I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead (32 page)

The Swan,
shot at MGM, is best remembered (if at all), as the last film
of Grace Kelly, who, ironically, plays a princess whose mother wants her to
pursue a Prince, colorfully played by Alec Guiness. However, Kelly finds
more in common and a great deal more attraction for her tutor, Louis
Jourdan. Agnes has a small but sparkling part of Guiness’ autocratic mother,
Queen Maria Dominika. The production is lush and was personally
produced by studio head Dore Schary and directed by veteran Charles
Vidor. The performances were good, particularly Guiness’, who provides
much of the humor. But overall the film is a bore, a very pretty, competently
played two-hour bore.

Pardners
was the next to last film to feature Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
together as a team. Agnes plays Lewis’ wife Matilda in the opening scene of
the picture where both Martin and Lewis play the fathers of the characters
they would portray in the remainder of the picture. After this scene, Agnes
is the Lewis character’s mother. Lewis played his typical dweeb who decides
to become independent of his domineering mother, who is trying to
arrange a marriage for him, by going west and proving he is as much a real
cowboy as his father and his friend Slim (Martin). After the first few
minutes of this picture, Aggie is not seen again. The film itself is actually
pretty good for its type and, like all the Martin and Lewis films up to this
time, it was a huge box office hit.

The Opposite Sex
was shot at MGM and is a remake of the classic 1939
film,
The Women.
The leading roles in this remake went to June Allyson (in
the role originally played by Norma Shearer) as the good wife, with Joan
Collins (in the part played originally by Joan Crawford) as the bitchy other
woman. Also in the stellar cast is Ann Sheridan, Ann Miller, Leslie Nielsen
(in a change from the earlier film, men do appear in this film), Charlotte
Greenwood, Alice Pearce (in a terrific bit as Olga, the Russian hair dresser),
Carolyn Jones, Jim Backus, and Dick Shawn. Agnes plays a colorful
Countess whom the Allyson character meets on a train heading to Reno full
of other women intent on divorcing their husbands. She has some good
lines especially when offering Allyson some champagne and advice: “. . . Oh,
don’t take it so hard, Cherie. Wait til you’ve had four like me. Husbands, I
mean, not champagne.”

The Conqueror
may be the
worst film Aggie ever appeared
in and she is in good company.
In the leads are John Wayne
and Susan Hayward and it is
hardly their most auspicious
moment in motion pictures as
well. Produced by RKO, when
Howard Hughes was still in
charge and systematically
ruining this once great studio,
the film cast Wayne as a 12thcentury Mongol warlord.
Time
summed up his performance:
“He portrays a great conqueror
as a sort of cross between a
square shootin’ sheriff and a
Mongolian idiot.” As for Agnes,
author Lynn Kear (
Agnes
Moorehead: A Bio-Bibliography,
1992) sums up her performance
thusly: “Agnes Moorehead, as Genghis Khans’s mother plays her role as
though she is in a Shakespearean tragedy.” This film is so bad it has
acquired a camp following due to its laughable dialogue: “I feel this tartar
woman is for me. My blood says take her,” says Wayne of Hayward. With
this cast, which also includes Pedro Armendariz, William Conrad, Lee Van
Cleef, and Dick Powell directing, not to mention a $6 million budget, it is
a shame that they couldn’t have found a script better suited to all the
talents involved.

This film also has a terrible legend surrounding it. Many of the people
in the company later developed and died of cancer. Most prominently are
Wayne, Hayward, Moorehead, Powell, and Armendariz (who killed himself
before allowing the cancer to consume him). A big portion of this picture
was shot on location in Utah near an atomic test site and the soil was full
of radioactivity. When the company moved back to Hollywood, tons of this
soil was shipped back with them so that it would match the sand used on
location. Mollie Moorehead would later say that it was working on this film
which led to Agnes’ death. When Debbie Reynolds was asked if she
believed in the connection between the high death rate of actors working in
this film and the location where the picture had been shot, she replied,
“Wouldn’t you?”

Agnes was so busy traveling to movie locations or performing her
one-woman show that some of the letters that her young foster son, Sean, sent
to her during this time sound like a cry for attention: “Dear Mother. I miss
you. I love you. I will give you some of my toys. Come home. I am a good boy
and I have my lesson every day. I want to send you a kiss.” Then another
begins, “Dear Mother, I miss you very much. I love you and want you to come
home.” She missed one birthday, but remembered him with several gifts.
“Dear Mother, I am very happy about all the gifts that you gave me. Thank
you very much. I am sure I will have a lot of fun with my bicycle. I like my
gun and punching bag and all the presents you gave me. I love you very much.
Your son Sean.” Sean spent summers on the farm. “Dear Mother. I am having
a nice time. I hope you are feeling well, we have a new calf. Say hello to
Freddie and Polly (Agnes’ maids) and Uncle Jack (Kelk)” But Sean’s situation
was not much different from that of most other children of celebrities. One or
both parents were off working or traveling and the children were in the care
of others. In Agnes’ case she was Sean’s sole support and to maintain a home
and give Sean the things she felt necessary she needed to work. She needed to
work not only for Sean’s sake but her own — it was her life.

Having appeared in seven films in 1956, Agnes would do three more in
1957 —
The True Story of Jesse James, Jeanne Eagels
and
Raintree County.
Of
these three, the most interesting was
The True Story of Jesse James,
which was
released in February. The film was produced by Twentieth Century-Fox and
was yet another telling of the Jesse and Frank James saga. But in the hands
of a revisionist director like Nicholas Ray, fresh off the success of
Rebel
Without a Cause,
the film attempted to be a sympathetic view of the James’
and why they turned to a life of crime. In short, it seems the Yankees drove
them to it. Agnes is cast as his elderly mother who tells the story in flashback. John Kreidl, in his book
Nicholas Ray,
writes: “While not exactly an
avant-garde western,
Jesse James
does call for a revolution of the James
brothers and specifically examines the violence inside them. To some extent
they are portrayed as rebels without causes, their violence and their good
reasons to be violent are posed against each other in a tense way.”

According to writer Gavin Lambert, who befriended Agnes while on this
film, Ray initially was very enthusiastic, but about half way through he
“lost interest and was drinking heavily.” Bernard Eisenschitz, in his book
Nicholas Ray: An American Journey,
writes that first Ray wanted Elvis
Presley, then a newcomer to the screen, to play Jesse. According to Lambert,
“(Ray) was interested mainly because he was to have Elvis Presley play Jesse
James. He saw Presley as another kind of James Dean . . . probably Fox
tricked him and pretended to be interested in Presley, but always wanted to
use their contract players Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter.” Lambert
adds that eventually Ray was “very happy” having Wagner cast as Jesse.

One of the most dramatic scenes in the film is when Jesse is whipped in
front of his mother and his neighbors, and expelled from Missouri by union
soldiers. The scene had to be rewritten and reshot, according to Eisenschitz,
in part because Ray “felt Agnes Moorehead was excessively hysterical as the
mother.”

After appearing in ten films in little less than two years, Agnes was more
than delighted to entertain an offer in January 1957 from Paul Gregory to
appear in a new play he was producing, written and directed by her old
friend Norman Corwin,
The Rivalry.

The Rivalry
dealt with the famous 1858 Illinois Senate race between
Stephen A. Douglas and his opponent Abraham Lincoln, told from the
point of view of Douglas’ wife, Adele. Initially, Brian Donlevy was cast as
Douglas but he couldn’t memorize his part. With the play opening in just
a matter of a week or so, an urgent SOS went out to Martin Gabel, who
replaced Donlevy. For the part of Abraham Lincoln Gregory and Corwin
had to look no further than 6’ 4” Raymond Massey, who had played
Lincoln numerous times on stage, films (
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
) and television.
Agnes was cast in the smaller but pivotal part of Adele Douglas.

Even though Agnes was busy working in one picture after another she
still had an actor’s fear of where her next job would come from. She had
enormous debts which worried her; the farm in Ohio and maintaining the
Beverly Hills mansion and the opulent lifestyle of a Hollywood celebrity
were important to her. The divorce from Gist was also financially draining;
Agnes ended up selling some stock she owned as part of a settlement with
him. Gregory helped by offering Agnes a weekly salary of $2,750 for a show
which was scheduled to tour 16 weeks. In addition he would furnish Agnes
with a maid or secretary of her choice (her longtime stand-in and secretary
Kathy Ellis), who would receive a salary of $100 per week, plus $50 weekly
for living expenses and transportation. She would also be second billed:

R
AYMOND
M
ASSEY
·
A
GNES
M
OOREHEAD
·
M
ARTIN
G
ABEL
IN
T
HE
R
IVALRY

The star billing, above the title, greatly appealed to Agnes.
Agnes found that she could
usually count on Paul Gregory to
come through for her. She needed
a loan to meet some of the
expenses of her various households and Paul proposed to her
accountant, Harold Williams,
“you and I had better get together
and work out the details on the
loan to Agnes if it is to be worked
out at all. Or, should you like, I can pay her in this year $1,750 per week
and hold $1,000.00 per week of her salary until after the next of the year,
then pay her that money so that she gets it next year.”
Paul also wrote a character reference on Agnes’ behalf to St. John’s
Military Academy in Los Angeles, where Agnes was applying for admission
for Sean. “It is my understanding that application has been made for the
Fall term enrollment at your Academy of Sean Moorehead, seven-year-old