How ‘The Women’ Embraced the Discreet Charm of the Catfight

‘Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women’By Illeana DouglasLyons Press, 304 pages“The Women,” the play and the movie, are period pieces, dated in so many ways, but so much a part of their period that they have survived precisely because they are, in a sense, immune to changing cultural values, time capsules to be savored almost like a guilty pleasure, watching beautiful women in their malicious quest to retain husbands or to steal them from one another.The play was a huge Broadway hit in 1936, making its author, Clare Boothe, a star in her own right, which she later magnified by marrying magazine mogul Henry Luce and entering conservative politics as a Connecticut congresswoman and later as American ambassador to Italy. She paid close attention to the way fiercely competitive women spoke and behaved in beauty salons and accordingly wrote dialogue that excited women and men alike in much the same way as cage boxing does today.Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so after reading Illeana Douglas’s authoritative account of how the movie was made, including a scene in which Rosalind Russell takes a bite out of Paulette Goddard — for real! Joan Crawford went at Norma Shearer with fury, trying to take down MGM’s queen and the widow of legendary producer Irving Thalberg. “The Women” (1939) was supposed to be Shearer’s triumph, and she held her own not only with Crawford but with Russell, Goddard, and Joan Fontaine, just beginning her career but doing an outstanding job that would result in her starring role in “Rebecca.” George Cukor, the so-called women’s director, had what might seem like an unenviable task of keeping all these leading women in line. But, according to Ms. Douglas, a renowned actress and filmmaker herself, he relished his role, encouraging the actresses to be aggressive.MGM decided early on that the movie would not be about New York women but about Hollywood and women stars trying to rival or even displace one another. Paradoxically, this is what made “The Women” work as an ensemble, as each actress seemed to thrive on creating friction on the set that produced bad feeling but superb, energized performances.Crawford, for example, liked to do some loud knitting during Shearer’s scenes and the resultant blowup, as Ms. Douglas explains, was Crawford’s payback for more than a decade-long resentment over having to take on roles that Shearer rejected, or roles that Shearer accepted and that Crawford thought should have been hers.Ms. Douglas does not ignore the other actresses, so that “Jungle Red” is very much a group biography providing important background not only on the play’s author (Booth had nothing to do with the movie), but on the film’s writers, including the rejected work of Donald Ogden Stewart, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and MGM veteran Jane Murfin, though she would receive a screenplay credit for the picture, in favor of fast on-set writing by Anita Loos who kept sharpening the barbs the women hurled at one another. The hair stylist, Sidney Guilaroff, and costume designer, Adrian, also get their due.That the movie is inimitable is apparent in Ms. Douglas’s account of attempts to revive the play, remake the movie for later generations, adapt it for television, and even turn it into a musical. None of those efforts were nearly as successful as the original play and movie. As we learn from the biographies of the actresses that Cukor cajoled but touted, and occasionally admonished, they projected a sense of themselves and their career ambitions into their roles.Why ‘Jungle Red’? It is the color of the nail polish all the women wear, with the implication that it is their war paint. The daughter of Shearer’s character, Mary, refers to her red nails as claws, making a cat scratching gesture. The studio called the film “the catfight of the century,” and reviewers, as Ms. Douglas reports, piled on, as in “Ladies on the Loose”: “They let down their hair, and kiss, bite, coo, and scratch in their eternal battle to win and hold the men.”So who wins? Some reviewers picked Rosalind Russell, as the champion scene- stealer; others favored Joan Crawford. Most were kind to Norma Shearer on her way out as an MGM leading lady, but triumphing, it seemed to certain critics, by underplaying among a cast of so many flamboyant standouts.Mr. Rollyson is the author of a forthcoming biography, ‘Our Eve Arden.‘

How ‘The Women’ Embraced the Discreet Charm of the Catfight

How ‘The Women’ Embraced the Discreet Charm of the Catfight

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