"Picture" Hedy Fired

The 1966 psychological thriller Picture Mommy Dead begins and ends with fire. However, there was a conflagration of a sort before the movie had barely begun filming that today wafts around the movie and in a way changed the course of one movie star's filmography. In short, it ended it!  Movie bit part actor turned TV writer Robert Sherman (later a key contributor to Barnaby Jones, 1973-1980) wrote a screenplay concerning the fiery death of a glamorous socialite, the mystery being who caused her to perish that way. Low-budget horror movie director-producer Bert I. Gordon was preparing the film and, in line with recent trends, sought to populate it with some Hollywood royalty a bit past its "sell by" date.
  

Don Ameche, after some coaxing (he had just relocated to the east and was reluctant to come right back to California for filming) was set to play the dead woman's widower. Gene Tierney (who'd starred with Ameche in Heaven Can Wait, 1943) was announced to costar as his new wife, the former governess to his young daughter. Tierney wound up taking an early hike and, after Merle Oberon declined to appear in her place, the comparatively younger Martha Hyer was cast as the new step-mom. One time British matinee idol Maxwell Reed was hired to play a forbidding-looking relative and hanger-on.
 

Then a trio of other names were enlisted to provide brief cameos; Signe Hasso, Wendell Corey and Anna Lee. And as the murdered glamour puss, Hedy Lamarr, long touted as one of the screen's most all-time beautiful ladies, was cast. (One exception to Gordon's casting concept was for the role of the teenage girl of the story. The role went to his own eighteen year-old daughter Susan Gordon!)

Lamarr posed in a satin and fur-trimmed gown for an all-important portrait to be used in the film. Then something dreadful happened. She, under a significant deal of stress over the possible drafting of her son into the Vietnam War, left a department store with $86.00 worth of merchandise that she had not paid for. After her arrest, she protested that is was a misunderstanding and even produced movie residual checks in her purse in the thousands. The case eventually went to trial in a splashy barrage of flashbulbs and outre fashions. Her son testified that she had also been emotionally disturbed that her looks were no longer what they had been (!) on the day of the incident. The charges were finally dropped.

Unfortunately, by then, the star had also dropped from Picture Mommy Dead. Press releases had earlier trumpeted Bert Gordon's declaration of support for her regardless of the arrest, but just before the trial began, she was found unable to effectively work on the film due to nervous exhaustion and was terminated.
 

Gordon had to act fast in order to salvage his project and so Zsa Zsa Gabor, for whom portraying a tantalizing, jewelry-covered socialite would prove no great stretch, was hastily brought in to take over the role. Her face was painted over Lamarr's on the already-completed portrait, with everyone hoping that no one would notice the rail-thin, demurely-endowed, taller body that now had Zsa Zsa's suddenly-narrower head on it! (No such luck, folks, your pal Poseidon - and many others - could discern this with ease!)

The cast finally set, filming could proceed and, thus, so will we. Picture Mommy Dead opens at an imposing mansion (the real life Greystone, where many a TV and film project has been filmed) that has one of its rooms afire. A canopy bed is roaring with flames and at the foot of it, on the floor, is a woman's body.

Turns out this woman is Zsa Zsa Gabor, lying still on the floor while flames lap around her. Someone removes a glittering diamond necklace from her throat while a child's voice is heard singing a rhyme about worms crawling in one's stomach and out the mouth. Then we see the fire lap at her shoes and legs.

Cut to a mountain convent where Don Ameche has come to collect his teenage daughter Susan Gordon, who's been under the establish- ment's psychiatric and recuperative care for three years. Nun Signe Hasso bids them farewell and good luck, though warns Ameche of Gordon's nightmares surrounding the night her mother perished, a night she recalls precious little about.
 

We then meet the new Mrs. Ameche, Martha Hyer, who was formerly Gordon's governess and worked her parents. Gordon received Hyer in a chilly fashion, complete with a snarled look we will see more of as the movie progresses.

Hasso encourages Ameche and Hyer to have patience with Gordon and Ameche assures her that his still rather unstable daughter will receive the best of care.

The trio heads to the mansion, where none of them have resided since the fateful demise of Gabor, and head up to the gnarled iron gate of the front entrance. That gate is nothing compared to the gnarled features of family cousin and general hangabout Maxwell Reed.  Reed suffered serious burns to his face on the night of the fire. (Was he trying to save Gabor or trying to ensure that she didn't survive?)

Next they parade through the cavernous estate (which is populated with a bevy of antiques that the director secured from the Hearst Castle) and enter a room that, at first glance, seems to contain the motionless corpse of a dead man! Turns out it's the next best thing, Wendell Corey, in a cameo as the family attorney.

Corey, affecting a hooty accent that is craggy, smoky and southern, informs Gordon of the convoluted dictates of her late mother's will. Something about how Gordon can live there if she wants, but the house has officially been willed to the state and she cannot touch her sizable inheritance until she is twenty-five. The furnishings and artwork, however, belong to her father Ameche.

Ameche informs Gordon that he has to sell the contents of the house in order to live. It seems he has already burned through his own $100,000 inheritance, mostly trying to keep Hyer in luxury. Ameche has, in fact, already set up the estate sale for the very next day. Corey spews out information and insults in equal mention. Meanwhile, Reed is still stewing about his own measly $500 bequest.

After getting reac- quainted with some of her old dolls and ugly toys, Gordon roams the halls of the mansion until she comes upon the portrait of her mother. She's enraptured with the painting, which has been set-up almost as a shrine.

Ameche is horrified by the fact that the picture has been put up this way. Reed explains that the next day is the anniversary of Gabor's death and so he thought it would be appropriate!

Next, Reed begins to whisper all sorts of horrible details into Gordon's ear about the fiery death her mother exper- ienced, insinuating that she had something to do with the killing.


Hyer is no saint, either, and soon begins to plot against Gordon. She informs Ameche that if he'll only have his daughter re-committed to a mental institution, everything will revert to him (i.e - them.) Hyer's makeup looks great throughout, but I especially love this shot of it, which affords us a nice view of her smoky, mascara-laden eyes.

Gordon is exper- iencing horrible nightmares and/or hallu- cinations and soon departs from her bed and heads back to the painting, which holds a fascination for her. She can't quit staring at the necklace in the portrait and reaches up to touch it, scraping her fingers across it until they bleed (?!) across Gabor's throat.

Horrified, she stumbles into Gabor's old room where she is confronted by her mother, with arms outstretch- ed. As she looks on, Gabor begins to become engulfed in flames, leading Gordon to collapse to the floor in terror.

The next day at the sale, Gordon comes upon a trio of Gabor's ritzy friends and hilariously insults them for having the gall to attend the liquidation of all her effects. (I LOVE the lady in yellow's hair just over Gordon's shoulder.) This whole sequence seemed so familiar to me and I realized that in the ill-advised Dynasty: The Reunion (1991) a similar scene took place, with the Carrington belongings being off-loaded, right down to being shot in the very same mansion!!

This is when Anna Lee's cameo comes into play. She portrays another one of the late Gabor's friends, full of chattiness and cattiness, who points out that someone has "vandalized" Gabor's portrait with those red streaks across its throat.

Later that day, we find Reed working with a falcon out on the grounds. We half expect to see Jane Wyman come padding out to greet him, but in fact it is Hyer who meets him out there. Unsatisfied with how her schemes are being met by Ameche, she starts to work on Reed as a possible accomplice to her plans to get rid of Gordon.

Gordon comes upon Hyer rooting through a wicker storage bin that has a dress of her mother's in it. It's apparently the exact same dress that Gabor posed in and then died in! Gordon tells Hyer that this was the original dress which, because it was torn, was reproduced a second time in order to be worn again. (Because fabulously wealthy socialites are always eager to wear the same thing again and again... I guess this is before secondhand shops like The Way We Wore and A Star is Worn could make use of old gowns...)

She mentions something that sounds to Hyer an awful lot like Gabor's missing diamond necklace, which gets Hyer all lathered up. Hyer is still bent on getting rid of Gordon so that she and Ameche can inherit all that lovely money, but he isn't interested.

Stymied by Ameche's lack of scheming sportsman- ship, Hyer turns instead to ex-lover Reed. She heads to his room and begins to seduce him into helping her achieve her plans for independent wealth. Apparently unfazed by his disfigurement (or perhaps she turned off every light), they get down to business.

Gordon is continually drawn to her late mother's portrait and stands before it with her arms extended as she tries to recall what happened. Picture. Mommy. Dead. Get it?

She experiences yet another series of disturbing hallucinations, this time involving Reed's falcon (or is it a hawk.) Upon awakening, she thinks she sees Gabor entering her room. Or is it Hyer dressed as Gabor? Reality and fantasy are beginning to blend for the young girl.

Now we are treated to flashbacks of Gabor on the fateful night of her death. We also get to see a rare shot of Reed without half his face melted away. Gordon relives the whole evening from start to finish until we at last find out just what happened to her departed mommy.

The end credits of the film are my FAVORITE kind. Each star appears on-screen with his or her name depicted along with it! So that is how I will run through them here. Ameche, who'd been a popular movie star in the 1930s and '40s, was suffering a bit of a career lull. He'd been appearing in some television, but had been absent from movie screens for five years. (Hysterically, as a kid I used to hear my family talking about old stars and I could never figure out who in the hell Donna Meechee was!) I have always had a bit of trouble connecting the handsome star of In Old Chicago (1937) and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) with the one of Cocoon (1985), his Oscar-winning comeback role (which had been preceded by the hit Trading Places, 1983), but this movie helps bridge the visual gap a little. Once he reclaimed his spot in the movies, he remained busy up until his death at eighty-five of prostate cancer in 1993.

It wasn't my intention to feature movies with Hyer almost back-to-back (The Best of Everything, 1959), but it just turned out that way. At this stage, Hyer was actively winning a variety of supporting and leading roles, albeit in films of variable quality. There were The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), The Chase (1966), The Night of the Grizzly (1966) and The Happening (1967) in this general time frame. Her frosty, plasticine demeanor actually worked pretty well in this rare villainous part.

Gordon had been quite a busy child actress from 1958 on. By this time (her last movie and almost her last on-screen role) she was eighteen and had not grown beyond 5 feet in height, one thing among several that limited her prospects as an adult actress. Her expressions may have been limited in variety, but she was a pretty good screamer in this at least. Sadly, she was felled by thyroid cancer at only age sixty-two in 2011. Her father is still alive today at age ninety-three! He later went on to produce and direct the camp riot Empire of the Ants (1977), which starred Joan Collins.

Speaking of Collins, Reed was her first husband, one who she claimed not only raped her prior to their marriage, but who also tried to rent her to an Arab sheik on their honeymoon! A British movie actor from the mid-'40s through the mid-'50s, he eventually moved to the U.S. and starred in the TV series Captain David Grief (1957-1960.) He reportedly requested the burn makeup for this movie in order to make him appear more sinister and diminish what he believed was his "good side." This was his final film. He died of cancer in 1974 at age fifty-five.

Corey was a not particularly handsome actor who nonetheless enjoyed a steady, successful career in films from 1947 through the late-1960s. Some of his better known films include Harriet Craig (1950) with Joan Crawford, The Furies (1950) with Barbara Stanwyck, Rear Window (1954) for Alfred Hitchcock and The Rainmaker (1956) alongside Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. Like Ameche, who also battled alcoholism, Corey had trouble with the bottle and died in 1968 of a liver ailment at only age fifty-four.

Hasso was a Swedish actress with a strong stage background. Her first Hollywood movie was actually Ameche's Heaven Can Wait (1943), though she proceeded to better parts in The Seventh Cross (1944) and, in particular, A Double Life (1947), which is one of her best-remembered movies. Her acting career diminished a bit in the mid-'50s and the car accident death of her only child in 1957 caused her to care little about that. She began writing song lyrics as a rewarding alternative, though she did continue to act occasionally on TV and the occasional film. She lived until 2002 when pneumonia claimed her at age ninety-one.

Considering that she played one in The Sound of Music (1965) right before this, it's surprising that British actress Lee wasn't the nun in this movie and Hasso the society friend! Lee began working in movies in 1932, eventually working with eminent director John Ford on several occasions, including How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Fort Apache (1948.) She ultimately became best-known for her long-standing work (1981-2003) on General Hospital as Lila Quartermaine. She had a seventy year career, passing of pneumonia in 2004 at age ninety-one.

When it comes to this movie (and in general!) the real longevity comes in the form of Gabor. One of the earliest examples of someone "famous for being famous," the 9-times-married showbiz personality and actress is ninety-nine of this writing, though she has been in arduously awful health for some time. With a social life that seemed forever in either a whirl or a crisis, she has weathered tumultuous divorces, countless tragedies, lawsuits and an arrest for slapping a police officer across the face when he pulled her over for a traffic violation. The lady who once declared that eventually a gal had to choose between her face or her fanny when it came to body maintenance, had to suffer the loss of a leg in 2011 due to infection. One of her more amusing quotes was, "I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house," though her type of persona is now gone, with only pale imitators in her wake.

As for the departed Hedy Lamarr, she lived until age eighty-five, dying of natural causes in 2000.  Because she didn't make this movie, The Female Animal (1958) had to serve as her cinematic swansong. She vowed she would never act again and she didn't. Her autobiography "Ecstasy and me" (named for her most famous film Ecstasy, 1933), came out the same year as Picture Mommy Dead and created a sensation, though she later claimed that most of it was ghostwritten and much of it untrue! When Blazing Saddles was released in 1974, she sued over the (mis)use of her name, settling out of court.

In 1991, she'd been accused once more of shoplifting, this time pleading "no contest" and allowing the charges to be dropped after a year of breaking no laws had passed. This tainted to a small point one of her other achievements, which was her series of inventions. (Beauty had a brain, too.) After tinkering with traffic lights and carbonated beverage tablets, Lamarr collaborated on wartime technology later led to the development of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.
 

You can see Ms. Lamarr here in a rare appearance on To Tell the Truth alongside her son Anthony (whose father was actor John Loder.) Even if you don't happen to care for her, the episode is very enjoyable to watch for the panelists and some vintage commercials! Though she later mangled her face with some really inadvisable cosmetic surgery, she looks and seems happy here and I hope she was.

Come Back, Little Diva

Today, we're taking note of a dozen film actresses (most of who could probably be considered divas, others perhaps not!) who once reigned supreme on the big screen, but then took an extended hike from the movies, whether they liked it or not, only to come back again years later (sometimes - but not always - with dire results.) We don't care whether the movies were any good or not, though. We just love to see the old mares back in action again! More on our cover girl shown on the left in a moment...
 

First we find Miss Janet Gaynor, the first actress ever to receive an Oscar (for Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans! Soon after, the award would be dedicated to a single performance instead of a whole season of them.) In movies from the mid-1920s, she enjoyed considerable popularity through 1938 (with 1937's A Star is Born gleaning her another Oscar nom, though she lost to Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.) She married famed costume designer Adrian in 1939 and retired from the screen.

Though she made a rare, but occasional, appearance on TV, she was coaxed out of retirement in 1959 (the same year Adrian died) to anchor the film debut of Pat Boone in Bernardine. She played the mother of costar Dick Sergeant and was the caring den mother of his college cronies including Boone. The guys had created a fictional female (Bernardine) and entered "her" in a contest, which "she" won! Most folks considered the movie "cute" or "nice" and it was Gaynor's last, though she did pop up for a requisite trip on The Love Boat in 1981 (passing away three years later from complications of a nasty taxi accident she'd suffered along with Mary Martin. She was seventy-seven.)
 

Miss Alice Faye morphed from a Jean Harlow-esque copycat to one of the most popular singing movie actresses of her time. Her deep, alto voice was featured in hit after hit musical, often alongside Don Ameche or Tyrone Power. Her song-filled movies had made money hand over fist for her home studio 20th Century Fox (which she nicknamed "Penitentiary Fox") and she eventually longed to try out a dramatic career, finally getting a shot at it with Fallen Angel in 1945, but when she discovered that studio head Darryl F. Zanuck had mercilessly edited her performance down to a shadow of what she'd shot, she got in her car, drove off the lot without any of her possessions and ended her career in movies on the spot.

She'd married comedian Phil Harris in 1941 and didn't need the hassle any more. She and Harris enjoyed a popular radio program together and raised their two children. In 1962, she was enlisted to portray Pat Boone's mother (what is it with Pat Boone?!) in a remake of State Fair. Cast opposite Tom Ewell, who she found less handsome than some of her costars of old, she was shocked at the demise of the business as she'd known it during the intervening 16 years and said so. She occasionally took on tiny parts in movies (including The Magic of Lassie in 1978) and like most other folks rode The Love Boat (in 1980), but stayed mostly retired until her death in 1998 of stomach cancer at age eighty-three.

Miss Claudette Colbert began acting in films in the late-1920s and started to make a name for herself in Cecil B. DeMille epics like The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934) while also proving to be highly adept at the soap operatics of Imitation of Life (1934) and romantic comedy such as It Happened One Night (1934), for which she won an Oscar. She was a considerable leading lady of the movies, but by 1955 was finding it hard to maintain her status. She did a bit of TV here and there, but was absent from movie screens.

In 1961, she returned to feature films with top-billing, but secondary publicity and promotion, as the mother of Troy Donahue in Parrish. Gone were costars like Clark Gable, Ronald Colman and Charles Boyer and in their place was... Karl Malden. Colbert still looked fit and lovely in the movie, but disappeared from screens again for a quarter of a century, popping up as Ann-Margret's nemesis in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987), a well-heeled TV-movie in which she still looked great. Colbert lived to be ninety-two until a series of strokes claimed her in 1996.

Polish siren Miss Pola Negri began making films in 1914 when she was but a teenager. One 1919 silent Madame Du Barry, in which she was the title character, caused a sensation in Europe as well as in the U.S. when it was released in 1922 as "Passion." She and its director Ernst Lubitsch were drawn to America where he prospered and she became a vamp akin to Theda Bara. A highly-public romance with Rudolph Valentino was also in the cards, but her intense overreaction to his death (complete with public fainting spells) put a bad taste in the public's mouth. The one-two punch of film censorship regarding sinful behavior on-screen and the advent of sound, in which her heavy accent was a handicap, helped lead to the end of her career in the early-1930s, though she worked in German and European films until 1943.
 

In 1964, she burst out of obscurity to take on the role of a glamorous woman of mystery in The Moonspinners (1964), starring Hayley Mills. Walt Disney himself approached Negri about taking on the part in this "Hitchcock for Kids"-style thriller. Her character had a pet cheetah (as suggested by her versus the everyday house cat the script called for!) Just prior to this movie, she'd been living with a female oil heiress for six years until the woman's death and had never remarried after her second divorce in 1931. Negri never acted on-screen again, but lived until 1987 when she died of pneumonia and the effects of an untreated brain tumor at age ninety.
 

One of many highly-flamboyant and at times scandalous silent film actresses was Alla Nazimova, who also went as simply Nazimova. A student of Konstantin Stanislovski and his "Method" acting, she in time broke away from that practice and developed her own ways of conveying extraordinary tragedy, a specialty of hers. On film from 1916, her career was hampered by the Production Code, which was dampening the type of sexually charged roles she'd perfected. She also suffered bad publicity when one of her marriages was revealed to have been a sham from the start. (She was a lesbian who, despite one earlier "real" marriage, had always maintained relationships with women. By 1925, it was all over in Hollywood.

After fifteen years away from the movies, she returned in 1940 to play Robert Taylor's mother in Escape. Her character was in a Nazi internment camp awaiting extermination with Taylor and his glamorous friend Norma Sheared struggling to get her freed. She followed this up with Blood and Sand (1941) as Tyrone Power's mother and continued to act until her death from coronary thrombosis in 1945. She was sixty-six and had been living with a woman since 1929 at The Garden of Allah, which had once long before been her own estate The Garden of Alla!
 

Hedy Lamarr was (and still is) considered to be one of the cinema's most beautiful and photogenic actresses of all time. The Austrian beauty had made a splash, literally, in 1933 at age eighteen when she filmed a nude bathing sequence in Ecstasy. (She was also shown in an implied orgasm sequence!) Marriage to what turned out to be a Nazi caused her to flee to Paris where MGM's Louis B. Mayer spotted and hired her. She became a hot property thanks to her glamorous looks, though her roles tended to be thin on character depth and dialogue. As the 1950s dawned, things career-wise became dire and she was finished in Hollywood after 1951's Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Spy.

Lamarr did a few projects in Italy and filmed a scene in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957) which was cut before release, but was finally seen again briefly (along with a raft of other stars) in the 1957 Irwin Allen debacle The Story of Mankind as Joan of Arc. (That's her at the top of this page with a pre-toupee Allen!) In 1958, she played Jane Powell's adoptive mother, a glamorous actress, who is romantically involved with the same man (scantily-clad George Nader) as Powell! The movie was The Female Animal. It was the last movie she'd make. She intended to work in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), but an eyebrow-raising autobiography and an arrest for shoplifting led to her being replaced by Zsa Zsa Gabor. No dummy she, Lamarr patented a sound spectrum/frequency-hopping method that laid the groundwork for today's wi-fi signals! Her colorful, roller-coaster life ended in 2000 when a myriad of heart problems claimed her at age eighty-five.
 

You could search the world and the annals of history and be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly candid, outrageous or sexually-voracious actress of talent than Miss Tallulah Bankhead. Chiefly a contributor to Broadway theatre, she had a stop & start career in movies beginning in 1918 (when she was but sixteen years old!) After establishing herself more significantly on The Great White Way, she had another round of film work, but often had to stand and watch as Bette Davis recreated her stage successes on celluloid. (Many folks felt that Davis also channeled Bankhead in 1950's All About Eve.) Already a bit of a comeback kid the time she made Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) after twelve years without a role in the cinema, she was again absent from the big screen by 1953.

In 1965, after a long stretch away from the movies (and some significantly hard living, dallying in vices of all sorts), Bankhead startled the world by traveling to England and portraying a staggeringly devout, careworn, plain-faced old bat named Mrs. Trefoyle in The Fanatic (called Die! Die! My Darling! in the U.S.) The deranged character was holding her deceased son's fiancee Stefanie Powers captive in order to keep his soul pure. She threw herself into the juicy part full throttle and knocked it out of the park, though most audiences at the time wrote the enterprise off as just another excursion into hag horror. By 1968, Bankhead was dead from the triple whammy of pneumonia, the flu and emphysema, aged sixty-six, but appearing older. The year before she died, she managed to turn in a two-part Batman episode playing the campy villainess The Black Widow.

Another comeback queen with more than one instance was the ultra-glamorous silent movie legend Gloria Swanson. After nine years away from movie screens, she took a starring role that many other old-timers turned down in Sunset Blvd (1950), playing a washed-up, out-of touch actress craving a comeback. Swanson earned an Oscar nom (losing to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday), but was unable to parlay her regained fame into many more movie roles. By 1956 she was all gone again except for the occasional guest role on television.
 

She swept back onto movie screens in 1974 with Airport 1975, the first sequel to the blockbuster hit Airport (1970.) The role of a famous actress traveling on a red eye flight was initially offered to long-absent Greta Garbo, who unsurprisingly turned it down. Swanson opted to play the part but make it a version of herself instead of a fictional role! She wrote all of her own hooty dialogue and even managed to work in publicity for her mammoth autobiography "Swanson on Swanson." This proved to be her final acting role on-screen, though she lived to be eighty-four, passing from a heart ailment in 1983 (after having led a life of extremely careful nutrition.)
 

Sleek, eye-poppingly stylish, German actress Miss Marlene Dietrich was another unique persona who rarely, if ever, held back her thoughts on life and on other people she encountered. Having kicked around in German movies for the better part of a decade, she scored big in 1930 with The Blue Angel and the film's director Josef Von Sternberg guided her to Hollywood and considerable success there in a string of films. A top female star during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, she in time began taking glamorous cameo roles, though 1957's Witness for the Prosecution allowed her a pretty meaty leading part. After 1961, she concentrated more heavily on her career as a nightclub entertainer than as a movie actress.

Seventeen years after having last been featured in a movie, Dietrich popped up for a sequence in the 1978 David Bowie film Just a Gigolo. She shared a scene with the star and then proceeded to sing a song (the title number.) Seventy-seven years old, she managed to appear far younger than that, but the image-conscious actress (who'd once allowed her skintight bodysuits to cut into her wrists and ankles until they bled!) was done. She offered her voice to the documentary Marlene (1984), but wouldn't appear on camera. She died of kidney failure at age ninety in 1992, having been bedridden for a dozen years in the wake of a fractured leg. Dietrich, who was known for her open sexuality (with men and women) was married only once (for fifty-two years!), but had only lived with the man for five years.

America's favorite "good girl" in musicals and as the wife of assorted heroes, June Allyson recovered from four years of rehabilitation from a childhood accident to become a Broadway chorus singer and dancer. Catching a break when Betty Hutton developed the measles, Allyson parlayed her understudy appearance into a role in a subsequent show and when that second show was filmed as a movie (Best Foot Forward, 1943), she was on her way. Many starring roles followed through the late-1950s whereupon she turned to the stage and TV for work. A tumultuous off-screen life (including alcohol abuse, an affair with Alan Ladd and the death of her husband Dick Powell) was at odds with her movie persona.
 

In 1972, Allyson returned to the big screen in a role that was utterly at odds with her usual array of portrayals! True, she'd made one attempt at being a villain (in 1955's The Shrike, a box office bust), but this time she jumped off the cliff as a dour, tough, lesbian murderess in They Only Kill Their Masters. The film starred James Garner and Katharine Ross, but also featured an array of veteran players in supporting roles (one of whom was a dissipated Peter Lawford, who'd costarred with Allyson in far sunnier pictures like Good News, 1947, and Little Women, 1949.) Allyson worked through 2001 (becoming a highly visible spokesperson for Depends undergarments), but died of respiratory failure in 2006 at age eighty-eight.
  

Easily one of the most exotic and striking actresses of 1920s and '30s cinema was Miss Anna May Wong, who cut a dazzling figure in beautiful costumes and had talent to spare. She, however, was only ever able to rise to a certain point in fame because it was then the practice to cast Caucasians in Asian roles even when a capable, in this case Chinese, one was on hand! Thus she found herself in supporting parts or with leads in lower-budget fare and without the ability to perform love scenes against a white costar. Having maintained a film career through 1942, she made only one more motion picture in 1949 before departing for television and radio.
  

In 1960, Wong was brought back to movie screens to play the imperious, possibly nefarious housekeeper of Lana Turner in the glossy Ross Hunter-produced mystery Portrait in Black. She next appeared as a guest on The Barbara Stanwyck Show and with a role set for her in Hunter's upcoming production of Flower Drum Song (1961) seemed primed for a prolific comeback, but illness followed by a massive heart attack claimed her before she could work on the musical (Juanita Hall played her part.) She was fifty-six.
  

A lifelong pusher of the sexual envelope, first on stage and then on screen, Miss Mae West was a curvaceous, wise-cracking pistol who always seemed to be generating controversy and public unrest whenever she performed. In the early-1930s, she embarked on a film career that, while successful, was consistently hamstrung by the moral codes of the day. She did her best to allow her famed double entendres to slip through the censors' eyes, but rarely without difficulty. By 1943, she had retreated from the movies and returned to her spicy and flavorful stage extravaganzas which often featured a bevy of musclemen at attention.
  

1970, however, twenty-seven years after her previous movie, found her back in action again. Myra Breckinridge featured her as a lascivious talent agent, bedecked in Edith Head costumes (the same designer who'd created many of her earlier looks at Paramount) and spouting a lot of the same sort of one-liners that had gleaned her attention decades earlier. The movie was quite a mess, but she reveled in the newfound attention it afforded her. She might have quit while she was ahead, but instead came back again eight years later for Sextette (1978), a dazzlingly bad musical that tarnished her reputation (with the 73 people who happened to see it, that is!) Within two years she was dead from complications of a series of strokes at age eighty-seven.

The title of this post is, of course, a play on Come Back, Little Sheba (1953), but it turns out that quite a few of these gals were little in stature if not in fame. Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong were tallest at reportedly 5'7" and 5'6," but no one else went above 5'5" and four of the gals were 5' even! There may be some others who didn't get singled out this time, but if there are enough of them, perhaps I'll revisit the subject again in the future.