Susan Hayward Sleeps Raw

On Saturday I traveled out to Brooklyn to hang out with Keith and Dan. They had both come to my reading, bless their hearts, and it meant a lot to me to have their supportive intelligent presences in the audience. Months ago, somehow, Susan Hayward had come up in conversation. Dan was telling me about one movie, part of her ongoing Oscar-grab, where she plays a “party girl” who ends up facing the death penalty, and I felt a sense of urgency to see this thing NOW. So finally, we set a date for a Hayward Day out at the beautiful comfy home of Keith and Dan. It was a gorgeous day. Our crazy storm totally broke the heat wave. We’ve had nothing but beautiful mild days ever since.

When I walked into Keith and Dan’s living room, I noticed the almost ritualistic placement of a couple of items on the coffee table (see photo above). You see why I love these guys? They were READY for me.

There was a giant Susan Hayward BOOK, and then a couple of her movies, including the one we were going to watch, I Want To Live!

There wasn’t much chit-chat. Dan sat down and began to regale us with the trajectory of Susan Hayward’s career. I could listen to Dan talk for three hours straight.

“Susan Hayward was a tough girl from Brooklyn. She got her start in the 30s and 40s but then in 1948 she got her first Oscar nomination for Smash Up. And then began the Oscar grab. She did My Foolish Heart, which was based on Salinger’s Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, and she is actually really good in that, but she loved to suffer. That was her thing as an actress. She loved to be drunk and homeless and jittering with the DTs on the Bowery. She apparently was really unfriendly and never spoke to anyone on the set. She just came in, did her work, and left. She was nominated three more times, and it just got to be ridiculous. She was determined to get that statue, and finally she won, for I Want to Live! And after she won, she still worked, a little bit, but basically she stopped after she won the Oscar. That was all she cared about.”

This is a condensed version of Dan’s impassioned monologue.

I asked questions. He supplied answers. He knows everything.

Keith brought down some fresh yummy currants, placed them in a bowl on the table next to Susan Hayward’s giant mug, and then we all settled in to watch I Want to Live!

In her own way, she is a riveting actress. She clearly has no fear. In the film, she plays a good-time gal who gets wrapped up in a bad element (but she’s just trying to survive, don’t you know, she’s not a BAD person, why does everyone think she’s bad?), and ends up getting accused of murder, convicted of murder, and … AND … given the death penalty. The final half hour of the film takes us through the entire agonizing appeals process, as the death penalty is staved off at the last minute, time and time again. But finally – SPOILER – her time runs out. And we are then treated with the beautiful sight of Susan Hayward, blindfold on, strapped into a chair in a small glass chamber, wincing and flailing about when the first whiff of cyanide hits her flaring nostrils. The film begins AND ENDS with an alarming message from journalist Ed Montgomery: “This is a FACTUAL STORY.” Once is not enough for those words. We clearly need to see them twice, to let the horror unfold in our own minds.

Directed by the recently deceased Robert Wise, I Want to Live! is thoroughly entertaining, most of all because of Hayward’s bizarre and fiery performance. At times it made me think of my friend Mitchell’s words on Liza Minnelli and her odd unique brilliance: “Liza commits to things that are so insane … that other performers would say, ‘You know what? I’m not doing that.’ But her commitment is so complete that it works. But still … it’s iNSANE.”

I want Dan to write about Susan Hayward because his perspective is so unique and I always love hearing him talk about actors.

One of the things I noticed about her is that she would snap her head around, dramatically. She would snap her head, as though she was in the middle of a Fosse dance number, and when she snapped her head, the emotion would flood her face. Like, the head-snap activated the emotion. But it’s so DRAMATIC. There are a couple of scenes where Barbara Graham shows that she’s the life of the party, by dancing around like a jazz baby, and it is fantaaaaaastically bizarre. The first 3/4 of the film shows Barbara Graham’s life and loves and poor choices.

Some of her line readings should be in the Smithsonian.

But the real masterpiece is that final section, with Barbara Graham lolling about on Death Row, with a sympathetic nurse hanging out outside her cell, and all of the officials waiting for the phone call from the governor. Her last meal arrives. It’s a giant platter of pastry. Of course it is. She smokes. She wears a fitted prison dress, showing off her impressive rack. She snaps her head around until you fear she will get whiplash. She’s a hard-boiled dame who doesn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve. On her first night in prison, she strolls into her cell, all insouciant and breezy, and once she is alone she strips down to her black negligee and dances around in her cell, cigarette dangling. You haven’t lived until you have seen Susan Hayward in this scene. She is reprimanded. She is handed official prison clothes, and she rips them off, barking at the guards, “I’ll sleep RAW.”

Oh hell to the yes, Susan. You sleep raw, girl!

There is one moment which is so strange that we had to rewind it to watch it again. The three of us burst into laughter spontaneously. It’s before Barbara Graham goes into the clink. She walks through a group of guys welding things, she’s on her way somewhere else, and she really has no business just strolling into the inner office. She makes eye contact with one of them. And then does this truly strange almost chicken-dance, looking around at all of the staring guys. I interpreted this as her aggressive “I’m gonna do what I want to do” attitude, but it came out so WEIRD. “Oh my God, I have to see that again,” I said. I absolutely love her for being so …. strange. So aggressive. She acts the SHIT out of this part. Her motivation very well may be: “Dammit, you WILL give me an Oscar for this.” It doesn’t matter. Or, it does. But it just makes it even more interesting.

After the movie, we hung around for a bit, reminiscing about Suzy Gilstrap and laughing hysterically about Skyward Christmas. We talked about movies we had seen, recent current releases. We talked a little bit about my reading. They both were in attendance, which meant so much to me. Dan basically has the whole thing production-designed in his mind. Once we get a director for it, I will definitely pass on Dan’s recommendations.

And almost randomly, I can’t even remember how it came up, Dan said that the full unedited version of Arizona Dream is on Youtube.

I have written about that movie before. I saw it at its full length at showing at a museum in Chicago, and fell madly in love with it. Was so excited when it came out on video, and I bought it, only to find that over half an hour had been chopped out of it. And you could FEEL it. The edit truly impacted the effectiveness of the film. It has always been my sadness that that original version was somehow lost. And who cares about Arizona Dream? It’s a small hearty bunch, but certainly not a groundswell of support that could result in at least a director’s cut. Who else saw the full length version? It’s not like it even got a proper release. in the theaters. I saw it in a museum, for God’s sake. So Dan said it was the full-length one on Youtube, and I went nuts. I am so happy! I am so happy, first of all, that the full-length version is at least see-able, and also so happy that I got to talk about that movie with Dan. It feels like nobody else has seen it, certainly not the full version I saw back in the day.

Then we went upstairs for dinner. We were having Chicago pizza, for Dan’s birthday which was this week. And Keith also had a peach and blueberry pie. We sat in their lovely dining room. We talked about:

— Barry Manilow
— who today is a “great actress” who is under the age of 50. Dan is convinced there are none. I gave him some options which were rejected roundly
— Michael Fassbender
— Vanessa Redgrave
— the two-volume biography of Faulkner Keith just finished
— Silkwood. I said, “I used to watch it with my two friends in college, Luisa and Mitchell. So we were a straight woman, a gay woman, and a gay man –” Dan interrupted: “So yeah, Silkwood is perfect for that demographic.” I said, “Yeah, there’s something for everybody.”
— what movie/theatre stars we would cast in my play, if it ever gets where it seems to be going. I wanted to hear their thoughts. I have a nice wish-list, should I need to pull it out at any point
— Clay Aiken. His coming out and the backlash he experienced from his rabid in-denial fans, who were basically ignorant bigots. The Claymates. Keith, trying to understand the situation, said, “So … what were the Clayfaces issues?” Uhm, clayMATES, Keith. Get your lunatics straight.

Oh, and humorous moment: My phone has not rung in 3 weeks. I don’t mean that I haven’t received calls. Oh, you can bet I have received calls. I have received more calls in the last 3 weeks than I have received since I was 16 years old and needing to talk to my gaggle of friends on a daily basis. But the actual RINGER appears to have stopped working. So I’ll be sitting there, right next to my phone, glance down and see that I have received 3 missed calls, and the phone never rang. So annoying. I looked through the Settings, trying to figure out if I had changed something. But I was baffled. I am not the brightest bulb when it comes to technology. I kept thinking, “Oh eventually I’ll just stop by the Apple store and have them fix whatever I did wrong.” I must reiterate that the last 3 weeks have been the most call-heavy of my entire life, practically. I am not exaggerating. I talk on the phone every day. This is a new universe, and I’m still not used to it, but whatever, I’m going with it, and it would HELP to have a phone that RINGS. Keith was telling me about something that had to do with his phone, and he took my phone to show me what he was talking about, and I said, “Oh, and while you’re at it, my phone doesn’t ring anymore. Could you look at my settings and see what I did wrong?” Keith glanced at my phone and pointed to the silver button on the side: “Your silencer is on.”

Oops.

I’m an idiot. I am so glad I didn’t go into the Apple store, all baffled and annoyed about how my technology doesn’t work, only to have them see my shame in plain view.

He took the silencer off, and I said, “Please feel free to judge me. I totally deserve it.”

Now my phone rings. Thanks so much to the veritable WHIZ KID of technology, Keith, who managed to see that I had inadvertently pressed my own Silencer and didn’t even realize it. It’s amazing I am able to get through the day without police intervention.

Meanwhile, we were eating yummy pizza and delicious corn on the cob and scrumptious pie. The coming night outside was beautiful and cool after a week of heat wave. I was happy to be with my friends.

Our entire gorgeous day ended with Keith pulling up “Bang Bang” on his computer, and we sat there, drinking tea, not talking, and rocking OUT.

Such days make me happy to live where I do, happy that I have met Keith and Dan, and happy to be me.

They make me “WANT TO LIVE!”