Claude Rains by David J. Skal

Author:David J. Skal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

In view of the fact that Mr. Rains has been co-starred with Vivien Leigh in a five million dollar picture, “CAESAR & CLEOPATRA” and is being co-starred with Paul Muni in “ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER” in the same size type as Paul Muni, and because it is my intention that I will not, in the future, commit him to any other outside picture without receiving co-star billing, I wonder if I cannot prevail upon you to grant him the assurance that when “DECEPTION” is released that he will be co-starred with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid.

Rains received same-line, same-size billing for Deception, but Warner balked at Levee's insistence on a $75,000 guarantee per picture, and the studio declined to renew its option on Rains's services. The following year, the actor returned briefly to the studio for his first and only top-billed assignment for Warners, teaming with Michael Curtiz for their last picture together. The Unsuspected was an unabashed piece of hokum in which Rains plays a popular radio personality, Victor Grandison, whose weekly mystery program milks a real murder, about which Grandison has far too much personal knowledge. Stylishly shot in brooding noir style, the film was a financial, if not a critical, success. For Rains, though, The Unsuspected was only the palest shadow of his best work at Warner Bros. The studio had been making less and less use of his talents, to the actor's frustration. (Bette Davis was struggling with the same issue and would be released from her contract not long after Rains's departure.) For the time being, at least, Rains was happy to be a free agent, and more than happy to give up his residence in Los Angeles and base himself, Frances, and Jennifer permanently in Pennsylvania. Thereafter, when asked by her schoolmates what her father did for a living, Jennifer would reply, “He's a farmer.”

Jennifer loved full-time life on the farm. In addition to helping with planting and harvesting, she learned from her father how to shoot a rifle and, like Rains in his Scottish Regiment days, became a crack shot, expert in picking tin cans off a fence. “Growing up as the only child of an actor noted for his beautiful speech was a burden—oddly enough not for me, but for my father,” she remembered. “He was determined that I would not have the Pennsylvania accent, that I would pronounce my words ‘succinctly,’ and in that he was successful.” For a short time when she was about seven she began stammering, just as her father had as a boy. “The cure for stuttering was to sing everything. I remember us sitting around the dining room table. The cook would enter the room with a silver dish holding the vegetables. ‘Here are the peas, Mr. Rains,’ she would sing in her gospel-singer's voice. Enjoying this therapy immensely, my father would belt out, ‘Pass them to Jennifer first, she must eat the peas before she eats the lamb chops.’ Fa Fa, as I called him then, thought this was all absolutely hilarious.

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