A love letter to the actresses he admired, 86-year-old actor Robert Wagner's engaging memoir – I Loved Her in the Movies, offers a warm embrace for the many women who helped him establish a successful career as a leading man, or inspired him professionally and personally in their unforgiving business.
Take Claudette Colbert, an Oscar winner for It Happened One Night. Wagner was a 20-year-old newbie when they made 1951's Let's Make It Legal – and he flubbed his way through 49 takes of one scene.
“She could easily have had me replaced by uttering a single sentence,” Wagner recalls. “Not only did she not have me replaced, not once did she roll her eyes, not once did she sigh, not once did she betray any impatience or anger at my incompetence. It was an object lesson in the discipline necessary to be an actor, not to mention a star.”
Wagner is best remembered as the star of classic television series It Takes a Thief (1968 to 1970) and Hart to Hart (1979 to 1984), but his film career stretched back 66 years.
I Loved Her in the Movies is a delight in large part because Wagner can also see Colbert and other great female stars from a fan's perspective. He never lost his admiration for the women who could move an audience to cheers and tears.
Among them were Marilyn Monroe, of whom he says: “I thought she was a terrific woman and I liked her very much. When I knew her, she was a warm, fun girl ... I never saw the Marilyn of the nightmare anecdotes – the terribly insecure woman who needed pills and champagne to anaesthetise her from life, and who reached a place where she couldn’t get out more than a couple of consecutive sentences in front of a camera.”
Then there is Joan Crawford: “Joan had drive. She also had a quality of directness I’ve always liked. She was never a particularly nuanced actress, but she was open to the camera in a very touching way. Men came and went with Joan, but her devotion to the camera never waned, because the camera was her true love.”
Barbara Stanwyck also receives a warm salute: “She loved to work and emotionally she needed to work. She had been very poor as a child and young woman, so money translated into security for her. Work always improved her mood ... whether it was a movie or TV show didn’t seem to make much difference to her; she just wanted to keep acting.”
What might be most surprising in the pages of I Loved Her in the Movies, Wagner's third book with Scott Eyman, is the streak of feminism that runs through his reflections on stardom, the nature of talent and the demands of a Hollywood career.
Men had it tough in the studio system, but women endured even more in a business that, Wagner notes, was run by and for men, who expected women to be submissive. Those who were not, such as Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, paid a high price.
Looking back, Wagner – whose actress wife Natalie Wood, also featured in the book, drowned in 1981 when they were on a weekend boat trip to Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California – finds a characteristic common to the female stars who still shine.
“The truth is that the vast majority of those who came up during the studio system were well defined in their own minds,” he writes. “They knew what they wanted, and if they didn’t, they didn’t last long. Almost all of them had endured hardships as kids, and as show business invariably presented its own kinds of hardships, they were by nature and necessity survivors.”
* Associated Press
