Killer Tomatoes by Ray Hagen

Author:Ray Hagen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2012-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

John Ireland and Mercedes in All the King’s Men (Columbia, 1949).

She did make it to Broadway, but there were more disappointments. Elliott Nugent’s A Place of Our Own opened April 2, 1945, and closed five days later. (Robert Garland in his New York Journal-American review said: “There’s a likely looking newcomer called Mercedes McCambridge, who reached the Royale by way of amateur theatricals and radio.” Rowland Field, Newark Evening News: “Mercedes McCambridge, who has been curiously in-and-out of several plays before they reached Broadway this season, is finally on hand in person to show herself to be a particularly winning young actress.”) Twilight Bar opened in Baltimore March 12, 1946 and closed in Philadelphia on March 23. A month later Sam and Bella Spewack’s Woman Bites Dog managed to last four days. (George Freedley, New York Morning Telegraph: “Mercedes McCambridge has authority and humor, rather in the Shirley Booth line, as a reporter.” Lewis Nichols, New York Times: “Mercedes McCambridge, attractive and from radio, is half the love interest; Kirk Douglas supplies the rest.”) Mercedes later recalled Douglas borrowing her eyelash curler.

She and William Fifield divorced in 1946: “When war was declared he was a conscientious objector. He went away, came back some two or three years later and we were not the same people at all. It was tragic.”

Mercedes continued in radio between stage flops. It paid the bills, but in 1947 she decided she didn’t like what was going on around her: “Analyst couches, nose-bob jobs and Dexamyl tablets—I thought there must be more than that.” So she sold her phonograph and fur coat, packed all of two suitcases and took off with her pre-school son John on a year-and-a-half adventure, first to St. Croix, Guadeloupe and Martinique, then to London and on to Dublin, Paris, Genoa and Portofino. She wrote an account of this journey, and its liberating effect on them both, in a book titled The Two of Us, published in London in 1960.

On her return she went back to radio. Especially notable was a superb CBS series, Studio One (1947-48), which featured Mercedes so often it might as well have been titled The Mercedes McCambridge Show. She co-starred with important theater and film names in adaptations of well-known classics and original plays. The series was directed and hosted by Fletcher Markle.

She did another play on Broadway, The Young and Fair, with Julie Harris and Rita Gam. It opened November 22, 1948, but she left it a few weeks later to begin work on her first film, Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men.

Rossen and Max Arnow had held open auditions in New York for the role of political hatchet-woman Sadie Burke and Mercedes attended the call with her long time friend, actress Elspeth Eric. She was aghast at the way the hopeful candidates were quickly herded in and out of Rossen’s office like so much cattle, and by the time it was her turn Mercedes was in a raging fury: “I read them the riot act

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