Jo Van Fleet

The other day someone called me a tough mother (he is delusional... I'm a pussycat) and as my movie-saturated brain works, I immediately thought of the character actress, Jo Van Fleet.  Not only is her career mainly a fifties thing (and aren't we highlighting the fifties as we type?) but in most of her films she was indeed a tough mother.  If she weren't a mother in some of them, she was still tough.   She was always tough... it's about all she knew how to be... on screen and off.

She didn't sing or dance and she didn't do comedy.  She did drama.  Before we limit her, let's agree that she did drama about as expertly as it could be done.  I don't think it's overkill to call her riveting.  And the bottom line is she scared me... so help me she did... always.  After a couple of films I expected her to scare me but she always had a few surprises up her sleeve and she kept me in a constant jumpy state.  I loved that about her acting.  Director Elia Kazan said she was full of unconstrained violence.

Born in Oakland, California, in 1915, next to nothing is known about her early life.  The mystery is likely no accident.  It is rare for a performer or for a studio to permit it but Van Fleet likely wanted her private life to stay private.  

She was educated at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and was heavily invested in their drama department.  A teacher suggested she move to New York and see what might be there for her.  It turned out she got a scholarship to study with Sanford Meisner at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse. 

She then went to study at the Actor's Studio under the guidance of Lee Strasberg and Kazan.  She credits Kazan with being the major influence in her career.  She made her Broadway debut in 1946 but fame came to her in 1953 when she starred in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real, directed by Kazan.  Her two most famous movie roles are also in Kazan productions.  For several years she alternated between the stage and television, the latter in some of the prestigious programs of the time.

When Kazan was formulating his cast for the movie version of John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), he turned to three of his Actor's Studio luminaries, James Dean, Julie Harris and Van Fleet for the lead roles.  Considered a modern-day version of the Cain and Abel story, here the brothers are Cal (Dean) and Aron (Richard Davalos).  They are pitted against one another for the attention of their father (Raymond Massey) while competing for the love of the same girl (Harris).

The most powerful character in the movie, however, is Kate, the boys' mother, who left her family because she didn't want to be chained to a humdrum life on a ranch.  When the story begins the father has lied to his sons telling them that she is dead but Cal discovers her working as a madam in a brothel a short train ride away.  Kate doesn't want to be discovered or taken back into the fold.  

Van Fleet was 39 years old when she made Eden but began a movie career of playing mothers much older than she actually was.  She is one of the few actresses to win an Oscar for her first film.  I'll tell
you those Oscar voters were just as blown away as I was.  Tough, heartless, mean, uncompromising, proud, dominant... damn, she was spectacular.  When she was in a scene, it was difficult to focus on another actor.  

Holding her own opposite Susan Hayward in I'll Cry Tomorrow

The same year as Eden she played Susan Hayward's controlling stage mother in another outstanding film, I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955). The biographical look at singer-actress Lillian Roth focused on her relationship with her mother, her several husbands and her out-of-control alcoholism.  Hayward regarded it as her best film. Hollywood may have expected fireworks between the two powerhouse actresses but they got on well.  Both were determined to give strong performances and both (always) retreated to their dressing rooms in between scenes, thus preventing any mishaps.  Van Fleet, by the way, was just two years older than Hayward.

Even after two enormously successful movies, she was still uncertain about film work.  The truth is the work held her interest but it was all the extras that perplexed her. She disliked her photo being taken unless she was in character.  She would not cooperate with publicity departments. On the stage she did her work and went home.  On movies there was all that sitting around and getting chatty with one another that annoyed her.  She didn't ask others personal questions and didn't want them asked of her.  She was usually not forthcoming with costars, didn't mingle well and kept everything strictly business.  By and large she respected directors and tried to give them what they wanted.  She was only unsuccessful if she didn't respect him. 

Her least starry role was in another A-picture, The Rose Tattoo (1955).  She played one of several friends of Anna Magnani.  I thought such a small rather unimportant role was a comedown after two blockbuster performances.  The formidable actress certainly met her match in Magnani.  I wonder how they got along.

It would have been difficult to salvage The King and Four Queens (1956), where Clark Gable plays an affable con man out to bilk a tough mother (guess who) of four outlaws and their beautiful widows of their hidden gold.  It was Gable's first independent film after a long tenure at MGM and a short one at 20th Century Fox.  It turned out to be too talky with little action and an implausible plot.  Van Fleet's mother role was another variation of what she'd already done much better in her first two films.

Tussling with Kirk Douglas

The Gunfight at the O,K. Corral (1957) got her as close to a romantic role that was likely to happen.  She plays Kirk Douglas' girlfriend although they are disagreeable and fight most of the time.  Douglas told of their big physical fight scene and his amazement at her Method (Actor's Studio) approach.  He said Van Fleet wanted to be pumped up for the scene and asked him to slap her before the cameras rolled.  Each time a retake was ordered, she asked Douglas to slap her again, harder and harder.  The male-oriented western was a rousing success.

This Angry Age (1957) is a strange movie that I very much liked when I first saw it and would love to see it again.  Based on a work by Marguerite Duras whose Indochina locales appealed to me, the film was also known as The Sea Wall.  It concerns a formidable mother of twins (Silvana Mangano and Tony Perkins) and their struggles to survive harsh times on their little plot of land. With its hint of incest and three Americans and an Italian playing French, it didn't make much of a splash,

She returned to Broadway and won a Tony for her lively supporting role in The Trip to Bountiful and a New York Drama Critics award for Look Homeward Angel.  The latter was her second time working with Perkins whom she came to dearly love.  Truth be told, she was very fond of the gay actors she worked with.)

After a three-year absence she returned to the screen in 1960's Wild River to play an obdurate 89-year old matriarch who refuses to leave her farm in a valley that's about to be flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority.  She was 45 and would sit in makeup for five hours every day to turn herself into a wrinkled 89.

Van Fleet and Clift in costume for Wild River

Her wordless final scene has always been held up by other actors (particularly perhaps her costars Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick) for its majesty.  She sits on the porch of her new home, her bundled possessions protectively in her lap, looking finally broken and near the end of her rope.  She was simply brilliant. Kazan said it was one of his favorite scenes from any of the films he made.

This was the halfway point in her movie career... seven down and six to go.  The problem was the next six roles could never compare to the first six.  Cool Hand Luke (1967) was certainly a good film but her cameo role as Paul Newman's rigid mother resulted in a single scene.  Bette Davis had turned the part down for that very reason.

Van Fleet's appearances in her last five films didn't amount to much.  The best of them was arguably as Peter Sellers' mother in the hippie-dippy I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968).  Then came the Wayne Newton (!) drama 80 Steps to Jonah (1969) and the inane Mafia comedy The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971).  She was lost in the cast of Roman Polanski's little-seen The Tenant (1976).  For her final screen appearance in Robin Williams's Seize the Day (1986), she was one of dozens of actors in brief roles. 

Her 44-year marriage to a dancer-choreographer was as mysterious as the rest of her personal life.  I can only imagine what people said about her and them.  After his death in 1990, she took her cantankerousness to a new level.  Living on New York's West Side, she was known in the neighborhood as being a bit loony.  Legend has it that when she was asked for some i.d. while shopping, she opened her handbag and whipped out her Oscar.  

Collecting her Oscar for East of Eden

Jo Van Fleet died in Queens in 1996 at age 80. It seems that few were surprised that her cause of death was unknown.

Her mentor Kazan said that whether on the stage, television or in the movies, Van Fleet's career stagnated and with it came a bitterness in her that was obvious to everyone.  She pleaded with agents, producers and directors to hire her with no success.  The more bitter she became, the more difficult, and she lived her final years in a perpetually sour mood.

Perhaps some of that was due to the fact that, good as she was, it was a one-note career... the tough mother.  It's all she really did.  When as a young woman she applied all that makeup to become older, it worked.  But when she herself became old and embittered, doors were shut.  That would be disheartening to anyone but it kills an actor.  Perhaps her cause of death was from a broken heart.


Next posting: 
A request from a reader