Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew [Hardcover]

John Oller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997

The luminous star of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Shane, and other classic films was, as the subtitle aptly puts it, "the actress nobody knew." Jean Arthur (1900-91) kept her personal life private, disdained the Hollywood publicity machine, and was called "difficult" because of her perfectionism and remoteness from costars on the movie set. John Oller, a lawyer, tracked down kinsfolk and friends never before interviewed to capture the elusive personality of a free spirit best embodied in her favorite role, Peter Pan. Arthur herself might have appreciated his warm, respectful portrait. "...[An] insightful, painstakingly researched analysis of Arthur's life and career raises the curtain on the complex, conflicted person behind the screen persona...Captures the special shine of a unique star who turned out to be a genuine eccentric." -Chicago Tribune

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The luminous star of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Shane, and other classic films was, as the subtitle aptly puts it, "the actress nobody knew." Jean Arthur (1900-91) kept her personal life private, disdained the Hollywood publicity machine, and was called "difficult" because of her perfectionism and remoteness from costars on the movie set. John Oller, a lawyer, tracked down kinsfolk and friends never before interviewed to capture the elusive personality of a free spirit best embodied in her favorite role, Peter Pan. Arthur herself might have appreciated his warm, respectful portrait.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 358 pages
• Publisher: Limelight Editions; 1st Limelight ed edition (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879100907
• ISBN-13: 978-0879100902
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,005,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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77 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NEGLECTED STAR GETS STAR TREATMENT AT LAST, May 7, 2003

By 

RALPH PETERS (CLOVIS, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (Paperback)

It would appear that writing a compelling, readable, and entertaining biography is a daunting task. So many are dry, filled with facts and dates of little interest, or just plain dull. The difference here is that John Oller can actually WRITE. Ms. Arthur is, without doubt, one of the sorely neglected stars of any era. Her comic genius in "The More The Merrier" alone would merit a critical gushing today if anyone in the 21st century had even a modicum of the lady's superb timing and class. That she has appeared in several other classics (perhaps most notably "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington") certainly warrants a full scale biography and Mr. Oller succeeds brilliantly.

The notoriously private Ms. Arthur is not painted as arch nor perverse; simply a woman with a different take on life and Hollywood. She saw there was more to life than glamour and makeup (even attending college during career lulls)and her 'eccentric' personality becomes all the more endearing under Mr. Oller's critical, yet always fair, judgments. The book isn't overstuffed with facts and dates; just what is needed. I wish all biographers would realize that sometimes less is, indeed, more. Highly recommended.

89 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars TO JOHN OLLER WE GIVE THANKS, August 26, 2002

By 

s.ferber (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (Hardcover)

I had waited impatiently for almost 30 years for someone to tackle a biography of Jean Arthur, one of my favorite actresses and one of the brightest comediennes of the '30s and '40s. In my youthful naivete, seeing that nobody seemed interested in the project, I thought about taking on the job myself. Thank goodness I waited for John Oller to write his book instead! There's no way that anyone could have done a better job with this most reclusive and challenging of subjects. Even during her heyday, Ms. Arthur was an extremely private person--"America's Garbo," as she was called--and in the final decades of her life, snubbed all efforts from outsiders seeking autographs or interviews about her glorious past. It may seem faint praise to call Mr. Oller's book a definitive biography when it is the ONLY one to have ever been written, but I just don't see how anyone will ever gain more access to Jean Arthur information than he has presented here. Oller has taken the time to interview dozens of Arthur's friends and family members, as well as associates from her film and stage careers and from her various teaching posts. The book is remarkably evenhanded. Arthur was apparently a very complex person, with lots of insecurities and neuroses that made her somewhat of a problem to work with. (I'm trying to be kind here.) Oller clearly thinks the world of the actress, but at the same time doesn't shrink from telling us when a producer or neighbor had something rotten to say of her. And when Oller runs into an area where the evidence leads to no clear result (such as the case of Arthur's possible bisexuality), he gives us the facts as well as can be known and leaves it at that. The book is anything but sensationalistic.
This biography traces Arthur's roots all the way back to the 13th century (!) but at the same time does not get bogged down in needless verbiage. It moves swiftly along; indeed, I almost found myself wishing that Oller would devote more space to some of my favorite Arthur movies. One would think that the most interesting segment of this actress' story would be the great Hollywood years, but as it turned out, the latter portion of the book, dealing with Arthur's life after Hollywood, was even more interesting. Oller takes us on a trip through Arthur's stage career, her life as a student and teacher, and her reclusive final years in Carmel, CA. It's all fascinating material, especially for fans of the actress who were never privy to any of this stuff before. The author writes well; it's hard to believe that this biography is his first book. By reading closely and looking at the notes at the rear of this work, one deduces that Mr. Oller spent the better part of a decade on this project...and the results have paid off extremely well.
That said, I should also note that there ARE some small problems with the book; some minor mistakes that a close reading reveals. For example, there are some errors as regards dates. Oller writes that Arthur's play "The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake" had a preview on Wednesday, 11/2/67. However, in reality, that date was a Thursday. He writes that Arthur's brother Robert was born in March 1892 and died in November 1955 at age 61. Shouldn't that be 63? He writes that at the time of Arthur's death in 1991, she hadn't appeared in a film "in more than forty years." But if "Shane" came out in 1953, wouldn't that be "a mere" 38 years? Mr. Oller tells us that Dee Hoty--the actress who took over briefly for Ms. Arthur in "First Monday in October"-- was "barely twenty" that year (1975), although the Internet Broadway Database gives her birth date as 8/16/52, making her over 23 at the time. He writes of an Oscar ceremony in February 1935 as being in the "spring"; shouldn't that be "winter"? He tells us that the movie "The Stripper," in which Arthur was reportedly going to make a comeback, was based on the William Inge play "Celebration." I have always thought the play in question to be called "A Loss of Roses." Does it go by another name? To end this nitpicking, Mr. Oller tells us that "Shane" was the "third highest-grossing film of 1953." But as reported in the book "Box Office Hits," "Shane" came in fourth at $9 million, behind "Peter Pan" ($24 million), "The Robe" ($17.5 million) and "From Here To Eternity" ($12.2 million).
I feel that these oversights need to be pointed out, as they tend to undermine an otherwise meticulously researched volume, but at the same time feel a bit churlish for seeming ungrateful for Mr. Oller's hard work. The fact of the matter is that he has done the world, and fans of Ms. Arthur in particular and old-timey movies in general, a terrific service, and I am very grateful to him. I have read his book twice already, and will continue to refer to it for many years.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last word on the great Jean Arthur, February 14, 2008

By 

Gary Morris (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (Paperback)

Jean Arthur would seem to be an impossible subject for a biography. The actress, who died in 1991 at the age of 90, was so reclusive she made Garbo look like a party doll. Interviews exist, but not many; fan magazine profiles inevitably puzzled over her, disgusted by an actress who refused to promote her own career. Her autograph is probably rarer than Garbo's, and she left little in the way of writings, no diaries and not much correspondence. Her stage career was based more on quality than quantity, consisting of a mere 17 appearances, some of which were in plays that closed after a single performance.

Fortunately for author John Oller, Arthur made a substantial number of films (89) and, more importantly in trying to unravel this tricky subject, she made a strong impression -- negative, positive, sometimes both -- on practically everybody she encountered, from fellow actors to her stage and film directors to students in her teaching classes to secretaries and stage hands. They've provided Oller with a wealth of history and anecdotal detail. What emerges is a surprisingly detailed, highly readable account of a complex woman whose integrity and perfectionism -- and sometimes pettiness and even arrogance -- both fueled her work and undermined it at almost every turn.

Arthur's high reputation persists on the basis of stage triumphs in Peter Pan and other plays, and supremely of unforgettable performances in screwball comedies like George Stevens's The More the Merrier, Capra films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can't Take It with You, and Borzage's dreamy History Is Made at Night. Behind her luminous face and trademark husky voice, according to Oller, was a woman tormented by self-doubt and neurosis who could be charming one minute and a harridan the next. These qualities surfaced quite early in her career before she developed her loathing of the fan magazines. In 1928 she told an interviewer, "I'm hard-boiled now. I don't expect anything" -- harsh words indeed for "a girl of 20," as she said she was. (She was actually 28; like most stars, Arthur wasn't above lying about her age.) Each rejection -- and there were many early on -- was accompanied by crying jags and nervous fits that would only get worse as time went on. Arthur's early films must have been difficult for the highly intelligent, well-read, sophisticated woman Oller portrays; they were mostly horse operas and slapstick comedies, along with walk-ons in bigger pictures. Hollywood didn't know how to use her at first: in Paramount on Parade (1930), the musically ungifted actress performed two numbers.

But Arthur's striking personality shone through by the early 1930s, and she gave memorable performances in a series of films that are remembered today as much for her presence as anything else. In spite of consistent success and critical raves, though, she continued to struggle with anxiety. Capra says she threw up before and after every scene in one of his films (in an inspired phrase he says "those weren't butterflies in her stomach, they were wasps!"). She was as intransigent as some of the Warners women like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in fighting the studios' manipulations. Being contracted to Columbia, she had it worse, having to fend off mogul Harry Cohn's capricious career choices and his crude sexual advances. Here her stubbornness paid off in 1938 with a new contract that was one of the body blows to the studios' control over actors.

Arthur's disgust with the machinery of stardom led her inexorably to the stage; more respectable, perhaps, but equally or even more problematic for an actress of her skittish sensibilities. Much of the book is taken up with the wildly dramatic struggle of producers, directors, and friends to get Arthur to go on stage and stay there through the run of a play. This was mostly a vain effort. Arthur gravitated to the counterculture and agreed in 1967 to do a play called The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. Riddled with pot-smoking stage hands, props that wouldn't work (one nearly fell on Arthur's head), and actors who didn't show up, the play closed after the first night. Oller's account of these events is hilarious, particularly his description of a crazed Arthur kneeling before an audience begging them to let her leave the stage. She alienated so many of her coworkers that the author probably couldn't list them all without doubling the book's page count. Still, she had her defenders who forgave her endless disappearing act from life, and this was equally due to her winning personality (when she wanted it to be) and her fierce talent.

Her Peter Pan, the best ever according to some observers of the time, made her more enemies than friends but was a huge success while it lasted. It was not a smooth production, however; Arthur nearly crippled it when she came down with one of her many "viral infections" that she seemed able to will into existence in times of stress. Besides the obvious mental relief she got from running away from innumerable commitments, she could spend time indulging her favorite activities: interior decorating, reading, philosophy, and playing with her animals. She found little solace in religion but pursued self-realization through mentors like Erich Fromm. She was also an eloquent observer of politics from the left. "The wrong people are running the country," she said, speaking of Nixon and his cronies. "You only have to look at their brutal faces to know that."

The author doesn't delve too far into Arthur's alleged lesbianism (which writers like Boze Hadleigh have taken for granted). Several things point in that direction: her slightly masculine manner and voice, her lack of interest in motherhood, her almost pathological refusal to wear a dress even when a role demanded it, and most of all the fact that she spent the last decades of her life with devoted "unmarried army nurse" Ellen Mastroianni. But Arthur was so secretive about everything, even with Mastroianni in some areas, that this will probably never be verifiable.

The book attempts some psychoanalysis on his mysterious subject -- perhaps appropriate given Arthur's fascination with therapy and her friendship with Fromm. But these sections are the only labored note here, adding an unnecessarily speculative touch to a book that's well grounded in the topsy-turvy reality of Arthur's life and art.