The Harris Curse and the Saxon Charm
I. The Jed Harris Curse
When casting about for something to watch, my habits are pretty haphazard. At home I am not usually someone who works her way steadily through a filmography. That’s something I do when attending film series and festivals, if possible. When I stumbled across The Saxon Charm from 1948, my thought process was, “OK, love Robert Montgomery, love Audrey Totter, I’ll give it a whirl.” Little did I know the vast extent of the rabbit hole that awaited me.
The Saxon Charm was directed by Claude Binyon, who on the evidence was no Alexander Hall. Then again, pace Wikipedia (who the hell is writing the classic-film entries over there?), this is not a noir, not no way not no how. It’s a drama centered on the depradations of Broadway producer Matt Saxon (Robert Montgomery)—and, in something else Wikipedia doesn’t bother to mention, it’s a remarkably lifelike portrait of Jed Harris, known in his day as “the most hated man on Broadway.” Therein lies the tale.
Jed Harris was the theatrical producer/director who gave John Barrymore a partial model for Twentieth Century, as well as provided Ben Hecht with the main character for his bluntly titled 1931 novel A Jew in Love. In his day, Harris was a Broadway titan who cemented his fame by age 28 with a string of four Broadway hits in 18 months. He produced The Royal Family, Coquette, The Front Page, and more. Women, mysteriously, flocked to him. Harris slept with other men’s wives whenever it suited him; his own wives included Stagecoach actress Louise Platt; some said Margaret Sullavan never got over him. In truth, almost none of them did, but usually for terrible reasons.
He was, of course, the product of an abusive childhood, of a household where beatings were a common occurrence. The son of Jewish immigrants, born in Austria though Harris liked to claim otherwise, his brilliance got him into Yale, where the era’s antisemitism left its mark. Harris remembered an editorial in the paper about “Jews and other scum beyond human ken.” He soon dropped out. The title of his autobiography, A Dance on the High Wire, came from his remark that being Jewish in this country was “rather like performing on the high wire in tight shoes.” What attracted him to the theater, Harris also wrote, was that it is “just about the only place in the world where you are not asked your race, your religion, your antecedents. You are only asked two questions: Can you sing? Can you dance?”
Harris had few if any scruples. He was a user and a taker, and sociopathically mean. (One story among dozens: When his 16-year-old son, the product of an affair with Ruth Gordon, stopped in a restaurant to say hi to dad, Harris told him, “You’ve got to stop bothering me.”) Indisputably gifted, Harris had a career that ping-ponged from hits to flops and back to hits, and ended with long years in the wilderness, his once-magic touch now a memory, his ability to fund shows vanished with most of his personal fortune. By the time he died in 1979, Harris was broke and had driven away nearly every friend he ever had. Obituaries noted his “sparsely attended” funeral.
But in 1948, Harris was alive, and also well, at least professionally. He’d directed the original Broadway production of The Heiress, which had just closed when The Saxon Charm hit theaters. And even if there had been little problems, like Harris so offending The Heiress’s lead actress Wendy Hiller
that she refused to go on stage if he was in the theater—oh well, you know, actors. In a clear case of “takes one to know one,” Harris called them “psychopaths” in his autobiography.The Saxon Charm started life in 1947 as a novel, and as Harris biographer Martin Gottfried put it, “the disguise was nonexistent.”
The author was Frederic Wakeman, who had written both the bestselling novel The Hucksters (dedicated to Harris—it was early days) as well as a play called Shore Leave that Harris optioned. Harris then spent months with Wakeman, asking for change after change to the play. Wakeman was hypnotized by the genius charisma and happy to drift along from office to restaurant to apartment, as they labored to turn his play into one of those Harris hits. After a while—a pretty long while—it became obvious that Harris was far more interested in having Wakeman as an acolyte than he was in producing anything. Wakeman took back his play and someone else produced it; Shore Leave was modestly successful. All this, and a great deal more, found its way into The Saxon Charm.Harris was accustomed to showing up in this or that author’s roman à clef and held his peace. But when Universal’s movie was announced, he was annoyed enough to threaten a libel suit. The lawyer told Harris, whose success with women did not stem from his looks, that being portrayed by a handsome, glamorous star like Robert Montgomery wasn’t the end of the world. Harris satisfied himself by giving a spiteful interview to The Hollywood Reporter.
I do wonder if Harris ever saw The Saxon Charm, and if he did, whether it struck him, even momentarily, as a warning, given that it not only nails his signature ability to alienate and destroy people, but also offers some bleak (and in time, accurate) speculation about how Harris would wind up.
II. The Saxon Charm
After all this lead-up, I wish I could you this is a great movie. Obviously I find it fascinating, but in truth The Saxon Charm has real problems. The pacing is slack, and the cinematography is never more than standard. The script (by director Claude Binyon) is hurt by its focus on the marriage between novelist turned playwright Eric Busch (Wakeman’s stand-in, played adequately by John Payne) and his wife, Janet (Susan Hayward. in a part based on Wakeman’s wife).
There’s a tendency in films of this era to center a movie’s stakes on young married strife. But said couples are so often dead boring. A movie like this, with so many husband-and-wife heart-to-hearts, makes you appreciate the marital arguments in a Douglas Sirk joint, or the brutally frank rows in something like the pre-code Bad Girl. The Busches’ most entertaining scene is when Janet comes home blotto and tells off Eric in front of a gaggle of her Midwestern friends. If they were going to cast Susan Hayward, so great at playing fed-up and damn near peerless at fed-up and drunk, and do it the year after Smash-Up, no less—why did no one say, “Let’s have her character drink her way through the movie”?
I suppose that to Fred Wakeman, the strain Jed Harris put on his marriage was the big deal.
To the rest of us, the big deal is Robert Montgomery and Audrey Totter. Montgomery brings the drawing-room charm of the rich playboys he played so often in the 1930s, adds the eloquence of a snide intellectual, and underneath it all, Montgomery gives Matt Saxon the icy tick-tock calculation of his serial killer in Night Must Fall. It’s an absolutely brilliant performance, peak-level Montgomery. You see why Eric falls for Saxon’s act. Matt Saxon has the lethal ability to make someone feel privileged to be in his orbit. When someone like Saxon is focused on you, you’re the most important person in the world. Until you’re not.Audrey Totter shows up, playing Saxon’s girlfriend Alma, about 15 minutes into the movie. Totter is best remembered for bad girls, but Alma is a good egg—so good you want to break the nose of anyone who would do her dirty, the only such dirty-doer in sight being Saxon. We meet her in the bar of a German restaurant where she’s waiting for Saxon and Eric, along with Janet as well as an affable, none-too-bright investor and his platinum-blonde date. It’s been a half-hour and Alma has ordered a sandwich, which she digs into with gusto. She knows her man, knows that finishing dinner with him requires a long sequence of things to go right, and they never do. Alma has taken a liking to Janet, and tries to warn her about Saxon: “He’s always had a certain contempt for people, especially for the fact that they have lives of their own to live. Even the cleverest are hooked once the Saxon charm goes to work.” And, later, after denying that she’s “his girl,” Alma says, “I wish I didn’t love him so much.”
Saxon arrives, in “charming” mode—at first. We’re about to see what happens when you don't treat a narcissist in the manner to which he feels entitled. Saxon’s favorite maitre d’ is gone; their reservation was lost; they’re seated in front of the swinging kitchen doors. The drumbeat of disaster gets louder. Saxon gets twitchy when Janet doesn’t go along with his food choices. The busboy is too loud. The stuffed cabbage is terrible, and Saxon snaps, throwing the food on the floor.
The owner scurries over. The restaurant is silent once the dishes crash, and Saxon the theater man roars into his performance. The words “Do you know who I am” are uttered not once, but twice. Bill unpaid, he makes his exit, trailing in his wake the other cast members of the Uneaten Dinner Tragedy, his final line projected to the cheap seats: “Let’s get out of this fascist pesthole!”
The perceptiveness of this scene is that the group is indeed being treated badly, but there are opportunities to salvage the evening. Saxon rejects every one. He’s incapable of de-escalation. It isn’t how his brain works. Not merely his first, his only reaction is to shove back. There’s no real violence in this movie, but there’s deep understanding of abusive behavior, and Montgomery shows it as an actor.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Harris himself had been known to throw restaurant meals on the floor. I’ll add that the person having lunch with Jed Harris on the day his timid teenage son tried to greet him was Fred Wakeman.
All my favorite scenes in The Saxon Charm involve both Montgomery and Totter. Their final showdown is a stand-up-and-cheer moment I feared would never come, and I won’t spoil it with description. But the build-up, that’s why the payoff satisfies.
Alma is a nightclub singer, and she has an audition for a swank gig, one she says proudly that she got on her own. Problem: Matt’s there. We may not realize how big a problem, though, until Alma starts to sing. Or tries to. Saxon interrupts, again and again. Montgomery does this with smooth confidence; Alma can’t object, he’s the great Matt Saxon. He poses her like a doll, tells her where to look, takes away her microphone, snarks over and over at what she is doing. Alma is a good singer, she knows cues and the music, but she’s getting rattled—Totter’s expressions, as dismay rises to near-panic, are perfection—and the few people hearing her know it, and there’s no way Saxon doesn’t know it. Deliberate sabotage? Oh yeah, it sure is, but at least Alma does get the job.
III. Toxic Genius, Faded Memories
The close model for Alma, Cinda Glenn, was also a nightclub artist, but not a singer. She was a contortionist-slash-dancer with an act that drew the crowds, and Harris. She embarked on a serious affair with him even though, like Alma, Cinda had his number, and how. The scene where Alma tells Janet to get out while she can—that may have had its origins in a conversation that Glenn had on a beach with Fred Wakeman, a talk that went to much darker places. Glenn said Margaret Sullavan had been pregnant when she married agent Lelard Hayward. She claimed that Sullavan left Harris after he’d kicked her in the stomach and knocked her downstairs, because he wanted her to have an abortion and then marry him. Wakeman, shocked, protested that Glenn couldn’t know this for sure.
“Doesn’t that sound like Jed to you?” she replied.
Jesus.
Where Cinda most closely resembled Alma was in her insistence on a degree of independence. She owned a small Madison Avenue apartment and clung to it for dear life, retreating there after arguments with Harris. Like Alma, it was Cinda who left Jed. She said the stress gave her eczema, and that she’d lose her mind if she didn’t get out.
I guess most eras believe they invented everything from sex to toothpaste, but our own age seems especially prone to this thinking. I often see writing about the “toxic white male genius” that assumes this type previously went unnoted, undiscussed, and in general was something our forebears just put up with. The Saxon Charm proves how wrong that is. People didn’t have our repetitive terms, but they knew. “The most hated man on Broadway”—that wasn’t a lighthearted description. It was a warning. Some took it, some didn’t; some emerged sadder and wiser, some didn’t escape at all.
One woman Harris loved, insofar as he was capable, was Gilda Davis, a married Florida socialite who left him when she saw Harris work himself into a frenzy over a man kicking his seat in the theater—she thought, “One day he’ll hit me.” Harris’s paramours, with notable exceptions such as Davis and Ruth Gordon, were mostly an unhappy group. The Saxon Charm has a brief scene with Heather Angel, an English actress I’ve always loved, playing Saxon’s aristocratic ex-wife Vivian. The thin, exquisite Angel gives Vivian a sense of high-strung intelligence. Vivian is based primarily on Rosamond Pinchot, who was married with two children but wanted to leave her husband for Harris. A highly accomplished woman and onetime actress, Pinchot worked for Harris on Our Town. As she moved to kiss him in front of the cast after their triumphant opening night, Harris shoved Pinchot away, and Pinchot went home to Long Island. That was a Friday night. On Sunday night, she ran a hose from her car’s exhaust and shut the garage door. She was found Monday morning.
Margaret Sullavan also died by suicide, in 1960. Louise Platt did all right post-Harris; their daughter Abigail was born after the divorce, and Platt remarried. But it was widely known, if not publicly reported until years later, that Harris had abused Platt; interviewers were told not to bring him up. Cinda Glenn came to an end so tragic I’m putting it in a footnote.
Theater is beautiful, and fleeting. There must still be people alive who saw a Jed Harris production—perhaps the original 1953 run of The Crucible, which he directed though it was poorly reviewed at the time. That turned out to be his Broadway swan song. But who, aside from diehard theater buffs (I see you out there, you can put your hands down) recalls that it was Harris who produced The Front Page and claimed he came up with its plot structure? How many attend a latter-day version of Our Town and know it was Harris, as its first director, who thought to stage the umbrellas at Emily’s funeral? Should you happen to read Haywire, by Margaret Sullavan’s daughter Brooke Hayward, or The Loveliest Girl in America, by Rosamond Pinchot’s granddaughter Bibi Gaston, it may not be unfair to conclude that the personal damage done by Harris has lived as long, or longer.
His New York Times obituary quoted Harris on theater: “The whole thing disappears like a breath of air. Nothing remains after your audience has gone. All it represents is a few moments of escape.” More than forty years after his death, the most readily available way to recall Jed Harris might not have surprised him, but he wouldn’t be pleased.
His third and last marriage was in 1959, to Beatrice “Bebe” Allen, an actress thirty years his junior who was said to resemble Cinda Glenn. At the time, Harris was in Hollywood, where he would rack up a few movie credits in the course of alienating the West Coast. He avoided mentioning his past to Allen, who was oblivious to Broadway. At some point during their union (early or late doesn’t matter, as Bebe walked out in a matter of months), they had moved into a house together. Harris was in bed upstairs, reading a newspaper, while Allen watched television downstairs. As Martin Gottfried tells it, Allen came upstairs and peeped in, saying, “Jed, I’m watching the oddest movie.”
“I don’t know what to make of it, or how to say this, but I’m so reminded—it’s uncanny—” And then she blurted it out.
“Does The Saxon Charm have anything to do with you?”
He said nothing. He held her eyes in his as he might have when considering an actress for a walk-on. Finally, evenly and coolly, he replied, “What do you think?”
Allen had nothing to say. She went back downstairs and finished watching the movie, and The Saxon Charm, she said later, was never mentioned again.
For the record: Hiller had announced she was leaving the run in a few weeks. So Harris scribbled “There is nothing so ungrateful as an English whore” on his star’s dressing-room mirror.
Martin Gottfried’s book is Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius, published in 1984. It’s out of print, but available second-hand, and it’s one hell of a good book. Gottfried’s work was invaluable in writing this, and is the source for most biographical details, along with Harris’s autobiography and obituaries.
My eyebrows rise at that barbed title, given that Harris’s Jewishness was so often invoked by his enemies. As indeed my eyebrows approach my hairline at Harris’s allegedly inspiring the look of two long-nosed greedy villains, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III and Disney’s Big Bad Wolf. The role that being Jewish played in his life would expand this overlong essay to the size of a novella; suffice it to say, there’s a lot to unpack.
In fairness to Harris, and let’s try that at least once, Wakeman’s affair with Judy Holliday surely had more to do with his eventual divorce than taking too many meetings for Shore Leave. But, go figure, the affair didn’t make it into The Saxon Charm.
Don’t read this if your heart is easily broken. Cinda did well for some years, taking up with a former Harris “angel” named Samuel Haas, who moved her into a house in Montego Bay, though they never married. She remained friends with Harris longer than most, too, although like everyone else, eventually she threw in the towel. Glenn got a $250,000 settlement after Haas died, in what Gottfried calls one of the first “palimony” cases. But, the biographer adds, she was a soft touch for friends and a bad investor, and she ran through the money. Glenn moved back to that Madison Avenue apartment she’d refused to give up. Now 59, she made what money she could by gradually selling her furniture. Cinda Glenn was found outside the door of her almost-bare apartment in September 1968, dead of starvation. “Her one request,” writes Gottfried, “was that Variety run her obituary, which they did.”
My God! Pinchot is tragic, Glenn operatically so. Makes you wonder and hope that karma smacked Harris hard in the backside when he got to the other side. What a story. As an abashed fan of both Montgomery and Totter, want to see this. Plus, a Susan Hayward I have not seen! Fantastic piece Farran!
Footnote #3. Yes. Much to unpack beginning with the birth name of Jacob Horowitz for the future producer.