One for the books

 

July 14, 1957
Los Angeles

At 95, Mary Foy has the formula for longevity: Watch your health, keep mentally active and be Irish. 

The Times catches up with Foy and her "double cousin," Ella Foy O'Gorman, as the women celebrate their 95th birthdays in the home they share at 1706 S. Menlo Ave.

Foy is of special significance because she became the city's first librarian--in 1879--and where would we researchers be without librarians?

Born on July 13, 1862, Foy was the first of 10 children, The Times said in 1933, the daughter of Samuel Calvert Foy, a saddlemaker, and Lucinda Macy, who learned the alphabet while crossing the country to Los Angeles in a covered wagon in 1850. Foy was born in the family home at Macy and Main streets. Her family moved to 7th Street and Figueroa about 1904, then moved again to San Rafael Heights in Pasadena.

Foy was the sole employee of the library when it was above a saloon at Main and Temple streets, at a monthly salary of $74 ($1,512.56 USD 2006). "Miss Foy once recalled that patrons of the saloon often came to her and her books to settle their arguments," The Times said in her 1962 obituary.

Five years after graduating from Los Angeles High School, she returned as a teacher and became the principal before resigning in 1901 to fight for women's suffrage. She also attended law school. A lifelong Democrat, Foy served as a national committeewoman to the Democratic National Convention in 1919 and ran for Congress in 1934. She helped found the pioneer organization that became the First Century Families of California and was active in the Native Daughters of the Golden West.

For her, the most interesting time in local history was 1867 to 1876, when "Los Angeles awoke from being a sleepy pueblo and began to grow into a modern American city," The Times said.

At 95, she and her cousin were "smart as paint and wise as serpents," living in a home full of books, manuscripts and artifacts of the past, The Times said. "The orderly little house is neat and workmanlike, with a marked mental aura. The cousins betray a persisting love of adornment with their bright dresses with pleated ruffles at the necklines, strands of pearls and brooches."

As for never marrying, Foy said: "I wasn't prejudiced against it" (one story, in fact noted that she was "much too pretty to be a bluestocking"). "I was too busy to think of it."

 

In the 1940s, she led the unsuccessful fight to preserve the 1873 Los Angeles High School on Fort Moore Hill, which was demolished in 1949 to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. The redwood building was too expensive to move, the group decided. The wrecking company planned to cut part of the building into sections to be sold as storerooms.

Foy died Feb. 18, 1962, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery after lying in state at City Hall. She was the oldest living graduate of Los Angeles High School.

I'll leave you with two memorable quotes:

When asked about their social lives, Foy and O'Gorman said they went out occasionally even at the age of 95, "However our constant companion is right in this house. It is the dictionary," they said.

"I've lived through dozens of depressions," Foy said in 1933. "Whenever the rains failed we had 'em for one thing. Californians have faced disaster too often to be scared about this one. We always bounce back."

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Gail Russell--in memoriam

 

Photographs by the Los Angeles Times
Sgt. C.H. Specht examines damage to Jan's Restaurant, 8424 Beverly Blvd., caused by Gail Russell's convertible.
Below right, Russell fails a test for intoxication administered by Specht.   

July 6, 1957
Los Angeles

You poor thing. Look at you lying there, probably for a couple days now, sealed off from the world in a little home on the Westside. No husband, no children and no career. Just an empty vodka bottle on the floor and you sprawled next to it in a blouse and the pants from your pajamas. Dead at 35. Your mother wanted you to have the career she never had. I'm sure she didn't realize you weren't cut out to be a movie star; so tightly wound and such a painfully shy, insecure bundle of nerves.

Let's go back 20 years to 1941, when you were studying to be an artist and someone started calling you "the Hedy Lamarr of Santa Monica High." How you hated that nickname and kept apologizing for it, so embarrassed that when you finally ran into Lamarr volunteering one night at the Hollywood Canteen you looked the other way.

You said: "We lived first in Chicago, came gypsying to California. When my family first came here it was a vacation, really. Then we put a down payment on a house and a down payment on some furniture. My brother went into the Army and one by one pieces of furniture went.

"When I was discovered for the movies I was sleeping on the living room floor on newspapers. I went for my first interview with paint all over my face--I'd been helping paint a room at the technical school. Paramount offered me a minimum salary--$50 a week--and Mom said, 'Take it, we need the money.' "

(Below right, Russell with Richard Lyon and Nona Griffith in 1944 after their juvenile movie contracts were approved).

"Mother practically dragged me in to see William Meiklejohn, supervisor of talent and casting at Paramount, who had tracked me down at University [Santa Monica] High School. I was petrified. Mr. Meiklejohn, a kindly man, kept trying to get me to talk, but nothing would come out.

"For my first test they put me into an evening gown. I had never even worn high heels before--or makeup of any kind. To say I was self-conscious is understatement plus. A week later they cast me in a Henry Aldrich picture, wearing a bathing suit and a transparent raincoat. It had been raining and there was a large puddle across from the studio commissary where the scene was to be shot. Of course they had to do it just as the sets broke for lunch and such stars as Alan Ladd, Bing Crosby and others were passing by.

"There I was trying to speak my lines while holding an umbrella which kept slipping from my nervous fingers. To this day I refuse all bathing suit scenes in public or private."

For one audition at Paramount, they put you in the fishbowl, a glass booth lit so that the actor couldn't see who was outside watching.

Below right, a studio publicity shot, 1949.

"My coach accompanied me and we read the script together. Then he excused himself. There I stood, sat, or something, for 10 minutes waiting for him to return. Finally they turned on the outside lights and to my horror I saw 15 executives filing away one by one. I frantically tried to remember what I had done those 10 minutes. What an experience!

"I started out weighing 125 pounds," you said of making "The Uninvited," then I was rushed to New York for the opening. When I got back I weighed 106--all in two months. Everything was that way, rush... rush... rush... So many pictures one after another. I tried to be a nice guy and took on too many things and didn't take care of my health."

You nerves got so bad that you spoiled one take after another.

"I have hand trouble. Unconsciously I clasp my hands and then start wringing them. It's getting to be a gag now on the set. Director John Farrow ("Calcutta" and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes") had a stock line to deliver every time my hands wouldn't behave. It was, 'Hands, Gail, cut.'  They finally tied my hands to my sides with handkerchiefs."

Then there was "The Angel and the Badman," the first of  the movies you made with John Wayne. A few years later when his wife, Esperanza, sued for divorce, she testified that she nearly shot him when he broke into their home the next morning after spending the night with you. She also said he gave you a car, although he claimed it was only the down payment.

 

Russell and defense lawyer Harvey Silbert in 1953, when she pleaded not guilty to drunk driving.

You and Wayne testified that there was no relationship between you. But your first arrest for drunk driving was only a few weeks later, Nov. 24, 1953, about the time your marriage to Guy Madison was unraveling. By the next year, you were in such bad shape that your lawyer wanted the trial held in your hospital room.

In 1955, you drove off after rear-ending a car in North Hollywood. And then you plowed into Jan's Restaurant, 8424 Beverly Blvd., at 4 a.m. on the Fourth of July, 1957 and pinned the janitor under your new convertible. 

You said: "I had a few drinks. I had two. No four. Oh, I don't know how many I had. It's nobody's business anyway."

 

Russell, age 31, in 1956.

In August 1957, you ended up in General Hospital's prison ward when two officers found you passed out after you failed to appear for a hearing in the drunk driving case.

You tried so hard to beat the bottle. You joined A.A. and spent a year in a clinic. "It was so lonely in the hospital in that oxygen tent for three months with no one to talk to except the Man Upstairs," you said. "I had long talks with Him--that's the reason I'm here today."

 

Russell and an unidentified man, presumably attorney Rexford Eagan, for another court hearing in 1958. She is  32 in this photograph. Note her dilated pupils.

And then for the last eight months of your life, you sealed yourself up in your home at 1436 Bentley Ave., and sketched and painted and drank until the place was full of art and empty liquor bottles. You wouldn't even open the door for the neighbors, just talked to them through the window. Your sister-in-law phoned every day in the week before you died. You told her you were painting and sketching and planning to get back into acting.

Your sister-in-law will say: "She was really, really and truly trying to stop drinking. It was tragic because she was so talented and suffering so much. If she had enjoyed drinking it would have been something else--but she didn't. No matter what they say about Hollywood, the people there were always wonderful to her through the long years she had her problems. She always got through when she made a call and anybody who ever worked with her always believed in her."

You once told Hedda Hopper: "I've learned you can't satisfy everyone. You start and then, all of a sudden, it stops and you can't even please yourself."

You'll get a private service at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood and be buried next to your father.  Some of your old co-stars will be there: Alan Ladd, Jimmy "Henry Aldrich" Lydon, Diana Lynn and Mona Freeman. No sign of John Wayne, though.  Or Guy Madison.

Rest in peace, Gail Russell Moseley,  1925-1961

Here's "The Angel and the Badman" on Google video.

Bonus fact: Jan's is still in business.

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Forest Lawn

Easter Sunday seemed like a good time to drive over to Forest Lawn and visit a few graves. I bought some flowers and went off to find Norma McCauley and Caren Lynn "Sande" Crabbe.

The woman at the front gate was extremely professional and helpful, and she gave me precise directions. Norma is in the Columbarium of Sunlight and Sande is in the Sanctuary of Celestial Peace. I was surprised at how many people were simply spending time at the hillside graves, with folding chairs and flowers. A couple of young men were partway up a hillside with a Marine flag.

The Columbarium of Sunlight is quite pretty and I had it entirely to myself. While I was in the area I found the graves of Earl Carroll and Beryl Wallace, who died in a plane crash, Mary Pickford and Atwater Kent, which reminded me of "Millionaires' Row" up at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

The Sanctuary of Celestial Peace was a bit different. I went in the wrong door and in wandering around, stumbled across the crypt of Art Tatum.

In fact, it was quite a day for musicians, as I also found Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, who had been sent a large floral wreath. There were roses on the crypt of William "Hopalong Cassady" Boyd.

"Sande" Crabbe is partway up the wall and while I was getting water for the flower I ran into a couple of women. It turns out  Paramahansa Yogananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship is in the same building and they were meditating in front of what appeared to be his crypt. I didn't want to interrupt them to find out.

One of the crypts was elaborately decorated for an Easter egg hunt. I have seen all sorts of grave decorations in searching for Los Angeles history, but this was a first and very nicely done.
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