Uncomplicated girls can't act - Joe Pasternak, film producer
Catherine Zeta-Jones enters a clinic suffering from bipolar disorder (aka manic depression), and she is congratulated for going public about her mental disorder.
It then transpires that her action was in anticipation of a scoop in the following day’s National Enquirer. Furthermore she maintained her condition had only developed because, she had been so preoccupied with looking after her sick husband, Michael Douglas. So her PR advisers wouldn’t even allow her to be just ill per se – instead there had to be an extraneous cause, and in this case it was the stress induced in an A-lister having to play Florence Nightingale in real life.
Whilst male stars in Hollywood have been able to get away with murder (almost literally in some cases), the lot of female stars has been far from easy. The young Robert Mitchum can get arrested for drugs, and more recently Hugh Grant, Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Junior to say nought of the Sheen boy, can get up to all kinds a shenanigans, without their careers being effected. In fact it could be argued that appearances on tabloid front pages may even have enhanced the middle-aged delinquents’ job prospects. But woe betide any female star who gets a yen for developing similar proclivities.
Tinsel town, we are told is run by cigar chomping men who have a clear idea of how their female commodities should act both on and off the screen. Perhaps a bit neurotic on the screen can be de rigueur, as that is what producers think constitutes acting, but off screen the key word has to be normal – whatever that is. Apart from being crazy in real life the next worse thing an actress can do is play a crazy. Take the case of the amazing Ronee Blakley who steals the show in the brilliant Nashville (1975). She plays a country singer who has what my mother used to call in hushed tones a nervous breakdown. By now her name should be tripping off our tongues, but these days she is virtually forgotten. Why? Because apart from having her head blown off in the first 20mins of The Driver (1978), she didn’t get much work after Nashville. One wonders if this could have possibly had anything to do with her playing a troubled singer?
The concept of the perfect woman was taken to extreme lengths in Mars Attacks (1996), where popping out of the invading flying saucer is Hollywood’s dream woman – a perfectly formed electronic one no less. Little chance there of anything untoward, except that the gizmos went a wee bit off message, with the result that the Earth invader developed an obsession with Tom Jones, can you believe? The 1950’s was a rich vein for space travelling women with the scariest of scaries (from a man’s point of view) being The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), which not surprisingly had followed on from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). But my favourite has to be every woman’s nightmare, and in some cases, sad to say, their reality - I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Such films, whilst dismissed at the time by broadsheet critics would have been subconsciously read by audiences as metaphors for the changing roles and expectations of women in society. Bit disappointing therefore when we move on to the sleep-inducing 2001 Space Odyssey (1971) and the macho The Right Stuff (1983) – not a cookie woman in sight anywhere.
“Frances who?” chorused the film press when Hollywood doyen Howard Hawks proclaimed FRANCES FARMER (1913-1970) to be "the best actress I have ever worked with.” Some praise indeed coming from no less a person than he, who had directed Louise Brooks, Carole Lombard, and Katherine Hepburn, to name but three. The daughter of a poor man’s lawyer and an anti-communist feminist, Frances gained fame if not fortune as a drama student in 1935 by winning a prize to visit the USSR. Her later collaboration with Hawks, Come And Get It (1936), is generally thought to be her best performance and it was predicted that she would become the next Garbo. Sadly she wasn’t able to live the dream. She couldn’t or wouldn’t conform and contemptuously described Hollywood as a nuthouse. The combination of prescribed drugs and alcohol, led to arrests and eventually incarceration in a nuthouse – not the kind of nuthouse she had in mind, just up the road from the Sunset Strip, but close - the Screen Actors’ Sanatorium where she was subjected to insulin shock treatment, and many other ghastly procedures over the next seven years. Eventually it is said, she was lobotomised for behaviour that would hardly raise an eyebrow today.
There is footage of her later in her later life, presenting her own TV show Frances Farmer Presents where her appearance bears a freaky resemblance to the computer generated woman in Mars Attacks. In recent times she has become a cult figure, even getting the ultimate accolade of a song about her by fellow Seattle-ite Kurt Cobain (deceased). Conspiracy theories abound not least of which is that the American establishment never forgave her for accepting the prize to visit the USSR and then conspired to have her harassed by the police and eventually incarcerated. Frances died aged 56 of cancer. An above average biopic on her, Frances (1982) starring Jessica Lange is well worth a viewing.
JEAN SEBERG (1938-1979) who in a sense can be considered to be the soul sister of Frances, became the defining icon of the French New Wave in Breathless (1959), when she strolled down the Champs Ellysee calling out in an American accent, “New York Herald Tribune. New York Herald Tribune”. It is said that the petite elfin should be grateful to the film’s director, Jean-Luc Godard for giving her the part, but others maintain that the maestro of the jump cut should be even more grateful to the troubled Hollywood expatriate for kick starting his career.
Picked out from 18,000 wannabees in a nation-wide contest to play the lead in St Joan (1957), the 17yr old was deemed to have failed to live up to expectations. In the 1960’s she became active in left wing political groups including the Black Panthers, and moved to France. Such was her influence especially in Europe that FBI director Edgar J Hoover ordered her to be neutralised, notwithstanding the fact that she was seven months pregnant at the time. Needless to say her child has still-born. So enraged was she at the role of the FBI which had been spreading rumours that the child’s father was a Panther, she called a press conference producing the body of her dead white child, as exhibit A.
By 1979 her mental health was deteriorating rapidly and eventually after a severe bout of depression and an attempted suicide on the anniversary of her child’s death, she went missing. At the end of an 11 day nation-wide search, her body was found in the boot of her car in a Paris suburb. She was just 40 and had died of a massive overdose of barbiturates. As with Frances, conspiracy theories surround her life and whether directly or indirectly it does seem that the US law enforcement agencies played some part in the deaths of these two talented and outspoken young women. A few years ago the National Theatre produced an engaging play about Jean’s sad and painful life. Should the NT ever decide to put it on again then I’d definitely recommend you to book up early. Buried in Montparnasse cemetery Paris, metres away from Jean Paul Sartre & Simone de Bouvoire who had attended her funeral, her grave has become a place of pilgrimage.
By the time Catherine Zeta-Jones reads this piece I trust that she is out of the clinic and on the mend. Whilst Hollywood’s prejudice towards mental illness among its female stars has shifted somewhat since the days of Frances & Jean, it has still a long way to go. Similarly in the real world, where at best mental illness is seen as a guilty secret, much work still needs to be done, as any reader will testify if they or a member of their family has or has had the misfortune to suffer a (sotto voce) NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
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