"It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors."
Gene Tierney
Helen has been sending me photos of our darling little bundle who is now walking and talking. I think she is trying to make me feel guilty for being away so much.
I know some people - mother, for example! - might think me somewhat cold and callous for putting my career over family by baseing myself here. But I like the space and the freedom here. I get to spend a good deal of time relaxing by swimming pools (having checked the perimeter thoroughly, of course) and American Martin is doing his best to ferry me around to auditions and social events so that I get seen. There are few moments when I truly miss home, ringing as it inevitably will be with the cries of an obstreperous toddler - and the equally loud complaints of Helen.
So many people out here love to parade their little darlings for the cameras. But when the cameras aren’t there, I hear the same people disparagingly refer to their offspring as ‘rugrats’!
I suppose I might not feel so guilty if I was sending more money home. I’m still being pushed way too much towards TV when what I really came here for was to do films and escape the bloody typecasting that was dogging me in the UK.
Once the press decided I was this funny little oddity who could be caught in a scene sleeping, that was the end of it for me as far as London was concerned. Trouble is every leading role for a Brit out here in Hollywood is being taken by Stewart blimmin Granger!
We’re at the same social events sometimes and he always pretends he’s never met me before. By all reports he’s rather difficult to work with, but somehow being an absolute pussy cat as I absolutely am - doesn’t make a dollar’s worth of difference. American Martin has also suggested I get elocution lessons in order to speak more like him. I mentioned this to Vincent (Price) at a party and he hooted with laughter.
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Never meet your heroes they say. How untrue. I’ve just come back from filming a cameo (not sleeping! awake!) in a long running Western series, and who should be playing a down-on-his-luck drunken lawyer – Claude blimmin Raines!
I think we both caught a whiff of booze on each other’s breath, which rather united us as seasoned pros who weren’t taking this TV thing too seriously. And we both stepped up at the required moment. I think my performance as some kind of ex-Confederate POW (yes, another POW part, I can’t escape) was adequate. Raines was top notch - why wouldn’t he be? He had just the right level of theatrically needed, without forgetting that screen acting needs underplaying with subtle small movements and modulation of the voice.
I stayed around to watch the rest of his scenes and at the end of the day I shook his hand and thanked him for inspiring me for all these years. I complemented him on his little cameo in 'Lawrence of Arabia' and told him I was hoping to work with Jack Cardiff very soon. He looked at me rather quizzically through his one good eye. I think he was pleased to be suitably lauded by a fellow Brit, but not pleased enough to accept my offer of buying him a drink. I suspect he had a bottle of his own in his car.
I’m not being snarky. There’s plenty of actors who use drink as some kind of crutch. I do it sometimes. But the key is to not let it affect one’s work in any noticeable way. We don’t all want to go the way of Erroll Flynn. Or Veronica Lake - God help her! I read about her situation in the paper the other day. What a mess, poor thing. Like many others, I was moved to send a few dollars to a support fund for her. There for the grace of God go the rest of us, I say. This business really does eat people up – especially the women. It's the cocktail hour as I write this by the way. Cheers!
[added later] Forgot to note that I also met a young actor who’s got a regular part in the TV western, who Dino tells me is going to be worth knowing. Dino will have him shipped off to Rome in no time, I imagine, to knock out yet more bloody cowboy movies. What is this obsession with cowboys?! Anyway, this chap is very tall and rather soft-spoken – not a great screen actor like Newman or Brando. But then again Martin says those 1950s types are on the way out (his way of explaining why the likes of me and Dennis H are having a hard time finding work). These tall quiet slightly no-name types are perhaps the future, he says!
I hope not!
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Sometimes things happen here that are frankly very strange.
I was sitting having my lunch at the studio canteen today, minding my own business as an actor in a minor role is expected to do, when who should dump herself down on the other side of the shared table than Gene flippin Tierney!
We had been warned about her and told to steer clear, but, frankly, pretty much everyone on this film is a bit batty - and expected to be given the nature of project. They’re going for Southern Gothic with dark hints of incest and violence, so every actor is being encouraged to be a bit melodramatic. Some are taking this note more seriously than others.
Gene Tierney turned up on set already quite mad, I think. I’d read about her being incarcerated in an asylum only a few years back, and we’d all heard stories of manic episodes of various sorts. It’s a shame really, given how beautiful and charismatic she can be.
I remember seeing her only a few years after the war, on the set of a rather mean -spirited gangster movie I was helping out on with cars and trucks and general mechanical work. They said she was already a bit wrong in the head even then, but you’d have to say you could forgive pretty much anything, given the way she looked. You couldn’t help staring when she turned up on set.
Cut to more than 12 years later and she’s now staring at me – this rather puffy-faced neurotic lady, puffing away on a cigarette asking me where I got my tinned sardines from.
It took me a few minutes to realise who she was. I’d explained that I brought my own sardines to the set. I always liked to have a tin with me – just a habit I’d picked up after the war. It was when she talked about eating tinned pilchards at Shepperton that I twigged it was Gene. Dear, dear, the years have not been kind. She was obviously in one of her manic moods because she talked ten to the dozen and no sooner finished one cigarette than lit another, whilst pretending to pick away at a salad.
I had the feeling that maybe she thought I was someone else, somebody she was on familiar terms with. We started off by reminiscing about Shepperton and I tried to explained I was just a car mechanic back then. This only got her more excited and she started to list all the cars she’d ever travelled around in and names were duly dropped – Jack Kennedy, the Aga Khan, Howard Hughes. She rambled on and on and I’m ashamed to say that instead of enjoying this brief moment with a screen legend I was wondering how to shake this batty lady off.
I wasn’t very surprised I suppose when she did finally start talking about her mental health. It was obvious she was unwell - and I think she knew it in a way.
“You ever had electric shock therapy?, she asked me.
“No,” I said, “No I can’t say I have.” (Confession – I don’t even know what it is)
“Don’t!” she said very intensely. And she looked at me with a dramatic expression of intense seriousness, and then within her eyes I could see her trying to mask the kind of agony I’d only ever seen before in Barth. It was her best moment in that whole production so far I tell you. Pity the camera weren’t rolling.
“Don’t ever do it,” she said. She stubbed out the third cigarette on her salad plate and got up to leave. “You here tomorrow?”
“Yes”, I said.
“Maybe I can get me some of those sardines,” she said almost saucily.
I am on call tomorrow as it happens, but I think I may avoid the canteen. There is something very disconcerting about someone who is genuinely mad. She switches from sad to light to aggressive to charming from nonsensical to rational like quicksilver. One doesn’t know what to say or do in order to try and keep things on the level, and there’s a sense that something truly terrible might happen at any moment.
I may have to go to the local library and look up what electric shock therapy is.
===
I have received two magazines from British Martin in the UK that contain interviews with Helen. I know he is sending them to me to exercise me. He’s still put out that I eloped across the pond and started giving my 10 per cent to American Martin.
There are the inevitable photos of her and the toddler – in the kitchen, in the garden, playing games, dressing up etc – ever the dutiful mother.
But there are also clues as to the kind of people she’s now running with. British Martin has been keeping me abreast of things on that score too.
Helen hasn’t mentioned anything about this in her letters. She enclosed one cutting of her with Newman at the Venice Film Festival, designed to make me jealous, I suppose. And also to prove she wasn’t stuck at home all the time - as she’d like other people to believe.
Apparently, she’s got pretty thick with those bohemian kitchen sink types that British television seems to be so in love with at the moment.
There’s a lot of bragging rights to be had from moving out of a nice house in Hampstead or St Johns Wood and slumming instead in a terrace in Battersea. Helen has resisted that temptation, at least, but I gather she’s already appeared in one of those TV ‘Plays for Today’ where everyone’s filmed in a pub talking over one another about abortions and unemployment.
From where I’m sitting in the sunshine it all seems rather grim and a bit of a pose given the background of the people concerned. I mean, it’s not as if Helen grew up on the streets. Much as I despise the glossy shallow stuff that I’m currently being offered, I think I prefer it to what I would get in the UK. Can you imagine? Dressed up as some tramp in the rain selling second hand shoes out of a pram or chattering away in a Cockney accent about how beatniks are eating away at the fabric of society. Give me a good old fashioned war movie any day.
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Kennedy was shot today. Killed stone dead in Dallas by some kind of communist sniper. Knowing how trussed up he must have been due to his back problems, I assume it was impossible for him to duck, which is why the second bullet got him in the head.
I sound as if I’m being hard and unsentimental about it. I’m not. It’s a devastating moment for everyone out here. There’s shock in the face of every person you meet. But I suppose experiences from the war do harden one somewhat. It’s not the first time I’ve seen someone shot in the head. It probably won’t be the last.
Perhaps I have a bit if residual anger for the way I was treated last year. I trogged all the way out to Camelot on a promise from American Martin that there might be a part for me in that silly PT109 movie. I didn’t bother writing about it at the time because it had been drilled in to me that it was all hush-hush and top secret – and nothing was going to come of it anyway. But I imagine every actor and his or her dog is going to come out with a Jack Kennedy story, now the stiff-backed pill-popper has snuffed it (note to self – don’t be quite so irreverent in public – the Yanks aren’t tolerating anything less than sainthood for President Kennedy at the mo).
There were at least half a dozen of us wasting our time on that plane, all due to meet the President and be checked over to see if we might get his approval for a role in his silly vanity project. I wasn’t deluding myself. I knew I wasn’t going to get the lead role – Jack Kennedy the war hero rescuing his pals from the perils of the Pacific. But there were plenty of other parts, and lots of Kennedy money sloshing about.
In the end I got less than two minutes with the great man and his brother and various other members of his entourage. I’m photographed from all angles. Kennedy shakes my hand and says: “Hello Mister…” pauses to check my name on a clipboard… “Shure.”
“You’re a Brit,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“And it says here you know Gene Tierney!”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.” I lied, but had thought it might help. Idiot.
He steps back, looks round at his brother.
“Too short and stocky to be you,” said Bobby, like I’m not in the room.
“But he could be in the boat,” says Kennedy. “I’m thinking I could drag him across an ocean with my teeth.” He chuckles at me. “Not now, with my back as it is, but back then…!”
I don’t really know what to say.
“Thank you for your time, Mister Shure.” He shakes my hand again, and flashes his small yellowing teeth. He think he’s beaming at me, but I’m surprised to find he’s rather dead behind the eyes, and all puffed up from whatever medication he’s taking (and he’s rather obviously taking medication..).
“Give my regards to London! And to Gene.”
And that, dear all, is my Kennedy anecdote. Another failed audition. I didn’t even get to be a dead body or a sleeping soldier in that one. I suppose there’s a chance now of me playing Kennedy in the end. The dead president. I could be good at that, I think.
Is it too early to be so irreverent? Let’s just keep that between me and the diary.
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I did my first advert today, and though I shouldn’t admit it, it was rather fun. It was directed by a rather talented young American Italian called Cimino, and it involved a bunch of us dressing up as American business types in gray suits and Sinatra fedoras, prancing around in a quite complex Busby Berkely type dancing number.
Quite how this is meant to sell seats on United Airlines is beyond me. I simply do not understand the world of television advertising. This Cimino chappie claims it’s rather a good grounding for aspiring directors, but I can’t believe it’s any substitute for being on a proper film set, in whatever capacity. I told him I went from car mechanic to lead actor in less than a decade, and it did me no harm to work my way up and learn all about the different departments along the way. He seemed unconvinced. He did, though, say he had a spot for someone in a sleeping pill advert that he thought I might be good for. I wanted to tell him I was trying to avoid the sleeping parts right now, but then he told me how much I could earn and I just shut up and smiled sweetly.
Honestly, nobody here is that bothered about what the work is they’re doing as long as they’re working. I thought when I first came out here that the work would be bigger, bolder, better, but that simply is not the case. Many of the really big movies are being made in Italy! Movie producers out here are VERY keen on chasing audiences - and audiences have no taste. They lust after a diet of westerns, war movies and sci-fi. Even poor old Raines has been roped into sc-ifi.
Oh and horror! I’m up for a part in a minor horror called ‘The Sleeping Dead’. They want me to play some kind of Dracula figure who spends most of the film lying down in a coffin, with various younger film stars plotting how to stick a stake through my heart and prevent me from rising in the night to feast on the blood of virgins. I have to admit I’m getting pretty fed up with this kind of work.
If only to save my liver, it might be time to go home.