By Ed Garea
“I
didn’t want any part of her, but I kept smelling that jasmine in
her hair, and I wanted her in my arms. Yeah. I knew I was walking
into something.” –
“Rip” Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), Dead
Reckoning,
1947.
She
was made for film noir: a sultry blonde with a smoky,
come-hither voice who had romance on her mind and homicide in her
heart. She played opposite such stars as
Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Stanwyck,
Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, and Van Heflin. And though her heyday
lasted only about a decade, her influence remains; fueled as much by
her private life as by the femme fatales she played on screen.
Lizabeth
Scott, nicknamed by Paramount, the studio that signed her in 1945, as
“the Threat,” died on January 31 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
in Los Angeles at the age of 92. While the hospital confirmed the
death, it did not list a cause, but her longtime friend Mary
Goodstein stated the cause was congestive heart failure.
When
Paramount signed her, the studio described her as “beautiful,
blonde, aloof, and alluring.” Their plans were to cast her in the
mold of Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake, two other blonde dames
of noir.
But critics and the public never saw her as being in the same league
with Bacall and Lake; she was seen as more of a generic imitation. It
wasn’t until years after her career flamed out that she was seen
and appreciated for bringing something original to the hard-boiled
characters she often played. In her book, Femme
Noir: Bad Girls of Film (1998),
film historian Karen Burroughs Hannsberry called Scott “one of film
noir’s archetypal femmes.”
She
was born Emma Matzo on Sept. 29, 1922, in Scranton, Pa., one of six
children of Ukrainian immigrant John Matzo and wife Mary (nee
Pennock), who owned a grocery store. She attended Marywood Seminary,
a local Catholic girls’ high school, but transferred to Scranton’s
Central High School. After graduation, she spent the summer working
with the Mae Desmond Players, a stock company in the nearby town of
Newfoundland. That autumn she enrolled at Marywood College, but quit
after six months, against her parents’ wishes, to move to New York
City, where she enrolled at the Alvienne School of Drama. She took
the stage name of “Elizabeth Scott,” and landed a small role with
the touring company of the stage hit Hellzapoppin, where
she had little to do, except to appear between sketches in stunning
gowns is a series of comedy blackouts.
After
the tour concluded, she returned to New York in 1942. Unable to get
an acting job, she was hired as a fashion model by Harper’s
Bazaar at $25 an hour. Later
that year, Broadway producer Michael Myerberg cast her in a small
role in Thorton Wilder’s The
Skin of Our Teeth. She also
understudied star Tallulah Bankhead, but had no chance to
substitute. When Bankhead left the show in 1943, Scott hoped to
replace her as star. But the role was given instead to Miriam
Hopkins, and Scott returned to modeling. But when Gladys George, who
replaced Hopkins, became ill, Scott was called back to the show and
won rave reviews. She later played the lead in the play’s Boston
run, also to rave reviews and good business.
Later
in 1943, when she was modeling after leaving the play, Warner
Brothers producer Hal B. Wallis spotted her at her 21st birthday
party held at the Stork Club in New York. Wallis scheduled an
interview with Scott the following day, but she canceled it when a
telegram asked her to replace Hopkins in the Boston production of The
Skin of Our Teeth.
In
1944, agent Charles K. Feldman, who saw her photos in Harper's
Bazaar, invited Scott to Los Angeles. After failed screen tests
at Universal-International and Warner Brothers, Scott again ran into
Wallis, who told her that he would hire her if he had the power to do
so. She thought he was jerking her around and left for New York. But
Wallis left Warner Bros. and formed his own production company, which
would release their product through Paramount. He called her again,
and she came out to Los Angeles, signing a contract with Paramount.
She was now known as Lizabeth Scott after dropping the “E” in her
first name “to be different.”
Her
debut film was the Ayn Rand-scripted You Came Along in
1945, in a role originally intended for Barbara Stanwyck. Scott
played U.S. Treasury flak Ivy Hotchkiss, whose job was to look after
three pilots on a patriotic bond-selling tour. She falls in love with
one of the pilots, Major Bob Collins (Robert Cummings), but while
she’s serious, he’s lackadaisical. Despite the efforts of the
other two pilots (Don DeFore and Charles Drake) to keep her in the
dark, she discovers why Collins isn’t serious: he has terminal
leukemia. It wasn’t a smooth shoot for Scott; she experienced
problems with leading man Cummings, though these were later worked
out, and she had difficulties with director John Farrow, who made no
secret of the fact he wanted Teresa Wright for the starring role.
Another consequence of the film was the lifelong friendship between
Scott and Rand.
On
the strength of this film, Wallis next cast Scott as one of the leads
in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946 over the
protests of top billed star Stanwyck who, in a letter, said that she
would not be co-starred with any other person other than a recognized
male or female star. Nevertheless, Scott wound up in third place at
the top behind Stanwyck and Heflin and ahead of Douglas, appearing in
his first film. Wallis, notorious for a weakness for blondes, was
obsessive with his new discovery to the point of demanding director
Lewis Milestone reshoot certain scenes to feature more close-up of
Scott. Milestone walked out, telling Wallis that if he wanted to
reshoot the scenes, he could do so himself, which is just what he did.
It
was during this time that the publicity for Scott from Paramount and
Wallis began to backfire. Journalists began to notice the resemblance
between Scott and Bacall, which, coupled with the studio’s nickname
for Scott being “The Threat” (as compared with Bacall being
nicknamed “The Look”), began the critical trend of marginalizing
Scott in favor of Bacall.
Scott
got her next starring role as a result of a loan-out from Wallis.
Columbia was about to film Dead
Reckoning with Bogart and Rita
Hayworth. But Hayworth was busy filming The
Lady From Shanghai, so Scott was
imported to fill in. The film represented Scott’s first portrayal
of a hard-boiled femme fatale. She plays Coral “Dusty” Chandler,
the ex-girlfriend of Bogart’s murdered war buddy who’s a singer
in a nightclub run by a local gangster. She knows more about the
buddy’s murder than she lets on, and to keep Bogart from finding
out the truth about his buddy, she seduces him into believing that
she loves him. Both the film and Scott were hits, with the film
typecasting her as a beautiful schemer caught in a whirlpool of
jealousy, greed, betrayal and murder, but nevertheless irresistible.
Her
fourth film was Desert Noir (1947), a
coming-of-age noir with Scott as the rebellious
daughter of Mary Astor, whose character, a casino and bordello owner,
runs the corrupt town of Chuckawalla, Nevada. The film also starred
newcomers Burt Lancaster and Wendell Corey.
In
December 1946, Scott began filming on Wallis’s I Walk Alone,
co-starring Douglas, Lancaster, and Wendell Corey. Scott plays torch
singer Kay Lawrence, who befriends convict Frankie Madison
(Lancaster), returning to New York after being in stir for the last
14 years. Kay’s boyfriend is Noll “Dink” Turner (Douglas), who
owns the Regent Club. However, Madison claims that he’s Dink’s
partner. Dink sends Kay to sweet-talk Frankie in order to stall for
time, but the truth is that Dink, having tired of Kay, intends to
dump her and marry socialite Mrs. Richardson (Kristine Miller).
The
film, a big hit with audiences and seen as one of the classic
film noirs today, contained even more drama behind
the scenes. Originally titled Deadlock, the role of Kay
was supposed to be Kristine Miller’s breakout role. But Scott,
having read the script, decided she wanted the role, and prevailed
upon Wallis, with whom she was involved in a hot and heavy affair, to
give her the part, which he did. Miller wound up with the
secondary role of the socialite. Her relations with Lancaster,
previously romantic (it was rumored that they were to marry at one
point) cooled to the point of near hostility. After filming wrapped,
Lancaster tried to break his seven-year contract with Paramount,
ostensibly on the grounds that it violated a previous freelance deal.
However, he also admitted that he never wanted to work with Scott
again.
Scott
followed up I Walk Alone with two films that refined
her femme fatale image even further. First up was Pitfall (1948),
with Scott playing Mona Stevens, a model who becomes involved in a
hot and heavy extramarital affair with bored insurance investigator
Dick Powell. Powell soon finds himself competing for her with
sociopath detective Raymond Burr, who is blackmailing Mona. She
followed this with a film that many critics and viewers regard as her
best performance and film: Too Late For Tears (1949).
In this film, Scott is the ultimate femme fatale, Jane Palmer, who
discovers $60,000 that had accidentally been thrown in the back of
her husband’s car. She will go to any length to keep the sudden
fortune, as witnessed by the bodies that begin to pile up.
Unfortunately, the film bombed at the box office, resulting in
bankruptcy for producer Hunt Stromberg.
One
of Scott’s problems was that, despite appearing in nine films from
1946 to 1949, she failed to achieve the level of stardom and clout
necessary to maintain popularity at the box office. Her health also
contributed, for in 1949 she collapsed in hysterics during the
filming of RKO’s The Big Steal, with Mitchum. Her
illness was such that she had to quit the film. The doctors
prescribed rest. By July 1949, Scott was sufficiently recovered to
star in the Princeton (University) Drama Festival’s production of
Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta. She also legalized her
stage name.
Her
films in the ‘50s were a mediocre lot, attributed in large part to
her falling star. Dark City (1950) was a traditional
noir with Charlton Heston (in his film debut) playing a bookie who is
the target of the vengeful brother of a dead man he swindled. Scott
once again played the torch singer-girlfriend. Two of a
Kind (1951) featured Scott as a socialite who seduces gambler
Edmond O’Brien into joining a caper. In The Racket (1951),
another traditional noir, Scott plays a torch singer (for the last
time), based loosely on mob moll Virginia Hill, who is caught up in a
struggle between big city police captain Mitchum and local mob boss
Robert Ryan. Red Mountain (1951) is a programmer
starring Alan Ladd as a Confederate Army captain who goes west to
join Quantrill’s Raiders. Scott is the wife of Arthur Kennedy, who
along with Scott, join up with Ladd after he rescues Kennedy from a
lynching.
In
the midst of this, Scott traveled to England in October 1951 to begin
filming Stolen Face, a Hammer Studio noir directed
by Terence Fisher. It’s a uniquely nutty film about plastic surgeon
Dr. Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid), who is devastated when the love of
his life, American concert pianist Alice Brent (Scott) leaves him and
reveals she’s engaged to another man. Dr. Ritter’s not about to
take this lying down, and decides that if he can’t have the real
thing, perhaps he can construct a duplicate to take her place. Which
is just what he does when he meets horribly scarred convict Lily
Conover (Mary Mackensie). A snip-snip here, a tug-tug there,
and voila! Mary now looks exactly like Alice, and Scott
now takes over the role as Lily. And, of course, he marries her. Not
only that, Ritter gives her the same clothes, hairstyle, and so
forth, as the departed Alice. Unfortunately for the good doctor, his
pet theory, elaborated in the first part of the film, that physical
deformities can lead to a life of crime, and if the deformities are
removed, so is the criminal’s need to commit crime, falls by the
wayside when Lily returns to her criminal ways. She steals jewelry
and furs, with the doctor bribing shop owners to keep it on the QT.
Just when it can’t get any worse, Alice pops back into Ritter’s
life, and now he’s stuck with two Lizabeth Scotts. It presages
Hitchcock’s Vertigo in a way, and Scott is
wonderful in the dual role.
An
important footnote here is that by casting Henreid, who was
blacklisted in America because of his participation with the
Committee for the First Amendment, Scott and Wallis were effectively
among the first to break the Hollywood blacklist.
Returning
to America, Scott began work on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis
vehicle, Scared Stiff, a remake of the 1940 Bob
Hope-Paulette Goddard comedy, The Ghost Breakers. Scott
plays the Goddard role, an heiress who inherits a haunted castle on
Lost Island, off the Cuban coast. Although Scott would claim fond
memories of working on the set in later interviews, it was not
without its trials. Scott found Lewis’s impersonation of her
offensive and made a point of telling him. Behind the scenes, a
jealous Wallis was instructing director George Marshall against
letting the romantic scenes between Scott and Martin get too steamy.
Scott’s
last picture for Paramount was 1953’s Bad for Each Other,
a drama set in Scott’s home state of Pennsylvania. She plays
avaricious heiress Helen Curtis, who has her sights on recently
returned Korean War physician Colonel Tom Owen (Heston), poor but
idealistic. Despite her plans to encase him in her jewel-encrusted
world, treating the imaginary illnesses of her society friends, Owen
opts to leave that world to minister to the impoverished community.
The film was a box office failure and ended not only her Paramount
contract, but also her professional and personal relationship with
Wallis. Scott was now a freelancer, going on to make a
Western noir titled Silver Lode in
1954 and the JD drama The Weapon, in 1956. She also
attended USC, where she audited courses in political science and
philosophy, and began investing in real estate.
In
April 1954, Scott flew to the Cannes Film Festival, where she spent
time posing for photographers, wading barefoot in a fountain and the
surf. Though she left immediately after the festival’s closing for
London, her visit to France would come back to haunt her, both
professionally and personally, damaging her film career beyond
repair, for she found herself caught in the crosshairs
of Confidential.
Confidential was
the premier scandal sheet of its day. There were others, such as Hush
Hush, but Confidential was
the most popular by far. Bogart said of it, “Everybody reads
it but they say the cook brought it into the house.” The magazine
developed a network of call girls, waiters, bellboys,
journalists, private detectives, and even minor actors who would
provide small bits of fact about celebrities. The magazine then
elaborated on the facts, magnifying them with a great deal of
innuendo, marked by the frequent use of puns
and alliteration. Instead of stating outright that an actor
had participated in a scandalous act, Confidential operated
by suggesting that something scandalous has occurred. Because the
stories contained a kernel of actual truth and could be attributed to
reliable sources, for a time celebrities would be unlikely to sue the
publication, if only because of fear of further revelations that
would come out at trial. For those who found themselves splashed over
the front pages, the advice was to wait it out until the scandal died
down.
In
September 1954, Confidential ran
a story titled, “Why Was Lizabeth Scott’s Name in the Call Girls’
Black Book?” A police raid on a Hollywood bordello in 1954
uncovered some interesting evidence. A “little black book” seized
on the premises contained one entry under ‘S’ that astounded the
vice officers: Scott, Lizabeth (4), Ho-2-0064, Br-2-6111. According
to the article, the cops could scarcely believe their eyes. “Could
that name be that of the honey-blonde star they’d seen in a dozen
top movies? If so, what was it doing rubbing elbows with a zesty
collection of customers for a trio of cuddle-for-cast cuties?”
The
magazine went on to state that when the cops questioned the older
girls, all they said was “We don’t want to get anyone in
trouble.” But then the article noted that one of the three girls
arrested, a juvenile of 17, cracked enough to convince the cops that
their first suspicions were right. Supposedly the cops called the
number listed in the book, only to have Scott answering, “with her
famous husky drawl giving her away.”
To
this little nugget was added a myriad of suggestion and supposition.
“Liz,” the article stated, “was a strange girl, even for
Hollywood, and from the moment she arrived in the cinema city, she
never married, never even got close to the altar.”
“Her
movie career,” the article continued, “went off like a rocket”
with such hits as You
Came Along, The
Strange Love of Martha Ivers,
and Dead
Reckoning,
but faded just as quickly. Liz “had few friends and never went out
of her way to make new ones.” But now, according to the article,
she “was taking up almost exclusively with Hollywood’s weird
society of baritone babes.”
“Baritone
babes” was the magazine’s euphemism
for the Sapphic sisterhood, or what Hollywood insiders called “the
sewing circle.” In what was par for the course with
every Confidential story
on lesbianism, Liz was linked to a Parisian lesbian named Frede: “In
one jaunt to Europe she headed straight for Paris and the left bank
where she took up with Frede, the city’s most notorious lesbian
queen and operator of a nightclub devoted exclusively to entertaining
deviates just like herself.” Well,
she did visit France, taking in Cannes. Whether or not she visited
Paris was of no consequence to the magazine, which was only getting
started. The fact that Frede was a friend and ex-lover of Marlene
Dietrich, whose own bisexualism was no secret, was enough to paint
Scott with the taint of guilt by supposed association. In
fact, Frede was the proprietor of the posh Parisian nightclub
Carroll’s, where the stars of France performed to a mixed
clientele. In her 1989 memoirs, Eartha Kitt, who began her singing
career at Carroll’s in the late 1940’s, described Frede as “the
most beautiful manly-looking lady in the world.” The article
also quoted her as saying that she “always wore male colognes,
slept in men’s pajamas and positively hated frilly feminine
dresses.”
The
truth about Scott was that she was a nonconformist to the core. Off
screen she was fairly open about her life, loved wearing shirts and
slacks, and unlike many other stars rumored to be gay, she refused
the services of a studio-provided “beard” husband. When Scott saw
the article she was furious, but instead of merely sitting by and
waiting for the storm to blow over, she enlisted the services of
lawyer-to-the-stars Jerry Geisler and sued the magazine for $2.5
million, accusing it of “holding the plaintiff up to contempt
and ridicule and implying in the eyes of every reader indecent,
unnatural and illegal conduct in her private and public life.”
However, it is important to note that she did not sue the magazine
for implying that she was gay, but rather for its allegations that
she used the services of call girls. The outcome of the trial was
never made public. Some reports state the suit was settled out of
court, while others maintain Scott lost on a technicality.
Her
movie career was in tatters, although ex-lover Wallis gave her the
female lead in the Elvis Presley vehicle, Loving
You (1957). She played Glenda
Markle, a press agent who discovers young country singer Presley and
sets him on the road to fame. Backstage rumors were that she was
smitten with co-star Elvis and tried to pursue a romance. Whether or
not she was successful is not known. The film did very well at the
box office and Scott received favorable reviews, but for her, the joy
of making movies had passed. “I simply decided there was more to
life than just making films,” she said in a 1970s interview. “And,
I proceeded to explore all of life’s other facets. None of us is
ever too young or too old or too smart to learn or to create.” In
fact, after Loving You,
she would only come out of “retirement” to make one more
film, Pulp,
with Michael Caine and Mickey Rooney, in 1972, as a nymphomaniac
princess.
Instead,
she turned to other things, such as music. In 1957, she cut an album
simply titled Lizabeth for Vik Records, a subsidiary
of RCA Victor. The album, a mixture of torch songs and romantic
ballads such as Cole Porter’s “I’m in Love Again,” also
contains in the inner notes an interview with Earl Wilson, in which
he states she is a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson, sleeps in the nude,
loves deep-sea fishing, and adores sexy clothes (possibly a counter
to the Confidential article). On April 23, 1958, she made
her public singing debt on the CBS program The Big Record.
The album was poorly received after its release, but since has become
a cult favorite.
She
also kept busy with television appearances, radio shows, and
television voice-overs for juice and cat food commercials. In
later years, living off returns from her many real estate
investments, Scott led a quiet, private life at her house in the
Hollywood Hills, helping to raise funds for museums, art galleries
and charities (including hemophilia research and hunger). She turned
down many requests for interviews and guest appearances, save for the
occasional appearance for special screenings of her films. She
also attended health clubs on a regular basis, and studied
literature, philosophy and languages. There were rumors that she
might marry Hal Wallis, but she remained steadfastly single, with
Wallis marrying actress Martha Hyer instead.
Survivors
include her brother Gus Matzo of Plymouth, Mich.; and sister Justine
Birdsall of Middletown, N.Y.
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