Gene Tierney: American Beauty

Gene Tierney was one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In the 1940s her great beauty launched her into stardom but she managed to become a fine actress as well. Unfortunately, behind the glamour was a bad marriage, a daughter born severely retarded due to exposure to German measles, and mental illness that ultimately brought an end to her career and almost to her life. 

 Here are the opening lines of her autobiography, appropriately titled, Self Portrait.

“It is a terrible thing to feel no fear, no alarm, when you are standing on a window ledge fourteen stories above the street. I felt tired, lost, and numb—but unafraid.

I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to take my own life, I cat-walked a few steps away from the open window and steadied myself, to think about it. The fact that I could no longer make decisions was why I had gone to the ledge in the first place. What to wear, when to get out of bed, which can of soup to buy, how to go on living, the most automatic task confused and depressed me.

I felt everything but fear. The fear comes to me now, twenty years later, knowing that at any moment I might have lost my balance. Then the decision would not have been mine. On that day, if I jumped or fell, either way would have been all right. There is a point where the brain is so deadened, the spirit so weary, you don’t want any more of what life is dishing out. I thought I was there.”

         

Tierney had been born in Brooklyn in 1920 but was largely raised in suburban Fairfield, Connecticut. Her parents were well off and even sent her to an exclusive finishing school in Switzerland during her high school years. At eighteen her family made a trip to Hollywood, where on a studio tour an executive, struck by her incredible beauty, asked her to take a screen test. A year later, after acting lessons back home and a small part in a Broadway play, she was back in Hollywood under contract to a major studio.

At first the studio did not know what to do with her. There was something exotic about her good looks and she was cast in a number of roles that had little to do with the person she was.

In 1942, for example,  she was cast as a charming South Sea  island girl in Son of Fury, an action adventure starring matinee idol Tyrone Power. In this film she hardly speaks of word of English, but her breathtaking beauty and innocence makes an indelible impression. 

Here is a list of what I consider to be her best films.

 

Laura: In 1944 Tierney became a full-fledged star playing the title role in this murder mystery that is now generally regarded as one of the greatest films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. 

Otto Preminger’s  direction of Laura received an Academy award nomination, and cameraman Joseph LaShelle won the Academy Award for best black and white cinematography. 

The cast was superb. Dana Andrews, playing a police detective, turned in his usual solid performance. In his screen debut Clifton Webb played a sophisticated, acerbic, and influential newspaper columnist, and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.

Nevertheless, Gene Tierney stands out in Laura. From the opening credits even her portrait on the wall of her beautifully designed apartment dominates the film. But it is not just her looks. She plays a sophisticated urbanite whose  deportment and manner make everyone in the film, even her maid, fall in love with her. Her costumes, designed by famed Bonnie Cashin, are a lesson in how clothes define and make the man, or woman in this case.

 

It is hard to imagine that a whole generation has not seen this film. But the directing, the photography, the sets, the writing, the great cast, and the haunting song and score that permeates the film make it a true classic. It can be watched over and over again like any great work of art.

Leave Her to Heaven: Tierney’s performance in Laura led to a starring role in Leave Her to Heaven, a 1945 Technicolor drama that almost exulted in her good looks as well as the looks of co-stars Cornell Wilde and Jeanne Crain. 

Nevertheless, it is a dark film. Once again, Tierney gets to play a beautiful, accomplished young woman but this time jealousy and suspicion, that today we would call mental illness, lead to the break-up of her marriage and terrible tragedy.

In one unforgettable and terrible scene, her beauty only accentuates the horror of what is going on while she sits placidly in a rowboat while a young boy drowns nearby. Her performance in Leave Her to Heaven, gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

 

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: In 1947 she starred along with Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Tierney played an independent young widow with a young daughter who moves into a seaside cottage reputed to be haunted by the ghost of a deceased English sea captain. It is a charming story beautifully told and acted by the principals with a wonderful musical score by Bernard Herrmann.

Whirlpool : In this 1950 suspense drama, Tierney played a sophisticated suburban housewife who turns to a devious hypnotist for help in dealing with a secret mental illness. Her husband, played by Richard Conte, is a psychiatrist who is totally unaware of his wife’s sickness. Perhaps in this film she came closest to portraying her real self and her impending mental illness.

Where the Sidewalk Ends:  This little-known film is now recognized as a quintessential film noir classic. It is like a Laura reunion. Tierney is reunited with Laura co-star Dana Andrews, director Otto Preminger, and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle.The film is another psychological crime drama but centers around Dana Andrews who plays a rogue cop. Tierney, still beautiful, played what amounts to a supporting role. 

Her career would continue through the next decade but mental illness although it could not mar her beauty, limited her ability to work and she never regained her previous success or stature.

 In her autobiography, she tells the whole story not only of her screen career but also of her battle with the illness that brought her to the edge of death on that fourteenth story window ledge. Fortunately, her story had a happy ending.

 

 

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Slavery in Westport CT

 

  

                       

Westport, Connecticut, has long been one of the wealthiest towns in Connecticut. It probably still ranks as one of the wealthiest towns in the country, especially given the recent migration of New Yorkers fleeing the chaos in nearby New York City. 

A recent page 1 article in my local newspaper, the CT Post, indicated that  a complaint had arisen about a “Eurocentric” historical marker outside Westport’s Town Hall. The complaint was lodged by Ramin Ganeshram, executive director of Westport’s Museum  for Culture and History, who noticed that the marker referred to the “first white settlement here in 1648,” but did not mention “the contributions—or explanation—of indigenous people or enslaved Africans.”               

Ganeshram went on to explain that the marker omitted the fact that “the town was built largely through the forced labor of indigenous and African slaves.”

 

According to Ganeshram there may have been indigenous people in southwestern Connecticut for 7500 years, but they built no town or Museum of Culture and History.  Even if indigenous natives were captured in battle, they were of no use as slaves or laborers. Sad to say, the colonists resorted to exchanging them for slaves of African descent in the West Indies.

 

There is no doubt that there were African slaves in Connecticut during the Colonial period, but it is a ridiculous over-statement to say that Westport or any town in Connecticut was built on the forced labor of African slaves. Not only were most of the slaves household servants, but also there were not enough of them to build a town. 

The late Dr. Vincent Rosivach of Fairfield University created a database of slaves in Connecticut that listed only nine slaves of African descent in Westport during the whole eighteenth century. 

Imported in small numbers from the West Indies to serve as household servants,  there can be no doubt that their life in Connecticut was far better than what it was in the sugar cane fields of the West Indies.

To say that Westport or any other town in Connecticut was built on the forced labor of indigenous people or African slaves is not only a gross distortion of history, but also a disservice to the waves of immigrants from Europe who built Westport and most other Connecticut towns. 

For example, perhaps a marker should be placed on the Westport Town Hall to commemorate the role of Italian immigrants in building the town. During my working career I had clients in all of the towns along Connecticut’s Southwestern coastline.  Practically every town along the coastline had its Italian section where the workers lived who actually did most of the construction work.  Even super-rich Greenwich had its Byram section, centered on St. Roch’s church. Saugatuck was the Italian section of Westport whose annual Italian festival attracted thousands during its heyday.

A chess buddy of mine came to this country from Italy after World War II. He had been born in Fiume before the war, but the city was taken over by Communist Yugoslavia after the war. Eventually, his family managed to flee to Italy, and he spent his teen years in a refugee camp. Finally, they managed to emigrate to the USA where he got a job as a laborer with a small construction company. After a while, he decided to go out on his own and become his own boss. 

Against all odds, he made the transition and eventually his company became one of the largest construction and home renovation companies in the area. He built thousands of homes and condos throughout Fairfield county. Westport was his prime location and his work can still be seen throughout the town.

 

It was people like my friend who actually built Westport. They worked for profit but usually harder than any slave. Moreover, their work profited generations to the point where now towns like Westport are exclusive showcases that can afford the luxury of a Museum of Culture and History.

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Carrara Marble Quarries

A recent survey indicated that Americans are generally proud of their country. This is true among all groups including Blacks and Hispanics. Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are the only exception. Apparently only 36% of the people in this age group are glad to live in America. In other words, 64% of college age Americans are not happy with their country.

 

I guess that it has always been the case for the young and inexperienced not to realize how good they have it, especially in this country. Unfortunately, these college age malcontents have had very little real education to help with their limited life experience.

 

Below is a traveler’s account of what laborers of their age experienced in the marble quarries of Italy a little more than a 100 years ago. *

 

In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw no beautiful or distinguished faces, --the women were without sweetness, the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with us ….

 

I understood this better when, about four o’clock 

on the next morning, I went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that littler town you come upon, at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Ages, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts…among which the people live. Thus busy with frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, where no green thing has ever grown, or even a bird build her nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble…which are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor, patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp boulders and dazzling rocks, …pulling as though to break their hearts under the tyranny of the stones, …Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drown any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanized man, have themselves become obscene…. The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel….an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded only to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some frightful tragedy…. Then, as you return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize your small baggage and set out for where the difficult road leads out of this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea.

 

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*This description of the Carrara marble quarries was written by Edward Hutton in 1908 in his book Florence and Northern Tuscany. Although an Englishman, he regarded Italy as his home and wrote a series of books on its various regions and towns.  He loved the Italian people and practically everything about them, but Carrara was a different story. He is my favorite travel author and I have been publishing what I consider to be the “best” of Hutton on my blog, Edward Hutton’s Italy.

 

 Note: Here is an explanation from my scientist brother about the formation of the mountains of marble.

 

 "most of marble is the remains of shellfish such as clams, and oysters. Shellfish make their shells from Calcium Carbonate and when they die their shells under pressure of the water transform into limestone and sometimes dolomite depending on location. Marble forms from limestone by what is called metamorphosis which involves tremendous pressure and heat. This rearranges the molecular structure of limestone into marble. Underwater volcanic activity and other geological forces lead to mountain formation as the molten rock rises from the ocean and cools. Imagine the vast number of clams, oysters, etc. which went into the making of the Carrara Quarry."

Declaration of Independence

  

                                          

 

Many, many years ago when I earned my Ph.D in History from Fordham University, my field of concentration was British politics at the time of the American Revolution. The subject of my dissertation was the political career of General Henry Seymour Conway, a statesman and politician as well as a military man. 

Conway was one of the few British politicians to oppose the attempt to subdue the American colonies by military force. In fact, he was the one who led the fight in the House of Commons to repeal the notorious Stamp Act in 1766 during the short lived Rockingham administration, and then in 1782, it was his motion in Parliament for a cessation of hostilities in America after the surrender of a British army at Yorktown, that effectively brought an end to the American war. 

In studying his career it became obvious to me that the Americans were fighting for what they considered to be their traditional rights as Englishmen. The Declaration may be difficult to read or understand today but here I reproduce a brief explanatory essay.

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Every July 4 we celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of the promulgation of our famed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Most of us have heard the famous opening lines of the document, 

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

However, few have ever read the entire Declaration and even fewer have any understanding of the nature of the actual grievances that led the colonists to sever their ties with England and seek independence. Most readers don’t get past the following words.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

King George III of England was one of the nicest, most benevolent rulers that England ever had, but the Declaration portrayed him as a tyrannical despot. However, the real conflict between England and her American colonies was not between Monarchy and Democracy but between the rights of the British people represented as they were by their own Parliament, and the rights of the American colonists represented as they were by their own colonial assemblies. In this conflict no one was a greater supporter of the rights and authority of the British Parliament than the King.

For the most part the Declaration of Independence does not complain about violations of individual human rights but concentrates on what it claims has been a systematic attempt on the part of the government in England to violate the rights and privileges of colonial representative assemblies. 

The founding fathers believed these assemblies that represented the leading citizens and property owners in the various colonies were the sole bulwark against monarchical tyranny on the one hand, and democratic anarchy on the other. They claimed that the King and his colonial governors have repeatedly refused to put into operation laws passed by these assemblies.

•He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

•He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained;

•He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature,…

•He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

In some cases the English government has even gone so far as to dissolve some of these representative assemblies and leave particular colonies without any form of self-government. The legal system, military defense, and tax collection have been taken out of the hands of the colonial representatives. Here are some examples:

•He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

•He has made the judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

•He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

•He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

In the end the Declaration claimed that it came down to a contest between their own local representative assemblies and a faraway legislature that did not represent them. Because they had come to deny the authority of the British Parliament, they never used the word Parliament in the document. 

There are elements in the Declaration that might seem offensive to modern ears. Jefferson and others in America opposed the efforts of a reforming British government to permit religious toleration of the large Catholic population in newly conquered Canada. For them Catholicism went hand in hand with despotism. The Declaration also complained about attempts on the part of the British government to prevent colonization of Indian territory. Indeed, it claimed that England was encouraging the native tribes.

Nevertheless, the leaders assembled in Congress insisted on their rights as Englishmen to govern themselves. They wanted government to be as close to home as possible. They would make their own laws, vote their own taxes when necessary, and be responsible for their own legal and military systems. They did not want to be governed by a faraway government that had little concern for their interests or welfare.

It was true that the founders were men of property and status. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin were not common men. Democracy would come later. For the present they wanted to protect their right to self-government. The British government had declared itself “invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” To resist, they were prepared to risk all that they held dear.

•“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” 

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