Living With Miss G by Mearene Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

studio next morning with a hangover that rendered him almost unfit for
work, would join him for dinner, and try and talk him out of his troubles.
One night in question, Walker got so drunk that he became unfit to drive
anywhere, so Miss G piled him into her car and brought him back to the
apartment. We had three beds, a double in Miss G’s room and two singles in
mine. Miss G moved in with me and slept like a log.
Walker tumbled into the double, and I heard him moving around in the
bathroom before he made it into bed. For hours he kept me awake because the
walls were pretty thin, and his crying and pitiful imploring of Jennifer to come
back to him were heard easily. I knew I could do nothing to help him, but I felt
so terribly sorry for him.
Next morning I got up with the light just breaking and went into the
bathroom to get the bits and pieces I needed to start the day. I opened the
cupboard where we kept the brooms and cleaning materials, and wondered what
on earth was hanging there. Then I worked it out. It was a sort of leather harness
that Robert Walker wore under his loosely cut clothes to fill him out as a
muscular figure. I did not touch it.
After he had been to the bathroom, Miss G and I tried to force coffee down
him, and off they drove to Universal for the day’s shooting.
I did not tell Miss G what I had discovered until she came back that
evening with Walker. We felt quite powerless to help. The movies had made
him famous and given him what amounted to a false physique, and his skill and
charm as an actor had introduced him to the lovely Jennifer Jones. Then it had
all crumbled and he had inherited this burden of tragic and overwhelming grief.
He never really recovered. He died in his early thirties.
After two failed marriages, an affair with Howard Duff, and what can
really only be described as a roll in the hay with Fred MacMurray, I knew very
well that Miss G was not happy with her situation. It was the same old thing.
She wanted to be married. She needed to be married.
That state had been implanted in her mind from the moment she had been
born. The Mama and Papa syndrome was as much a part of the North Carolina
landscape as the winters and summers and the plants that grew.
Marriage was a woman’s destiny. Marriage fulfilled her, gave her children,
a role in life and happiness. Her mother and father, despite much hardship,
proved that to her. Her sisters were married. Her own two marriages and two
quick divorces rankled in her mind as a deep sense of failure. Oh sure, we could
laugh and joke about it all, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.
Then into our lives after One Touch of Venus came another MGM
potboiler, The Bribe , with Robert Taylor, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, and
John Hodiak. Robert Taylor was very handsome, very experienced, very
famous, and very married to Barbara Stanwyck
He had a roving eye, which fastened upon Miss G. And this time, Miss G
took it very seriously.
Taylor had first zoomed to movie fame when he played Greta Garbo’s
lover in Camille . The scene between the dying Greta as Camille and Taylor’s
character at her bedside remains to this day as a gem of cinema history. Trouble
was Taylor was now labeled as the swooning lover in the Rudolph Valentino
mold, a near gigolo type.
Taylor hated that image. He was in truth very macho–the ranching, riding,
hunting, shooting, fishing male—but Hollywood type-casting had fixed him
eternally. He hated his part in The Bribe .
Filmed on the back lot at MGM against scenery and back projection slides
suggesting some vague Latin American background, Miss G played the unhappy
wife of the villainous character played by John Hodiak. The wife is rescued
from her martyrdom by handsome Federal Agent Taylor. Hodiak is popped into
jail, and Taylor gets Miss G as his just reward.
During the weeks it took to make The Bribe , I was beginning to wonder if
Miss G was going to make a habit of going to bed with her leading men. In