The Books: “Life Is a Banquet” (Rosalind Russell)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Life Is a Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

Marvelous book. Laugh-out-loud funny, touching inspiring, serious – with awesome character sketches (her sister Duchess will live on in my memory FOREVER) and just a real joie-de-vivre feeling. You like her SO much. She seems like a great dame. Made good friends, kept them for life, had a great relationship with her husband, had a rocky road of a career (she was one of those actresses “hard to place”) – but had the great good fortune to NAIL it in one or two crucial roles in films that will live on forever. She made her mark, man. Imagine a world without His Girl Friday, or imagine that film with any other actress in it. Noooo!!

Her autobiography was published after she had finally succumbed to cancer. She had lost both of her breasts, she was weakened to the point of needing oxygen, a wheelchair … and yet still: every day, she would dress up, in a lovely suit, and have lunch (with martinis) with her husband. Her husband of 35 years or something like that – Freddie Brisson. They were set up by Cary Grant, who was the best man at their wedding in 1941.

Freddie wrote a prologue to her book. He writes:

After she died I found a petition she had tucked away in her prayer book. It said in part, “Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.”

Freddie writes of their courtship. Rosalind gave him a HELL of a hard time. He would call to ask her out, and her maid would answer the phone, and he would hear Rosalind bellowing in the background: “Tell him I’m out!!” hahahaha But he was persistent. The two of them went to the races, they went out dancing until 2 o’clock in the morning … but still. She held him off. She was Hollywood’s “Bachelor Girl”, after all. She had a great career, and a great life. It would have to be a prrreeeety damn good offer for her to give that up … and she knew that. She put Brisson through his paces.

Listen to his story of his proposal:

The first time I proposed, she didn’t accept. I persisted. “I’m going to write your mother and ask for your hand.” And I did. “There’s no way I’m going to get rid of you, is there?” Rosalind finally said, laughing. But when she gave up, she gave up on her own terms. “I don’t like any of these proposals after you’ve had an evening out. I’m not interested in that nonsense. If you want to propose, then come around at seven o’clock in the morning, and put a white handkerchief on the ground and kneel down and ask for my hand.”

At seven o’clock the next morning Roz at last accepted.

The two of them were faithfully married from 1941 to 1976, when she passed away.

rosalindrussell-withhusbandinlondon1958.jpg

Rosalind Russell, in her book, comes off as a person who had her head on straight. Much of that could probably be attributed to her family, and the values they instilled in her. It was a humorous eccentric family, full of siblings … all powerhouses … full of accomplishment and lunacy. They were a family who loved to laugh. You can see that in her face. Her face is made for laughter. She comes off as a loyal person. If she was your friend, she was your friend for life. She was quite a clotheshorse and was also responsible for launching the careers of a couple of up-and-coming designers. James Galanos was one of them. He was her dressmaker and stylist for decades.

Her husband, Freddie Brisson, writes in the introduction a story that brings tears to my eyes:

In 1960, after she had the first mastectomy, Rosalind went to [James] Galanos. He says it was the only time he ever saw her break down. She had come to his office, very crisp, very businesslike. “I’m going to tell you something nobody in the world knows except Freddie and my doctor. I’ve had my breast removed, and I want to keep it quiet. So long as I can be active, I don’t want to be thought a freak, I don’t want people looking at me in person or on the screen and wondering about my sex life.” (You have to consider the era. Women had not yet begun to go public about their mastectomies.)

“I want you to start thinking in terms of how I can now be dressed,” Rosalind said to Jimmy, and then she began to take her clothes off. She started to cry, and he saw that she could hardly lift her left arm, it was so swollen, and he broke down too. From that day forward, he specially designed every piece of her clothing, and neither he nor his fitter ever told a soul.

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She was an actress, not a glamour girl or a starlet. She could never play an ingenue. She was too much of a wisecracker. Her face was too angular to be considered naive or youthful or even, in certain angles, beautiful. Even as a toddler, she looks like she’s about to bark out some snarky comment. She had to grow into herself before Hollywood really knew where to place her. I love journeys like hers. It gives hope to all of the odd ones out there, the misfits, the ones who don’t conform – not because they don’t WANT to, but because they flat out CAN’T. She was one of those.

The book sparkles with life. For example, often in autobiographies like these – the childhood sections come off as schmaltzy or cliched in some way. It’s hard to write believably about childhood. You have to be specific. Get rid of the golden mist of nostalgia before you try to do it.

But listen to one of Russell’s stories:

We children would be up on the third floor — we had a billiard room there; my father played billiards, not pool, and to this day I can shoot so well, people think I must have earned my living at it — playing games and racketing around over my mother’s head, while she sat downstairs doing those name tapes. We had turned an alcove on the third floor into a bowling alley, and we also had a pool table.

My poor father, he never made a bet in his life, he didn’t approve of betting, and he brought up a bunch of gamblers. After he died those of us who were still in school used to come home at different hours — sometimes just for weekends — and there was always a crap game going in my father’s library. My mother permitted it, and stayed to supervise. The dice were going all the time, and I remember arriving late one Friday night and having a chum of one of my brothers, a young man who didn’t know I was a member of the family, warn me against the Russells. “Do you know those people?” he whispered. “Be careful, they’re all sharp shooters.”

And in the background my relatives were yelling, “Get your money up, get your money up, it;s all cash here …”

Now I don’t know about YOU, but I want to hang out at the Russell house.

“Do you know these people?” hahahahahaha

A terrific book all-around. Read it, that’s all.

Here’s an excerpt that has to do with His Girl Friday. Listen to how smart she is about acting, process, directing. She is totally in charge. Just let her GO. Prepare the space for her, and let her GO.

Clip from His Girl Friday below.

EXCERPT FROM Life Is a Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

The next morning, going into New York on the train with my brother-in-law, Chet La Roche, and most of the people who had been at dinner the night before, everyone had his own copy of the New York Times, and we were all reading, and it said in the New York Times that Rosalind Russell was to play this part in a picture called His Girl Friday. Then it said the names of all the women who’d turned the part down. Howard Hawks, who would be directing, had tried to get Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur; he’d asked every leading woman in town before Harry Cohn had stuck him with me. (I was told later that Cohn had asked Hawks to go up to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and take a look at The Women, but I don’t think he ever went.)

Anyway, coming down from Fairfield, I didn’t dare look up from the paper. I kept thinking about all these people saying, “Oh, how marvelous.”

I arrived back in California in a bad mood, and California was in the middle of a heat wave. I’d built my first swimming pool, a salt-water pool (you just dumped salt in, but you had to have special pipes), and it was about a hundred and seven degrees outside, and I was supposed to go down and see Hawks, but I kept brooding about being humiliated in the New York Times, and before I went to Columbia, I jumped in the pool, got my dress and hair all wet, and then went and sat in Hawks’ outer office.

I was always so sassy, it seems to me, so unattractive, now that I think about it.

Hawks came out, did a triple take, and ushered me inside.

“You didn’t want me for this, did you?” I said. (Besides being sassy, I was forever assaulting some guy — Bill Powell, Howard Hawks — with the news that he really hadn’t wanted me.)

“It’ll be all right,” Hawks said. “You’ll be fine. Nonw go to Wardrobe and tell them I’d like you in a suit with stripes, rather flashy-looking.”

“Okay, Mr. Hawks, goodbye,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

His Girl Friday was to be a remake of The Front Page, a story about the newspaper business. Columbia had bought the property from Howard Hughes, who’d already made it once with Pat O’Brien and Lee Tracy as the reporter and editor. It had been Hawks’s idea to change the Hildy Johnson character into a woman.

We’d been shooting two days when I began to wonder if his instructing me that my suit should be kind of hard-boiled-looking was the only advice I was going to get from Mr. Hawks.

He sprawled in a chair, way down on the end of his spine, and his eyes were like two blue cubes of ice, and he just looked at me.

After the second day I went to Cary Grant. “What is it with this guy? Am I doing what he wants?”

“Oh, sure, Ross,” Cary said. (All the English call me Ross.) “If he didn’t like it, he’d tell you.”

“I can’t work that way,” I said. I went over to where Hawks was sitting. “Mr. Hawks,” I said, “I have to know whether this is all right. Do you want it faster? Slower? What would you like?”

Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. “You just keep pushin’ him around the way you’re doin’,” he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

He’d been watching Cary and me for two days, and I’d thrown a handbag at Cary, which was my own idea, and missed hitting him, and Cary had said, “You used to be better than that,” and Hawks left it all in. It’s a good director who sees what an actor can do, studies his cast, learns about them personally, knows how to get the best out of them. You play the fiddle and he conducts. I think filming the scene is the easiest thing. It’s preparing for it, rehearsing with it, trying to get at the guts of it, trying to give it meaning and freshness so that the other actor will relate to you and think of you as his mother or his wife or his sister, rather than just reciting lines, that’s the actor’s real work. A good director knows how to help you with it.

A good director also knows when not to direct. Nobody ever tried to direct Gable. They let Gable be Gable. I don’t mean that he wouldn’t take direction, but when he walked in with the gun and the uniform, and he’d just been over the top, what more could anybody do about that? Gable was the same sitting on the sidelines as he was when he got up and played the scene, and nobody wanted him to be anything else. People like Gable, Wayne, they’re personalities, and a personality is an asset, you don’t destroy it or mess with it.

Grant was different; he wasn’t just a personality, he could immediately go off into a spin and become any character that was called for. He was terrific to work with because he’s a true comic, in the sense that comedy is in the mind, the brain, the cortex. (Every actor you play with helps you or hurts you, there’s no in between. It’ s like tennis, you can’t play alone or with a dead ball; and a lot of pictures fail right on the set, not in the script, where they say it starts. A group of actors and a director can wreck a good script; I’ve seen it happen.)

Cary loved to ad lib. He’d be standing there, leaning over, practically parallel to the ground, eyes flashing, extemporizing as he went, but he was in with another ad-libber. I enjoyed working that way too. So in His Girl Friday we went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it.

Then I started worrying that all this noisiness and newsroom high spirits might seem too chaotic to a watcher, and one night after we were finished I again went to Hawks. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that audiences won’t follow us.”

“You’re forgetting the scene you’re gonna play with the criminal,” Hawks said. “It’s gonna be so quiet, so silent. You’ll just whisper to him, you’ll whisper, ‘Did you kill that guy?’ and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when we’re with Grant, we don’t change it. You just rivet in on him all the time.”

Everybody in the world talks to me about that picture, though it happened in 1940 and they couldn’t get another actress to do it. I’ve had so many indifferent directors, the kind who didn’t prepare, didn’t do their homework, faked their way through (and the actor is really the victim of the director), but I’ve been good with good directors, and for me to get Cukor and Hawks in rapid succession was terrific.

(That an actor needs not only decent direction, but decent material goes without saying. You’re home free if you get material that holds you up. George Burns, who won the Academy Award for his part in The Sunshine Boys, told me it didn’t even feel like work, playing that Neil Simon script – “The stuff is so funny, the words he uses, the way he puts it together.” Being given good material is like being assigned to bake a cake – I might as well add baking to the other similes, tennis, violin playing, I’ve hauled in here – and having the batter made for you. It’s all there, you only have to pour it in the pan, get the oven going at 350 degrees, and you’re home free, everybody says you’re a master cook.)

Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, “Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch,” and Cary said, “Well, I don’t want to kill the woman,” and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, “Try killin’ ‘er.”

And once Cary looked straight out of a scene and said to Hawks (about something I was trying), “Is she going to do that?” and Hawks left the moment in the picture — Cary’s right there on film, asking an unseen director about my plans.

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6 Responses to The Books: “Life Is a Banquet” (Rosalind Russell)

  1. nightfly says:

    “Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.”

    My heart just cracked, Sheila. Wonderful. Another great post.

  2. Catherine says:

    Roz Russell – I love her. You’ve probably seen her on What’s My Line, but if you haven’t, hit that up on YouTube straight away! She is GAS.

  3. mitchell says:

    love this book and HER soooooooooo much! remember Elaine Stritch referring to the husband, in capacity as producer, as the “Lizard of Roz”…lol

  4. red says:

    Mitchell – hahahaha Lizard of Roz!!

  5. Stephanie says:

    I love her Auntie Mame. I’ll check out the book – thank you!

  6. NANCY MORSE says:

    I have loved watching Auntie Mame, reading the books, and then watching Auntie Mame again and again.

    I saw Rosalind Russell accepting an award, online, before she died and her face looked as though she had been given cortico-steroids. The rest of her was trim, as always.
    But she was still lovely.
    To learn that she suffered so greatly with breast cancer is heartbreaking.

    This was a person of quality, from a remarkable family.

    I think a comedienne cannot be too perfect in the face. If too beautiful, she destroys that facade when being humorous.
    Pretty, yes, but not what we would call classic beauty.

    Carol Burnett is beautiful now and lovely but her success was done with the original face, chin, teeth, etc. She had this gift also.

    Lucille Ball was beautiful but also had the ability to look gritty and funny.

    Rosalind Russell was one word above all: elegant.
    Exquisite also.

    It is time to state the obvious. These breast implants being done, the cosmetic surgeries. These people will age very ungracefully.

    The Audrey Hepburns, the Rosalind Russells and the other earlier-mentioned comediennes, who are small or at least, trim and delicately assembled…who have straight limbs, and beauty of carriage….these are the people who are attractive in clothes. These are the people with style.

    Too bad that there are so many people around who go only on looks, anyhow.

    But back to the reason for writing a response.

    I loved reading these excerpts. At 77, I do not need to buy another book and deeply appreciate learning more about this remarkably-strong woman.

    My husband, like many men, saw this character as useless. He said, “But what did Mame do in her life? She did not work, did not make a contribution to mankind, so why does everyone enjoy this story?”
    But then, my husband of 54 years, told me a long time ago that he wanted to marry me because we would walk alongside each other, not one dictate to the other and not one submissively “yes, dear-ing” him.
    My reply: because her elegance is something that women enjoy and appreciate.
    Because the beauty of this movie is timeless and the humor irrepressible.

    Together, we as husband and wife – even with the back-and-forth-banter about Auntie Mame – laugh at the Gloria and the ping-pong ball, about the hors d’oeuvres made with ground-up tuna, clam juice and peanut butter, as Mame surreptitiously flings hers into the bushes.
    Being called “Mamie.”

    All a setup of what was to come: of all these ridiculous examples of hyposcrisy – things set up Mame’s using Beauregard Burnsides’ inheritance for buying land for a discriminated-against people, the Jews – a home for displaced musicians, was it? – right next to these hypocrites entertaining her.
    And nothing that they could do would have changed that.

    As I said, I loved the movie and finally, thanks to you, to the Internet, to the writers and reviewers here, I got to learn more about her.
    Thank you, thank you thank you!
    n morse

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