Born in 1930 Amarillo Carolyn Sue, whether she liked to admit it or not, was like her mother in many ways and one of the strongest was a sense of drama which, to their credit, was matched with an active and colorful sense of imagination. Her mother was not really a stage mother... not that she wouldn't have been had she had more opportunity.
Young Carolyn and I had something in common (no, I don't look like Bette Davis, even now)... we both lived in movie magazines. In our lives it was a chance see something beyond our little cookie-cutter home towns and after we moved to Los Angeles, we still checked out all the beautiful people in the mags but then realized we did actually move among them. (She realized that more than I did.)
She was drawn to movie magazines for another reason, too. She did everything she could to assuage the pain of her father abandoning the family. She would have abandonment issues the rest of her life (she preferred leaving her men before they left her and she always thought they would do exactly that) in addition to trust issues and though she would not always admit it, she was looking for a father.
Despite being a basically shy girl and young woman, she threw herself into school (she reportedly skipped two grades) and acting in school, giving poetry readings and speeches. I have known a lot of people who have succumbed to their shyness but not Carolyn. Good for her... she pushed her limits and showed a talent for blooming as a shy person. She could never remember a time she didn't want to be an actress. She would dream of moving to Southern California and attending the famed Pasadena Playhouse. It's all she talked about.
While working as a disc jockey she got the unbelievably good news that she'd been accepted to the Playhouse (her grandfather paid the tuition) and she left Texas at age 17 and in some ways never looked back. On the other hand, that child of Texas never really left. And she didn't know then that she never, not really, would fit into Hollywood.
In the year she graduated from the Playhouse, she got herself a nose job. She said she didn't like the hook. Later there was teeth capping. She was never crazy about her looks and they contributed to her inferiority. Part of why she often gravitated toward kooky parts in movies was because she thought they would match her unusual looks. She did something that one doesn't often hear about in or out of movies. She was a natural blonde who became a brunette. She thought she would photograph better with darker tresses.
She was in a play in Los Angeles when a talent scout from Paramount saw her and she signed on with the studio. She nabbed some very small parts in several films but then she was out. They let me and six secretaries go, she quipped.
Also in 1950 she married for the first of four times. Don Donaldson graduated with Jones from the Playhouse. He was very supportive of her career while she thought he was a terrible actor who would never make it. He didn't and the marriage didn't either. It was over within a year and she became almost immediately involved with actor, writer and one-day megawatt producer, Aaron Spelling.
This marriage, her longest at 12 years, was initially about two starving thespians looking to crack open Tinseltown for their big breaks. He acted at the time (I will forever think of him as a geeky front desk clerk in some wretched hotel in a downtown slum... or in any parts that character actor Elisha Cook Jr. might have played). Jones, however, encouraged him to write for television, to get in on the relative ground floor of what she perceived as gonna be big.
She wasn't married to him when he became big but once he did he often employed her in one of his series and they were never out of touch for long, despite being in other marriages.
In 1953 she had small parts in two noteworthy films. In House of Wax she was memorably one of those Vincent Price and Charles Bronson murdered and turned into a wax figure. The 3-D horror film was a sensation at the box office. She also had a single scene on a barstool taking abuse from the sadistic Lee Marvin in the superb film noir, The Big Heat.
She was hired to play the role of the prostitute Alma in 1953's From Here to Eternity but had to drop out because she got pneumonia. Donna Reed dropped in and won an Oscar. Jones would have been the perfect choice. She hated the setback and what could have been but always being highly-driven refueled her.
She was visible in The Seven-Year Itch and more so in The Tender Trap, both 1955. She was buddy-buddy with the latter's star, Frank Sinatra, and they would have more fun on the screen four years later. The year 1956 saw her in a brief role in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and a decent costarring role in the popular sci-fi entry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Also in 1956 she had a small role alongside many other actresses in The Opposite Sex. One of the best things to come of this was a lasting friendship with its star, June Allyson. She, in turn, was married to former actor, Dick Powell, who had become a famed TV producer. The two friends put their heads together and voila, Powell hired Spelling to produce his first TV shows.
Jones first dyed her hair black for The Bachelor Party (1957) which pleased writer, Paddy Chayefsky and director Delbert Mann. Her six-minute role as a lonely party girl would secure her only Oscar nomination which is generally considered to be the film that ushered her into another new phase of her career. Warner Brothers signed her to a contract.
One thing she liked better about her new hair color or was hoping to like was that the comparisons to Bette Davis might stop. Jones was flattered but found it a hindrance. Despite the good work she felt she was doing, she was by no means the accomplished actress Davis was and she knew it, accepted it. She refused to watch any more of Davis' movies for fear of unconsciously starting to mimic her famous gestures.
Even Davis publicly said after Jones received her Oscar nomination, I have the feeling that I'm looking at myself 27 years ago. One day they were working at the same studio on different projects and Jones was taken to Davis' dressing room to meet her. Terribly excited and nervous about meeting the great star, Jones' hopes were quickly dashed when Davis simply dismissed her. Rudely, she wouldn't even look at Jones. She said afterward to an agent friend who was also in attendance that she couldn't believe how mean Davis was. The agent said he believed that Davis would not have been able to stand looking at a younger version of herself. Nonetheless, Jones would never forget the slight. It is crushing when our heroes take a tumble.
Mickey Rooney would be playing Baby Face Nelson (1957) and he wanted someone different to play his moll. Director Don Siegel found Jones and Rooney to be magnificent. I think she was born to play this part. Molldom suited her. She had already perfected her sullen look. No stretch to figure out why she was often slapped onscreen.
It was mostly an act she left onscreen. She could put words together in a sentence that produced a sting. But she also rarely went over the top because if they stung back, she was mortified and strangulated by her basic insecurities. She was a kind person, not as over-the-top Hollywood as some, and could be a great friend. She did love acting and while never really comfortable being the leading lady, she did luxuriate in playing a character who was in some way offbeat. And really, that's who she was in real life. She loved being around actors and that extended to up-and-comers, still struggling, and offered them an ear, advice, meals and sometimes connections.
My favorite of all Carolyn Jones' movies is King Creole (1958), and believe me (or gag me), I cannot believe I am saying that about an Elvis Presley movie, most of which were fairly dreadful. This one, however, is different. Elvis is better, Carolyn is terrific as the moll, sweet Dolores Hart is there, a dramatic Walter Matthau is the big, bad thug and dear Dean Jagger as Elvis' worried dad.
She never looked better in any of her gangster girl roles than she did here... Paramount's high priestess Edith Head saw to that. While Matthau treats her shabbily, she has a romance with Elvis and wants to see the kid get a break. We know from about the first five seconds of meeting her that she won't be in any sequel.
She plays Alan Ladd's neurotic, alcoholic wife in The Man in the Net (1958). When she vanishes, he is accused of murder. You get the idea. She wasn't expecting much from it and in fact took the role mainly to make her friend June Allyson happy. Allyson had an affair of sorts with the unhappy Ladd and wanted Jones to keep an eye on him.
She wrapped up a nice role opposite Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in The Last Train from Gun Hill (1959) and then went into a part that I have always thought Jones was born to play. I've wondered if they wrote it with her in mind. A Hole in the Head (1959) stars Sinatra as a small Miami hotel owner with an assortment of issues to deal with. It is a lovely little film told by the remarkable Frank Capra who loved his tales of extraordinary ordinary people.
Eddie Hodges is Sinatra's most engaging little kid, Edward G. Robinson and Thelma Ritter his brother and wife, Eleanor Parker is a rich lady in whom Sinatra has a romantic interest and Jones is a kooky, bongo-playing neighbor. Her Shirl is so energetic and fun and her screen time should have been longer somehow. Her character resists Parker's and in real life it was much the same. It was rare for Jones to not get on with coworkers.
Career (1959) probably provides the best Jones performance of them all. You know I love movies about movies but I may not have said I love movies about Broadway, too. Career is about Tony Franciosa (the reason I initially saw this movie) who wants success on the big stage. Things aren't going well. His wife leaves him and takes the new baby.
The few acting jobs have been fine but they didn't pay much and no one came. He's fallen in with an off-Broadway director (Dean Martin) who promises big things. Martin is having a relationship with the ditsy, alcoholic daughter (Shirley MacLaine) of a big producer. Jones plays Franciosa's agent who is secretly in love with him. She quietly and often sadly runs though a litany of emotions that clearly demonstrate this actress had bloody well arrived.
Funny, too, because just before filming began, Jones and MacLaine said they wanted to switch roles. MacLaine, no stranger to kooky either, didn't want the more staid role of the agent, and as it turned out, Jones was tired of playing the same parts... this being another oddball. And Jones and Franciosa end up getting all the raves.
She is probably the best thing about Ice Palace (1960), Edna Ferber's tale of Alaska's fish cannery empire, and considering Richard Burton and Robert Ryan are the leads, that's a high compliment. However, the story and its many characters needed some fine-tuning and the film was not a success. Nor were Burton's continual attempts to get Jones bedded.
She replaced Hope Lange in three scenes as George Peppard's frontier wife in the mammoth, all-star How the West Was Won (1962). She then joined another Jones, Shirley, Gig Young and Red Buttons in a silly naval comedy, A Ticklish Affair (1963). I reviewed it for my job when it first came out. About Carolyn I said why is she in this? I thought oh-oh, this is not good for the career. By the way, Buttons called me at the newspaper and read me the riot act because of my overall unfavorable review.
Her movie career did dry up... no, not completely but certainly when considering anything of much value. She knew it, too, and didn't like it but she knew she had television on which to fall back. She had worked in the medium a lot. She always wanted to be a great movie actress like... no, I can't... and she knew that would never happen with one TV show after another on the résumé. But TV did pay the bills, something that always concerned her. While I never met her, she lived a couple of blocks down the street from me in the early 70s and it wasn't exactly Beverly Hills.
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| Jones and John Astin in The Addams Family |
Then the lead in a television series was offered to her in 1964 and she would accept the role that would define her acting career forever more... Morticia Addams in The Addams Family. She got the role because cartoonist Charles Addams' said she was his first choice. It proved that she indeed had those comedy chops and her proven abilities at kooky were just what everyone in The Addams Family needed. It was a wonderful two-year experience for her and apparently for the rest of the cast as well.
In 1966 she had a five-segment role as Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, in the Batman series. Television and bad movies were the agenda from now on out except for a one-night turn in an episode of Roots (1977). She also became one of those celebrities who would lend a name and presence to various events.
In 1968 she married Herbert Greene, a Tony-winning Broadway musical director, arranger and co-producer. For a while he was also Jones' vocal coach. I'm not sure that a big motivation wasn't some financial security but the newlyweds moved to the desert and away from Hollywood. She had gotten to a certain age, she said, and she was never beautiful enough for being a top actress. Maybe no one thought of her after Morticia. Oh, she was pissed at how they treated her.
She wrote a novel and ultimately got fed up with the inactivity of her life in the desert. Drinking had become a problem and there were plenty of desert-dwellers to join her. And now the husband wasn't working out very well either. After nine years, she told the courts he didn't want her to work which is probably mainly untrue and she may have been jealous of his career. Regardless, it hadn't been an easy union and now it was over.
She needed to scale down and make sound money and she forced herself get excited about joining the regional theater circuit. In that milieu, she was considered a queen, a glamorous movie star and her smalltown costars were gobsmacked to be in her midst.
She was in New Orleans to appear in Move Over, Mrs. Markham, when Peter Bailey-Britton, a handsome Canadian actor, 20 years her junior, introduced himself as her leading man. They didn't start off so well together but that eventually led to a friendship, then one with benefits, doing several more plays together and just as they were about to break up, she asked him to marry her.
Her last role was as the scheming matriarch of the Clegg clan on the daytime soaper Capitol in 1981. Working with Richard Egan as her husband and Constance Towers as her nemesis was a joy for Jones. Shortly after the show's debut, Jones was diagnosed with colon cancer and she was told it would take her life. In no time at all the disease spread to her liver and stomach. Considering what she had to go through, it seemed amazing that she finished that first season, often performing in a wheelchair, but finish it she did.
In 1982 she married Bailey-Britton. Her friends were surprised but many likely assumed that with marriage she could offer him something (just saying he was Carolyn Jones' widower might be good for him) for staying with her and helping her out til the end came. He did that and she died less than a year later in 1983. She was 53 years old.
I thought she was a good actress, lots of fun to watch. Her best film work is unquestionably King Creole and Career and well worth your time.
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A life thrown away
Good article on Ms.Jones...I believe another actress whose career was short-changed because of her resemblance to Bette Davis was the very lovely Lucille Bremer of MGM...
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