Jennifer Jones, Postwar Actress, Dies at 90
Matthew Kruk
Jennifer Jones, Postwar Actress, Dies at 90 By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Jennifer Jones, who achieved Hollywood stardom in the postwar years in
"The Song of Bernadette" and other films while gaining almost as much
attention for a tumultuous personal life, died Thursday at her home in
Malibu, Calif. She was 90.
Ms. Jones, who was chairwoman of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena,
Calif., died of natural causes, said Leslie Denk, a museum spokeswoman.
Ms. Jones was the widow of the industrialist and art patron Norton
Simon.
After winning an Academy Award for her performance in "The Song of
Bernadette," Ms. Jones went on to star in successful films like "Love Is
a Many Splendored Thing" and "Duel in the Sun." She was nominated for
Oscars five times.
She was also known for an off-screen life that included bouts of
emotional instability; an early marriage to the Svengali-like David O.
Selznick, the producer of "Gone With the Wind"; the suicide of their
daughter; and a later marriage to another larger-than-life figure, Mr.
Simon.
It was Selznick who gave Ms. Jones the role of Bernadette Soubirous, the
young French peasant girl whose visions at Lourdes created a sensation
in 1858. "The Song of Bernadette," based on Franz Werfel's best-selling
novel, was a huge hit, and it brought the little-known Ms. Jones instant
fame.
"After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright," Ms. Jones
said in 1981. She told another interviewer: "When you're young, you're
full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did 'The Song of
Bernadette' without knowing what was going on half the time."
When she made "Bernadette," Ms. Jones was married to the rising young
actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her
husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in
New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together
until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year
later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut as the
young sailor in "Bataan."
But the marriage didn't last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by
then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick. Seventeen years her
senior, he would be the mastermind of her career.
Selznick's wife, Irene, the daughter of the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer,
left him in 1945, in part over his affair with Ms. Jones. David Thomson,
in his biography of Selznick, "Showman," said Selznick had found
something special in Ms. Jones. "She was so meek, so young, so lovely,
so entirely ready to be David's creation that she left all the
responsibility with him," Mr. Thomson wrote.
Ms. Jones and Selznick were married in 1949 on a yacht off the coast of
Italy. Until his death in 1965, he made virtually all the decisions in
his wife's career. He supervised her dramatic training and produced many
of her early movies, including "Since You Went Away" (1944), "Duel in
the Sun" (1947), "Portrait of Jenny" (1948) and a lavish version, the
second, of Ernest Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" (1957). The film, which
also starred Rock Hudson, was a critical and box-office failure and the
last movie Selznick made.
When Selznick lent his wife out to other producers, he often chose
badly - turning down the classic film noir "Laura," for example, or
insisting that she star as the mentally ill Nicole Diver in the film
version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" when she was both
too old for the role and in precarious mental health herself.
Ms. Jones never set her own course. Though her roles expanded - from the
country girl Bernadette to the passionate half-caste young woman lusting
after Gregory Peck in "Duel in the Sun" to the wealthy adultress of
Vittorio De Sica's "Indiscretions of an American Wife" (1954) - the
screen image was always as molded by Selznick.
But her acting was admired. She received Oscar nominations as best
actress for her performances as an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten's
love in "Love Letters" (1945), as the wanton Pearl Chavez in "Duel in
the Sun" and as a Eurasian doctor in love with a Korean War
correspondent (William Holden) in "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing"
(1955).
Ms. Jones was born Phyllis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919,
the only child of Philip and Flora Mae Isley. Her parents owned and
starred in the Isley Stock Company, a tent-show theatrical troupe that
toured the rural Midwest. As a child she spent her summers taking
tickets, selling candy and acting in the company.
After a year at Northwestern University, she moved to the American
Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was cast as Elizabeth Barrett
opposite Robert Walker's Robert Browning in "The Barretts of Wimpole
Street." The two soon married, and on their honeymoon in 1939 they went
to Hollywood, where they found bit roles. Ms. Jones, as Phyllis Isley,
appeared in a western, "New Frontier," and a serial, "Dick Tracy's
G-Men."
Retreating back to New York, the couple had a son, Robert Jr., in 1940,
and another, Michael, less than a year later. Michael died in 2007.
Robert survives her, as do eight grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren.
Ms. Jones met David O. Selznick in New York when she went to his office
there to read for the lead in "Claudia," Rose Franken's hit stage play,
which Selznick was turning into a movie. The "Claudia" role went to
Dorothy McGuire, who had starred in the play, but Selznick, who had by
then triumphed with "Gone With the Wind," was taken by the lithe,
dark-haired Ms. Jones and saw a future for her in Hollywood. (He came up
with the name Jennifer Jones during that first encounter.)
Ambitious but emotionally fragile, Ms. Jones placed herself in Selznick's
hands. He cast her in a William Saroyan play, "Hello Out There," in a
theater season he was presenting in Santa Barbara, Calif., and she
received rave reviews. He was already planning to lend her to his
brother-in-law, the producer Bill Goetz, at 20th Century Fox, for "Song
of Bernadette."
After "Bernadette," Selznick cast her as Claudette Colbert's daughter in
"Since You Went Away," his attempt to make a "Gone With the Wind" about
the World War II home front. Ms. Jones was nominated for a supporting
actress Oscar as the girl whose first love is a young soldier.
Although Ms. Jones and Mr. Walker were estranged, Selznick cast Mr.
Walker as the fearful soldier who is strengthened by Ms. Jones's love.
The couple divorced in 1945. Mr. Walker, who later scored a success as
the villain in Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," died at age 32
in 1951 after years of emotional problems and excessive drinking, which
he attributed to his loss of Ms. Jones.
Among Ms. Jones's other movies were the comedy "Cluny Brown" (1946),
directed by Ernst Lubisch; "Carrie" (1952), a film version of Theodore
Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie" co-starring Laurence Olivier; John
Huston's "Beat the Devil" (1954), a film noir parody that failed at the
box-office but later found a cult following; "Madame Bovary" (1949); and
"Ruby Gentry (1952), a King Vidor film with Charlton Heston about
destructive passions reminiscent of "Duel in the Sun."
After Selznick's death in 1965, Ms. Jones's film career petered out in
"The Idol" (1966), about a young man sleeping with the mother of his
girlfriend; the low- budget "Angel, Angel, Down We Go" (1969); and the
ensemble disaster movie "The Towering Inferno" (1974). In 1968 she made
a rare stage appearance, in a revival of Clifford Odets's "Country Girl"
at New York City Center.
The year before, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of
sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at
Malibu. In 1976, on Mother's Day, Ms. Jones's 21- year-old daughter,
Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los
Angeles.
Ms. Jones married another powerful man, the industrialist Norton Simon,
in 1971, in a ceremony on a yacht in the English Channel after a
courtship of three weeks. Mr. Simon, who had turned a bankrupt orange
juice bottling plant into a conglomerate that included Hunt Foods and
Canada Dry, had retired in 1969 at 62 to concentrate on collecting art.
He spent more than $100 million on his collection, one of the country's
greatest private art collections, housed at the Norton Simon Musuem.
After being stricken by the paralyzing neurological disorder
Guillain-Barre syndrome, Mr. Simon resigned as president of the museum
and was succeeded by Ms. Jones, who also took the title of chairwoman.
She oversaw a gallery renovation by the architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Simon
died in 1993 at age 86.
Throughout her life Ms. Jones appeared shy and aloof in public, and she
rarely gave interviews. She explained why in one of the few she did
give, to a reporter in 1957.
"Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don't
like it," she said. "I respect everyone's right to privacy, and I feel
mine should be respected, too."
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