Claudette Colbert — Why Claudette Went Gay! (1933) 🇺🇸
Claudette Colbert, who all the world knows is a lady, balked when Ernst (Great Director) Lubitsch asked her to lift her skirt and show her pretty legs for the camera! She wouldn't do it, and she didn't! Lubitsch cajoled, coaxed, threatened, but Claudette steadfastly refused to do that naughty, naughty piece of business for "The Smiling Lieutenant." That was some time ago.
And then the next thing we knew she was playing Poppaea, wickedest woman in history. Poppaea, dangerous, unscrupulous, whose diaphanous and scanty garments were supplemented on occasion by jewelled breastplates and bangles, and dispensed with entirely when she indulged in her bath of wild asses' milk with only an exotic coiffure to guide her!
When Lubitsch strolled on the set of Sign of the Cross one day, his eyes questioned Claudette, whom he found attired in a tiara and a few yards of chiffon as she tickled the nose of a tiger. "So-o-o?" Lubitsch said, in sonorous, mocking tones, shaking his head wisely at the scantily clad figure before him.
"But I explained to him," says Claudette, "that I felt far less self-conscious almost completely undressed as Poppaea than I did as a nice girl flicking her skirts in the face of an admirer. One belonged, and the other didn't."
Claudette knew she was regarded on the screen as one of those "nice" girls — charming, winning, appealing, but "nice," innately, appallingly and irrevocably "nice." Because she speaks English correctly, because she has breeding, because her manners, as well as her clothes, are good, she found herself smouldering indefinitely in stuffy screen drawing rooms. On the stage Miss Colbert had made a name for herself by her portrayals of young ladies of somewhat smooth virtue, clear-sighted and sophisticated. Perhaps her greatest success was her characterization of the delectable little tart in The Barker. But on the screen her seductiveness was practically lost in a sea of sweet goodness. Nature designed La Colbert as potential competition for Crawford and Dietrich — but Hollywood persisted in pigeon-holing her!
It's all very well to be catapulted onto a pinnacle of virtue, but Claudette did not like being just another movie "good girl," and found herself hankering for at least one of the seven deadlies. In the part of Poppaea she knew she would find them.
A desire to go back to her old stage tricks kept smouldering within her. She wanted in the worst way to be bad, really and truly bad, but she found herself balked at every turn.
As time went on, Fate, in the polished person of Mr. DeMille, suave and penetrating, who has uncanny sense in fathoming feminine personalities, stalked onto the set. As Claudette walked across the Paramount lot, Mr. DeMille emerged from behind a piece of scenery where he had been watching her intently, and stopped her.
"What on earth have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, in his direct, determined fashion. "Why have you been playing the roles of unsophisticated girls? Don't you know that you are wicked? You are the wickedest young woman I have ever laid eyes upon!" — and DeMille lives in Hollywood — "you are the essence of sophistication!"
Were Claudette's cheeks red? Did she draw her cloak of reserve about her and murmur, "Sir, how dare you?" She did not. It was all she could do to restrain herself from playing a big emotional scene right on the lot, without cameras, lights, or anything, as Cecil DeMille added, "I want you, young woman, for the role of that arch-seductress among women — Poppae." Claudette was enchanted; The Sign of the Cross was produced, and together they won the battle.
And they said she had found her sex appeal! Shades of The Barker and See Naples and Die, and her other plays on Broadway!
Perhaps it is part of the innate practicality of her French heritage; perhaps it is because of a delicious sense of humor; perhaps because she had a brother who wouldn't let her take herself too seriously, or perhaps it is just because of her own good head, well-poised on her shapely young shoulders, but the fact remains that in the midst of the idiosyncracies of the topsy-turvy film world, she stands forth as a girl who managed to keep her head up and her feet down.
Claudette changed the way she wore her hair to suit her new personality. She adopted the simplicity of the bangs and straight hair worn by the Egyptians. Finding the bangs effective, she modified the coiffure further for her own personal use.
So it is a sophisticated Claudette who vacations in New York between pictures; who plays at Palm Springs; who loves life and lives it fully.
Claudette confesses that when she first went out to Hollywood she found her equilibrium was fast being upset. It all happened at the Brown Derby. For some reason or other, mostly because everybody did it and it seemed to be expected of her, she went there for luncheon practically every day. She had made several successful pictures in the East and had that flourishing stage career behind her to bolster up her self-esteem. But Hollywood hasn't exactly the reputation for being particularly generous in its attitude towards a newcomer. Claudette felt she was being; stared at and dissected. And she began to feel that in the midst of all the beauties and charm, and the general atmosphere of sex appeal rampant, she was being adjudged in simple parlance as "none too hot." She began to get nervous, unduly sensitive, horribly self-conscious. She ate her lunch daily in misery.
"Until one day it occurred to me," she says now, "that after all it wasn't in my contract to appear daily at the Brown Derby, and since I didn't like the general appraising attitude, what the devil was I going there for?" (Claudette likes her cuss words).
So she stopped going places, and now with the few friends she has selected as boon companions, she spends most of her time in the house Greta Garbo once selected as a safe retreat, and which Claudette now rents as her Hollywood home.
But what about her domestic affairs? Claudette believes in homes — one for herself and one for her husband, Norman Foster. When she first went out to Hollywood she did go so far as to stay a few days under her husband's roof, but she and Norman continue to keep separate homes.
After seeing Norman's picture, "State Fair," Claudette sent Foster a wire saying: "You are still my favorite juvenile."
This, from the sophisticated Claudette, means a lot!
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Here's Colbert in her most knockout role — Poppaea in Sign of the Cross — jewelled, scantily clad, and unscrupulous in the use of her charms.
Claudette with Ernest Torrence and Ben Lyon in "I Cover the Waterfront."
Here's the screen Claudette of yesterday — gentle, dignified and amply clad, and in general as demure as a Louisa Alcott heroine. Remember "The Smiling Lieutenant"?
A close-up of Claudette's current coiffure, which she adopted to go with her new screen character. And very becoming, at that!
Hail to the film goddess! Diana Wynyard is caught by the camera on her way home for a visit in England, following her triumphs in "Cavalcade" and Reunion in Vienna.
Here's a handsome pair of budding stars, Bill Janney and Helen Mack.
Collection: Screenland Magazine, July 1933