Virginia Mayo

She completely bewitched me when I was a kid and first getting adjusted to sitting in darkened movie theaters.  Perhaps it started because she had a blonde attractiveness that reminded me of some women in my family.  Then it seemed like she was in every movie I was seeing... musicals, noirs, westerns, adventure films.  She had a spunk onscreen that attracted me.  She once said I was more talented than Hollywood gave me credit for.  I think she was right. 

Virginia Mayo needed some of that spunk offscreen, too, but she basically did as she was told and accepted roles she was given even if she thought she was wrong for them.  Critics usually referred to her as decorative and there were too many films where that was certainly the case but she had talent and versatility and some films to prove it.

 

While under contract to two studios during the forties and early fifties, she excelled in comedy and drama and was a skilled dancer although her singing voice was always dubbed since she couldn't carry a tune.   

I believe that she was misused and underused at both of those studios.  Both of them had bigger fish to fry and she just got lost in the shuffle.  While she did a fair amount of cheesecake photos, she was not one to take part in much publicity.  She didn't go on studio-arranged dates to Mocambo or The Trocadero chiefly because she married at the same time her career took off, a move that angered her boss.  She loved acting but the stardom bit left her cold.  In many ways she was a wife and mother who just happened to be in the movies.  Her husband was an actor only because he was too short to be a cop.  They were not particularly drawn to showbiz types as friends and it likely hurt their careers.

Virginia Jones was born in 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Her dad was an advertising salesman who served several terms on the PTA.  Mom stayed at home to raise Virginia and her older brother.  She had an aptitude for being dramatic and when she turned six her mother enrolled her in a dramatic school run by an aunt.  She stayed in that school for 10 years learning, among other things, how to use her voice and body but her biggest thrill came with dance classes.  

During most of her school years she starred in class plays and her aunt had her dancing and acting at churches, lodges, festivals... wherever something might be suitable for a young girl.  When she graduated from high school she joined a dancing troupe which led to a job in the chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera, famous for its outdoor performances.

It was at this time that a vaudeville act, Mayo and Morton, who had a schtick called Pansy the Horse (yes, one was the front and the other the rear) and they needed a pretty woman to appear as a ringmaster.  As a result she would change her stage name to Mayo.  Eddie Cantor caught the act and hired them to perform in his Broadway show, Banjo Eyes.   Then Broadway impresario Billy Rose hired the act for his Diamond Horseshoe Revue.  Rose was so impressed with Virginia that he created special solo numbers for her.

Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn who ran a small studio saw Mayo and thought she would be a perfect foil for the studio goofball, Danny Kaye, in a series of movies he planned to make.  Goldwyn signed her to a seven-year contract.

She was cast alongside Kaye, in his first movie, and Dana Andrews and Dinah Shore in Up in Arms (1944) in the second female lead.  But Kaye saw her screen test and found her lacking talent and Goldwyn gave her a sliver of a role as one of his famous Goldwyn Girls and put her through extensive training.

She would certainly never forget her small role in Jack London (1943).  It was made after Up in Arms but released before it.  It's not the part of a blowsy stowaway on an oyster ship that commanded her attention.  It was the leading man, Michael O'Shea.  Though he marries Susan Hayward in the story, in real life he married Mayo in 1947.  They would remain married until his death in 1973.

With her only husband, Michael O'Shea

The Princess and the Pirate (1944) was her first good film notices.  Critics commented on her expert comic timing for which she credited her costar, Bob Hope, a man she also held in high regard for teaching her so much.

Then came four more silly movies with Kaye... Wonder Man (1945), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and A Song Is Born (1948).  I think one or more of them was highly-regarded but you couldn't prove it by me.  I almost watched Mitty once and thought why ruin a good record?  I've never seen any of them because, White Christmas notwithstanding, I cannot bear watching Danny Kaye. 

Somewhere among those movies she complained to Goldwyn that there was no chance to be noticed in a Danny Kaye film because all she was was a foil for him, a stooge.  The complaint likely didn't go down well with Goldwyn since he liked Kaye and his movies.  It may also have something to do with the fact that Goldwyn chose to release her from her contract early, in 1948.  He told her I'm not going to do any more pictures for the next five years that you will be suitable for.  Ah, Goldwyn and his cheap shots.

Sandwiched among those Kaye movies is the best film Mayo would ever make... the soldiers-returning-from-war drama, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).  The 172-minute story focuses on three friends who arrive back in the same midwestern town at the same time.  Dana Andrews is married to Mayo, a woman he hardly knew before he left.  She is a heartless tramp who wants nice things from any man who can give them to her.  He leaves her after catching her with Steve Cochran.  

The film won the best picture Oscar and a number of other prizes.  She was dismayed early on when she heard director William Wyler didn't want her in the film because he didn't think she could act but Goldwyn overruled him.  She had the last laugh when the critics and public alike praised her work.

In late 1948 Mayo signed on with Warner Bros.  While Goldwyn claimed he had nothing to suit her, WB said they wanted to use her in musicals, a genre that they were eager to revitalize.  But whether they mentioned it to her or not, they obviously saw something in her that screamed bad girl and they got started right away.  In fact, the studio was so high on her that she was featured in five movies in 1949 alone... none of them musicals.

She got top billing and the title role in Flaxy Martin (1949), an enjoyable B film noir.  She is a moll who hires an attorney (Zachary Scott) with the sole intention of framing him on a murder charge.  Dorothy Malone, Elisha Cook Jr. and Douglas Kennedy lend great support.

Mayo made her first western, Colorado Territory (1949), a pretty darned good remake of the Bogart-Lupino starrer, High Sierra.  She and Joel McCrea are wanted by the law and head up into the hills for the expected finale.  It has always enjoyed fine reviews.

The Girl from Jones Beach (1949) was her first big production at the studio and I'll be hornswoggled if I know why.  It costarred Eddie Bracken so you know it had to be just plain silly and she did little more than parade around in a bathing suit.  

Mayo's other top movie and one in which she was letter-perfect is opposite James Cagney in the electrifyingly blinding White Heat (1949).  Cagney certainly gets the lion's share of the attention of a psychopathic killer but Mayo is right there with him as his backtalking, cheating wife.  One of the best scenes is when she tells him she's leaving him for Steve Cochran (who could blame her?).  Cagney is a mama's boy to one of the screen's most wicked mothers played deliciously by character actress Margaret Wycherly.  The two women hate one another, making Cagney more crazy, and the tension of it always gets me pumped up.  

She was loaned to United Artists to co-star opposite George Raft in Red Light (1949), a decent noir.  She is not given a lot to chew on here while she traipses after Raft as he tries to solve the killing of his brother.  Raft does a credible job and there's thuggish Raymond Burr to capture your attention.

I don't think you'll find any article that has anything nice to say about Backfire (1950)... until now, that is.  It's a B noir about a man (Gordon MacRae in a rare dramatic role) released from a hospital who gets involved in the strange disappearance of a friend.  Mayo is the nurse who helps him out.  It's far from perfect but I liked it anyway.  It was strange billing... Mayo & MacRae are the main actors but they are billed third (her) and fifth.

WB assigned her to the swashbuckler, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), opposite Burt Lancaster, and as Gregory Peck's Lady Barbara in the seafaring Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) and opposite Kirk Douglas in the western Along the Great Divide (1951).  These films provided her with chances to star opposite three very popular leading men but it says something that none of the films were among these actors' big movies.

I have long maintained that Mayo's musical career got sidelined because shortly after she arrived at WB so did Doris Day.  Films that might have gone to Mayo and increased her visibility and bankability went instead to Day.  At the same time MacRae was getting popular with his beautiful singing voice and Gene Nelson was wowing 'em with his dancing and singing.  These four would spend several years appearing with one another in countless lightweight but extremely popular musicals.

L to R... Nelson, Mayo, Cagney, Day, MacRae

They would all appear together in The West Point Story (1950) and Cagney was along as well.  The title tells you all you need to know about the brainless story.  Mayo was given her first chance to dance at WB in this film and she is hot!  My favorite part is when all five and a host of others sing and dance to The Military Polka.  I loved it.  You mustn't hold this against me.

In 1951 came the musical Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.  Gee, I wonder if that title had anything to do with why no one went to see it.  It's another one of those three-young-beauties-in-search-of-husbands theme and while it is largely a waste of time, Mayo and Nelson carve out an imaginatively sexy dance to the tune of The Birth of the Blues.

Mayo would always say She's Working Her Way Through College (1952) was her favorite film.  She far preferred musical-comedy (and that opportunity to dance) to dramas.  The 1942 Henry Fonda-Olivia de Havilland comedy, The Male Animal, was musically updated as a showcase for Mayo and Reagan.  She is a burlesque queen who gives it up to attend college and he is the married professor whose life gets all jumbled up because of her presence.   

It was back to drama as a vixen in the life of frontiersman Jim Bowie in The Iron Mistress (1952).  She and Alan Ladd had chemistry and the fictional story somehow attracted attention.  I'm fairly sure this was my first Mayo film.

Around this time Mayo's beauty so impressed the Sultan of Morocco that he said seeing her is tangible proof of the existence of God.  Oh dear.  Oh my.  In actuality, Sult may not have known that his goddess was a little bit cross-eyed and had to be photographed carefully.

With Gene Nelson... oh could they dance

My own favorite Mayo film has always been 1953's She's Back on Broadway.  Of course it's nowhere close to being in the same league as Best Years or White Heat but it's my sentimental favorite.  She plays a movie star down on her luck who elects to return to Broadway only to find out the play's being directed by the man she once ran out on.

Steve Cochran and Gene Nelson were her leading men in the film and in real life they were two of her best buddies and she emphasized she didn't know either one of them that way.  This was her final film with each... her fifth costarring venture with Nelson and her sixth with Cochran.  It was also her last musical, sadly.

In 1953 she gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Mary who was always the shining light for her parents.

While Mayo still had five more years to go on her contract with Warners, she would never again find the projects that might have elevated her to further stardom.  Like all good movie stars of the day whose careers were no longer as shiny, she began appearing in a slew of westerns.  Among them were Devil's Canyon (1953) with Dale Robertson, Great Day in the Morning (1956) with Robert Stack, The Proud Ones (1956) with Robert Ryan, The Big Land (1957) again with Ladd, The Tall Stranger (1957) again with McCrea, Fort Dobbs (1958) with Clint Walker and Westbound (1959) with Randolph Scott.

And of course then came television, although she never did as much as some of her contemporaries.  She and O'Shea went on the road with some plays but their lives were happier on the ranch they had built in Thousand Oaks, California, where she lived for the rest of her life. Of course the area has been built up for years but when the O'Sheas moved there it was mostly barren.  She has said they were never wealthy nor did they ever live in a mansion and she always drove herself to work.  She was just a working girl who loved to dance.

Westbound was her final movie under her WB contract and in the next 38 years she only made 11 films, all of them, really, not so good.  She had the misfortune of being in two of the most dreadful... The Story of Mankind (playing Cleopatra) and Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood.

O'Shea, who became a plainclothes operative for the CIA after leaving show business in the mid-50s, died in 1973 of a heart attack.  

In 2001 she did one of those as told to autobiographies called Virginia Mayo: The Best Years of My Life.  While I loved it, it had the look of a self-published book.  More to the point, it appeared as though no one had edited it.  She repeated some of the same things over and over and there were numerous errors, both grammatical and factual.  Nonetheless, it was fun, a bit juicy and full of comments, favorable and not so, about people with whom she worked.  Here's a sample:

Danny Kaye: demanding man with attitude problems, needed to be brought down

Vera-Ellen: a dear friend and about the best female dancer Hollywood had

Joel McCrea: gentle, kind and funny

Dale Robertson:  he isn't my favorite human being

Alan Ladd: a very shy man and there wasn't anyone nicer

George Raft: the so-called actor, he was awful

Burt Lancaster: handsome, sexy, powerful but he was rough and kissed too hard

Ronald Reagan: he was great fun to be with

Doris Day: I didn't like her much; she didn't seem to like to work with other lead actresses

Kirk Douglas:  he was so tense and awfully hard to work with

Gregory Peck:  the best kisser in the business

Jack Palance:  he was weird and I didn't like working with him at all

Clint Walker: he was nice but not much of an actor

Randolph Scott:  I really didn't get to know him

Guy Madison: a truly nice man

In her later years her name or picture would occasionally pop up somewhere and I always enjoyed catching up.  There was a man she saw regularly but it seems she was completely content to spend her time with her daughter, son-in-law and three grandsons.  She died of pneumonia and heart failure in Thousand Oaks in 2005 at age 84.

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