Susan Hayward

The Full Biography

Susan Hayward. Actress. The Brooklyn redhead who tested for Scarlett, lost the part, and spent twenty years playing women the town would not let rest — until one of them brought the statue.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a woman on death row, hair still red, eyes refusing the chaplain’s comfort, in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! The year is 1958. The Academy Award came the following April. What the still cannot show is Edythe Marrenner of Brooklyn, a model who went west for a Gone with the Wind test, four nominations that did not convert, a Georgia farm, a picture shot in Utah dust that the cast would spend decades paying for, and a last illness she met the way she had met the parts: without asking the room to look away.

She was born Edythe Marrenner on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, to Walter Marrenner and Ellen Pearson. The household was not a studio. It was Flatbush work, a sister, a brother, a girl who learned early that a face could be a living. Washington Irving High School. Then modeling — the Saturday Evening Post, the kind of commercial beauty that photographs as American and costs the sitter her own name. The first pressure was to be looked at without being heard. She did not intend to stay in that bargain. In 1937 David O. Selznick was testing every young woman on the eastern seaboard for Scarlett O’Hara. Hayward tested. She did not get the part. Vivien Leigh did. The test got her a ticket west and a studio name. Edythe became Susan. Marrenner became Hayward. The town is full of those conversions. Few of them turn into a career of this voltage.

The first years were the usual grind: bits, contracts, a face in a crowd, a girl who is pretty enough to keep and not yet expensive enough to fear. Girls on Probation (1938). Beau Geste weather around the lot. Warner Bros., then the slow climb through supporting work into leads that asked her to suffer in public. She married the actor Jess Barker in 1944. Twin sons, Timothy and Gregory, arrived. The marriage was a war conducted in the columns and in the house; it ended in 1954 after a custody fight the papers treated as entertainment. She did not play those years as a victim in interviews. She went to work.

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) was the first nomination: an alcoholic nightclub singer, a performance that treated addiction as a job with hours, not a moral. My Foolish Heart (1949) brought the second, a wartime romance with a pregnancy the Production Code could not quite look at. With a Song in My Heart (1952) was Jane Froman, the singer whose body had been broken in a plane crash and who went back onstage anyway. Hayward lip-synced to Froman’s voice and played the will. Third nomination. I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Lillian Roth’s drinking and recovery, was the fourth. Four times the town put her in the first row and then gave the statue to someone else. She had become, by the mid-fifties, the actress you hired when the woman on the page had to break and then refuse to stay broken. The redhead was not decoration. It was a warning. Between the nominations she also made the pictures that paid the house and are easy to skip in a solemn account: Westerns, melodramas, a studio’s idea of a fiery woman in a fiery dress. She was not above them. She was in them, on time, with the same voltage she would bring to Graham. Walter Wanger and other producers learned that she would argue a line and then hit the mark. Directors who wanted a pliable star found someone else. Directors who wanted a woman who could look at a camera as if it owed her money kept hiring her. The four losses at the Academy were not a campaign she performed. They were a fact she carried into the next call time.

In 1956 she made The Conqueror for Howard Hughes, a Genghis Khan picture shot in the Utah desert downwind of the Nevada nuclear tests. John Wayne was the Khan. Hayward was the captive. The film is a curiosity now. The location is a medical file. A striking number of the company — Wayne, Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Dick Powell, extras, crew — would die of cancer. No court ever made the desert a verdict. The coincidence sits in the biography and will not leave. She did not live long enough to become the spokeswoman for that argument. She lived long enough to become one of its examples.

Robert Wise cast her as Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958). Graham had been executed at San Quentin in 1955. The picture is a protest against the gas chamber dressed as a crime story. Hayward played the cheap toughness and the terror underneath it without asking for tears. When she was asked why she took the part, she said she had to play her — that if she had not thought they should make the film, she would not have taken it. After the shoot she called the simulated execution medieval. On April 6, 1959, the Academy named her Best Actress. The fifth nomination converted. She accepted the way a working woman accepts a debt the town had been postponing. The statue did not make her gentle. It made her, for a season, undeniable.

I never thought of myself as a movie star. I’m just a working girl. A working girl who worked her way to the top — and never fell off.Susan Hayward

In 1957 she had married Eaton Chalkley, a Georgia businessman, and made a life in Carrollton, well off the Hollywood map. He died in 1966. The farm years are the turn that is easy to miss because they look like a retirement and were not. She came back for the pictures she wanted or needed. Valley of the Dolls (1967) put her in as Helen Lawson, a Broadway survivor who will not be replaced, a part that is also a sneer at the town that had made her wait. She played it with the voltage of a woman who had already won and already buried a husband. The redhead, by then, was a fact the lighting had to honor.

The twins grew up in the weather of a famous mother and a custody fight. Friends from the lot describe a professional who arrived on time, knew the lines, and did not perform humility for a columnist. The woman on the Georgia farm kept the same hours without a call sheet. Both are the life. She was not a clubwoman and she was not a recluse. She was a working actress who had decided the town did not get to own the off-hours.

The later years

After Chalkley’s death the map folded back toward California. She worked when the part or the money required it: television, a picture, the slow conversion of a leading woman into the woman who arrives in the second act and takes the scene. Brain cancer arrived in the early 1970s. She did not issue a press conference about it. She was treated. She appeared, when she could, with the hair and the posture the public expected, because the public had paid for the redhead and she was still a professional. The illness was not a farewell tour. It was a medical fact a proud woman tried to keep off the front page for as long as the body would allow.

She died on March 14, 1975, in Hollywood Hills, at fifty-seven. The obituaries led with the Oscar and the red hair and the women who drank and the woman who went to the gas chamber on screen. The better ones remembered Brooklyn, the Scarlett test, the four losses, Carrollton, and the Utah dust. She was buried in Carrollton, beside Chalkley, which is the geography of the second marriage written in stone. The twins remained. The statue remained. I Want to Live! remained the picture students are shown when someone needs to see what a star can do with a woman the Production Code would once have refused to photograph honestly.

The last chapter, in full, is not only the cancer. It is a woman who had already buried the Georgia husband, who had already won the thing the town had withheld, who kept taking work because work was the identity, and who then had to do the hardest part without a script. Friends said she was angry at the body, which is a sane response. She had made a career of women who did not go quietly. She did not go quietly. She also did not turn the dying into a campaign. The campaign, if there is one, sits in the coincidence of The Conqueror and in the pictures that still play: Froman walking again, Roth drying out, Graham in the chamber, Lawson refusing to be replaced. Those women are the late style as much as the medical file is. They are what she left a viewer who never knew Edythe Marrenner.

Hollywood’s memory is short and its manners are worse. It kept the redhead and the Oscar night and let the Brooklyn name fade. That is the usual theft. What remains, if you stay for the pictures, is a specific voltage: a woman who could play ruin without asking for a prize, and who then, on the fifth try, received one for a part that is also an argument about the state. The 1940s still is the face the studio sold. The 1959 still, statue in her hands, is the town catching up. The Georgia stone is the ending she chose when she still had a choice. A complete life holds all three. The working girl who said she never fell off had, by 1975, been taken off by something no nomination could postpone. The sentence she wanted is still the accurate one. She worked. She got to the top. The fall, when it came, was not a career fall. It was a body. The work is what does not fall. Television in the last seasons gave her the kind of guest hour a fading leading woman is offered and that she treated as a job, not a humiliation. She had never thought of herself as a movie star. She had thought of herself as a working girl. The working girl kept working until the body closed the shop. Neighbors in Carrollton remembered a woman who could be sharp in a grocery and then sit in a pew without performing the Oscar. Hollywood remembered the statue night. Both memories are true. The one she would have recognized is the grocery and the pew and the next script, if there was a next script. There was not, at the end, a next script. There was a medical file and a stone in Georgia. The pictures remain the script she does not have to be alive to play.

After she was gone

The twins kept the private name. Carrollton kept the grave. The Academy kept the clip of 1959. Film schools kept I Want to Live! when they wanted a star who could do terror without syrup. Valley of the Dolls kept Helen Lawson as a camp object and, if you watch it cleanly, as a survivor’s joke. The Utah argument kept being written without her testimony. She had already left the stand.

She came out of Brooklyn, lost Scarlett, took the town’s name, broke four times on Oscar night, won on the fifth for a woman in the chamber, farmed in Georgia, came back as Helen Lawson, and died at fifty-seven with the redhead still the first fact in the obituary. If you only remember the statue, you have the night. If you remember Edythe, the four losses, Carrollton, and the Utah dust, you have her.

Portrait: 20th Century Fox (studio publicity still) · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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