Stars in Residence
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum1/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-01_stars_in_residence.jpg
Hollywood romances are known to be fleeting, but it's true that every rule has an exception. After 50 years of marriage, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward exemplify togetherness, with Newman once famously declaring, "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?" After their 1958 wedding, the couple purchased a house in Hollywood, where the backyard swing set and shaded lawn created an idyllic playground for daughters Elinor, Melissa and Claire. Woodward, a best actress Oscar winner forThe Three Faces of Eve(1957), was, in 1960, the first actor to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Newman received an honorary Oscar in 1985 and won an Academy Award for best actor inThe Color of Money(1986).
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum2/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-02_stars_in_residence.jpg
Carole Lombard不是天生的怪僻的女主角;她和流派evolved together. The actress liked to say that her feature movie career (which followed an important apprenticeship in a dozen Mack Sennett two-reel shorts) began with "17 flops in a row." Before he directed her inTwentieth Century(1934), her breakthrough movie, Howard Hawks called her the worst actress in the world. But he is also said to have told her costar John Barrymore that she would be a sensation — if only they could keep her from acting. What the notable director and actor did was encourage Lombard to be herself, and this turned out to be the key to liberating an antic original from the restraining shell of a gifted, if not particularly inspired, contract player.
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum3/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-03_stars_in_residence.jpg
In November 1924, Gary Cooper, who hoped to train as an artist, followed his parents from their ranch in Montana to a rented Craftsman house in Hollywood. Soon after his arrival, he got his first break, finding work as a movie stunt rider. With his good looks, riding ability and natural talent, he began landing larger roles, culminating in an attention-grabbing 90-second part inWings(1927), a film that went on to win the first Academy Award for best picture. His success and fame rose steadily after that and, in 1929, he moved to an apartment nearby on Argyle Avenue. In a career spanning several decades, Cooper won Oscars for best actor twice: forSergeant York(1941) andHigh Noon(1952). And wherever he lived, reminders of his boyhood in Montana were always to be found.
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum4/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-04_stars_in_residence.jpg
Doris Day, one of the best-loved and highest-paid female stars of the 1950s and 60s, purchased a house in Los Angeles's Toluca Lake area from comedienne Martha Raye in 1951. Interested in design, Day visited an upholsterer immediately after her wedding to Martin Melcher. "I remember Marty standing there…muttering, I don't believe this is happening on my wedding day.' [The day] we returned from our wedding trip to the neat house in Toluca Lake, [my son] Terry excitedly running to the car, Alma in the kitchen preparing a welcome-home dinner,…was the answer to what I had prayed for," the actress told A. E. Hotchner, who wrote her 1975 memoir,Doris Day: Her Own Story. "From the time I was a little girl, my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a family."
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In 1939, when asked what he considered to be the secret to a happy marriage, Humphrey Bogart deadpanned, "All a husband has to do is learn to say Yes, dear.'" The remark no doubt brought the chuckle it intended, as the antics of the "Battling Bogarts" were already widely known to be anything but a "Yes, dear" affair. Between 1938 and 1945, Bogart and his third wife, actress Mayo Methot, proved a gossip columnist's delight, providing a steady stream of copy with highly public displays of pyrotechnics that were often as physical as they were verbal, leading legendary wit Dorothy Parker to observe tartly, "Their neighbors were lulled to sleep by the sounds of breaking china and crashing glass."
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum6/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-05_stars_in_residence.jpg
Born in England as Archibald Leach, screen star Cary Grant embraced Hollywood upon his arrival in 1931, fresh from the Broadway stage. Having appeared earlier that year in a motion picture short titledSingapore Sue, Grant was brand new to movies. Green as he was (he would himself recall that project with some chagrin), he was remembered and a screen test at Paramount led to a long-term contract and such early films asBlonde Venus(1932) with Marlene Dietrich. Despite the fact that Grant could be somewhat reserved in person, he became known for a joyous ebullience and charm, not to mention a polished, debonair screen presence. With his penchant for physical fitness, Grant would come to look every bit the part of the California athlete. Between romances — including marriages in the 1930s and 40s to actress Virginia Cherrill and Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton — he would live in rented houses with his friend and fellow bachelor and leading man Randolph Scott, who later starred inThe Last of the Mohicans(1936) and countless westerns. In 1935 they moved into a house built for Norma Talmadge on the beach in Santa Monica, quickly establishing themselves as everyone's favorite hosts for Sunday brunch. As William Randolph Hearst, Jr., is quoted to have observed, "There were girls running in and out of there like a subway station."
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Bette Davis moved to Hollywood with her mother, Ruthie, and their atrociously named dog, Boojum, in December 1930. She'd been appearing on Broadway in forgettable plays likeBroken DishesandSolid South(with one standout appearance on tour as Hedvig in Ibsen'sThe Wild Duck), but Hollywood's still-new ability to synchronize sounds with images required a whole new crop of actors — ones trained to speak. And so, as a gossip columnist reported at the time, "Talkies want Donald Meek ofBroken Dishes. Also want Bette Davis." In June 1934 Davis and her husband of nearly two years, the boyish musician Harmon "Ham" Nelson, moved from one lavish rented home to another: from Greta Garbo's place on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood to a sizable Spanish Colonial Revival house at 906 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. "I adore space," Davis wrote in her autobiography,The Lonely Life. "In the city I want to push away the buildings with my own two hands and let the sky rush in." In all, the nomadic actress lived in more than 75 houses. "A nest was always being improvised," she said of her lifestyle. "Favorite cigarette boxes and ashtrays have followed me around the world. I am a nester — and I've always found myself out on a limb."
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum8/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-06_stars_in_residence.jpg
"I don't know whether it was the weather, the people or the music," actress Ava Gardner wrote about her feelings for Spain, "but I'd fallen head over heels in love with the place from the first moment I'd arrived." She would go on to develop an interest in bullfighting — as well as in bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. In December 1955, following a separation from third husband Frank Sinatra, Gardner moved to Spain and found a ranch-style brick house set on two acres outside Madrid; later, she settled into an apartment in the city. "The only necessities I couldn't seem to get — Hershey bars, Kleenex and Jack Daniel's whiskey," she wrote, "were replenished by visiting friends."
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum9/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-09_stars_in_residence.jpg
"The only phone in the house was at that desk," recalls Christopher Mitchum about his father's den in the four-bedroom redwood-clad house he shared with his father, actor Robert Mitchum, his mother Dorothy and his brother James in Los Angeles's Mandeville Canyon. "One evening," Christopher Mitchum recalls, " I was sitting in the den on the padded bench in front of the roaring fire. A blond woman wearing a bone-colored dress walked into the room and crossed straight to the fireplace. She turned and lifted the back of her dress to warm her bum, which was at eye level and just inches away from me. My dad walked in and said, Have you met my son Chris?' She looked over her shoulder, flashed a radiant smile and said, Hi. I'm Norma Jean.' That's how I met Marilyn Monroe."
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© 1978 David Sutton/mptvimages.net, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, mptvimages.com/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Courtesy Ava Gardner Museum, Courtesy Christopher Mitchum10/10dam-images-homes-2009-07-stars_in_residence-10_stars_in_residence.jpg
"My home?" asked Marilyn Monroe. "It will be a place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble. As for me, I just want to be an artist and an actress with integrity." Throughout her life, Monroe occupied a series of residences, owned no jewelry and counted books, records and a picture of legendary actress Eleonora Duse among her most cherished possessions. Even after attention-getting roles inThe Asphalt JungleandAll About Eve(both 1950), she still kept a modest, one-room apartment at the Beverly Carlton Hotel in Beverly Hills. "I'm not interested in money," she once said. "I just want to be wonderful."
