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army camps. The breakdown must have occurred in fall 1944. It had to be
brief. Columbia wanted her for She Wouldn t Say Yes; Warners, for Roughly
Speaking (1945), which was delayed until Rosalind recovered. The dizzying
round of films, motherhood at thirty-six, army camp tours, and an Oscar
nomination that made her determined to win the coveted statuette: these
had all taken their toll. In the preface, Frederick also refers to the deaths of
Rosalind s older brother and sister, John and Clara, in the same context as
her breakdown. Since Frederick wrote that they died in the early years of
his marriage to Rosalind, readers might assume that there was some con-
nection between her breakdown and the loss of her brother and sister.
Actually, John, born in 1905 and thus two years older than Rosalind, died
on 21 October 1961 of a coronary occlusion resulting from arteriosclerosis;
and Clara, the duchess, died on 4 October 1963 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
101
102 LOSING TO LORETTA
Perhaps Frederick s despondency over Rosalind s death caused the juxtapo-
sition of the two incidents. Still, there was enough tension in Rosalind s life
to precipitate a collapse in 1944.
The breakdown caused Rosalind to modify her schedule for the rest of
the decade, but only slightly: two films in 1945, one in 1946, two in 1947,
and one each in 1948, 1949, and 1950. Slowing down was her only conces-
sion to mental health. Once Rosalind recovered, she reported for work on
Roughly Speaking, which required her to age over a period of twenty years.
When Warner Bros. purchased the rights to Louise Randall Pierson s autobi-
ography, Roughly Speaking, there was no one at the studio who could have
played the author, except perhaps Bette Davis. Davis could age convinc-
ingly and did, in Mr. Skeffington (1944), for example. But she would have
brought more brittleness than resilience to the role of Louise, the daughter
of an improvident father whose sudden death leaves his family in financial
distress. Although the film begins in 1902 (with Ann E. Todd playing Louise
as a child) and covers a forty-year period, Rosalind does not appear until
Louise is in her late teens, about to enter a women s college, which is little
more than a secretarial school. Raised to be grateful for a comfortable exis-
tence as well as to aid those less fortunate than herself, Rosalind had no trou-
ble playing a woman forced to make a living as a typist without suggesting
that clerical work was beneath her. Rosalind s Louise is a working-class
grand dame, determined to swim upstream regardless of the current, as
if she is equipped with a life jacket that reads Survivor. That Louise is; she
survives a marriage to a Yalie (Donald Woods), who dumps her for another
woman, and turns her second husband, a shiftless charmer (Jack Carson),
into a go-getter as they move from one enterprise to another, hitting the big
time with a parking concession at the 1939 World s Fair.
Although Louise Randall Pierson seemed to represent a departure
from the career women that Rosalind had been playing, the character dif-
fered only in degree from her other roles: Louise did not have a career so
much as a series of jobs. Yet whether she was taking dictation or growing
roses, Louise approached her work as a professional. Rosalind was that kind
LOSING TO LORETTA 103
of woman herself, able to take charge of her household because she first took
charge of her life. That she demanded and received expensive perfume from
Harry Cohn suggests a fearlessness that only someone with supreme self-
confidence could bring off. Nor did she appreciate a male actor s attempts at
familiarity, which she repeatedly discouraged. Although she never mentions
the lothario s name in Banquet, she strode into his dressing room and excori-
ated him for his ungentlemanly behavior. Rosalind never played a lady in
distress for one reason: she would not have been convincing.
When Rosalind arrived in Los Angeles in spring 1934, she immediately
began doing volunteer work in hospitals the result of her father s mandate
to serve humanity. She preferred the pediatric ward, perhaps because, as an
adventuresome and sports-minded child, she fractured so many bones that
she was more familiar with orthopedists than internists. Inevitably, she
became aware of Elizabeth Kenny, the Australian nurse, better known as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]