Isabel Jewell — Only A “Bit” Girl (1936) 🇺🇸
The film “Lost Horizon” marks the finding of her own horizon for Isabel Jewell.
by Whitney Williams
Coincident with her being selected for one of the important rôles in this unusual screen story, Isabel found within herself the peace and fulfillment of purpose she eternally seeks in the picture. As though Fate itself, following four long bitter years of disappointment and struggle, elected to lend a guiding hand, she finally is achieving the realization of her dreams.
Life has not been easy for the little actress who trekked out to Hollywood four years ago from the Broadway stage, to enact in the screen version of Blessed Event, the part she created on the stage in its original form. She has had to undergo setbacks such as few Hollywood actresses are called upon to endure, and still emerge with their heads erect and a smile on their lips. Hollywood has treated her shabbily, no mistaking that, but never once has she been tempted to quit and give up the screen as a bad job. Isabel’s not that kind, she’s not the “quitter” type. She knew exactly what she wanted, and was willing to make sacrifices to gain her end.
When she arrived in the film capital, she realized she had a hard road to travel. Hollywood fairly teemed with beautiful girls, and Isabel had never considered herself any more than passably pretty. To compete with such loveliness meant buckling down to the most laborious back-breaking toil, but Isabel possessed the courage of youth and the enthusiasm of a born artist.
Circumstances, however, played against her from the first. Summoned from the east to step into her showgirl part in Blessed Event, the studio did not even accord her a screen test. She knew nothing about film make-up. The make-up department, never having seen her before, merely slapped greasepaint on her face as they would any extra girl, and Isabel walked onto the set without the vaguest knowledge of anything pertaining even remotely to screen-craft.
The outcome, of course, was disastrous. The beauty that naturally is hers was hidden as though behind a mask. Few of her friends recognized her as she trouped with Lee Tracy in the latter sequences of that film. That she displayed an unmistakable talent for dramatic acting was entirely beside the point. She did not photograph well — how could she, when she did not understand make-up technique and the studio had evinced no inclination of remedying this unfortunate situation? And that made her undesirable screen timber.
The picture ended in May and Isabel did not work again until February. Hollywood seemed to have forgotten her.
“Nobody would believe I had the ghost of a chance,” Isabel now says, looking back on those gloomy days, “and producers were afraid to cast me in a picture. They remembered how I appeared in my first film and judged me accordingly. Talk as I would, I couldn’t convince anybody that the reason I hadn’t looked well was because I hadn’t been properly made up.”
Even in those months of cheerlessness, Isabel was scanning the far horizon, beyond which lay fame and success. Through discouragement and disillusionment she kept her eyes ever on her objective, ever onward, until today… But I’m getting ahead of my story.
Since the screen would have none of her, Isabel turned again to the stage… but in Hollywood. Otto Kruger was to star in Counsellor-At-Law at the El Capitan Theatre, and the actress won the part of the fast-talking telephone operator.
Immediately, Hollywood sat up and took notice of her work. Even John Barrymore nodded his head sagely, in approval of this petite actress, and when he made the screen version of “Counsellor-At-Law” he insisted that Isabel enact her rôle in the picture.
“Now…” thought Jewell, “here’s where I finally go to town.”
She did, in the film. She stood out in gemlike clarity. And, for a time, the future beckoned with alluring promise.
She played the leading feminine rôle opposite Otto Kruger in that actor’s initial starring picture, “The Women in His Life,” and appeared prominently in several more productions. Metro-Goldwyn placed her under contract. Instead of continuing to cast her in sizable rôles, she was relegated — with one exception, that of the girl in “Evelyn Prentice” — to unimportant parts that decidedly did not further her career. Once more, she appeared to be forgotten. Whenever any small part would be up for casting in a film , the executives would say, “Give it to Jewell… she always turns in a good performance.” All of which got her nowhere.
To recall that unhappy period pains her even today. “I was up tor more parts during my year with Metro than any other actress on the lot,” she says, “but something always interfered with my being cast. Life then was just one disappointment after another. I suffered so many disappointments and slaps in the face that I almost became accustomed to them.”
Not because of any lack of ability did Isabel fail to win good rôles. Sometimes her size — she’s only five feet tall, you know, and weighs considerably under one hundred pounds — prevented her filming a part. Other elements out of her control, too, were responsible. The studio knew she was a splendid actress, knew the great potentialities that lay in the palm of their hand. Isabel was doomed, as have been other fine actresses before her, for one reason — the studio paid no heed to her.
This practice, through which so many talented players have fallen by the wayside, is attributable to no one factor. It is merely a condition that exists in Hollywood. It cannot be explained, other than downright heedlessness on the part of studio executives. More times than one have capable actors and actresses suffered through its prevalence. Sometimes they are found before it is too late; on other occasions their careers vanish into thin air, while less talented players forge ahead.
Fortunately for Isabel, the studio did not exercise its second option on her services and she was thus enabled to regain the identity that seemingly had been lost in the studio shuffle. But during this period a tragedy was to enter her young life.
Her beloved father, ever so close to her heart, lost his eyesight. One of Wyoming’s most famous doctors, he had waged a losing fight for years against failing eyesight, and when Isabel took him to her home in Hollywood he could not see even the gold of his daughter’s hair.
For months on end, then, Isabel tended her father faithfully, while Los Angeles’ ablest eye specialists worked to avert this tragedy in a family that once had been so gay and carefree. Months of mental suffering left their mark temporarily on this youthful actress, who had so much to offer but whom Hollywood was passing by.
There came the day that Metro announced it would film “Tale of Two Cities.” The story of how Isabel got the rôle of the little dressmaker in the picture serves admirably to illustrate the courage and tenacity that has finally won this girl her place in the Hollywood sun.
After camping on the office step of David Selznick daily for weeks, Isabel finally convinced the producer that he should give her a test for the part. The test accordingly was made and apparently she qualified. With that off her mind, the harassed Miss decided she would hop to New York for a brief holiday before starting work.
Scarcely had she arrived in the east, however, than trade papers announced that another girl would play the seamstress. Isabel’s blue eyes popped. She reached for a telephone and in a few moments was talking to Producer Selznick over long distance.
“What’s this about another girl going to play my part?” she asked.
“Well, Isabel,” explained Selznick. “we changed the character slightly. Sorry. Better luck next time.”
“Wait a minute!” shot back the Jewell. “What makes you think I can’t do it with the changes?”
“Well…” began Selznick, but he got no further.
“I’m taking the next plane for Hollywood,” Isabel told him. And she did, leaving her hotel within an hour. Once more in Hollywood she persuaded the studio to give her another test, and won the rôle!
Peering again into the far horizon, Isabel, to her delight, discovered it lay not so far away. Gradually, and steadily, she was approaching the line that once seemed so far distant.
“Ceiling Zero” offered her an opportunity of which she took full advantage. It was during the filming of this picture that she read James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon,” and immediately was consumed with a desire to appear in the production should it ever reach the screen.
Then… wonder of wonders, Frank Capra sent for her, to test her for one of the important parts in the picturization of the book. Almost concurrently with this action, her father began to regain his eyesight. Moreover, out of a clear sky the owner of the house she had been eating her heart out to occupy, since first she had entered it two years previously, decided to go to Europe and offered the picturesque little bungalow to Isabel. And… Capra, for whom she would give years off her life to act, gave her the part in Lost Horizon!
Lost horizon? Found horizon!
Peculiarly, a strange parallel is to be drawn between Isabel Jewell, the actress, and Isabel Jewell, as Gloria Stone, in the production of Lost Horizon. Both have been searching for peace of soul and attainment of ambition, and simultaneously both find these qualities. All the more wonderful is the fact that Isabel Jewell, the woman, arrived at her goal, as she was enacting the part of the girl in the picture, with a similar object in mind.
As you undoubtedly know, Lost Horizon has topped all best-selling book lists for months. Its translation onto the screen is a worthy, but daring, feat.
Telling a deeply-moving story of a group of persons who have found real peace, most of the action of the picture unfolds high up in inner Tibet, in Shangri-La, whither Isabel Jewell, Ronald Colman, star of the picture, John Howard, Edward Everett Horton and Thomas Mitchell have been borne via airplane… kidnapped as they were evacuating Baskul, a settlement somewhere on the Chinese frontier, before an approaching horde of ravishing native demons.
Ruled by a High Lama, who is said to be three hundred years old, Shangri-La is a garden of contentment, a spot free from the greed and fears of a world gone mad with avarice, where life goes on forever. Into this idyllic state the little group is transplanted. Colman, a famous explorer held high in the esteem of the British Empire, learns that he has been abducted at the suggestion of Jane Wyatt, a girl who has read his books and gleaned from them that he was a man searching for peace… one who needed Shangri-La.
“The purpose of Shangri-La,” Colman is told by the High Lama, “is to preserve the treasures of beauty. The time will come when brutality and lust for power must perish by its own sword. It is against that time that you were brought here. You cannot leave.”
This rather formidable and philosophical but intensely fascinating premise has been taken by Director Capra and Robert Riskin, his scenarist, and woven into a script proclaimed by all who have read it as one of the most complete works ever to be fashioned into a picture. Certainly Frank Capra is exerting every force at his very facile command and from all indications the finished film will be one of the great pictures of the season.
“The mystic spell of the book seemed to extend even to the players,” Isabel, who plays the best rôle of her career, observes, in touching upon the merits of the production. “I have never worked with a cast, either on the stage or screen, so imbued with an established mood. We were swayed by the book, but under Frank Capra’s direction… we were inspired.”
Lost Horizon is a fitting climax to the directorial career thus far of the Academy-winning Frank Capra. But, more particularly, it strikes its shaft straight home in the life of Isabel Jewell. Isabel has found her own Shangri-La!
Collection: Silverscreen Magazine, September 1936
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