Being a Star, Joan Fontaine Writes, is “No Bed of Roses”
Worst is a life-long feud with her sister, Olivia de Havilland. But she does hold forth in a palace-like abode with a ghost.
The Washington Star, September 25, 1978: NEW YORK — You thought all Hollywood movie queens had quietly faded away. Meet Joan Fontaine.
She does not walk. She sweeps, regally. Her blonde hair brushed smoothly back off her face lacks only a tiara. She does not speak conversationally. She delivers her lines in a theatrically throaty voice, flinging a hand to her heart, tossing her head high. She is in turn imperious, condescending, deceptively gracious, unwittingly revealing. She never for one moment forgets — or lets you forget who she is or, more accurately, who she was.
“Quite frankly,” she says, “to be a star took a lot of doing. And why give it up? ”Thirty seven years ago, Joan Fontaine, now nearly 61, won an Oscar for her role in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Suspicion.” Through the ’40s and into the ’50s, she reigned on the Silver Screen along with women she admires like Greer Garson and Joan Crawford and her sister, Olivia de Havilland, who has been her lifelong rival and nemesis, whom she doesn’t.
Now she has written a book about life with Sis, her four husbands, two daughters — one an adopted child she’s disowned- and, most of all about her mother, Lilian, whom she revered and who, from everything she writes about her, treated her like a stepchild.
“No Bed of Roses,” her book is called, and because Fontaine retains the glamour of that bygone era, her publisher, William Morrow, is sending her on a three-month publicity tour which includes two weeks in England. And everywhere she goes, her schedule is madly complicated and crowded, she says, because her friends everywhere are clamoring to fete her,
“It’s terribly first class,” she said. “Quite frankly, I love the limousines. I love the roses and the sweets and the $25 breakfasts.”
Fontaine had just returned to the East Side mansion she calls home — she owns the entire fifth floor — from the West Coast where her book tour revived a celebrity the grandeur of which she hasn’t experienced there in more than 20 years. She says she left Hollywood when they offered her a role as Elvis Presley’s mother. “I thought I’d been there long enough, thank you!” Now, with the exception of a very occasional “beautiful” television or movie role (she will appear in ABC’s drama, “The Users” next month), she tours in one dinner theater play a year.
“I don’t want to do bit parts. I’d rather be a star in a dinner theater with my name over the title, than play some small part in lousy picture.”
Arriving for a day, with an ear infection and a desk full of invitations to accept, she has just canceled all her book interviews for two days, including this one. Unreached — the call was made a half hour earlier — the reporter shows up in her lobby which looks like the entrance to a castle. Some instinct aroused by clues in the actress’ book has prompted the impulse to come armed with a rose.
On the house phone, Fontaine claims complete ignorance of the appointment, but importuned and apprised of the rose, she suddenly relents. She warns that she is covered with “layers of stage make up” and false eyelashes and that her ear has just been lanced but she will “throw on a dressing gown; come on up.”
Having certainly figuratively and almost literally crossed a moat, one now stands at the entrance of a palace a story and a half drawing room that stretches ahead acres to medieval windows.
The chatelaine is far from the wreck she has described on the house phone. She appears, dressed in a sky blue bathrobe that matches her eyes, her hair perfect, slim, scarcely touched by time. Not missing a step, she leads on through the room passing a needlepoint rug she later points out as of her making, and into the dark beamed library where she sinks gracefully into a chair by the fireplace.
One of the reasons she wrote the book, she says, is to dispel all the erroneous information that has been spread about her and especially her feud with Olivia.
“When you become a legend, people become experts on your life.”
In seconds, Fontaine is off and running on Olivia de Havilland, who won two Oscars, now lives in Paris and has, for the second time, exhibited “inexplicable,” “brutal” behavior concerning their mother. “She’s done it twice over my mother’s memory,” Fontaine says a smile on her face during the following recital, but her voice venomous and trembling perceptively.
Fontaine has described in “No Bed of Roses” that because of a theatrical commitment in “Cactus Flower,” she was unable to be at her mother’s side during her last illness and her death, at 88, in 1975, although she spoke to her daily on the phone. Olivia had rushed over from Paris, spent the last two months, made all the funeral arrangements and neglected to invite Fontaine to the service, scheduled during a performance of “Cactus Flower.”
By calling her mother’s executor and threatening to make the whole sordid story public, Fontaine was able to have the memorial service, held at her mother’s old home in Montavido near Saratoga Calif., postponed two days until she and her daughter, Deborah, could attend.
Now, Fontaine goes on tightly but smiling still, “Olivia did it again. She and the executor arranged for a ceremony commemorating a theater at Montavido in my mother’s name.” Not only was Fontaine not invited, but her name was left off the invitation which bore the names of her sister and the executor’s.
After the funeral service, Fontaine wrote she had “no words at all” for Olivia. Now she says, “nor will I ever again.” Fontaine explains it was sibling rivalry. “Olivia always told people I got there first, I got the first academy award. I got the first husband. If I die first, she’ll be furious!” She can understand Olivia’s pique. “After all she’s older than I am.”
Fontaine’s laughter reverberates hollowly in the cavernous room. She looks around, possessively, fondly. “This is all mine. I did it all myself. Not one person helped me. I earned it. I paid for it. I live here. I love it.”
She says she has no more of the guilt feelings that have plagued her her whole life. The guilt of being a single mother, accused by her daughters and others of neglecting her children because she had to go out and earn their living. She had four husbands, but she alone raised Deborah, now 28, (she left Deborah’s father, William, when the child was nine months old) and Martita, 31, the Peruvian girl she adopted at age four.
She has never seen Martita for 15 years, ever since she gave her a round trip ticket to Peru so the girl could visit her own parents. When Fontaine took Martita home with her in 1951, to offer her a better life, she told the parents she would send her home for a visit when she was 16 years old. The girl refused to go. She ran away instead.
“Until my adopted daughter goes back to see her parents,” Fontaine says in a hard edged voice, “she’s not welcome. I promised her parents. I do not forgive somebody who makes me break my word.” But now Fontaine is free. She’d no sooner think of marrying again than she would have of adopting another child.
Unaccountably at this moment, the lights in the room dim. This is the second time it has happened in an hour. It is the ghost she shares her house with, explains Fontaine. “I get along beautifully with it,” she brags. “But the maids say the moment I leave all hell breaks loose. Voices are heard. Things fall off the wall. Doorbells ring and there’s nobody there.”
She looks again with satisfaction at the immense room, which, with dusk has taken on a haunted air, and points to a carving on a beam high ahead, a sort of a cross and the date: 1699. “This was the millionaire J. Gould’s son’s apartment and all the wood paneling was brought over from Spain.” Her priest, she says — “I am an Episcopalian” — has told her it is quite possible” she does have a ghost. “My mother had one, you know.”
Her mother who engraved all the milestones of her life with words she has never forgotten. Commenting on Fontaine’s makeup just before she was to go on in her first play, as an eighth grader: “You look just like Harpo Marx.” Noticing Fontaine, as a teenager, holding hands with a boy during a drawing room concert, “I saw you. You’re nothing but a whore.” Washing her face with soap and water just before she is to attend her first academy award dinner, at 19, because an RKO studio man had made her up: “You look like a painted hussy.” Her mother, who never saw any of her movies. Who had two husbands who tried to molest Fontaine as a child.
It’s all in the book. The book, ironically, is dedicated to her mother. “You loved your mother?” you ask, keeping incredulity out of your voice.
“Ahhhhhh,” she breathes. How she adored her!
Then Fontaine’s smooth forehead gets just a suspicion of a frown. She talks about the family decision for her to use the surname of her mother’s second husband as a stage name, because Olivia had already claimed their father’s — de Havilland.
“I did resent having to change my name. Terribly. I still do. Joan Fontaine. I don’t know who she is. I’m Joan de Havilland. I was born that. Joan Fontaine is sort of a fictitious person I’m looking after, doing the best I can for her. Maybe it’s a good detachment. Maybe it is why I can achieve as much as I have. I really look upon her as not being me. I’m in charge of Joan Fontaine.”
“I’m Joan de Havilland.”
Original Title:
Joan Fontaine, still a queen: No Bed of Roses’ is the story of her life
