I recently acquired a transcript of an obscure Glenda Farrell interview from 1959. It contains not only a lot of information about Glenda Farrell herself, but also much about Hollywood in general and various classic stars, directors, and other show-business people, and her opinions and observations about them. I thought that some of you here at the SSO might find some of it interesting, so I decided to share a few of the most interesting parts here.
First of all, it turns out that the story about the sprained ankle and a stagehand asking if there was a doctor in the house may not be true. That piece of information came from an interview with Tommy Farrell. He was away in college at the time, so he may have heard an incorrect second-hand version of how his mother met her future husband. Here is Glenda Farrell's own recollection of how she met Henry Ross:
Then I came back. I still was stage struck. I was offered a play called "Seperate Rooms". I came back and we did it on the road first, played Chicago, opened in New York—and it ran two years.
After a two year run, you get pretty tired, and I got a sore throat. The doctor came to see me, but I didn't get any better. I guess I was just terribly tired. Then somebody said, "I know a wonderful man, the catch of New York, a great doctor—why don't you just see him?"
The last thing I wanted was a catch in New York. I was tired. I just wanted to get well. This doctor came over to see me—and p.s., I married him.
Her recollections on the initial difficulty of getting roles and on being cast in Little Caesar:
In the meantime, I'd done "Little Caesar", but that was just accidental. Lila Lee was supposed to play "Little Caesar", and she got ill. I was doing some show, and someone approached me about it, and I went out and did the play, then came back to N. Y.
You see, I tried - every agent tried to get me into pictures, but I never was a very pretty girl. I always had deep circles under my eyes, and lines down beside my mouth. I'd test, and they'd say, "You don't photograph". So I'd come back to N.Y., to the stage. So at the time they called me for "Little Caesar", I thought: "Oh—what'll I use for a face?"
They didn't want me, in the beginning. So I did it. In "Little Caesar", the photography wasn't so hot, because it was one of the first of the talkies. I'd never done a silent picture - this was my first—and there were about three cameras, and all of the overhead lights, and oh, that's hard on a baby! That will put lines there that you haven't arranged for yourself yet.
On actors meddling:
Well, I think actors tend to meddle, and I don't think they should. That's probably my training—I had a severe training, for that I'm very grateful. I think actors should act and leave the technical end of it to the men who know that end of it, and not interfere or worry about the sequence. That's not their job. No matter how much they worry about it, there's the film cutter. My brother's a film cutter and I know, the greatest scenes in the world he can take and whirl around and say, "We have to cut that, because it destroys part of the story." So why should the actor worry? That's not his job. Let him do his role to the best of his ability, and leave the technical end of it to the technicians, because they know what they're doing.
On parties and the truth about her many publicized romances:
I've never been to those "glittering fabulous parties". I've been to a few, and as a matter of fact, do you know what those parties were? This was in the thirties. We'd have to get dressed up—they'd give us an order—we'd have to go to the Trocadero or the Colony or whatever the big cafe was at the moment—usually they cooked up a romance with somebody on the lot, for publicity, someone you didn't care about at all, but it made news, made the papers, it was publicizing both of you. You'd come home so tired because you'd been up working at 5 or 5:30 in the morning. You'd have to come home and change and get into the evening clothes and go down there. and you couldn't wait to get home. As soon as they took all the pictures, you'd be laughing gaily at the table—but you couldn't wait to get home.
That's really what it amounts to. People think the actors are having such a time. They never think of you as working. So many young girls think movies are so glamorous, and when they find out you have to get up at 5:30 every morning, and that when you go out it's for publicity, more or less, they have a little different attitude about it.
Q: Do you remember who your studio romances were?
Farrell: I don't remember them all. I never got around to scrapbooks—I've got thousands of pages stuck in envelopes that I never had the time to get into a scrapbook. My son once started one. Lots of them were people I didn't remember existed. Somebody would come along, start a career—they would sign people up—if they didn't make it, that just went the way of all jobs. I don't remember their names. This was all part of the job. Several in one year? Oh, yes. It meant nothing on either side. We worked too hard. We didn't have much time for romance. You can't get up so early, go study your lines, and still...you know, you just fall into bed at night.
Q: What about the people who were giving the huge parties.
Farrell: The people who were giving the huge parties were Dorothy di Frasso, and millionaires who had nothing to do but come to Hollywood and enjoy what they felt were the glamour people. They'd give parties, and you'd go on a Saturday night to a party. No, that wasn't a studio order, this was all a social thing. It was good to get away from the grind, go to a party, but that's all.
On whether she chafed at being typecasted in comedic roles:
I think actors chafe under everything. I think this is something they shouldn't but they do, all of them, and I think it's part of the breed and nothing can be done about it. It's a dissatisfaction with themselves, always wanting to better themselves, always wanting to better everything they do. That is an actor's curse, yet possibly the thing that keeps them going and helps them to make progress.
Q: For instance, did you want to do drama at the time?
Farrell: I wanted to do everything they wouldn't let me do. I wanted to do drama, and they were making money at what I was doing, so that was what I had to do. Well, I was very happy in my work—but every actor is frustrated, every actor wants to do something else. This is a natural thing. You want to do something more important and something better. So I don't think this is chafing or saying we were mistreated. We weren't. It's something every actor does, and God help him if he doesn't—he stops growing.
On the uniqueness of comedians, a sense of comedy, and the difference between comedians and comics:
All comedians are unique performers. It's possibly something they're not aware of themselves, until they get the part that brings it out and displays it to them, so they become aware of the fact that they play comedy and that they got laughs. Then they begin to develop this certain quality, develop it till they get bigger and bigger laughs. This is something the comedian himself can do. A writer can write divine lines, beautiful lines, and they can cut around, and the director can direct the actor, all so that she may be a great comedienne in this particular part, but they may never reach that again. Because if they don't have the lines, they can't do it. However, this may be the start of the development of a technique and flair for comedy—because I think most actors start out not knowing they're comics, and suddenly find that a unique way of reading a line gets a laugh. A simple line can be read by five different people, and only one person get a laugh, and that one person can get a big laugh on it. It's his own individual way of interpreting the line. This is the thing a comedian does, and he cannot do it unless he's experienced, unless he learns the way to get the laugh and knows what's in back of it.
It's pretty hard to explain this. Comedians analyze their ability. You look at yourself very objectively, and at your comedy objectively. You never quite associate it with yourself. It's your job to look at it that way, the way you would look at your machine there. You develop it, you see it grow, you see something more you can do with it and you develop it along those lines. It's something that you don't really share with a lot of people. You work on this yourself, and you bring it about yourself.
Q: You don't personalize your comic part to the same extent as a dramatic part?
Farrell: No. Never. As a matter of fact, your greatest comics are offstage your quietest people. The outside world might even call them dull people. Because they don't have to prove themselves, they don't have to say, "I'm funny". They know they are. They get paid for it.
Q: What was the particular comic gift of Joan Blondell?
Farrell: Well, Joan has great humor. Comediennes must have an understanding of comedy. It's a comic sense, that's what it is. A sense of comedy is completely different from a sense of humor. It isn't the same thing at all. You have to be able to keep the two in abeyance—your sense of humor and your sense of comedy.
A sense of comedy must project. A sense of comedy, you do not connect with yourself. A sense of humor is you. A sense of comedy is being able to project. I have some friends who are the funniest people I know, but they'd never know how to be funny on the stage. They wouldn't know how to project. This comedy would fall flat. Yet the greatest comedians I know are the dullest men in the world, or the dullest women, in a drawing-room, according to the layman.
I've had people come in to me and say: "Say something funny!" You want to run away. This is your job, your business—but you don't go about being funny all the time. As a matter of fact, I know a few comedians who make it a point to be funny offstage, and they bore me so I just can't stand it. This, I think, is insecurity, where a comic's concerned.
Again, there's the difference between a comic and a comedian. A comic and a comedian are two seperate types of performer. George Brent, Donald Cooke—they're comedians. It's light, wonderful humor. This is comedy. They can take a simple line and get a laugh out of it and it's very funny, it's the humor, the comedy, the light touch with which they handle the lines.
A comic bounces his lines off of somebody. A comic is almost always cruel. His comedy is almost within himself. I don't know quite how to explain it...
Q: Would you identify someone you consider a comic?
Farrell: Well, after what I'm saying about it, I don't think I should. It's a cruel type of humor. It's always at someone else's expense. Watch them on TV. The comics come out and say, "My mother-in-law did such and such." Their comedy is at the expense of someone else—it's like tripping the old lady to get a laugh. A comedian's comedy is never like that at all. His comedy is never cruel, never bounced off of anyone. It may be sharp or acid at times, but it isn't associated with himself personally. The comic is usually a comic in the drawing-room also. He's always trying out his routines. Where the comedian—it's a technical studied art. It's the implication of a line that gets the laugh, or it's more humor at themselves. Light comedy is almost barbed at oneself, if it ever gets personal, as against the comedy that bounces off of someone else. I think comics can become great comedians—we've got plenty of them that graduated from burlesque and have become great, delicate comedians.
On Hollywood marriages:
I know people think actors are quite loose and they marry around a lot. Well, possibly they do marry around a bit in Hollywood, because they never get a chance to meet anybody else. You never get a chance to meet anybody except the people on the lot that you're working with. Joan Blondell married Dick Powell because she was working with him all the time, and they were madly in love—I'm not saying this wasn't a love affair, because it was. But also, it can seperate you, because you work so hard. You work all day with somebody, and then you come home, and you're tired—it just doesn't lend itself to a happy married life. You're married to the theatre. It's very difficult to have a happy personal life in show business if you are devoted to your business—if you're married to someone in the industry. Actors have a greater chance when an actor marries a non-professional. Those people have a great chance for happiness, because the woman makes her husband's career her career. His life is her life, she sees that he's happy when he comes home. But men are not willing to take that position. When an actress marries a man, he doesn't want to see that she is catered to every minute. As a male (and as it should be), he wants the attention. But an actress can't give it to him. An actor's (non-professional) wife understands that. He's the god in the house. But men will not make the woman the god. He's got to be the lord and master. That, I think, is why marriages do not last in Hollywood. I don't think it's because they're thrown in contact with each other—no more than with a doctor or a nurse, or anybody else in business contact—I think it's the fact that their lives are just built that way, and they don't have a chance.
People who marry outside of the industry have a great chance of happiness. Now, I have. I'm the lucky one. I've been married twenty years to the most wonderful man in the world. He's the head of the house, but he still treats me like an actress, and I can be temperamental and he doesn't pay any attention to it. It doesn't matter to him. But I'm sure if he were an actor, and if my career suddenly took a spurt and his didn't at the moment—and this happens, up and down, all through your career—he would resent it. The man resents that. It's his male ego, and you can't blame him for that. So I think an actress has a very slim chance of being happily married unless she's married to someone outside the business. Or, she could marry a producer, someone else in the business, but not an actor, because it's rivalry—and a man cannot stand rivalry. It's the competition that isn't good.
All the men I know—like Hughie Herbert, Guy Kibbee, Alan Jenkins, Frank McHugh—their wives were our best friends. Their wives were outside of show business. They made the actor's lives beautifully happy at home, and the homes were well-run, and so they were happy men. The women didn't have as great a chance, because where are you going to meet a man who is going to give you the attention a wife gives?