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"Mad as Hell." Director Kazan and many another of Barbara's friends in New York urged her to stay away from pictures. "She was not a commodity, a can of peas," says Kazan. "She was an actress." But Actress Bel Geddes had at last been granted a wish completely on her own terms. She was not to be turned off. "I wanted desperately to be a movie star," she admits today. She went to the coast determined, often quite touchily (as in the matter of dressing rooms), to be treated like a movie star. The one thing she could not, or would not, do was to behave like a movie star.
Hollywood has a name for such actresses. It calls them "sensitive." For one reason or another, a "sensitive actress" will refuse to do a striptease, or be hit by a custard pie, or perform other trifling tasks often deemed necessary to her art. Helen Hayes had been an outstanding sensitive in her brief flings at Hollywood. Barbara was plainly another. She met all the requirements of the star's life with open rebellion. Even the barbecue grill at her home annoyed her because it was so typically Hollywood. Besides, she says, "I hated being under contract, hated always being told what to do next."
Hollywood's hard-working hours gave Barbara little chance to see her baby. Her husband Carl's was but one of the voices urging her on with advice and suggestion. Some of the advice was probably good, but under the avalanche of expert opinion her own confidence wilted. "The self-assurance she had on the stage just vanished," says one of her best friends on the coast.
At one point, simply to avoid the incessant heckling of makeup men who complained about the difficulties of shading her "nipple" nose, Barbara went to a plastic surgeon and had it bobbed. "It hurt," she said, "like the devil." The Hollywood payoff came when R.K.O.'s new boss Howard Hughes declared that Barbara had "no sex appeal." "That," said Barbara, "made me mad as hell." After 2½ years and four pictures, she and the studio parted company. "I was fired," is the way Barbara puts it.
She stayed on the coast for another 14 months, got small parts (at $35,000 each) in two pictures (Panic in the Streets and the current Fourteen Hours) with 20th Century-Fox. Then she quit. Last fall, after a brief jaunt in summer stock, she went back to Broadway and the stage.
"Something Important." Some critics argue that Actress Bel Geddes was a downright flop in pictures. The fact is that she was neither a success nor a failure. As the daughter in Mama, Barbara did well enough to be nominated for an Oscar.† She was distinctive in none of her pictures, but in none was she disastrous. Like a diamond in the wrong setting, she seemed simply to have lost the special radiance that marked her on the stage. In the proper setting, the radiance was quick to return.
New York's critics gave every sign of wanting to welcome Barbara home with loud huzzas when she came back to Broadway last fall in John Steinbeck's gauntly Saroyanesque play, Burning Bright. But in the face of Steinbeck's dreary obscurities, the best most of them could muster was a cordial hello. Last month, when Barbara at last rode into town on a good play, the huzzas were unanimous.