Luise Rainer(1910-2014)
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Luise Rainer, the first thespian to win back-to-back Oscars, was born
on January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish
family. Her parents were Emilie (Königsberger) and Heinrich Rainer, a
businessman. She took to the stage, and plied her craft on the boards
in Germany. As a young actress, she was discovered by the legendary
theater director Max Reinhardt and
became part of his company in Vienna, Austria. "I was supposed to be
very gifted, and he heard about me. He wanted me to be part of his
theater," Rainer recounted in a 1997 interview. She joined Reinhardt's
theatrical company in Vienna and spent years developing as an actress
under his tutelage. As part of Reinhardt's company, Rainer became a
popular stage actress in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1930s. Rainer
was a natural talent for Reinhardt's type of staging, which required an
impressionistic acting style.
Rainer, who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three
other German-language films in the early 1930s, terminated her European
career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler
consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism
bringing about the Draconian Nuremberg Laws severely curtailing the
rights of Germany's Jews, and efforts to expand that regime into the
Sudetenland and Austria, Hitler and his Nazi government was proving a
looming threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent
scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated
to the United States.
She made her American debut in the movie
Escapade (1935), replacing
Myrna Loy, who was originally slated for the
part. It was her luck to have
William Powell as her co-star in
her first Hollywood film, as he mentored her, teaching her how to act
in front of the camera. Powell, whom Rainer remembers as "a dear man"
and "a very fine person," lobbied MGM. boss
Louis B. Mayer, reportedly telling him,
"You've got to star this girl, or I'll look like an idiot."
During the making of "Escapade", Rainer met, and fell in love with, the
left-wing playwright Clifford Odets,
then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a
happy union. MGM cast Rainer in support of Powell in the title role
of the
The Great Ziegfeld (1936), its
spectacular bio-epic featuring musical numbers that recreated his
"Follies" shows on Broadway. As Anna Held, Ziegfeld's common-law wife,
Rainer excelled in the musical numbers, but it is for her telephone
scene that she is most remembered. "The Great Ziegfeld" was a big
hit and went on to win the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1936.
Rainer received her first of two successive Best Actress Oscars for
playing Held. The award was highly controversial at the time as she was
a relative unknown and it was only her first nomination, but also
because her role was so short and relatively minor that it better
qualified for a supporting nomination. (While 1936 was the first year
that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored supporting
players, her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, listed her as a lead player,
then got out its block vote for her.) Compounding the controversy was
the fact that Rainer beat out such better known and more respected
actresses as Carole Lombard (her
sole Oscar nomination) in
My Man Godfrey (1936), previous
Best Actress winner Norma Shearer (her
fifth nomination) in
Romeo and Juliet (1936), and
Irene Dunne (her second of five unsuccessful
nominations) in
Theodora Goes Wild (1936).
Some of the bitchery was directed toward Louis B. Mayer, whom
non-MGM Academy members resented for his ability to manipulate
Academy votes. Other critics of her first Oscar win claimed it was the
result of voters being unduly impressed with the great budget ($2
million) of "The Great Ziegfeld" rather than great acting. Most
observers agree that Rainer won her Oscar as the result of her moving
and poignant performance in just one single scene in the picture, the
famous telephone scene in which the broken-hearted Held congratulates
Ziegfeld over the telephone on his upcoming marriage to
Billie Burke while trying to retain her
composure and her dignity. During the scene, the camera is entirely
focused on Rainer, and she delivers a tour-de-force performance.
Seventy years later, it remains one of the most famous scenes in movie
history. With another actress playing Held, the scene could have been
mawkish, but Rainer brought the pathos of the scene out and onto film.
She based her interpretation of the scene on
Jean Cocteau's play "La Voix Humaine".
"Cocteau's play is just a telephone conversation about a woman who has
lost her beloved to another woman", Rainer remembered. "That is the
comparison. As it fit into the Ziegfeld story, that's how I wrote it.
It's a daily happening, not just in Cocteau." In an interview held 60
years after the film's release, Rainer was dismissive of the
performance. "I was never proud of anything", she said. "I just did it
like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like
having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it.
And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of
giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that."
Rainer would allay any back-biting from Hollywood's bovines over her
first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer
Irving Thalberg's spectacular adaptation
of Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth", the
former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role
won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of
The Good Earth (1937) was rooted
in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer's acting
opposite the legendary Paul Muni as
her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had
to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress
Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays
Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an
actual Chinese woman and a Caucuasian actor in yellow-face drag. So,
Thalberg gave Rainer the part, and she made O-Lan her own. She refused
to wear a heavy makeup, and her elfin look helped her to assay a
Chinese woman with results far superior to those of Myrna Loy in her
Oriental vamp phase or
Katharine Hepburn in
Dragon Seed (1944). In the late 1990s,
Rainer praised her director,
Sidney Franklin,
as "wonderful", and explained that she used an acting technique similar
to "The Method" being pioneered by her husband's Group Theatre comrades
back in New York. "I worked from inside out", she said. "It's not for
me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It
has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me
do it." The win made Rainer the first two-time Oscar winner in an
acting category and the first to win consecutive acting awards
(Spencer Tracy, her distaff
honoree for
Captains Courageous (1937)
would follow her as a consecutive acting Oscar winner the next year,
and Walter Brennan, Best Supporting Actor
Oscar winner for
Come and Get It (1936) the year
Rainer won her first, would tie them both in 1937 with his win for
Kentucky (1938) and trump them with his
third win for The Westerner (1940),
a record subsequently tied by
Ingrid Bergman,
Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and surpassed by
Katharine Hepburn.)
Rainer's career soon went into free-fall and collapsed, as she became
the first notable victim of the "Oscar curse", the phenomenon that has
seem many a performer's career take a nose-dive after winning an
Academy Award. "For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards.
Nothing worse could have happened to me", Rainer said. A
non-conformist, Rainer rejected Hollywood's values of Hollywood. In the
late 1990s, she said, "I came from Europe where I was with a wonderful
theater group, and I worked. The only thing on my mind was to do good
work. I didn't know what an Academy Award was." MGM boss Mayer, the
founding force behind the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
had to force her to attend the Awards banquet to receive her Oscar. She
rebelled against the studio due to the movies that MGM forced her
into after "The Good Earth".
In one case, director Dorothy Arzner had
been assigned by MGM producer Joseph M. Mankiewicz (whose wife,
Rose Stradner had been Rainer's understudy
in the Vienna State Theater) in 1937 to direct Rainer in "The Girl from
Trieste", an unproduced
Ferenc Molnár play about a
prostitute trying to go reform herself who discovers the hypocrisies of
the respectable class which she aspires to. After Thalberg's death in
1936, Mayer's lighter aesthetic began to rule the roost at MGM.
Mayer genuinely believed in the goodness of women and
motherhood and put women on a pedestal; he once told screenwriter
Frances Marion that he never wanted to
see anything produced by MGM that would embarrass his wife and two
daughters.
Without the more sophisticated Thalberg at the studio to run
interference, Molnar's play was rewritten so that it was no longer
about a prostitute, but a slightly bitter Cinderella story with a happy
ending. Retitled by Mankiewicz as
The Bride Wore Red (1937),
Rainer withdrew and was replaced by
Joan Crawford. In a 1976 interview
in "The New York Times", Arzner claimed that Rainer "had been suspended
for marrying a Communist" (Clifford Odets). This is unlikely as MGM,
like all Hollywood studios, had known or suspected communists on its
payroll, most of whose affiliations were known by MGM vice president
E.J. Mannix. (Mannix, one of whose functions
was responsibility for security at the studio, once said it would have
been impossible to fire them all, as "the communists" were the studio's
best writers.) The studio never took action against alleged communists
until an industry-wide agreement to do so was sealed at the Waldorf
Conference of 1947, which was held in reaction to the House of
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launching a Hollywood witch hunt.
It was more likely that Rainer, fussy over her projects and wanting to
use her Academy Award prominence to ensure herself better roles,
withdrew on her own due to her lack of enthusiasm for the reformulated
product. In the late 1990s, Rainer recalled the satisfaction of being a
European stage actress. "One day we were on a big tour", she told an
interviewer in the late 1990s. "We did a play by Pirandello, and
Reinhardt was in the theater. I shall never forget, it was the greatest
compliment I ever got, better than any Academy Award. He came to me,
looked at me and said - we were never called by first names - 'Rainer,
how did you do this?' It was so wonderful. 'How did you create this?'
I was so startled and happy. That was my Academy Award." Rainer still
is dismissive of the Academy Awards. "I can't watch the Oscars," she
said. "Everybody thanking their mother, their father, their
grandparents, their nurse - it's a crazy, horrible." She blames the
studio and Mayer for the rapid decline in her career. "What they did
with me upset me very much", she said in a 1997 interview. "I was
dreaming naturally like anyone to do something very good, but after I
got the two Academy Awards the studio thought, it doesn't matter what
she gets. They threw all kinds of stuff on me, and I thought, no, I
didn't want to be an actress."
Mayer pulled his famous emotional routines when Rainer, whom he wanted
to turn into a glamorous star, would demand meatier roles. "He would
cry phony tears", she recalled. Mayer had opposed her being cast as
O-Lan in "The Good Earth", but Thalberg, who had a connection with
MGM capo di tutti capi Nicholas Schenck, the president of MGM
corporate parent Loew's, Inc., appealed to Schenck, who overrode
Mayer's veto. (Mayer, who was involved in a power struggle with
Thalberg before the latter's death, had opposed his filming Pearl
Buck's novel. Mayer's reasoning was that American audiences wouldn't
patronize movies about American farmers, so what made anyone think
they'd flock to see a film about Chinese farmers, especially one with
such a big budget, estimated at $2.8 million. (Upon release, the film
barely broke even.) Thalberg died during the filming of "The Good
Earth" (the only film of his released by MGM whose title credits
bore his name, in the form of a posthumous tribute).
Rainer felt lost without her protector. She recalled that Mayer "didn't
know what to do with me, and that made me so unhappy. I was on the
stage with great artists, and everything was so wonderful. I was in a
repertory theater, and every night I played something else." Rainer
asked to play Nora in a film of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" or portray
Madame Curie, but instead, Mayer - now in complete control of the
studio - had her cast in
The Toy Wife (1938), a movie she
actually wound up liking, as she was charmed by her co-star, the
urbane, intellectually and politically enlightened
Melvyn Douglas. She recalls Douglas,
ultimately a double-Oscar winner like herself, as her favorite leading
man. "He was intelligent, and he was interested also in other things
than acting."
Her problems with the culture of Hollywood, or the lack thereof, were
worsening. The lack of intellectual conversation or concern with ideas
by the denizens of the movie colony she was forced to work with was
depressing. Hollywood was an unsophisticated place where materialism,
such as the stars' preoccupation with clothes, was paramount. As she
tells it, "Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was
at a luncheon with Robert Taylor
sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what
do you want to do', and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good
suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I
practically fell under the table."
MGM teamed her with fellow Oscar-winner Tracy in
Big City (1937), a movie about conflict
between rival taxi drivers. The memory of the movie disgusted her.
"Supposedly it wasn't a bad film, but I thought it was a bad film!" She
was also cast in
The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937),
reteaming her with "Ziegfeld" co-star Powell, a movie she
didn't like, as she couldn't understand its story. A detective tale,
the script thoroughly confused Rainer, who was expected to soldier on
like a good employee. Instead, she resisted.
After appearing in
The Great Waltz (1938) and
Dramatic School (1938), her
career was virtually over by 1938. She never made another film for
MGM. "I just had to get away", she said about Hollywood. "I couldn't
bear this total concentration and interviews on oneself, oneself,
oneself. I wanted to learn, and to live, to go all over the world, to
learn by seeing things and experiencing things, and Hollywood seemed
very narrow." When World War II broke out in Europe, Rainer was joined
by her family, as her German-born father was also an American citizen,
allowing them all to escape Hitler and the Holocaust. Even before the
outbreak of war, Rainer had been very worried about the state of
affairs of the world, and she could not abide the escapist trifles that
MGM wanted to cast her in. When she protested, Mayer told Rainer
that if she defied him, he would blackball her in Hollywood.
Disturbed by Hollywood's apathy over fascism in Europe and Asia and by
labor unrest and poverty in the U.S., she decided to walk out on her
contract. She and Odets returned to New York. They were divorced in
1940. "Hollywood was a very strange place", she remembered. "To me, it
was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On
one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the
other side, heads hanging." Her frustration with Hollywood was so
complete, she abandoned movie acting in the early 1940s, after making
the World War II drama Hostages (1943)
for Paramount.
She made her Broadway debut in the play "A Kiss for Cinderella", which
was staged by Lee Strasberg, which opened
at the Music Box Theatre on March 10, 1942 and closed April 18th after
48 performances. Rainer then worked for the war effort during World War
II, appearing at war bond rallies. She went on a tour of North Africa
and Italy for the Army Special Service, socializing with soldiers to
build their morale, and supplying them with books. The experience
changed her life, allowing her to get over the shyness she'd had all
her life. It also broadened her experience, forcing her to deal with
the obvious fact that there were more important things than movie
acting, which had proven unfulfilling to her.
Fortunately, Rainer found happiness in a long-lived marriage with the
publisher Robert Knittel, a wealthy man whom she married in 1945. The
couple had a daughter and made their home mostly in Switzerland and
England as Rainer essentially left acting behind, although she did do
some television in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Her retirement from the
movies lasted for 53 years, until her brief comeback in
The Gambler (1997), a movie based on
Fyodor Dostoevsky's eponymous story.
In the film, Rainer played the role of the matriarch of an aristocratic
Russian family in the 1860s who is in hock due to the family members'
obsession with gambling.
Toward the end of her life, Rainer lived in a luxurious flat in Eaton Square in London's
Belgravia district, in a building where
Vivien Leigh once lived. Blessed with a
good memory, she claimed she could not remember the 1937 Academy Awards
ceremony, when she won her first Oscar. She says the glamour of the
event was out of sync with her life at the time, which was one of great
sadness. "I married Clifford Odets. The marriage was for both of us a
failure. He wanted me to be his little wife and a great actress at the
same time. Somehow I could not live up to all of that."
She had intriguing offers during her long retirement.
Federico Fellini had wanted Rainer for
a role in La Dolce Vita (1960), but
though she admired the director, she didn't like the script and turned
it down. Rainer occasionally plied her craft as an actress on the
stage. She made one more stab at Broadway, appearing in a 1950
production of Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea", which was staged by
Sam Wanamaker and Terese Hayden and
co-starred Steven Hill, one of the
founding members of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. The play was a
flop, running just 16 performances. "I was living in America and was on
the stage there - sporadically. I always lived more than I worked.
Which doesn't mean that I do not love my profession, and every moment I
was in it gave me great satisfaction and happiness."
Rainer had no regrets over not becoming the star she might have been.
She outlived all of the legendary stars of her era, which likely is the
best revenge for the loss of her career after bidding adieu to a
company town she could not abide.
on January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish
family. Her parents were Emilie (Königsberger) and Heinrich Rainer, a
businessman. She took to the stage, and plied her craft on the boards
in Germany. As a young actress, she was discovered by the legendary
theater director Max Reinhardt and
became part of his company in Vienna, Austria. "I was supposed to be
very gifted, and he heard about me. He wanted me to be part of his
theater," Rainer recounted in a 1997 interview. She joined Reinhardt's
theatrical company in Vienna and spent years developing as an actress
under his tutelage. As part of Reinhardt's company, Rainer became a
popular stage actress in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1930s. Rainer
was a natural talent for Reinhardt's type of staging, which required an
impressionistic acting style.
Rainer, who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three
other German-language films in the early 1930s, terminated her European
career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler
consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism
bringing about the Draconian Nuremberg Laws severely curtailing the
rights of Germany's Jews, and efforts to expand that regime into the
Sudetenland and Austria, Hitler and his Nazi government was proving a
looming threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent
scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated
to the United States.
She made her American debut in the movie
Escapade (1935), replacing
Myrna Loy, who was originally slated for the
part. It was her luck to have
William Powell as her co-star in
her first Hollywood film, as he mentored her, teaching her how to act
in front of the camera. Powell, whom Rainer remembers as "a dear man"
and "a very fine person," lobbied MGM. boss
Louis B. Mayer, reportedly telling him,
"You've got to star this girl, or I'll look like an idiot."
During the making of "Escapade", Rainer met, and fell in love with, the
left-wing playwright Clifford Odets,
then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a
happy union. MGM cast Rainer in support of Powell in the title role
of the
The Great Ziegfeld (1936), its
spectacular bio-epic featuring musical numbers that recreated his
"Follies" shows on Broadway. As Anna Held, Ziegfeld's common-law wife,
Rainer excelled in the musical numbers, but it is for her telephone
scene that she is most remembered. "The Great Ziegfeld" was a big
hit and went on to win the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1936.
Rainer received her first of two successive Best Actress Oscars for
playing Held. The award was highly controversial at the time as she was
a relative unknown and it was only her first nomination, but also
because her role was so short and relatively minor that it better
qualified for a supporting nomination. (While 1936 was the first year
that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored supporting
players, her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, listed her as a lead player,
then got out its block vote for her.) Compounding the controversy was
the fact that Rainer beat out such better known and more respected
actresses as Carole Lombard (her
sole Oscar nomination) in
My Man Godfrey (1936), previous
Best Actress winner Norma Shearer (her
fifth nomination) in
Romeo and Juliet (1936), and
Irene Dunne (her second of five unsuccessful
nominations) in
Theodora Goes Wild (1936).
Some of the bitchery was directed toward Louis B. Mayer, whom
non-MGM Academy members resented for his ability to manipulate
Academy votes. Other critics of her first Oscar win claimed it was the
result of voters being unduly impressed with the great budget ($2
million) of "The Great Ziegfeld" rather than great acting. Most
observers agree that Rainer won her Oscar as the result of her moving
and poignant performance in just one single scene in the picture, the
famous telephone scene in which the broken-hearted Held congratulates
Ziegfeld over the telephone on his upcoming marriage to
Billie Burke while trying to retain her
composure and her dignity. During the scene, the camera is entirely
focused on Rainer, and she delivers a tour-de-force performance.
Seventy years later, it remains one of the most famous scenes in movie
history. With another actress playing Held, the scene could have been
mawkish, but Rainer brought the pathos of the scene out and onto film.
She based her interpretation of the scene on
Jean Cocteau's play "La Voix Humaine".
"Cocteau's play is just a telephone conversation about a woman who has
lost her beloved to another woman", Rainer remembered. "That is the
comparison. As it fit into the Ziegfeld story, that's how I wrote it.
It's a daily happening, not just in Cocteau." In an interview held 60
years after the film's release, Rainer was dismissive of the
performance. "I was never proud of anything", she said. "I just did it
like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like
having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it.
And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of
giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that."
Rainer would allay any back-biting from Hollywood's bovines over her
first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer
Irving Thalberg's spectacular adaptation
of Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth", the
former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role
won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of
The Good Earth (1937) was rooted
in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer's acting
opposite the legendary Paul Muni as
her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had
to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress
Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays
Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an
actual Chinese woman and a Caucuasian actor in yellow-face drag. So,
Thalberg gave Rainer the part, and she made O-Lan her own. She refused
to wear a heavy makeup, and her elfin look helped her to assay a
Chinese woman with results far superior to those of Myrna Loy in her
Oriental vamp phase or
Katharine Hepburn in
Dragon Seed (1944). In the late 1990s,
Rainer praised her director,
Sidney Franklin,
as "wonderful", and explained that she used an acting technique similar
to "The Method" being pioneered by her husband's Group Theatre comrades
back in New York. "I worked from inside out", she said. "It's not for
me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It
has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me
do it." The win made Rainer the first two-time Oscar winner in an
acting category and the first to win consecutive acting awards
(Spencer Tracy, her distaff
honoree for
Captains Courageous (1937)
would follow her as a consecutive acting Oscar winner the next year,
and Walter Brennan, Best Supporting Actor
Oscar winner for
Come and Get It (1936) the year
Rainer won her first, would tie them both in 1937 with his win for
Kentucky (1938) and trump them with his
third win for The Westerner (1940),
a record subsequently tied by
Ingrid Bergman,
Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and surpassed by
Katharine Hepburn.)
Rainer's career soon went into free-fall and collapsed, as she became
the first notable victim of the "Oscar curse", the phenomenon that has
seem many a performer's career take a nose-dive after winning an
Academy Award. "For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards.
Nothing worse could have happened to me", Rainer said. A
non-conformist, Rainer rejected Hollywood's values of Hollywood. In the
late 1990s, she said, "I came from Europe where I was with a wonderful
theater group, and I worked. The only thing on my mind was to do good
work. I didn't know what an Academy Award was." MGM boss Mayer, the
founding force behind the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
had to force her to attend the Awards banquet to receive her Oscar. She
rebelled against the studio due to the movies that MGM forced her
into after "The Good Earth".
In one case, director Dorothy Arzner had
been assigned by MGM producer Joseph M. Mankiewicz (whose wife,
Rose Stradner had been Rainer's understudy
in the Vienna State Theater) in 1937 to direct Rainer in "The Girl from
Trieste", an unproduced
Ferenc Molnár play about a
prostitute trying to go reform herself who discovers the hypocrisies of
the respectable class which she aspires to. After Thalberg's death in
1936, Mayer's lighter aesthetic began to rule the roost at MGM.
Mayer genuinely believed in the goodness of women and
motherhood and put women on a pedestal; he once told screenwriter
Frances Marion that he never wanted to
see anything produced by MGM that would embarrass his wife and two
daughters.
Without the more sophisticated Thalberg at the studio to run
interference, Molnar's play was rewritten so that it was no longer
about a prostitute, but a slightly bitter Cinderella story with a happy
ending. Retitled by Mankiewicz as
The Bride Wore Red (1937),
Rainer withdrew and was replaced by
Joan Crawford. In a 1976 interview
in "The New York Times", Arzner claimed that Rainer "had been suspended
for marrying a Communist" (Clifford Odets). This is unlikely as MGM,
like all Hollywood studios, had known or suspected communists on its
payroll, most of whose affiliations were known by MGM vice president
E.J. Mannix. (Mannix, one of whose functions
was responsibility for security at the studio, once said it would have
been impossible to fire them all, as "the communists" were the studio's
best writers.) The studio never took action against alleged communists
until an industry-wide agreement to do so was sealed at the Waldorf
Conference of 1947, which was held in reaction to the House of
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launching a Hollywood witch hunt.
It was more likely that Rainer, fussy over her projects and wanting to
use her Academy Award prominence to ensure herself better roles,
withdrew on her own due to her lack of enthusiasm for the reformulated
product. In the late 1990s, Rainer recalled the satisfaction of being a
European stage actress. "One day we were on a big tour", she told an
interviewer in the late 1990s. "We did a play by Pirandello, and
Reinhardt was in the theater. I shall never forget, it was the greatest
compliment I ever got, better than any Academy Award. He came to me,
looked at me and said - we were never called by first names - 'Rainer,
how did you do this?' It was so wonderful. 'How did you create this?'
I was so startled and happy. That was my Academy Award." Rainer still
is dismissive of the Academy Awards. "I can't watch the Oscars," she
said. "Everybody thanking their mother, their father, their
grandparents, their nurse - it's a crazy, horrible." She blames the
studio and Mayer for the rapid decline in her career. "What they did
with me upset me very much", she said in a 1997 interview. "I was
dreaming naturally like anyone to do something very good, but after I
got the two Academy Awards the studio thought, it doesn't matter what
she gets. They threw all kinds of stuff on me, and I thought, no, I
didn't want to be an actress."
Mayer pulled his famous emotional routines when Rainer, whom he wanted
to turn into a glamorous star, would demand meatier roles. "He would
cry phony tears", she recalled. Mayer had opposed her being cast as
O-Lan in "The Good Earth", but Thalberg, who had a connection with
MGM capo di tutti capi Nicholas Schenck, the president of MGM
corporate parent Loew's, Inc., appealed to Schenck, who overrode
Mayer's veto. (Mayer, who was involved in a power struggle with
Thalberg before the latter's death, had opposed his filming Pearl
Buck's novel. Mayer's reasoning was that American audiences wouldn't
patronize movies about American farmers, so what made anyone think
they'd flock to see a film about Chinese farmers, especially one with
such a big budget, estimated at $2.8 million. (Upon release, the film
barely broke even.) Thalberg died during the filming of "The Good
Earth" (the only film of his released by MGM whose title credits
bore his name, in the form of a posthumous tribute).
Rainer felt lost without her protector. She recalled that Mayer "didn't
know what to do with me, and that made me so unhappy. I was on the
stage with great artists, and everything was so wonderful. I was in a
repertory theater, and every night I played something else." Rainer
asked to play Nora in a film of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" or portray
Madame Curie, but instead, Mayer - now in complete control of the
studio - had her cast in
The Toy Wife (1938), a movie she
actually wound up liking, as she was charmed by her co-star, the
urbane, intellectually and politically enlightened
Melvyn Douglas. She recalls Douglas,
ultimately a double-Oscar winner like herself, as her favorite leading
man. "He was intelligent, and he was interested also in other things
than acting."
Her problems with the culture of Hollywood, or the lack thereof, were
worsening. The lack of intellectual conversation or concern with ideas
by the denizens of the movie colony she was forced to work with was
depressing. Hollywood was an unsophisticated place where materialism,
such as the stars' preoccupation with clothes, was paramount. As she
tells it, "Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was
at a luncheon with Robert Taylor
sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what
do you want to do', and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good
suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I
practically fell under the table."
MGM teamed her with fellow Oscar-winner Tracy in
Big City (1937), a movie about conflict
between rival taxi drivers. The memory of the movie disgusted her.
"Supposedly it wasn't a bad film, but I thought it was a bad film!" She
was also cast in
The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937),
reteaming her with "Ziegfeld" co-star Powell, a movie she
didn't like, as she couldn't understand its story. A detective tale,
the script thoroughly confused Rainer, who was expected to soldier on
like a good employee. Instead, she resisted.
After appearing in
The Great Waltz (1938) and
Dramatic School (1938), her
career was virtually over by 1938. She never made another film for
MGM. "I just had to get away", she said about Hollywood. "I couldn't
bear this total concentration and interviews on oneself, oneself,
oneself. I wanted to learn, and to live, to go all over the world, to
learn by seeing things and experiencing things, and Hollywood seemed
very narrow." When World War II broke out in Europe, Rainer was joined
by her family, as her German-born father was also an American citizen,
allowing them all to escape Hitler and the Holocaust. Even before the
outbreak of war, Rainer had been very worried about the state of
affairs of the world, and she could not abide the escapist trifles that
MGM wanted to cast her in. When she protested, Mayer told Rainer
that if she defied him, he would blackball her in Hollywood.
Disturbed by Hollywood's apathy over fascism in Europe and Asia and by
labor unrest and poverty in the U.S., she decided to walk out on her
contract. She and Odets returned to New York. They were divorced in
1940. "Hollywood was a very strange place", she remembered. "To me, it
was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On
one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the
other side, heads hanging." Her frustration with Hollywood was so
complete, she abandoned movie acting in the early 1940s, after making
the World War II drama Hostages (1943)
for Paramount.
She made her Broadway debut in the play "A Kiss for Cinderella", which
was staged by Lee Strasberg, which opened
at the Music Box Theatre on March 10, 1942 and closed April 18th after
48 performances. Rainer then worked for the war effort during World War
II, appearing at war bond rallies. She went on a tour of North Africa
and Italy for the Army Special Service, socializing with soldiers to
build their morale, and supplying them with books. The experience
changed her life, allowing her to get over the shyness she'd had all
her life. It also broadened her experience, forcing her to deal with
the obvious fact that there were more important things than movie
acting, which had proven unfulfilling to her.
Fortunately, Rainer found happiness in a long-lived marriage with the
publisher Robert Knittel, a wealthy man whom she married in 1945. The
couple had a daughter and made their home mostly in Switzerland and
England as Rainer essentially left acting behind, although she did do
some television in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Her retirement from the
movies lasted for 53 years, until her brief comeback in
The Gambler (1997), a movie based on
Fyodor Dostoevsky's eponymous story.
In the film, Rainer played the role of the matriarch of an aristocratic
Russian family in the 1860s who is in hock due to the family members'
obsession with gambling.
Toward the end of her life, Rainer lived in a luxurious flat in Eaton Square in London's
Belgravia district, in a building where
Vivien Leigh once lived. Blessed with a
good memory, she claimed she could not remember the 1937 Academy Awards
ceremony, when she won her first Oscar. She says the glamour of the
event was out of sync with her life at the time, which was one of great
sadness. "I married Clifford Odets. The marriage was for both of us a
failure. He wanted me to be his little wife and a great actress at the
same time. Somehow I could not live up to all of that."
She had intriguing offers during her long retirement.
Federico Fellini had wanted Rainer for
a role in La Dolce Vita (1960), but
though she admired the director, she didn't like the script and turned
it down. Rainer occasionally plied her craft as an actress on the
stage. She made one more stab at Broadway, appearing in a 1950
production of Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea", which was staged by
Sam Wanamaker and Terese Hayden and
co-starred Steven Hill, one of the
founding members of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. The play was a
flop, running just 16 performances. "I was living in America and was on
the stage there - sporadically. I always lived more than I worked.
Which doesn't mean that I do not love my profession, and every moment I
was in it gave me great satisfaction and happiness."
Rainer had no regrets over not becoming the star she might have been.
She outlived all of the legendary stars of her era, which likely is the
best revenge for the loss of her career after bidding adieu to a
company town she could not abide.