Hollywood’s Most Infamous Downfall
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In the 1950s, Gloria Grahame was the femme fatale. Then one day, her husband came home and made a truly heinous discovery—one that ruined her career forever. “You want to bite somebody? Yeah, well pick your spot.” Gloria Grahame shot to stardom after appearing in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Yet if her name isn’t as well-known today, maybe that’s because this ingenue never got a happy holiday ending—far from it. Born in Los Angeles in 1923, her mother, Jean McDougall, went by the stage name Jean Grahame and worked as an actress and acting coach. As a result, Gloria was exposed to Hollywood’s inner workings from a very young age, which wasn’t always a good thing. Before she was 21, she was making her Broadway debut in “The World’s Full of Girls,” where she caught the eye of Hollywood bigwig Louis B. Mayer, who was in the audience one night. Mayer, who headed MGM Studios, snapped up the emerging talent and signed her to a contract almost immediately. It was supposed to be a dream come true for Grahame, but it was more like a nightmare.
Signing with MGM and becoming a screen star was all Grahame had ever wanted, but her big break had a notorious dark side, namely Louis B. Mayer himself. Sometimes called the monster of MGM, Mayer was infamous for discovering starlets like Greta Garbo and Hedy Lamarr, and then mistreating them horrifically. Mayer even made child star Judy Garland go on diet pills and often forced her to sit on his lap. Grahame was in for a harrowing ride. Perhaps under Mayer’s sinister influence, Grahame began to feel incredibly insecure about her looks, especially next to all the seemingly perfect starlets she worked with. In particular, she started to become obsessed with her upper lip and was insistent it was too thin and had deep, unseemly ridges. Her solution to this problem was inventive: without much money to permanently fix her lip, Grahame used to stuff cotton in her mouth while filming to compensate for its thinness, giving her mouth a plump, if strange, appearance. Mortifyingly for Gloria, the wadding would sometimes fall out of her mouth during kissing scenes. “Everything from A to Z, USA, AO.”
In 1944, MGM put Grahame in “Blonde Fever,” making use of her sultry looks to have her play a romantic rival opposite screen sweetheart Mary Astor. It was the beginning of a lifelong pattern for Grahame, as she gained stardom for playing risqué seductresses and fallen women. By the end of her life, though, this dark fantasy had turned into reality. Around this time, Grahame started developing something of a reputation around Hollywood, and not a good one. Her co-stars and fans couldn’t help but notice her bottle-blonde good looks, her drive, and her ambition to make it in Tinseltown; however, they also noted she was eccentric. One of Grahame’s more avant-garde tastes was her relatively early enthusiasm for plastic surgery. Over the years, her insecurities had only grown deeper, and by the mid-40s, she was regularly getting procedures done to make her lips a little bigger and her face a little younger. It was a slippery slope, but Grahame thought she had control of it.
Although her life was slightly fraying at the edges, she did have a stroke of good luck. After meeting fellow actor Stanley Clements, she married him in 1945, walking down the aisle and then trying to settle into a life of wedded bliss. In 1946, a twist of fate turned Grahame into a star: she nabbed a role in the classic Christmas film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring Hollywood titan Jimmy Stewart. True to type, Grahame played the cheeky Violet Bick, the flirty woman who narrowly avoids a life of shame at the end of the film. Today, it’s one of her most famous roles, yet it only led to heartache. Instead of seeing Grahame’s work in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and being impressed, Louis B. Mayer and MGM dealt the actress a cold, hard blow. They realized the sultry starlet didn’t fit their own idea of a lovable ingenue, and they traded her off to RKO Studios in 1947, just a year after “It’s a Wonderful Life” came out.
In the late 1940s, it wasn’t just Grahame’s professional life that was falling to pieces; her private life was an absolute mess too. Her marriage to Stanley Clements was firmly on the rocks just three years into the union, and the ill-fated couple ended up divorcing in 1948. Just one day after officially divorcing Clements, she picked up and married her new beau, the notoriously difficult director Nicholas Ray. She was around four months pregnant with Ray’s child at the time of the wedding and gave birth to a boy, Timothy, just five months after her nuptials. Like Grahame, Nicholas Ray had been married once before, and the new couple were hoping that the second time would be the charm for both of them, so much so that they even took a risky step and tried to work together on a film, 1950’s “In a Lonely Place.” It turned out to be a mistake.
Even before filming began, their marriage started to unravel. She and Ray were at each other’s throats constantly, and Ray was reportedly controlling and aggressive with Grahame on set beyond what any director should be. Apparently seeking out new ways to control his wife, Ray forced Grahame to sign a disturbing contract. In it, she had to agree that “my husband shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct, and even command my actions during the hours from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day except Sunday.” She then further acknowledged in writing that “in every conceivable situation, his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail.” After weeks of this, Ray and Grahame separated while the movie was still in production. Terrified that one or both of them would get the boot from the movie if the truth got out, Ray started sleeping in a dressing room under the guise of working on the script, while Grahame played along and acted like nothing was wrong. They divorced soon after, but there was supposedly another scandal that led to the end of their marriage, one that wouldn’t be revealed until years later.
The head of Grahame’s studio, RKO, was none other than famed rake and mega-weirdo Howard Hughes, a man known for his dating exploits, airplane feats, and controversial films. So when “In a Lonely Place” ended up earning Grahame rave reviews, you’d think Hughes would be happy. For all the blood, sweat, and literal tears that Grahame poured into “In a Lonely Place,” it came back to her tenfold, and many critics still recognize it today as her best performance. Not that Howard Hughes noticed; Grahame’s philandering boss later admitted he never even watched the movie. Through all this, Grahame still knew her worth. In 1951, she begged Hughes to loan her out to star in “A Place in the Sun,” the now-classic Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift movie. Hughes didn’t just refuse; he also forced her to act in a small supporting role in the film “Macao” instead. Grahame knew better than anyone that success is the best revenge, and she set about proving it. In 1953, just a year after her divorce from Nicholas Ray officially went through, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for “The Bad and the Beautiful,” a feat made more impressive by the fact she only had a little over 9 minutes of screen time in the film. “Thank you very much.”
Grahame then went on the romantic rebound, jumping back into matrimony with television producer Cy Howard and even having a daughter with him. From almost the moment she married Howard, Grahame kept something huge from him. While filming the sensual noir “Human Desire” in 1954, the same year she married him, Grahame struck up an affair with her co-star Glenn Ford, a magnetic actor who was also one of the first-class womanizers in Hollywood. By the early 1950s, Grahame was becoming a hot ticket and turning into Hollywood’s go-to femme fatale, until it all came crashing down in 1955. She took a role against type and starred in the good-time comedic musical “Oklahoma!” as a humble and innocent farm girl. “The peddler man’s going to drive me to the box social; I got up sort of a taste.” When the dust settled, it couldn’t have been more disastrous for Gloria Grahame. “Oklahoma!” was far from a hit, and audiences complained that her femme fatale good looks didn’t match up with the country bumpkin she was playing. Besides that, people whispered that she had been difficult on set, feeling she was better than some of her co-stars and alienating everyone in the cast.
By the time filming began on “Oklahoma!”, Grahame’s obsession with plastic surgery had reached tragic proportions. She had undergone even more operations on her face, and the most recent surgery had paralyzed her upper lip, affecting her speech and performance in the musical. Grahame had a pleasingly high-pitched twang to her raspy voice, but her singing voice? Not so much. According to one source, the actress was utterly tone-deaf, leading to a very embarrassing moment in “Oklahoma!”, her only singing role that wasn’t dubbed over by someone else. Sound editors had to painstakingly splice her recordings together practically note for note. It was the beginning of the end for Gloria Grahame. Over the next decades, Grahame’s career opportunities plummeted, and she began to take on television roles instead of securing plum parts on the silver screen. And that wasn’t all. In 1957, her third marriage to Cy Howard likewise fell apart, and she divorced him for mental cruelty, sharing custody of their daughter together.
In 1974, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer. However, the dark prospect had a strange effect on the actress. Considering it a wake-up call, she immediately stopped smoking and drinking, and changed her diet and exercise regimen while undergoing radiation therapy. Miraculously, it worked, and less than a year later, her cancer went into remission. Starting in 1979, Grahame found herself romancing a much younger lover when she met Liverpool actor Peter Turner, who was nearly 30 years her junior and who hadn’t even been born when she starred in “In a Lonely Place.” The scandalous pair carried on their affair for two years. After keeping cancer at bay, Grahame was ready to have a second lease on life. She threw herself into her work like the old Hollywood workhorse she was. In fact, the minute she found out her cancer was in remission, she went back on set ready to make her triumphant return. Yet, as far too many people know, remission doesn’t mean cured.
In 1980, what little luck Grahame had ran out. Her cancer had come back with a vengeance after six years in remission, and doctors wanted to put her through more rounds of radiation treatment to tackle the disease once more. After all she’d been through, Grahame’s response was heartbreaking: she was simply unable to confront the reality of her second cancer diagnosis. So, rather than facing it head-on, she simply ignored it. She stubbornly refused to admit she was sick and didn’t receive treatment. Instead, she buried herself in stage work all over the US and Britain. Grahame had an utterly scandalous life, but her most infamous moment was truly jaw-dropping. Although she went through a vicious divorce with her second husband, Nicholas Ray, at the time most people didn’t know the real reason behind their split. The couple didn’t get along on the set of “In a Lonely Place,” sure, but it really all unraveled when Ray made a deal-breaker of a discovery. Until the end of his life, Nicholas Ray claimed that one day he came home and found his wife Gloria Grahame in bed with his 13-year-old son, Anthony.
Today, Grahame’s biographer claims this didn’t happen and that Nicholas Ray made up the accusation. But in 1958, eight years after Nicholas supposedly caught them red-handed, Grahame and her former stepson Anthony got back in touch and started up a full-blown adult relationship. Two years after reconnecting, the dubious lovebirds tied the knot in a wedding ceremony in Tijuana, Mexico. By this point, even Gloria and Anthony knew they were doing something risky, and they actually kept the ceremony a secret for years, but the story leaked in 1962. The revelation ignited a blaze of tabloid speculation and scandal-mongering, with widespread denouncements of the union. Almost overnight, Grahame’s fading Hollywood star turned into box office poison. The most biting blow, however, came from closer to home. Grahame’s Tijuana wedding wasn’t just tabloid fodder; it also united a bevy of her bitter ex-husbands against her. Cy Howard, her third husband, was so incensed and disturbed that he charged her with being an unfit mother and tried to win sole custody of their daughter Mariana. Likewise, Nicholas Ray also entered into a long, protracted legal battle with the star over the custody rights of their son Timothy.
It was all too much for Grahame to handle. In 1964, faced with a career on the downslide and a handful of scandals at her doorstep, Grahame suffered a massive nervous breakdown. Things got so bad that she even submitted herself to electroshock therapy to try to rid herself of her nerves. She never fully recovered, either professionally or personally. Though it had completely disastrous beginnings, Grahame’s relationship with her stepson lover Anthony Ray might actually have been her most functional. It was certainly the longest-lasting by far. The couple made it just shy of 14 years and only divorced in May 1974, right around when Grahame got her first cancer diagnosis.
In 1981, Grahame couldn’t outrun fate any longer. She became acutely sick during rehearsals for her latest performance in England, prompting her cast to rush her to the nearest hospital. While there, she got the news she’d been dreading: Grahame’s cancer was now so advanced they wanted to perform surgery immediately, but she said no. Desperate and alone, she made a bizarre decision: she called up her ex-lover Peter Turner and asked him if she could spend her little remaining time on Earth at his mother’s house in Liverpool. As strange as this request was, Turner could hardly deny it. This time of her life is reflected in Turner’s book “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” which got the Hollywood treatment in 2017. While staying at Turner’s family home and rapidly deteriorating, Grahame begged him not to tell either her family or any medical professionals about her condition. He betrayed her instantly. Terrified for her, Turner notified her family within days, and they flew to England to visit. When her children arrived, they insisted she fly back to America with them, even though Grahame, Turner, and her doctors were staunchly against it. In the end, the children won, and they transported Grahame back. On October 5th, 1981, she wouldn’t survive the night. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for more videos.
