Jennifer - The Fabulous Life of a Girl Named Jones
by Maxine Arnold
(Photoplay, September 1947)
(Note: This is one of the better articles about Jennifer written for a fan magazine. It is well written and researched with no noticeable mistakes. Of particular interest is the last paragraph which mentions a life size statue of Jennifer as Bernadette in Tulsa. I wonder if it is still there?)
Nine-year-old Phylis Isley was walking with her parents down Broadway, a tiny part of that solid wall of humanity that moves up and down when the theaters are out.
She was oblivious to the milling masses, the shouting newsboys, honking taxis, electrical fireworks and the rest of the constant carnival that makes up Times Square.
Her hazel eyes saw nothing but the name "Ruth Draper," blazing away on one of the marquees.
"Someday my name will be in lights like that too," she said excitedly.
"Yes, yes, dear," said quiet-voiced Mrs. Isley.
"But, mother, it really will! protested Phylis, not to be done out of fame so fast.
Her dream then was to be a successful monologist like Draper or Cornelia Otis Skinner. When the Isleys had left Oklahoma City for the child's first trip to New York, her dramatics teacher had urged them to take her to see the star.
That night settled it for Phylis. "Someday I'll be up there..."
Today wherever you turn she is "up there". Movie marquees fight with each other in flashing the name of Jennifer Jones in "Duel In The Sun". She has proven her right to be there by running the gamut from saint to sinner on the screen, playing equally well the roles of Bernadette and the sexy, sultry half-breed, Pearl Chavez.
She has the unequalled record of winning the Academy Award with her first starring role and of having been nominated in every Awards line-up since.
But long before Oscar's votes started rolling in, early symptoms of stardom got her the votes of her childhood playmates, school friends, teachers and everybody who knew her. All of them sensed that this tall willowy girl, with her wide expressive hazel eyes, pink cheeks, her solid sincerity and electric enthusiasm, was born to be a star.
Jennifer's parents knew it, though they were too familiar with show business and its hardships to encourage her in that direction. Her father, Phil Isley, a lovable genuine person, had come up the hard way, traveling with tent shows and really toughing it until he eventually got into the theater business on his own. Her mother, affectionately known as "Dolly" to her friends, had worked in offices that booked road shows. They wanted their daughter just to grow up and be a lady and enjoy the comfortable amount of money they had.
But whether they wanted it that way or not, it must have been early apparent to them that she was born to act. For Jennifer was always coming home from school in different character, aping the mannerisms and inflections of children she's been playing with. Later she took spells at being Janet Gaynor, Sylvia Sidney and Katharine Cornell. She really concentrated on Sylvia, studying her dignified, retiring manner, her low throaty voice and lingering look. "Some kind people said I looked like Sylvia Sidney, so I guess it was successful - the wistful business," Jennifer once said laughingly.
After seeing Katharine Cornell in "Wingless Victory" some five times, Jennifer wrote her for advice about how to become an actress and will never forget her answer. There's only one way to become an actress...and that's never to give up trying to be one."
"I've never forgotten that," Jennifer has said since. "I'm still trying to follow it."
Today directors talk about how Jennifer virtually "lives" every part while she's playing it, fairly breathing her own life into it. She always has. So much so that once during a school play when she was supposed to take poison, she played the scene so realistically some children jumped up from their seats shouting, "Don't let her take it - don't let her!" When the curtain fell they were sure she was dead.
This same sincerity later prompted director Henry King to say that among the various stars he tested for "The Song of Bernadette", only Jennifer actually saw the Vision. "In twenty years as a director I've worked with many fine actresses, but few inspired ones. And she is inspired."
Her former French teacher, Marie Gicquel Barrett, who first brought the book to Jennifer's attention and urged her to try for the part, remembers many "inspiring" performances Jennifer used to give on a bench under an elm tree in the back yard of her home in Tulsa. Nobody had more faith in her future than this French teacher and Jennifer's first dramatics teacher, Mrs. Irene Kendle. It was of the latter than Jennifer said, when she first came to Hollywood, "She taught me everything I know."
Curiously enough, all this absorption in what must have seemed to others a make-believe world did not cut her off from having friends. A great deal of it was due to the qualities of the girl herself. Jennifer's greatest desire always was to be just one of the "gang".
Certainly her native generosity of spirit was an important factor in cementing life-long friendships. When she was chosen May Queen for her class at Monte Cassino, she said unhappily to her best friend, Ruth Bowers King, "This is silly. I don't want it. You should be queen." Not until years later did Jennifer's other good friend, Mary Birmingham, discover how she had become class valedictorian. Originally Jennifer has been asked to accept the honor but she refused in her friend's favor, saying quickly, "Let Mary do it. I'm doing so many things."
Unlike the other girls in their gang "The Toppers," they called themselves, Jennifer cared little about social events. "Dates bored her to death," says Mary. "Whenever she went out with us she took the whole crowd by storm and was always the most popular, but she just didn't care for anything but acting."
When the other girls daydreamed about the future, most of them agreed they'd get married when they were twenty-five.
"Not me," Jennifer would break in. "I'm going to wait until I'm thirty-five!"
"Then Phyl was the first in our gang to get married," they laugh now.
In those days, Jennifer liked to stop by Wolferman's store and buy candied apples, getting the steering wheel all sticky as she alternated between driving and eating the rest of the way home. A special lark in those days meant going on a hamburger binge. She would have a friend over to spend the night and, instead of raiding the icebox when they got hungry, they'd make sure the rest of the household was asleep, dress and go buy a sack full of hamburgers, then drive out to a country road, park and eat the whole sackful and listen to the car radio.
The close association of the girls was broken temporarily when the Monte Cassino days were over and it was time to go on to college. Ruth
went to Texas University, but Jennifer after careful study chose Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, because of its excellent drama department. However, they were inseparable during vacation periods. Once when Ruth had two more days of vacation than she, Jennifer deliberately missed her train back to Northwestern so that they could drive out into the rain-soaked country for a long excursion
together.At Northwestern Jennifer met David Bruce, whose name was then Andy McBroom. It was to mark a new era for both of them, for Bruce, fired by Jennifer's enthusiasm, returned with her to play leads in the stock company which Papa Isley had finally persuaded to back when he realized it was useless to try to dissuade his daughter from a career in acting. The "Mansfield Players" was directed by Richard Mansfield Dickinson and Jennifer, of course, was its leading lady.
But make no mistake about it, she carried her end of the load, as Dickinson himself would gladly tell you. They traveled by automobiles during that hot summer, with the scenery lumbering along in a truck ahead of them. Though her father owned the company, Jennifer never ducked any of the hard work. She helped put up scenery, painted, cleaned up the stage and worked props. Her parents usually joined them wherever they were playing on weekends and brought their laundry, which they'd sent back to Tulsa by them the week before.
Jennifer worked up quite a rolling repertoire in "The Family Upstairs," "This Thing Called Love," and "Smilin' Through," which latter she particularly enjoyed because of the its dramatic depths and haunting love scenes.
But opening night of her first "professional" engagement with the Mansfield Players was anything but auspicious for Jennifer. She fluffed
some lines of "This Thing Called Love" and further disgraced herself in her own eyes by knocking over a lamp and breaking it. She was completely crushed. She wanted to pay for the broken prop out of her own allowance and it took the combined persuasion of her parents and all members of the cast to get her back on stage again the next night.She's still extremely self-critical about her own work, magnifies out of proportion any small failure, and studies any luke-warm reviews conscientiously, saying, "They're very helpful to me."
All these years the remembrance of Broadway and Ruth Draper's name in brilliant lights had been locked away in Jennifer's mind like a precious jewel. The time was now at hand when she must get to New York to learn more of her chosen career. Under her persistent campaign, Mother and Dad Isley finally broke down and agreed to her attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
There she met the tall, lanky youth from Utah who was to become her husband. They were a match for each other in enthusiasm and impetuousness. What more natural than that in due course Jennifer should carry him back home to Tulsa to do a dramatic radio series with her? Thus listeners of KOME were presently taking in their stride the earnest young voices of Phylis Isley and Robert Walker on a half-hour dramatic show Sunday afternoons.
Jennifer was insistent that the scripts have two equally good leads. "Bob has so much more talent than I have," she would say.
Jennifer's sudden decision to marry Bob was part of the pattern of her impulsiveness - and at the same time of her natural reserve. A girl generally confides her romantic plans to her best friend but even Ruth King had no idea of what was brewing until a week before the wedding.
They were married early one morning at the Christ's King Church. It was a private family wedding with only some ten people present. Jennifer wore a Peter Pan-ish hat with high crown and a red velvet suit, which she used to say brought her luck.
The optimism was undoubtedly prompted by the fact that after she and Bob had decided to shake the dust of Oklahoma from their feet and try their luck in Hollywood, Jennifer had succeeded in getting a job at Republic Studios. Her first screen role was in the "Dick Tracy" series. There was even talk of teaming her with Roy Rogers.
But things weren't going well for Bob. New York might be a chance for both of them. So the Walkers bundled their possessions into their care and headed East.
The rest is a twice-told tale. How after a struggle Bob began to find success in radio, while Jennifer kept house and bore their two children, Michael and Bobby, just eleven months apart. How Jennifer walked in cold to read for David O. Selznick and came out with a contract, thereafter to enter upon a period of intensive study under his coaches. How the call came for her to go to Hollywood and prepare for "The Song of Bernadette" and Bob landed a Metro contract.
But the luck of the red velvet wedding suit was beginning to fade. About the how and why, Jennifer and Bob have always been silent. But most of Hollywood could take lessons in the conversational loyalty each has displayed where the other in concerned and in the manner in which they've worked together to keep their separation from being any more painful than necessary to their children. And it's no secret that during his publicized "disappearance" when the studio was alarmed over his absence, Jennifer drove back to Hollywood alone early in the morning from her vacation at Delmar to get the latest news of him.
Meantime, "The Song of Bernadette" had hurtled a new star across the Hollywood skies. But the girl from Oklahoma couldn't face the labyrinth of a Hollywood opening. Clothes, photographers, reporters, dinners, parties and the awful moment when she would have to walk the red carpet between the rows of premiere bleachers, with the microphone raising its slender neck like a snake about to strike.
She would save her first taste of success to share with her friends at the Southwestern premiere which was held in her home town.
With her two boys, she climbed aboard the train for Tulsa, the black taffeta dress she'd bought for her Hollywood debut as a star tucked away in her bag. The studio had offered to send a maid along but Jennifer declined. They started out with a nice box lunch which was promptly up-ended on the floor. And the problem of keeping the boys safe together in their upper berth in the drawing room was almost too much. "Whew!" she laughed when her father and Ruth King met her at the Kansas City station to accompany her on home.
The town turned out to meet her when the train pulled in. "I'm so glad to be here I could almost die!" Jennifer said.
She wore a yellow and brown tweed suit, alligator pumps, and carried a large felt hat that impressed the members of the "The Toppers" there to greet her. "She never used to even own one," they said. But she was the same "Phyl" they'd always known. The only reference she made to her new screen status was while signing an autograph. "I never could make a decent 'J' and now I have to make two of them," she laughed.
Huge banners saying "Welcome Jennifer Jones" were strung across Main Street. Giant posters of Norman Rockwell's painting of her in the character of Bernadette stood up high on the corner of the First National Bank and in the window of a local department store. Two others, six by eighteen feet, were mounted over the marquee of the Ritz Theatre for the premiere.
That night Jennifer saw her childhood dream come true. Her name fairly blazed in lights over Fourth and Main Streets, Tulsa's "Little Times Square," while on the sidelines hundreds of home-towners applauded the new star who was born.
It was thrilling, breath-taking - but not terrifying like a Hollywood premiere.
Even today she still has to brace herself for a function like the "Duel In The Sun" premiere. You see her step out of the limousine and pause politely for the cameramen. But her hands are trembling. She hurries as quickly as possible down the last red mile of carpet, body tense, looking neither right nor left until she reaches the haven inside the theater. It's her night to take bows but, being Jennifer, she can't.
Perhaps it is this same tenseness and reserve which has prevented her from making many Hollywood friends. Then again, her loyalty to her Tulsa chums may be responsible. A more practical explanation is her complete devotion to her work which has confined her contacts to those connected with it - hairdressers, make-up people and most particularly Anita Colby who was Selznick's directress of women stars and who now is like a sister to her.
Today Jennifer is one of the hardest working stars in Hollywood. As evidenced by her performance of the perils of Pearl in "Duel In The Sun", which would have tired any serial queen. Jennifer admits by way of understatement that it was "the most vigorous thing I've ever done."
She climbed over Arizona cactus and rocky crags with a gun in her hand until her arms and hands were scratched and bleeding, her fingernails broken and torn. She spent hours at a time in slimy water for those sump scenes in which was supposed to be shivering with cold and blue from the chill. And she says, "I was cold and blue. It was no feat of acting."
She has the same eager enthusiasm she's always had. Jennifer has finally found herself a home. A beautiful pink stucco French Riviera style out in Brentwood, furnished in rich colors that make a perfect background for Jennifer's own rich coloring, her gold-brown eyes, pink cheeks and gleaming wealth of dark brown hair. She had it redecorated while was in New York on location with "Portrait of Jennie" and was so eager to know how the place was coming, she wanted photographs sent her of the various rooms.
Her young sons took an active interest in the redecoration too. "We want funny things over our bathtub," they told their mother before she left. And they got them. Murals featuring two little boys in a boat.
There are those who think this is the home Jennifer is preparing against the time when she and David O. Selznick may be man and wife after his marital problems have been cleared up. Whatever the outcome, the mutual faith of Hollywood's brilliant star-maker and his sensitive star continues to write screen history.
Today back in Tulsa there stands a life-sized statue of Jennifer in the role of Bernadette. Against a backdrop of lilac bushes and her native Oklahoma dogwood, the statue in an inspiration to other ambitious home-town girls to remember the story of a girl names Jones.
