Rhonda Fleming

I always had a special fascination for this actress.   I was drawn to Hollywood's great beauties and I confess I had a real yen for redheads.  She more than filled the bill and was quite popular with the public.  She was an actress who appealed to both men and women.  I thought she seemed like she was having a good time.  She always said her story in show biz was the Cinderella story. 

Rhonda Fleming also had that other trait that whetted my moviegoing appetite... she was a spirited lass although I should probably say fiery since it's a word closely associated with redheads.  Her characters were never subservient and with respect to male characters, she always gave as good as she got.

Fortunately or unfortunately she became far more well known for her looks than for her films or her acting ability.  That red hair, blue eyes and ivory-white skin made her the dream of cameramen.  They all loved working with her and in color films she was utterly stunning.  She was labeled the Queen of Technicolor although Maria Montez, Maureen O'Hara and Yvonne De Carlo also wore the appellation well.

She and her older sister were adorable little girls, too, and raised in lush and lovely Beverly Hills, California.  Marilyn Louis was born a Leo in 1923.  Dad was an insurance salesman (must have been a very good one) and Mom was a stage actress and a former Manhattan model.  She gave her daughter the best training in how to be a proper young lady.  She went to private schools in Beverly Hills and then to Beverly Hills High.  She wasn't sure what she wanted to do for work later on but she did love to sing and had a lovely lyric soprano voice.  She caught every Deanna Durbin movie at least once. 

If she thought about movies at all seriously in her teen years, it was generally concerning how she would look and what beautiful dresses she would wear.  She longed to be made up to look beautiful and let's face it... right there in the movie capital, Mama has been an actress, and the young woman, if not quite what she would become, was already talked about in glowing terms.

A few weeks after graduating high school, she was walking across a Hollywood street when the notorious gay Hollywood agent, Henry Willson, stopped her.  He said she was too beautiful and had such grace not to be in the movies.  Oh, those were beautiful words... Mama, did you hear?

Willson's stable of young hopefuls were primarily handsome gay men but there were a few handsome straight men and some women, too.  Willson, of course, is famous for re-naming his clients such names as Rock and Tab and Troy.  Marilyn Louis signed on the dotted line and before the ink dried she was Rhonda Fleming.

Willson took her to see the nutty professor, otherwise known as David O. Selznick, who produced big movies and was the grand master over the artistic lives of the few he had under contract... Bergman, Peck, Cotten, Temple, Fontaine, Jourdan, among others, and of course Jennifer Jones whom he married and dominated.  Selznick was excited about Fleming's red-haired beauty, her body (which was on the cusp of being statuesque), how she carried herself, her speaking voice.  He hired her without a test, although she would soon get one, and he thought she would do nicely as an actress.

She married the first time in 1940 to an interior decorator and had her only child, a son, the following year.  Over the years she would marry a sometimes-actor, two producers and a doctor.  Four of her marriages ended in divorce and she was widowed twice.  Her most famous marriage, #5,  was to Ted Mann (1978-2001), a producer and philanthropist.  He is the Mann of Mann's Chinese Theater, formerly Grauman's Chinese, with all the famous hand and footprints.

She began making movies (one was Selznick's lovely Since You Went Away, 1944) in small, uncredited parts... some a single scene.  Then she appeared in the three best films she would ever make.  Her name would appear in the cast and her character would have a name but still, the roles were small.  It is astonishing that these films and her stunning beauty would not propel her into the big time in Hollywood but it oddly never happened and yet her career thrived for decades.

The first of those three films was in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).  It is a Selznick film and a damned good one.  Bergman and Peck play two doctors at a mental asylum who fall in love when she finds out he is suffering from amnesia and isn't who he says he is.  Fleming was asked to play a nymphomaniac and reportedly had to run back home and check her dictionary.

The funny thing is that Marilyn Louis came from a religious family and was a religious person.  Rhonda Fleming would continue that tradition her entire life, regularly attending church.  Her frequent lusty screen portrayals were indeed some very good acting.  Off screen there was little mention of her romantic escapades because Fleming didn't date as much as she just simply married.  Six times.

Dorothy McGuire, another Selznick contractee, was the central character in the suspense drama, The Spiral Staircase (1946), about some shadowy murderer who dispatches those with physical afflictions.  Fleming has a different connection but is knocked off anyway.

After she appeared in one of the best film noirs ever, Out of the Past (1947), with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, people knew who she was.  The plum female role went to Greer but Fleming's secretary part was too shifty not to be interesting.  She would do more noirs.

She was loaned out to Paramount to make a couple of flicks with two of its top-draw leading men.  I didn't particularly care for either one of them so I didn't see a lot of their films.  Bing Crosby threw Fleming's name in the pot for his leading lady, her first leading lady role in a big film, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1948).  Luckily she got a rare opportunity to sing in a picture but this time-traveler thing is just too silly to contemplate.

And then there's The Great Lover (1949) with Bob Hope.  He is a doofus scoutmaster pursuing a beautiful duchess on an ocean liner while a killer is pursuing him.  Hope's movies were very popular and this was no exception.  It seemed that everyone was talking about Rhonda Fleming. 

Whether it was a conscious decision or not, Fleming slipped (easily) into B flicks, specifically costume pictures.  She had a chance at this point to work in A movies but she elected for the B stuff.  It was ok with me.  She made 28 movies in the fifties and having just gone over the list, I can safely say I saw them all.  It seemed most everyone thought of her for work in a B and damned few for an A.  

I made the mistake of doing lesser films for more good money, she said.  I was hot.  They all wanted me but I didn't have the background or guidance to judge for myself.  My only regret is that I didn't get to make a truly great movie.

She claimed after those first few films, good directors didn't want her.  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Her big truth was she sold out for the bucks and for her the bucks were in B films.  She was a good actress, certainly not great but she rarely went all out.  She knew her stock-in-trade and she didn't set it aside.  And of course it wasn't acting that was in her blood, it was looking beautiful and wearing fabulous clothes.  And of course the money she was making. 

In 1950 she ended her association with Selznick, even though her contract had five more years to run.  That, too, was a mistake.  If the contract had five more years on it, he could have held her to it but didn't, which speaks volumes.

That same year she made the first of four films with John Payne.  The Eagle and the Hawk and Crosswinds (1951) were colorful B adventure films and the other two we'll discuss shortly.  I thought he was her best screen partner.  She was offered a contract at Paramount and she grabbed it.  All she needed to know was that it was the studio that employed renowned costumer Edith Head.

In 1951 she made the first of four films with Ronald Reagan.  The Last Outpost, Hong Kong (1952) and Tropic Zone (1953) more B adventures.  She and Reagan were a popular duo.  Their final film, also with Payne, is one we'll discuss more fully.

Dick Powell starred in and essentially directed a decent film noir, Cry Danger (1951), and Fleming is the femme fatale.  I loved it when she was bad.  The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951) with Glenn Ford was a so-so western but Fleming remembered it mostly because she declined a stuntwoman for a scene in which a horse rears while she's riding it and the animal toppled over, on top of Fleming.  Surprisingly she was not killed or even injured.

Pony Express (1953) was a silly and highly fictionalized western about Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill (Charlton Heston and Forrest Tucker) helping to establish the Pony Express.  All nonsense but of course I found it a galloping good time with Fleming as a California secessionist bad girl and Jan Sterling getting acting plaudits as a Calamity Jane-type character.

In 1954 at Universal she and Jeff Chandler were oh so gorgeous in the ultra silly Yankee Pasha and then she went to Italy to make the even sillier Queen of Babylon.  Both were signs that her career wasn't being taken too seriously by anyone other than her fans.

More to my liking was Tennessee's Partner (1955) reuniting Fleming with her two frequent costars, Reagan and Payne, and Coleen Gray as a gold-digger in a gold mining story featuring male friendship at its center.  I saw the western the other day and it seemed to hold the same charm for me that it once did.

She was the object of mentally deranged Wendell Corey in a decent B thriller, The Killer Is Loose (1956).  The same year she starred with Payne for the final time in a noir, Slightly Scarlet (1956) involving two sisters in city corruption and murder.  The sister is another beautiful redhead, Arlene Dahl.  What a sight to behold these two were.  I suspect in real life they were rather competitive with one another given that their standings in Hollywood were similar.

Fleming worked for director Fritz Lang in the crime drama, While the City Sleeps (1956), about a serial killer of beautiful women in New York City.  It has a large, impressive cast and John Barrymore Jr. is the creepy killer.

Fleming's most popular film was likely Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) but not because of her.  The teaming of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas was exciting as was the performance of Jo Van Fleet.  All three played real people while Fleming's role was made up and little more than decorative.

In 1957 she launched an act for Las Vegas that was very successful and where she would enjoy a few engagements  over the years.  Around this time she also joined actress-singer Jane Russell and singers Connie Haines and Beryl Davis as part of a traveling gospel singing quartet. 

With Jean Simmons in Home Before Dark

She and I have something in common.  We both think her best work and favorite film is Home Before Dark (1958).  She and Jean Simmons, both blondes here, are stepsisters trying to deal with Simmons's return home from a stay in a mental hospital.  It is one of my 50 favorite films.  I would love to know how Fleming came by this part.

With the all-star The Big Circus (1959), about finding who is  sabotaging the circus, Fleming more or less drew a curtain on her movie career.  From 1960 to her last work in 1991, she appeared mainly in episodic television and in a few movies not worth mentioning.  (I realize some of you are wondering why I mentioned some of the ones I have.)  She claimed she made a great deal of money from real estate and didn't need to work so often.

She made a record album that did well.  She performed on Broadway in The Women.  She also did some regional theater.  She had a one-woman show at the Hollywood Bowl and took her Vegas show on the road.  She was on the board of the Los Angeles Music Center.  She turned down an offer from Yul Brynner to join him on the road with The King and I.

 

After her movie career faded, she became a philanthropist and became involved in cancer research and aid for needy children.  Along with husband Mann she helped build the Jerusalem Film Institute in Israel. 

She was a founding member of an Alzheimer's research center.  She created the City of Hope Hospital Rhonda Fleming Mann Research Fellowship to advance research and treatment of women's cancer.  She opened a unique retail store with a consultation suite called Reflections which dealt with wigs, head coverings, breast prostheses and more that helped men and women deal with their physical appearance changes brought on by cancer.

Let it be noted that the beautiful B movie actress with the lovely singing voice became an A+ human being in the general field of human suffering.  What a special person she was.

Rhonda Fleming died in a Santa Monica hospital in October, 2020 of natural causes.  She was 97 years old.

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A 40s comedy