Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

Between Heaven and ( Continued, from page 47) “I have to look beautiful and poised and be sure of myself. I feel so far from it!” She went on from this to dip into her troubles as an actress generally. But after a while she was no longer talking about her professional problems. She was talking about the personal problems of Anne Baxter, woman. By this time she was crying. As if she too realized that the only way to be rid of some inner affliction was to purge herself, she was pouring forth a long tirade of self-condemnation. She said that she had grown up only in certain ways, ways that were necessary to fulfilling her ambitions. In other ways she had never grown up. She spoke about her marriage and blamed herself for the divorce which ended it. “Our greatest fault, my husband’s and mine,” she said, “was that we couldn’t fight, and let the truth out. We were too reserved. Or too frightened, if the truth be known, to let our real differences emerge. We avoided, as too many couples do, those honesties through which you come to grips with a marriage and handle it. Or handle yourselves. “I blame myself most because I was the woman. It was my business to see what was happening. And if I had really been in charge of myself, instead of master only of that part which was ambitious and selfseeking, there might never have been a divorce. And even then, there might have been a reconciliation. It sickens me that what I have left behind in my life aren’t footsteps in the sands of time, but footprints in cement. It can be too late!” The doctor busied himself to give her a sedative. After a while it began to take effect, and her eyes grew heavy-lidded. He rose quietly to his feet, but before he could go, Anne had a few more words to say, this time (and the doctor had to smile inwardly) spoken as an actress, as if she well knew what was happening and was trying for a good curtain line . . . and the lines came out all mixed up. “I so often think of the play ‘Our Town,’ when Emily Web, the young girl who has died, comes back from her grave for a brief interlude. She tries to establish communication with her family and fails. Finally, sadly, she has to say, ‘Oh, it all goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize — all that was going on and we never noticed.’ ” Now the actress fell asleep. The doctor lowered the shades and tiptoed from the room. When he reached the lobby of the hotel, he telephoned the company manager and told him that he saw no need to cancel the show the next night. Miss Baxter would be able to go on. The doctor was right. Anne Baxter went on and performed well. She has always been able to go on. It is only in real life that she has failed to perform in a manner calculated to bring a full measure of happiness. This is purely because she hasn’t done a good job of playing the most important role of all — the role of Anne Baxter. She is both too intelligent and too honest to think that she ever will. “I know now,” she once said, “that the life in Hollywood which I had to lead, that any inordinately ambitious young actress has to lead, is like walking through a mine field. What you stand to lose, with each mine you touch off, is another phase of your own identity — your all-important, personally possessed you. It means a steadily increasing inability to be yourself during those precious moments when it is only as yourself that you can be touched by the heart’s warmth we all hunger for. Real friendships. Even more fleetingly, real love. “After a while you know the field is mined, and you know what is happening to you. But you can’t help it. You still walk through the field. And when you get blown up — and you do — you try in a dazed way to put yourself together again. The only trouble is that you can’t put yourself together exactly the same as you were before. There is a difference. And you don’t always like this difference. It sometimes even frightens you, and you try to hide your fright from the members of your family or your close friends. ‘Is this what I have become?’ you ask yourself.” What has happened to Anne Baxter is not uncommon. It is true, probably, of most sensitive feminine stars, and of practically all the more beautiful and successful ones. But where an Ava Gardner or a Marilyn Monroe or a Rita Hayworth will seek sooner or later to leave Hollywood, as if by so doing she will thus be able to leave her unhappiness behind, an Anne Baxter is under no such illusion. “That’s just kidding yourself,” she commented recently. “Between an actress’s private life and her professional life there can be no partition, as so many have so hopefully claimed. After you’ve made your bed, you can’t lie on it a woman in love one minute and a public personality the next. Each conflicts with the other and both conflict with the inner you. The ambitions, the crackling nerves you take to Color portrait of Tony Perkins by Marshutz; Anne Baxter by Fraker; George Nader by Barbier from Globe; Debbie, Eddie and Carrie Fisher from M-G-M; Ava Gardner from M-G-M; Pier Angeli and Perry from M-G-M. the studio you take wherever else you go. They are damningly still with you when you want to take your hands off the controls and be just a woman. “You can get pretty desperate because this is true. Because whatever the magic of stardom is, with all its lights and glamour and shouting, it is not the magic that leads to simple fulfillment. In time this has its effect on you. I have become, quite frankly, a manic-depressive, saved only by — thank God for it — a sense of humor. When I feel good I feel so wonderfully good. But Lord, how low I can get, and how often I go through the cycle!” A hazel-eyed, intense girl who has always had to fight off a tendency to be pudgy, Anne is successfully slim as she now enters her thirties. She has lived quietly with her five-year-old daughter Katrina, ever since her divorce in 1953 from John Hodiak, who died of a heart attack a little more than a year ago. Anne’s home is now a shrubbery-hidden, smartly remodeled Hollywood house located just above the Sunset Strip, where are gathered all the town’s night clubs — to which she rarely goes. She has a fervor for acting that is as strong today, apparently, as it was when she was just a child living in Westchester County, New York, and begging her folks to bring her to Manhattan to see the Broadway plays. She can remember every part she has ever had, from her gradeschool roles to her latest ones in Cecil B. De Mille’s “The Ten Commandments” and in “Three Violent People.” This was aptly demonstrated one evening about five years ago when she happened to be eating with Hodiak in a Beverly Hills restaurant. The waiter brought a note from a diner who had observed her enter. “I was your leading man once, in the sixth grade at Horace Greeley School in Chappaqua, New York,” the note read. Anne took one look at the signature and wrote a quick reply. “No, I was your leading lady,” she corrected. She was right. He had been the star. She is very precise about such things; she tends to date events by the roles she happened to be playing when they occurred. “It was just before I worked in ‘Sunday Dinner for a Soldier’ that I met John,” she will say. This was in 1944, and John, incidentally, was also starred in the same picture. While making the film they fell in love. “But,” as she has also said, “it wasn’t until I was cast in ‘The Razor’s Edge’ that I decided to marry John.” That was in July of 1946. Their little daughter was born in July of 1951, or, as Anne would put it, just before she worked in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” A deep unhappiness made itself evident in their lives a year later and they were unable to cope with it. She won her divorce decree from Hodiak at a time when her name was being linked romantically with director-publicist Russell Birdwell. If Anne Baxter’s cup is not brim full today, it is all the more strange because she never needed Hollywood in the first place. But it seems that little girls who are also stragestruck are made not only of sugar and spice but great gobs of dissatisfaction as well. Anne’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Stuart Baxter, learned this about their only child when she was barely able to talk. Mr. Baxter, vice president of a distillery corporation, was quite well-to-do. Mrs. Baxter’s father was, and still is, a world-renowned figure in architecture, the much discussed nonconformist Frank Lloyd Wright. Anne had only to accept her status to gain for herself a good life, it would seem. But this was too easy. This she would not do. “Some people have to overcome the handicap of adversity to get places,” she once explained. “My barrier, I knew right from the start, was the cushion my birth had put behind me. All I had to do was lean back and live comfortably. I was frightened at the prospect, because I knew it would take the fight out of me, make the life I craved seem less important. It is hard to remember exactly how you felt as a child, but the essence of it all was, I think, that I wasn’t satisfied being just myself. Nor did I want to be some beautiful, mystical creature. I felt a great urge to be useful . . . through acting. Besides, if it isn’t enough being just you, what better place than the stage to be someone else?” Anne was not yet twelve when she was studying the theatre in a dramatic school in New York. This was after her folks had moved to Chappaqua from Michigan City, Indiana, where she was born. She was not yet fifteen, had been an acting apprentice at the Cape Playhouse and had done three Broadway plays when she was invited to make a movie test by the then titan of picture-making, David O. Selznick. Her mother chaperoned her West, and Anne has never forgotten the afternoon she was