Faye Dunaway in Baton Rouge: So Terribly Vulnerable
“She epitomized fragility,” Madeleine Sherwood told me. “She was so terribly vulnerable."
One of my first memories related to the movies—to the making of movies, not the viewing of them—was when I was four years old and the Otto Preminger film Hurry Sundown was filming in my hometown of Baton Rouge, its cast lodged in the Bellemont Motor Hotel, long demolished, but in its day a sprawling, faux antebellum compound right on Airline Highway.
The casts of many films had been placed here, central to the city, an easy commute to plantation sites or levees. Also, prior to the full construction of the Interstate, Airline Highway was the main route between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Bellemont had gaudy carpets, themed rooms, and a large swimming pool, which was shot up by a rifle in the night because Robert Hooks, a Black actor, had dipped into it. As Madeleine Sherwood told me in 1990, Otto Preminger refused to back down, and he walked out to the damaged pool to yell at supposed, hiding villains. However, he did not go alone, and as Madeleine Sherwood told me in 1990, the director walked with the diminutive actress and held up her hand with his and yelled “Shoot! Go on, shoot!” (This incident is related beautifully in Foster Hirsch’s biography of Preminger.) Sherwood claimed that there were no more problems at the Bellemont, although proud Klan members did ride out to locations where they were filming. Preminger, who could manifest white, foamy spit within seconds when angry, went right to their cars and trucks to “talk,” and they drove away.
The most frightened cast member of Hurry Sundown was Faye Dunaway. Sherwood felt great empathy toward the actress, spent time with her, as did Jane Fonda and, to a lesser extent, Michael Caine. “She epitomized fragility,” Sherwood told me. “She was so terribly vulnerable. Otto—a man I really liked, really had a good time with—was not kind to her. He told me that he believed in her talent, and she did not, so he pushed and heckled her to rise to what he knew she had. It just came across as bullying, but I think Otto really had respect for her.”
How I came to learn of Faye Dunaway in Baton Rouge was from a woman who worked in the delicatessen in a grocery store across the street from the Bellemont: Hi-Nabor. Dunaway came in often to get food and to chat. My mother and I were shopping there during this time, waiting for our order when this woman told us of the actress who was so nice and pretty, who came in to just “hang out,” and then went back to the motel. When Dunaway was invited to a crawfish boil being hosted by another employee of Hi-Nabor, the actress attended, and appeared to have a good time.
My mother had her hair done by a woman named Ione, who operated an establishment called Ione’s Villa of Beauty. (Elsewhere in Baton Rouge were Mitzi’s Glamour Box and, my favorite, Craytonia’s House of Coiffure, whose tagline was “If you’re not becoming to yourself, you should be coming to us.”) Ione was called one day to attend to an actress at the Bellemont, but she was unable to accept the assignment, so she recommended another hairdresser. The hairdresser (her name lost to time) went to the Bellemont and gave Faye Dunaway a “glamorous” hair-do for a night in New Orleans. The woman said Dunaway was lovely, tipped her well, and walked with her to the front desk of the hotel, where the hairdresser retrieved her envelope of cash that had been provided by the producers of Hurry Sundown. Dunaway invited the woman to the set of the film and then to join her for dinner in her motel suite. I remember seeing, months after the fact, the photographs from this night: Two Southern girls, blonde, laughing, eating, drinking Coca-Cola in a forest-green suite at a motel. The hairdresser related that “Dorothy Faye,” as she had been told to call her, was “so terrified all the time. She thinks people are laughing at her.”
Why am I thinking of this? Today (January 14) is Faye Dunaway’s birthday. I have had a complicated, turbulent relationship with Faye Dunaway, which hardly makes me unique. There are so many anecdotes, stories, scars related to Dunaway, and I have been guilty of participating in the particular parkour of gathering and laughing into the night over tales of thrown plates, tirades, demands to have toilets flushed, lettuce leaves weighed as if they were jewels, and one, which I know to be true, of the actress eating a full pound of crisp bacon in seconds because she was impatient to reach ketosis on her low-carb, high-protein diet, then rushed to the bathroom to urinate on a keto stick. Rage ensued when she remained negative for ketosis. (The last fact could be applied to at least a dozen people I know, male and female. You know, the times in which we live.)
I am not saying that Dunaway isn’t difficult, I worked at The Carlyle for two years, and Dunaway was on the DO NOT TAKE list, even if her visit was to paid for by a production company. The Carlyle did reluctantly allow Dunaway to receive packages at the hotel, and I assure you many of the men at the front desk looked at and tried on a number of items sent by Giorgio Armani for awards telecasts. We also would record the Tony and Emmy Awards in one of the suites for her, and she was always pleasant when she came by to pick up the tapes. Dunaway begged to be reinstated, and even called upon Jack Nicholson, a loved guest at the hotel, to speak up for her, but the management refused. Her transgressions included breaking into the hotel’s gym in the middle of the night because she was not to be denied her exercise. “What I am,” Dunaway told me and a concierge named Dino, “is impatient. I want things done well. I am not difficult.”
I had phone interviews with Dunaway, and I saw her once in Los Angeles, not far from where she lived on Willoughby. There was always a pattern to each meeting: Charm. Comfort. Humor. Paranoia. Rage. Dismissal. I could set a timer to her moods. Why? I finally asked her. “Everyone,” she said, “is out to get somebody. To get me. To get a quote. To get me angry. I’m tired of it.” I could also always get her to return to charm and comfort if I asked about her mother. If I mentioned Baton Rouge and Hi-Nabor and her high hair in New Orleans. If I mentioned Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan. Sweetness returned.
I am not a close friend to Faye Dunaway. We’re on what I would call “calmer” terms these days. The last time I saw her, things were cordial and light and brief. I think of what Tennessee Williams thought of her—coiled for disappointment—and I think of Madeleine Sherwood, whose therapist June Jackson Christmas, was once suggested to Dunaway. “I never had a problem with her,” Sherwood told me. “I never had a problem with anybody after I had approached them with trust, and I refused to react. If you get angry at what Faye says, she gets worse. If you look confused and hurt and ask her what’s wrong, you get that little girl I met way back during the time we made that movie.”
And then…
“What I don’t like,” Sherwood continued, “is that we devalue her work with these stories, some of which might be true, but so many are recycled from other tales. It’s like Jerome Robbins. Apocryphal tales. Bullshit. Gossip. I went to a screening of two of Faye’s films, and all around me people were giggling and repeating these stories. What was lost was the work on the screen. I’m a believer in what’s delivered, and, you know, fuck the private life. I went through this with [Elia] Kazan. You know, I lost work because I was labeled as ‘red,” “subversive,’ but Kazan had nothing to do with that. Kazan was not as honorable as we might have wanted him to be, but I’m not giving up on him or his work Don’t give up on anyone’s work.”
Faye Dunaway’s work remains. There is work by this actress that will stand. I have had testimonials to her from Kazan and from Sidney Lumet. Both said essentially the same thing: Look at the work.
Someone got to this woman and hurt her. Someone often gets to her and finds her and sees that young woman. Lloyd Richards, who instructed Dunaway at Boston University, told me about her once: “I remember that sweet face looking at me and begging me to make her better. That’s what I remember.”
Happy Birthday, Faye.
Photographs: Terry O’Neill; the Bellemont Motor Hotel, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Faye Dunaway and John Phillip Law in Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown.
© 2024 James Grissom