Rosalind Russell went into His Girl Friday (one of my favorite movies ever) knowing that she was about the 15th choice for the role. Howard Hawks had pretty much offered it to every other actress in Hollywood – only to find everyone either uninterested or unavailable. Finally, he “settled” on Russell. Russell knew this because there was a huge article in the New York Times about the whole thing – and reading it, she felt completely humiliated.
Nobody wants to know they are not the first choice.
Russell was pissed off.
She was enough of a success at that point that she felt dissed and pissed.
And here is how she went to her first meeting with Howard Hawks (I love her. She’s so ballsy!! Hawks, by the way, ended up falling in love with her too. She was, just by being herself, the quintessential Howard Hawks Woman.)
Russell writes:
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.”
