#ClassicFilmReading: No Bed of Roses by Joan Fontaine

Joan Fontaine's 1978 memoir, No Bed of Roses, is a masterclass in spilling tea and grinding axes. In the introduction, she admits as much: "When I had read several biographical obituaries of my film career, read the inaccuracies, the false assumptions, the downright unrealistic appraisals of various stages of my contractual life in Hollywood, I felt that someone had to set the record straight. It might as well be me." 

What follows is 314 pages worth of drama that, God willing, will someday, along with Olivia de Havilland's memoirs (which, caveat, may not exist but I hope they do!), be tangled up into a complete and detailed story of a lifelong feud where the truth exists somewhere in the middle. You can already picture the limited series based on their feud, can't you? 

(If Ryan Murphy ever makes this series, do you think Sarah Paulson will play Joan or Olivia?)

Instead of a straight review of the facts, since you can get it from reading this, or from reading Wikipedia, I want to devote my fourth review in the #ClassicFilmReading challenge to sharing some of my favourite revelations, catty remarks, vivid descriptions, and otherwise eyebrow-raising tidbits in Joan's (in my opinion) classic memoir. Here are my favourite bits.

FAMILY FEUD:

• The opening line: "Father said I should have been named Onyx because I was unexpected. Mother said I was conceived on her chaise lounge one Saturday afternoon. Father had come home from his chess club with a moment to spare before dressing for dinner." 
• She confirms that she had a Vision whilst a pupil at the Notre Dame Convent in Belmont, California. I bring this up because it's literally the only mention of Joan in Olivia's Every Frenchman Has One.
• Joan, who later in life attended Le Cordon Bleu in New York, says about discovering her love of cooking as a child: "I soon learned to curry favor with the grown ups by mastering the might cookstove. My ego rewards were tied to my apron strings. Olivia was smarter. She just wouldn't learn." 
• Olivia apparently refused to let Joan speak to her in public and definitely not in front of her friends. 
• Mervyn Le Roy offered Joan a personal contract tied to Warner Brothers when she was first starting out, but Olivia and their mother told her to turn it down because Warner Brothers was "Olivia's studio, her domain. Its gates could not be opened to both of us." She worked at RKO and was always under personal contracts to producers and loaned out for work. 
• Olivia also forced her to change her last name, and thus Joan Fontaine was born. She tried out Joan Burfield and Joan St. John before a fortune-teller at the Trocadero told her to pick a surname that ended in 'e' as it would bring her luck. Fontaine, her stepfather's surname, was the first name that popped into her head and she used it.
• Joan's father rang up the papers and claimed she wasn't taking care of her destitute father, but the papers didn't run the story because nearly every actor had a relative come out of the woodwork and claim mistreatment. Interesting that he didn't, at least as Joan tells it, pull the same trick on Olivia.
• Joan, who was born in Tokyo and spent considerable time in her teenage years there, totally glosses over the fact that she had a Japanese stepmother who was in an internment camp during the Second World War. Her father and stepmother are barely mentioned after she leaves them for good in the '30s. 
• Joan swept in and 'stole' Howard Hughes away from Olivia in 1939, while taking a break from the set of The Women. He was interested in her romantically for decades though Joan never cowed to his romantic overtures. 
• "Rumours of the 'feuding sisters' being circulated by the Warner Brothers' publicity department were not without foundation, yet hardly for print. Both of us led such circumspect lives that our studios were at a loss to make the two sisters exciting. Warner's took the initiative." 
• After her wedding to Brian Aherne in 1939, Joan left behind her wedding dress and veil in the hotel room with instructions for Olivia to pack them up and ship them home. She allegedly never did this, and the room's next occupants simply returned the bridal ensemble to housekeeping. Joan never saw the pieces again. 
• "Never, ever, did Mother acknowledge that she had seen me on the screen during my entire Hollywood career. She never admitted viewing any of Olivia's films either. At least, not to me." 
• Joan wasn't going to attend the Oscars in 1942, which she ended up winning, because she didn't want to have to party all night and wake up early to continue filming The Constant Nymph. Olivia, who was also nominated in the category, knew the publicity surrounding the sisters would be so great that she forced her sister to attend. 
• "...Olivia arrived with our usual saleslady from I. Magnin. They deposited in my dressing room tan-and-white-striped boxes containing all the size sixes the store possessed. Between takes, I tried on all the dresses, finally selecting a ballet-length black number with a lace skirt and mantilla, which was hastily basted to fit me. 
• When she won the Oscar, she didn't react right away, causing Olivia to mutter "Get up there, get up there!" and making Joan feel terrible, like any goodwill between the sisters had evaporated in that moment. 
• When Olivia was nominated in 1946 for To Each His Own, she was furious with Joan because she'd made a quip about Olivia's husband to a reporter. "Searching my mind for wisps of information, I volunteered: 'All I know about him is that he has had four wives and written one book. Too bad it's not the other way around.'" Olivia snubbed her at the Oscars two weeks later, in an iconic moment that was captured by photographer Hymie Fink of Photoplay. 
• When her mother died: "Thus I said good-bye forever to my mother. As for Olivia, I had no words at all." 
• Olivia didn't involve her in any end-of-life decisions for their mother and allegedly kept her away from her funeral services. 

GOSSIP:

• So many Hollywood couples hosted parties because they could be written off during tax season. "As a guest entered a Beverly Hills house, he was obliged to sign in before having the first cocktail. Flame-haired Greer Garson, never without her mother, Nina, always courageously wore scarlet or cyclamen. She also carried her own thick red pencil in her evening bag. Her signature in the guest book was as much of a standout as she was." 
• Joan, after signing with RKO, only attended one drama lesson (taught by Ginger Rogers's mother, Lela) then quit because she thought her own mother, who had wanted to be a stage actress, was a better teacher. 
• Katharine Hepburn is the one who convinced RKO to give her leading roles in B pictures to develop her skills and told a producer, "That girl may go somewhere." 
• "One Christmas, David O. Selznick's present to me was a set of imported Lowestoft, a two-hundred-and-fifty-piece set from Carole Stupwell in New York. In disfavour the next year, I received a five dollar geranium plant. The price tag was still on it." 
• "Having an excellent Japanese chef and his wife in our Fordyce kitchen, we often gave sit-down dinners for twenty. One evening I gave one with an all-Russian menu, starting with caviar and vodka, served in chilled Orrefors shot glasses." A guest then suggested that they follow Russian tradition and smash the hundred-dollar-glasses into the floor after drinking. 
• Joan became friends with Eva Peron while visiting Argentina. She also dined with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, sort-of dated Prince Aly Khan (who later married Rita Hayworth), and knew many titled Europeans. I'd love to see her social schedule.
• After meeting Prince Aly Khan in Paris, "my room at the Winstons' was filled with red roses. Over lunch at Maxim's, ALy handed me a small package from Cartier's: a gold-and-crystal desk clock in a red morroco-leather case. Aly became my escort at all the parties and racing gatherings," which included trips to Deauville and the Mediterranean.
• Richard Burton allegedly only received a contract with Twentieth Century Fox after Joan had seen him in a play, Henry IV, and told Darryl Zanuck about the talented actor in the leading role. 
• Ray Milland had a photographic memory and could have his ten pages worth of re-written lines recited to him while playing gin rummy against Joan and still remember every single word. Joan also had a photographic memory and could do the same. 
• She stayed at Vivien Leigh's London apartment while working (while Vivien stayed at her New York apartment while appearing on Broadway) and was later accused of stealing watches given to Vivien by Laurence Olivier. The FBI called her, but didn't seem to take Vivien's accusations seriously (Joan implies that they might have heard her make the same accusation about other people). 
• In the '60s, "To pay my income, I spent summers in stock, made a horrendous film for Irwin Allen [Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea]. I invested in oil, bought citrus groves in Florida, an apartment building in Beverly Hills."

DESCRIPTIONS: 

• When her house, Fordyce, burned down: "...there were the material things that I would never touch again. The English antiques, the Georgian silver, the oil paintings: a Corot pastoral, a Marie Laurençin portrait, a Henry Varnum Poor still life. My portrait by James Montgomery Flagg, a series of Hogarth prints...a sixteenth-century map of England given me by Geoffrey de Havilland." 
• "My first impression of southern California was its blue, blue sky, its balmy flower-scented air, its gardens in perpetual bloom." It sounds lovely! Her descriptions of Hollywood, down to the Chateau Marmont, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ciro's, the Trocadero, Schwab's Drug Store, Grauman's Chinese Theatre... I feel like I'm there. 

Olivia and Joan, or Joan and Olivia, since this post is about her, have always fascinated me. These two successful sisters climbed to the top of Hollywood and to this day, they're the only sisters who have ever won Oscars. They're legends, but their feud is a cherry on top of their legacies. Did it happen the way Joan says? Did it happen the way Olivia has teased in interviews? 

Olivia said in an interview to mark her 100th birthday in 2016, "On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed. Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way."

So where do I stand? Well, I love the way Joan writes, but there's definitely an overarching theme of woe-is-me and everyone in her life, from her sister to her parents, her husbands, her children, her colleagues, her staff, has wronged her at some point. 

Perhaps she was too sensitive and sickly for a world that expected her to have gilded armor on 24/7. 

Perhaps she lacked the perspective to see the role she played in these conflicts. 

Perhaps she was right in every situation. We'll never know for sure, and I keep harping on this, but I sincerely hope that Olivia left behind a manuscript with the instructions not to publish until after her death. 

Here's what I know: Joan was a supremely talented actress who succeeded on her own merits and has a long list of great performances, from the classics Rebecca and Suspicion to The Constant Nymph, Island in the Sun, Serenade, to some of her B-picture comedies like Maid's Night Out and The Man Who Found Himself. She'll always be tied to Olivia, but she should be judged on her own merits as well. 

If you read No Bed of Roses, you'll see just how hard she worked to carve out her own life, and you won't be disappointed!