Hollywood Brunettes

Other than hair color, these featured actresses didn't have a great deal in common except that none of them made it to the top of the Hollywood heap.  One was more famous for her relationship with Howard Hughes than she ever was for a career.  One was a former ice skater whose Hollywood career hung on her marriage to a studio head.  The third, the best actress of the bunch, was a film noir staple who was one of the most exciting bad girls the movies ever produced but never rose above B flicks.  Let's meet them:

     Faith Domergue

She was 15 when she met Howard Hughes, 36, aboard his yacht the Southern Cross.  She was part of a Warner Bros contingent taking part in some industry function.  The oddball billionaire took a shine to her within an instant.  She was young, innocent but sultry, with dark hair and stacked... qualities that always revved him up.  They began a romance although what that really means is questionable as it always was with Hughes.  It was 1939 and it was a different time.

Domergue (for some reason pronounced duh-mur) was given the usual Hughes promises to make her an actress.  While looking for the right property, he kept her under wraps, as he liked to say, which meant prisoner.  He gave her everything she could want, flew her everywhere and employed her relatives.  Still, what about that career and some personal freedom?

One day he slipped a diamond ring on her hand while telling her she was the child he should have had.  Now that's romantic.  It didn't help that he added she belonged to him now and she was never to look at another man. Ultimately she realized that they were not going to marry and that he was seeing other women.

She upped and married someone else in 1946 and shortly thereafter Hughes started production on Vendetta with Domergue in the lead.  He fussed with it so long that it wasn't released until 1950, a certifiable mess.  Also in 1950 she costarred with Hughes' favorite actor, Robert Mitchum, in Where Danger Lives, a decent film noir with Domergue as the danger.

She appeared somnambulistic in her acting and I was surprised she just didn't fade away but she became a regular in B flicks, particularly westerns and horror.  In the latter arena she made Cult of the Cobra, This Island Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea and The Atomic Man.  Later on she became somewhat of a regular on TV westerns.

It's been said that among all the actresses Hughes was involved with, Domergue was among his top favorites.  (She was portrayed in 2004's The Aviator by Kelli Garner.)  He saw her as a replacement for Jane Russell.  Did she need replacing?  Domergue lived for a spell in Italy after marrying a producer.  She died in Santa Barbara in 1994 at age 74.



       Vera Ralston


She was born Vera Hruba in Czechoslovakia in 1923 and she became a European ice skater who won the Silver Medal at the 1936 Olympics and insulted Hitler twice with her youthful audacity, thus gaining a new appreciation throughout Europe.

As war broke out, she came to America and joined the Ice Vanities and then the Ice Capades. At one of the Ice Capades shows, Republic Pictures head honcho Herbert J. Yates caught a performance.  He was taken by Vera and envisioned her as a threat to Sonia Henie as an actress.  Her first two Republic pictures were Ice Capades extravaganzas.

It was apparent to everyone but Yates that she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag.  She also had a thick accent and was always regarded as hard-looking and not particularly pretty.  Yates wanted to Americanize her as much as possible and told her to come up with a new last name.  She saw Ralston on a cereal box and liked it.  For four years she was known as Vera Hruba Ralston and then Vera Ralston.  In the late 40s a young actress whose name really was Vera Ralston couldn't use it because of the duplication, so she changed her name to Vera Miles.

Ralston's first big picture was Dakota (1945) opposite John Wayne.  After making another one with him, The Fighting Kentuckian, in 1948, Wayne told Yates, who was now married to her, that he didn't want to make any more pictures with her because it would ruin his career.  

Republic occupied the lowest rung of the Hollywood ladder but Yates put his wife in one colorful B picture (and some Cs) after another.  Nearly every one lost money.  They all tended to look the same because her costars were often the same.  Forrest Tucker, Brian Donlevy, John Russell and David Brian were in many of her films.  The best one she ever made was 1954's expensive-looking Jubilee Trail and although she was top-billed, Joan Leslie was the focus of the western.

When Yates was ousted from Republic in 1958, she stopped making movies at the same time.  She lived happily in Santa Barbara until her death in 2003 at age 79.





      Marie Windsor



I'm wondering if any actress was murdered more often onscreen than Marie Windsor.  I doubt it.  She was a superb villainess... cornering the market on deceitful, wanton and greedy.  Her image was clothed in masculinity.  She was tall (at 5'9"), big-shouldered, had a deep (but oh so lovely) voice, was gutsy and threatening, had huge cow eyes and while I thought she had many moments of pretty, it was a manly pretty.  Or hey, maybe it's just me. 

I adored her acting.  When she was in a scene, it was difficult to watch anyone else.  I love performers who corral me like that.  She had three or so roles worth mentioning, but this was a B actress all the way.  Frankly, many of her 81 movies were beyond redemption.  

She was just a working stiff, a woman who needed to work and took what she was offered.  I have wondered if she was pigeon-holed early on because of her looks.  Let's face it... it happens.  She also started with a low-rent studio like Republic which never did anyone any good except some early western actors.  I saw her so much because of my love of westerns and film noir and she made a slew of each.

In 1952 and 1956 she made the best movies she ever did.  The first is The Narrow Margin (co-starring another splendid B actor, Charles McGraw), an exquisite noir about a woman hiding from the mob on a train as she's on her way to testify against them.  It has thrills and chills galore, sassy writing and delicious acting.  The sparring between the two leads alone is worth the price of admission.  It also has an ending few could see coming.

The 1956 film is The Killing, perhaps the granddaddy of all heist movies.  Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Sterling Hayden, it concerns a daring daytime racetrack robbery.  In another sexpot role, this time as a blonde, Windsor is the cold-blooded wife of the always-skittish Elisha Cook Jr. in one of his nervous nellie roles as one of the gang.  Their banter made me nervous.  

I thought she was memorable as a rare good girl in 1952's The Sniper and once again she bit the dust.  Equally impressive was she as John Wayne's caustic ex-wife in 1953's Trouble Along the Way.  Ultimately, she became a regular fixture on episodic TV and rarely as a villainess.   She passed away in 2000 at age 80.



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