKO and Universal and approval of her directors. She chose both shrewdly. Her most glaring wrong decision was when she bolted to Europe for six months to avoid doing "Theodora Goes Wild." The studio waited her out and the film made her a star as comedienne.

 

When she was 10, a year before her father took suddenly sick and died, he gave her one piece of advice. "Irene, make up your mind what you want and go after it. But be prepared to pay well for it."

It would seem that she has had to pay very little for her success. She was home for breakfast every morning and for dinner every night. Her contracts allowed her to start work at 10 and leave work at 6, and only one of her films was made on location. And yet...

"I never really had time to enjoy my success. Time! All my mother wanted was me and my time. I could give her a new car, but I couldn't go around to the shops with her. I didn't have time. I had good governesses for my daughter and yet with these grandchildren I see how much time they demand, how much of you they demand."

When her mother died, "I was devastated. I couldn't go on. When I go, my daughter will be able to carry on." When she speaks of how she and her daughter are "poles apart on most issues," it is with a rueful acceptance of a world that does not prize her values. She does not expect "young people" to have faith in her old-fashioned sense of the word. "But if they have no belief in a higher authority, at least they could exert self-discipline."

 

For herself, "religion does take your mind off the more frivolous side of a place like Hollywood." She stands up, suddenly remembering years back, "when an old lady in the beauty shop" was to wait under her dryer an extra 20 minutes so that Irene Dunne's hair could be finished. She is 18 year away from glory, and people still offer her first place in line, still caress her with spongeful of flattery. And the flattery, the sycophants, still rouse her rare anger.

There is one execption. "When I travel, I want all the privileges in the world. They can meet me at the plane and give me a red carpet and order me a limousine." She pauses, and the rest of the sentence could serve as epitaph.

"Otherwise, I'll wait my turn."

 

(Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1970)