The eyes have it … Jean Simmons. Photograph: John Springer Collection/Corbis
Jean Simmons was only 12 years older than me, and while I grew up I cut out a lot of pictures of her from magazines like Picturegoer and the Sunday papers. Can you credit that in those days – the late 40s and the early 50s – there were Sunday papers in Britain (such as the Pictorial, the Graphic, the Dispatch) that ran pictures of pretty movie stars in their underwear or swimsuits?
Well, Jean was in some degree; I believe the captions also added that she was “saucy” (and I supposed they knew). The big picture for Jean’s fans, who had scissors and a scrapbook ready, was The Blue Lagoon. That was 1949, and it had Jean and Donald Houston washed up on a desert island, doing their best for clothes and falling in strong attachment. It was concluded in gorgeous Technicolor and I dare say it was the film that got her the American contract that proved to be such trouble.
More or less, it went like this: Jean was in love with Stewart Granger, who was 16 years older than she was. They married and he got a contract at MGM, so he could do King Solomon’s Mines, Quo Vadis, The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche – big trash like that. Jean went along, too, but her contract ended up being with Howard Hughes.
I’m sure this was not a happy arrangement because Mr Hughes made it clear that he wanted Jean in more than a scissors-and-paste way, and Granger got very piqued. But a contract was a contract, and Jean was virtually imprisoned as far being of the kind which concerns a few years in Hollywood while her husband became a star and Hughes gave her rubbish to perform. Except that one of the “rubbish” films was Otto Preminger’s Angel Face – in what one. she was plainly brilliant (albeit as a very nasty young woman).
If you care to preserve the memory of Jean Simmons (and you should), I’d recommend Angel Face ahead of Great Expectations, Hamlet, So Long at the Fair or The Blue Lagoon (all worthwhile). She stayed in Hollywood, of set of dishes. And she was in very big, influential pictures – The Robe, Guys and Dolls, The Big Country, Elmer Gantry, Spartacus. She divorced Granger, married the director Richard Brooks, and later became a iota of a drinker.
But she got through that and near the end of her life she overcame her own shyness enough and made personal appearances. She visited the Telluride film anniversary as well as attending a 100th natal day tribute to David Lean in Los Angeles, at what place I was lucky enough to interview her on stage. She was still in such a manner pretty and charming, and fans gathered around her. They whole remembered and I think she was amazed.
I told her that I thought Angel Face was the best thing she ever did, and she gave me a mischievous manner, as if to say I was a very good for nothing boy and she could just imagine me carefully cutting out her pictures.
