Helen Hayes — Give Me One Year (1935) 🇺🇸
Helen Hayes is doing now just what she does every time she finishes a picture. She is suffering the tortures of the damned. Telling herself that she is through with pictures. That she wants to live her own life. In her own way. That she is going back home and take life easy, in the manner of other women. That she doesn't care if she never sees another motion picture studio or theatre or anything else that can drag her away from her home, her husband and her baby.
by Mary Sharon
A few days before she left for New York, I visited her at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she lived while she was making What Every Woman Knows.
She had a comfortable, but unpretentious, suite of rooms on the third floor of the hotel, from which she could look out upon the palm-lined boulevards and, on warm afternoons, could throw open the many windows of the living-room and bask in the sun.
Only, the day that I visited with her was a gray, dismal day. I found Helen, correspondingly gray and dismal. She lay back against the upholstered chaise longue and hugged her misery to her heart. It was useless to try to console her, for she was in the throes of one of those let-down moods that come to all artists after the finish of a really good piece of work, into which they have flung their whole soul — and she wanted her baby. Two griefs combined in one.
"My words have caught up with me at last," she told me in all wretchedness. "I have always said that a woman can successfully combine marriage and a career. I have just learned that I was wrong. I want my baby today more than anything in the world. I haven't seen her for such a long time. I call her on the phone almost every day, but she is usually too shy to talk to me. Last night, when I called, her nurse told me that she has learned to swim. Then she let little Mary tell me in her own words and she said, 'Please, mama, come home quick before summer is gone. I want you to see me swim.'" Helen sighed and turned out her hands in a way that told me despair and need more than words could have done. Her gesture made me remember the scene in The White Sister, where she held out her hands towards her lover who was going away to war. There was that same, poignant emptiness in them.
"I can't tell you how I felt when she begged me to come home. Anyway, it decided me. I am going. A hundred movie contracts and stage offers cannot keep me away from my baby any longer.
"Think what it means to any woman to be away when her little girl is learning to take her first, little, wobbly steps. Learning to lisp her first words. When somebody else must teach her all those little first things. Sing lullabies to her and put her to sleep. I feel terribly about it, now. As if I've been cheated out of something that was a part of my birthright. Money, success, fame — nothing can repay for lost loveliness like that.
"I'm homesick and tired. I've worked so hard this year, have gone through sixty-two weeks without a rest of any kind. I came straight to Hollywood from the long run in Mary of Scotland. But I'm through."
She held up her chin belligerently.
"I have made up my mind and I am going to stick to my decision.
"I am not going to do any thing for one whole year. I am going to go home and live normally for twelve, long, happy months with my husband and my baby. I am going to take care of my roses, putter around the garden, arrange furniture, fix drapes, wash dishes and do all the things that every woman instinctively loves to do. I am going to really live for one year. Do you know how grand it seems just to be saying it?"
Silence lay like a pool, then. She was deep in thought and a tiny furrow appeared between her eyes. Finally, she spoke again.
"I suppose I shall be laying myself open to criticism. So much was said when I quit to bring little Mary into the world. But I'm really free. I'm not breaking or abusing any ethical rule in resting for a year."
I knew then, that she was really talking to herself. Some small voice in her conscience was smiting her for her decision.
"The Guild expects me to go out on the road with Mary of Scotland," she explained, "but there is one nice thing about it. The Guild never stars any of its players. The play is the thing with them. So there is no stipulation that I shall be seen in the play. Rather it is billed that Mary of Scotland will be given at such and such a theatre. That leaves me wholly free. Someone else can carry on in my place."
I asked her about What Every Woman Knows. Was she satisfied with the finished picture? Had she enjoyed making it?
"It has been horrible." She threw the words out into the room and they hung there.
I felt as if she had suffered and crawled and squirmed under a lash. The fire that makes her pictures live and breathe was in her voice and in her eyes.
"I wish I could tell you how perfectly terrible it has been, how much I have suffered in making this picture. I don't say that anyone except myself was to blame. I have learned the technique of the stage, have used it over and over until it is as much a part of me as eating or sleeping. When I bring that technique into pictures, I find it is too exaggerated. I have to watch myself all the time.
I get into a scene. Get to feeling it and I forget. Then, it has to be done over and over and over again, until all the beauty has gone out of it for me. I feel like a piece of wood.
"You won't believe it perhaps, but I had to have thirty-seven retakes for one of my big scenes in What Every Woman Knows. I felt as green as a new extra, before we were through.
"Then, too, I feel my lack of beauty. I never knew I had a face until I came to Hollywood. All the girls are so beautiful and I am so ugly."
Silence again and then, in a subdued hurt voice, "I love beauty so. I wish I could have been pretty. I always felt so bad about being tiny. All of the great stage actresses are beautiful and tall. Emotional roles demand height. I overcame that handicap. In some way, I succeeded in giving an illusion of height on the stage. But what can you do when you have no beauty of face or figure?"
Useless to tell her that she succeeds in giving an illusion of beauty, that she has a glamor and appeal that mere beauty can never give, that there isn't a beautiful woman on stage or screen today who would not trade her loveliness for that inner fire and greatness that makes Helen Hayes completely irresistible.
"I never want to make another picture from any of my stage plays," she was very firm about this. "I had many offers to play in pictures before I finally signed to make Lullaby, which was released as 'The Sin of Madelon Claudet,' but I didn't think I would be any good for pictures. I was not even interested until M-G-M promised to let me make What Every Woman Knows. That is why I signed my contract with them in the first place. Now, I am so disappointed that I don't ever want to make another picture. I didn't even go to see the rushes on the last retakes for it hurts me to look at them."
I could hardly keep from smiling, for I remembered that she went through this same period of regret when she made The Sin of Madelon Claudet. She experienced the same despair when she finished The White Sister. She waded through a morass of bitterness when she saw the preview of A Farewell To Arms. It will always be so with her.
She cannot see the perfect beauty she gives to her performances. Instead, she sees shadows under her eyes and lines about her mouth, that are lost to those who are thrilling to the poignant reality of her shadow self.
Sitting there in the half-dusk, she drew a wrap around her shoulders, as if to protect herself from a sudden chill.
"I am so afraid of getting old," she whispered. She didn't say any more, but I understood.
Every woman knows those moments of fear when life begins to etch faint lines around the corners of the mouth, when telltale wrinkles begin to show beneath the eyes. I knew that Helen Hayes had been staring too long into her mirror, looking for those first, sad tracings.
They are discernible now, because she is utterly worn and tired. She has given everything she has to this last picture and it has taken something out of her that only rest and play can return.
"Even if I weren't selfish enough to want to be with my baby, I know that I simply must quit for a while and rest." She curled up on the couch and put her hands under her chin. "I have reached a spot in my life where I am beginning to realize that I must not use up all of my reserve strength. I have got to take stock of myself, take things a little easy. I know that if I should go out on the road and try to play in Mary of Scotland on this twenty-four-weeks' tour, as they expect me to do, I will be heading straight for a nervous breakdown. I feel shaky and tired. I need rest and I am going to have it."
Then she talked of her baby. And just talking about her made her forget her worries. Her face shone, happily.
"I can hardly wait to get home. Baby always has an apartment near me when I am playing in New York and I see her as much as possible every day. But how wonderful it will be just to be able to play with her, talk to her, ride with her, spend every waking minute with her! I can't tell you what it means to me."
"Haven't you signed to make another picture?" I asked her.
"Yes. But I won't." This, defiantly. "I am, first of all, a woman. I have given up four years of my baby's life to others. Now I am going to care for her myself. I miss Charlie, too. We have never been able to live like other married people do. But when I stay home, we can. He can drive back and forth to the studio and we can be together every evening of every day. Life is very short, too short to spend it foolishly, apart."
I wondered then, if there were not another reason behind her temporary retirement. I asked her if there were — if she were going to have another child. She answered evasively. It would be nice for Mary. She had not thought a lot about it, although she doesn't think children should be too far apart. She doesn't intend to let Mary grow up as an "only" child.
Helen Hayes has a fine reserve and dignity that makes it impossible for her to "let down her hair" like so many actresses do, and tell her innermost thoughts and hopes.
I suspected, but I knew no more about her maternal plans when she had finished, than when I first asked her.
She gave out a story last year when she was leaving Hollywood. Said that she intended to retire permanently when Mary becomes ten years old and spend the remainder of her life being merely her mother. I reminded her of it.
"I'll never retire permanently," she assured me solemnly. "The stage is in my blood. Right now, I am fed up with work because I have worked too hard and much too long without rest. But when my year is up, I'll come back. I want to continue to work as long as I live."
She changed the subject then, and we talked about babies. She showed me some pictures of little Mary and told of the funny childish things she said and did when they were together on her last visit. She was a little happy when I left her. I was happy, too, to know that she has reconsidered her earlier decision, that her rare artistry is only going to be withheld from us for a season.
(Left) A snapshot of Helen and her daughter, Mary MacArthur, with a small friend, taken last summer in Nyack, New York. Since that time, Helen has had only the briefest visits with little Mary.
(Left, below) With Brian Aherne in What Every Woman Knows, for M-G-M.
That versatile actress of stage and screen, Miriam Hopkins, recently agreed to appear in Sam Goldwyn's pictures to the tune of a four-year contract, though she's still an RKO star. Eddie Cantor put his John Hancock on the papers as a witness, making it all very legal.
Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, December 1935