Are You Up-To-Date about Miriam Hopkins? (1932) 🇺🇸

Did you know that her silvery blonde hair is natural? Did you know that she’s afraid of Hollywood? Did you know that she even lives a different, kind of married life? In this story you’ll discover the real Miriam. Don’t miss reading it and knowing her better

by Faith Service

Says Miriam Hopkins: “The most important thing in life is to have friends who sit around the fire with you and talk — and talk — until someone says, ‘My Lord, it’s dawn!’“

And that little remark reveals Miriam Hopkins, the next little girl to be starred by Paramount, because she has stolen four pictures out of five. That is the keynote to her warm personality — the answer to “What is she really like?” Fame and wealth and even love are not the most important things in life to her. Good friends, good talk around an open fire, forgetfulness of time and place — that’s what Miriam wants from life.

And here’s another revealing remark. The driver of the Paramount studio car said to me, as he was driving me home, “You been with Miss Hopkins to-day? Jeez, she’s swell! I been driving her from her dressing-room on the lot to the set these past few days because she hasn’t been feelin’ well. There’s not many of ‘em would say ‘thank you’ for a little run like that. But she always does. She never forgets. She’s real.”

There you have Miriam Hopkins.

She’s real. She’s a rare sort of person. She has friends among the literati of New York. She has invitations to go sailing on the Schenck [Joseph M. Schenck] yacht, invitations to the Hearst ranch, invitations to Marion Davies’ formal dinner parties. She has, also, friends among the electricians and the studio chauffeurs, the extras and the prop-boys. Her colored maid is her friend. Her secretary is her friend. The script girl on the set is her friend. She never forgets to order coffee and sandwiches for them when, during a long day’s work, she orders them for herself.

Miriam has a heart

I watched her on the set, making “Two Kinds of Women,” with Phillips Holmes and Irving Pichel also in the cast. For three hours by the clock they went over and over and over one small scene because an old man, an “extra,” spoiled his lines, couldn’t get a bit of business in the tempo wanted by William de Mille, directing. Mr. de Mille was white with weariness and exasperation. Miriam, suffering from pleurisy, was white, too, but not with exasperation — with pity. With tolerance. And with her own pain.

She waited until Mr. de Mille was elsewhere on the set and then, quietly, she called the old man to her, tried to explain to him what was wanted, went over it with him, suggested some moves by which it might be easier for him. She made expressive eyes at the rest of the cast, warning them not to complain about him, warning them not to laugh. She said to me, “The poor, old thing — he’s trying, isn’t he?” In anybody else you might call this acting. But not in Miriam Unlike most witty people, the sharp-witted Miriam has a heart as big as all outdoors. It just isn’t in her to be a show-off.

That makes her success in Hollywood — both on and off the screen — all the more remarkable.

Southern without the accent

Miriam was born in Savannah, Georgia. She is a Southern gal, suh, without a Southern accent. She was brought up on a huge plantation that eventually formed part of the tiny town of Bainbridge, Georgia.

There is writing blood in the family. Her maternal grandmother, Mildred Middleton Cutter, published several books of poetry and for some years conducted a page of comment and poetry for “ Munsey’s Magazine.” An uncle, under the name of Dixie Hines, wrote a syndicated column up to the time of his recent death. Miriam’s mother studied music and had musical hopes for one of her two daughters. And Miriam’s older sister, Ruby, is an advertising writer, and represents several large hotels. Which may explain why Miriam says that if ever she should find the stage and the screen blocked to her (which will never, never happen) she would be a newspaper reporter like a shot!

Miriam, as a child, never even thought about becoming an actress. She neither posed in front of mirrors nor dressed up in her mother’s cast-off finery nor muttered Portia’s lines in The Merchant of Venice, at the age of seven. She studied art, music and literature and when, at the Goddard Seminary in Barre, Vermont, she won a twenty-dollar prize for elocution, she just thought that it was swell to have the twenty beanos. She played the leading role in her senior play, The Fascinating Fanny Brown, and between the first and second acts fell downstairs and broke her ankle. It never occurred to her to back out. She simply played the two remaining acts without her shoe and no one was the wiser. And she never realized that with the breaking of that bone she was to become one of the best actresses that Broadway would some day lose to Hollywood.

When Hoover was lucky

Her first professional make-up was applied by the present President of these United States, Herbert Hoover. She had been studying dancing at the Yestoff-Servova School in New York. A group of the girls were sent to dance at a benefit for the Near East Relief. They wore tattered gowns and smudges on their faces. Miriam had been so busy applying the smudges to others that she forgot herself until it was almost too late. A gentleman standing by hastily smudged her face for her and when she later inquired about him, she was told that he was none other than Food Commissioner Herbert Hoover.

Her first job was in the chorus, dancing. Her first big part was in Little Jessie James, musical comedy hit. After which she decided to turn toes down on dancing — her ankle was beginning to bother her — and to wait for something dramatic to come her way. No one took her seriously. She was too young, too blonde (she is a natural silvery blonde, ye unbelievers!) and too frivolous-looking, somehow. Miriam took herself seriously. She waited, rejecting all offers, until “The Puppets” came to town with Claudette Colbert and Fredric March, who had been doing the romantic leads on the road. Miriam took Claudette’s place with Fredric as, a few months ago, she took Claudette’s place in the affections of “The Smiling Lieutenant” — and stole the picture, even from Chevalier.

After The Puppets, Miriam played in “The Home-Towners” and her leading man was our own Chester Morris. She went from The Home-Towners to “An American Tragedy” (in which Helen Twelvetrees also played), and thence to “Excess Baggage.” There followed “The Garden of Eden” and “The Enemy” and her biggest success of all her successes, the part of the Grecian flapper in “Lysistrata,” the comedy by Aristophanes that has been running for a couple of thousand years.

Wanted her as Bathing Beauty

Her first movie offer came during the run of that play. It was from Mack Sennett. He wanted her to be a bathing beauty. That is what naturally blonde hair and a naturally — er — blonde figure will do for you, whether you’re Greek or Georgian. Miriam considered the phenomenal rise of Gloria Swanson from one-piece suits to stardom — but declined. Then came Paramount with the offer of the feminine lead in “Fast and Loose” — and thus we have Miriam with us to-day. And if, by any chance, you didn’t see her in The Smiling Lieutenant, you missed the most delicious delicacy ever served in gelatin. If there were more women like Miriam Hopkins and more men like Maurice Chevalier, we would have neither wars nor depressions nor prohibitions of any kind whatever. Then the world would become a civilized place, amusing, gay and kind.

Miriam is living in Greta Garbo’s erstwhile home in Santa Monica. It doesn’t awe her. She says there are plenty of good sheets and warm blankets and that is her main reaction to the Garbo hacienda. A girl-friend of Miriam’s feels otherwise. She wrote to Miriam, “Oh, if I could come out and visit you while you are living there — if I could only sleep in the very bed that Garbo slept in — just for one night.” Which is doubtless, Miriam admits, the normal reaction.

She has been married for three and a half years to Austin Parker, playwright. Like Fannie Hurst, she believes that married folk are happier living fairly separate lives. Which is to say that she believes in separate houses for husband and wife and occasional meetings or get-togethers. She feels that two creative personalities would blow off any one roof. She has tried the separate housing idea persistently. In New York they took separate apartments in the same building. That didn’t work very well because, while Miriam’s was completely furnished, Mr. Parker invested only in a desk and chair and that meant that he would retreat to Miriam’s eyrie when his work was done.

Her present married life

In Hollywood they also took separate houses, but Mr. Parker (who’s now writing scenarios), decided that it was all a very silly business and told Miriam so. Miriam said, “All right, dear, the house is big — we’ll try it.” Mr. Parker has moved in, bringing his young niece with him — “and now,” says Miriam, making a gesture with her small and very expressive hands, “now the house is swarming with Parkers.”

Miriam feels that Bernard Shaw was wrong when he said that men and women should live together only during the mating years. She feels that men and women should share a house together only after the mating years. “It might work,” she said, “when a man and a woman are old and could shove one another around in wheeled chairs or pass the peppermints or something.”

She’d like to have a baby of her own. She feels that to have a son is important. But she loves children because they are children and not, she thinks, because they might be hers. She may adopt one.

She is afraid of Hollywood. She doesn’t know why. She admits that she is far from being a jittery juvenile. There is nothing of the ingenue about Miriam. Nevertheless, she has heard tales of a certain producer who gives yachting parties with locked doors and of the macabre doings of certain lavish households. She thinks the New York writers are the most depressing people out here. They sit around and look suicidal and moan, “My God, the only way to beat this is to drink — and drink; — and drink —”

“She also thinks that the real movie colony, the Marion Davies’ and the Bebe Daniels’, are the important people here. They are gay, she has found; they do things, they are bright and amusing and entertaining. They are fun.

The Hopkins favorites

Her favorite actress is Lynn Fontanne (you saw her in “The Guardsman”), and her favorite actors are Adolphe Menjou and Bobby Coogan. She adores Ernst Lubitsch, director of The Smiling Lieutenant, and Reuben Mamoulian [Rouben Mamoulian], who directed her in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which she again acted with Fredric March.

She once had a hobby for collecting first editions (like another New York newcomer, Sylvia Sidney) and during that time once paid three hundred dollars for a first of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She was then making three hundred a week. She says, “This sounds swell. It makes a swell item for a fan magazine, even if it doesn’t make good sense.”

She says that she would like to be dramatic and say that life is not worth living and that she would like to “end it all,” but she knows that if someone heard her say that and obligingly pointed a gun at her, she would run fifty miles.

She likes to wear black and white, and to be surrounded with yellow roses. She feels that she has grown up because, now, she comes right out and says she detests certain things. And her pet hates are ocean travel, dry Martini cocktails and cauliflower. She feels that she would loathe parsnips if she should ever eat them.

She likes domesticity, or part of it. She gets a kick out of having a seamstress in to make white organdy curtains for the ex-Garbo bathrooms. She loves to order meals and new furniture. She feels that she would detest counting the laundry.

Her suppressed desire is to be a martyr for some Great Cause. Or even for some Great Man. But he would have to be great. Such a man as Mussolini or the very late Imperial Caesar. She cannot imagine being a martyr to a small man’s egotism. She would cook and clean and live in two rooms with a man who was doing something worth the doing, scornful of money or of the world’s honors. She doesn’t think there are enough of such men to go around and so doesn’t expect to be a martyr.

She has the most glorious hair I have ever seen, the kindest heart, the keenest wit, and the talkingest hands.

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Miriam Hopkins can’t control her silvery blonde mop of hair — it’s always wanting to go places. And Miriam, herself, is like that. She just can’t help going places on the screen, because she’s uncontrollable. The little Southern girl with the crooked smile has appeared in five pictures and stolen four. She’s the next girl that Paramount is going to star — because she has looks, figure, talent and brains. What her face doesn’t tell you about her, the story opposite will

Photo by: Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972)

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1932

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Are You Up-To-Date series:

1932-02 — Miriam Hopkins

1932-03 — Lois Moran

1932-04 — Phillips Holmes

1932-05 — Douglas Fairbanks Jr.