Gone with the Wind producer David O Selznick was the most powerful man in the movies when he launched the career of Jennifer Jones – then married her. Here, in an extract from her new book “West of Eden”, Jean Stein weaves together first-person accounts from Jones’s friends and relatives with historical documents to tell a tragic saga from Hollywood’s golden age.  Memo from David O Selznick [Leading producer in Hollywood] to Whitney Bolton, director of advertising and publicity for Selznick, September 10 1941:  I would like to get a new name for Phylis Walker. I had a talk with her and she was not averse to a change. Normally I don’t think names very important, but I do thin[k] Phylis Walker a particularly undistinguished name… I don’t want anything too fancy, and I would like to get at least a first name that isn’t carried by a dozen other girls in Hollywood. I would appreciate suggestions.  Memo from David O Selznick to Katharine Brown and Whitney Bolton:  To: Miss Brown, Mr. Bolton, January 8 1942  Where the hell is that new name for Phylis Walker? Personally, I would like to decide on Jennifer and get a one syllable name that has some rhythm to it and that is easy to remember. I think the best synthetic name in pictures that has been recently created is Veronica Lake.  BOB WALKER [one of Jones's two sons with Roert Walker]: In her later years, Mother would say to my brother, Michael, and to me, about our dad, “Why in heaven’s name did I ever leave that fellow?” But David had the keys to the kingdom, one that Dad wasn’t privy to. Mother was new and fresh and looking for other adventures, and to her Dad was probably limited. Neither Mom nor Dad were very worldly. But Selznick lived and breathed Hollywood glamour, and the kings and queens of Hollywood bowed at his feet. After Gone with the Wind, there wasn’t anybody who had more power in Hollywood. And he discovered a lot of glamorous women – or women that he helped make glamorous, or helped convince the public that they were glamorous.  DANIEL SELZNICK [son from David O Selznick's first marriage]: S N Behrman [a playwright and screenwriter] said that every relationship my father had was a Pygmalion relationship. It was that way with Ingrid Bergman and Joan Fontaine and Rhonda Fleming and all the others.  All you have to do is look at our home movies and see the shy, trembling, stuttering creature that he married. Each year Jennifer got a little more confidence. Each year she realised she was really naturally beautiful. She began to wear different kinds of clothes. She began to do her hair differently. She began to wear different kinds of jewellery. Slowly, Galatea emerges. But that was not the girl that my father married.  I was on the set of Duel in the Sun for the scene outside the McCanles Ranch at night, filmed on the soundstage at my father’s studio in Culver City, with all these wonderful lanterns hanging outside the façade of the house. Duel in the Sun represents a kind of apotheosis of David’s fantasy of Jennifer. At one point during the filming, he had her go to some place outside of Tucson and crawl across sharp pebbles so that her knees got completely bloodied. In 110-degree heat. And she was prepared to do whatever was required.  But Jennifer and David’s relationship was very turbulent. Will we ever know how many suicide threats she made? Because if she left suicide notes, they would have been burnt by you know who. He was protecting his own ass, if you will excuse the expression. If she killed herself, the headlines would have said she left a suicide note blaming David Selznick. Imagine his fears that this woman, whose life he had transformed for better or for worse, might take her own life.  BOB WALKER: Mom and David moved into the house at 1400 Tower Grove Road when he married Mom in 1949. But while Mother was enjoying her garden parties and burgeoning career, thanks to her new husband, Dad was an alcoholic and he was getting into trouble. In 1948 MGM had sent him to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Unfortunately, the studio decided after only four and a half months of treatment, “Nope, we’ve got to have him back to do this movie.” Of course it was premature.  MGM still wanted him to be the fair-haired boy so they could continue casting him in lover boy parts as the romantic lead. They put him in Song of Love and One Touch of Venus. It wasn’t until he played Burt Lancaster’s evil brother in 1951, in Vengeance Valley, that he played a villain. And then he played Bruno in Strangers on a Train. He took it all so seriously. It worried me a great deal.  I used to play with this game made from a box with handles on each side, and you would use the handles to manipulate a steel ball through a labyrinth that had numbered holes along the path. The point was to keep the ball from falling in the hole. Less than a year before Dad died, I started playing the game as if it would determine how long he would live. If the ball fell in the hole marked 30, then Dad had 30 days left to live. And I would dream at night that he was lying in a white coffin, all dressed in white. I would wake up and go check to see if he was OK, squeeze his feet.  Apparently Dad was in bed one afternoon and wasn’t feeling all that great. Dad’s shrink, Benjamin Hacker, came to see if he could help him calm down. The shrink gave him an injection of something like sodium amytal. It was an accident. In those days, I don’t think they were trained enough to know that you don’t give a serious depressant to someone dead drunk. He died in 1951. He was 32.  DANIEL SELZNICK: When Robert Walker died, the pressure grew because David suddenly had responsibility for the children of this woman that he’d fallen in love with. He did his best to keep the publicity down. But to say that my father asserted himself to manage the public perception for the boys’ sake is a cover to make him look good. I have no question about it. I’m not looking forward to seeing this in print, but it’s the truth. Let’s be honest with each other, it’s horribly damning. He was so selfish, so needful to protect his own reputation.  STEPHEN SONDHEIM [composer and lyricist of West Side Story]: I was travelling in Europe for the first time, and John Huston took pity on me and gave me the job of clapper boy on [his 1953 film] Beat the Devil. I was unpaid and thrilled with the experience, but I had to leave two weeks into the shooting when my money ran out. I knew Jennifer Jones not at all, but I do recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square of Ravello, rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but below it she was tearing her napkin into shreds. This was not in the script.  DANIEL SELZNICK: Jennifer felt that her marriage to my father hadn’t, in some people’s eyes, been validated, especially by David’s mother, Florence Sachs Selznick, who was a tough, funny Jewish mother, maternal, quite loving, but very old-fashioned. So one of the reasons she was so keen to get pregnant was to give Mother Selznick a new grandchild, to take the pressure off. I think Jennifer got pregnant twice and had two miscarriages. When Mary Jennifer was born in 1954, I think David’s life became richer and sweeter. He watched her growing up with endless fascination and paternal love.  DON BACHARDY [an artist]: Christopher Isherwood and I first met Jennifer in January 1955. We lived over on Mesa Road in Santa Monica, and Truman [Capote] was staying with David and Jennifer. He came over for a long, long lunch and afterward suggested that I drive him to David and Jennifer’s so that I could meet her. So we went over, but Jennifer wasn’t back yet. Truman said, “Well, we’ll wait for her.” So we did. Jennifer came home and wanted us to see her new baby, Mary Jennifer, in her crib.  BROOKE HAYWARD [actress, married to Dennis Hopper in the Sixties]: You can see how Mary Jennifer might have ended up being disturbed. By the time she was seven, it seemed that Jennifer had lost interest in her. I’d known Jennifer and David forever.  In 1961, within several weeks of my marrying Dennis Hopper, our house in LA burnt down, and the Selznicks took us in. Jennifer never, ever appeared before six o’clock at night. Almost every night we’d have dinner together up in the main house: David, me, the two children, maybe Dennis, and Mary Jennifer. And every single night, at six o’clock sharp, in would come Jennifer in her jodhpurs and riding boots and with a whip, having just walked up and down the hill in front of the house.  And this was the first time she would see her daughter all day. Jennifer would appear for about 10 minutes, swishing the whip against her boots, and then she would go upstairs. She never left the house during the day. She had yoga lessons, she had massages, she had her hair done every day, she had clothes brought and taken away.  For years after we lived with David and Jennifer, Dennis and I would be invited to their parties, which all of Hollywood attended. Jennifer would appear for the first time at least two and a half hours after dinner had started, in the most gorgeous evening dress you’ve ever seen. She would walk the length of the room, go to every table, shake hands and kiss everybody, and then disappear. She would come back later in a second dress and then disappear again. She never sat down. We’d have coffee in the living room and she would appear in a third dress. She never wore fewer than three dresses in one evening.  DENNIS HOPPER [actor and director, made his debut opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)]: I have a very different take on David Selznick from the rest of the world. He was broke by then, which I didn’t know till later. So he had a lot of time and he would spend a lot of it with me. He was a big man who was very funny and very quiet and chose his words very well. And he was very, very amenable. He wasn’t an overpowering figure, you know, but somebody who really wanted to give advice and help me.  He gave me my first chance to direct. He gave me around $500 to do a little film of Mary Jennifer. We went down to the beach, as I remember, probably Malibu. It was about 20 minutes, maybe a half-hour long, a film of Mary Jennifer at the beach, making a sandcastle, playing in the water, somebody reading a story to Mary Jennifer. It was the first time I directed anything.  LAUREN BACALL [actress who starred in The Big Sleep (1946) opposite future husband Humphrey Bogart]: We were all crazy about Jennifer, but we saw the flaws. We always thought she was a little nutty. I don’t think I ever told her how to be a better wife or mother. She went through a period when she was in Switzerland, and with a shrink that she felt she needed, and it was quite obvious that she wasn’t there for her children for a while. It became more than that. Dr Meier, the guy who was her analyst, also became her lover.  When David’s mother died, in 1959, she was in Switzerland and she did not come back. Knowing how close David was to his mother, you know, I felt that was a bad move. David really needed her and she wasn’t there. So the fact is, she wasn’t a wife. She had the role but refused to play the part.  BOB WALKER: Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim rented the house next door. They had this incredible Fourth of July party in 1963 where she invited the Byrds to play. It was wall-to-wall young and interesting people like Terry Southern, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, great writers, actors, directors, and artists. Bob Dylan’s kids were always over. Richard Pryor’s kids were friends with our kids, the whole thing. We were all drinking Lafite Rothschild 1959 by the caseload and smoking all the best Michoacán. Our house had a wonderful sloping shingled roof and at the intermission, the Byrds came over to hang out on the roof, along with Fonda and Hopper and whomever, puffing away, looking at the stars and enjoying life. We were all feeling celebratory, like cosmic warriors.  DANIEL SELZNICK: My father got angrier as he grew older, because he was more and more frustrated by his inability to have the level of control over his own career that he used to have. Nothing was working for him. Toward the end of my father’s life, he managed to be in New York quite a bit of the time. He was living at the Waldorf Towers. Mary Jennifer was living with him, with her nanny Emily Buck in tow. And Mary Jennifer was quite happy there. She and David had a very close relationship.  Meanwhile Jennifer was often in India on various spiritual journeys. Jennifer, all her life, had sought spirituality.  My father was still on Benzedrine. He was addicted to it. And he was smoking three to four packs of Kent cigarettes a day. He was with his lawyer when he died in 1965. He had gone to his office to discuss a pending deal, I’m not sure for what. He was only 63.  I flew the next day to LA to see Mary Jennifer at Tower Grove. She had no idea that David had any physical problems. I’d been talking with Jennifer for a couple of hours when Mary Jennifer came into the living room, her face so tear stained. She had been given some sort of sedation, and she was almost unable to talk.  BOB WALKER: After David died, my mom began an affair with another shrink. I think his last name was Newton. She called him Fig as a term of endearment. It may have been something there that went wrong that caused her to go over the edge. Mother tried a couple of times to commit suicide. That time she was near Malibu at Point Dume, on the beach, but I don’t remember the details.  DON BACHARDY: You know that attempt to drown herself in the ocean? Chris and I were very shocked and dismayed. Chris wrote her a charming postcard saying, “Jennifer dear, next time you go swimming, won’t you invite us to go with you?” She loved that and immediately had us to dinner, to reassure us that she wasn’t feeling suicidal. She was very embarrassed by all the fuss and the headlines. She wanted to assure us that she wouldn’t be silly again. I think she just probably got depressed. As we all do.  “Love at first analysis turns to charity”, from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner:  When Norton Simon met Jennifer Jones, it was their mutual “profound involvement” in psychiatry that attracted them to one another – rather than her obvious beauty and fame, or his obvious wealth. They “didn’t connect” on the first date, at a small Los Angeles party, she recalls, because “Norton was preoccupied with his art project”. A renowned collector, Simon founded the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. “On the second date, however, I brought along my psychoanalyst Milton Wexler to look him over,” she says with a grin. “I was gold-digging for a project I was working on, [Wexler’s] Hereditary Disease Foundation.” Later, Simon brought his own psychoanalyst into the budding romance, to assess Jennifer. They were married three weeks later – with a prenuptial agreement. “Norton said to me, 'I’m a crook and you’re a crook. What do you want?’ ”  WALTER HOPPS [an art dealer and museum director]: When Jennifer Jones and Norton Simon were married in 1971 they immediately established a new residence at 22400 Pacific Coast Highway, just south of the Malibu Colony, in a contemporary house with the ocean lapping against the sand.  Norton’s was a whole modern mythology, dependent on will and a kind of irrational act in the face of the total absurdity of nothingness. But eventually style and gesture and how things were seen to be done became a concern of his. The notions associated with the voracious and megalomaniacal wilfulness of the earlier robber barons – Mellon, Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller – hooked up with Simon so that he was both something new and a reincarnation of something old.  JUDY SIMON [the wife of Donald Simon, one of Norton Simon's two sons from his first marriage]: Norton was very competitive by nature. He was very critical all the time of his two sons, Bob and Don, whom I later married. Don said it wasn’t bad until they came into adulthood. He saw the boys as competitors, not sons. Which was bizarre, because they were so far from being competitors: one, Bob, was a poet who always carried a volume of Emily Dickinson with him, and Don, his interest was in international relations.  JOAN WILLENS BEERMAN [a psychoanalyst]: In 1969, Bob shot himself in the closet above the bedroom where he and his wife, Sylvia, slept. Blood began dripping down on the bed and that’s how she found him. She told me herself. She was nine months pregnant. It was so sad. He was about 28, maybe 30. He felt that he couldn’t be the kind of father to this child that he wanted to be. That’s the legacy of Norton. Both the boys were so sweet. Two guys with a sensibility that wasn’t equipped to take his berating. They were so demeaned by him.  MARIN HOPPER [Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper's daughter]: When I came with my mom to visit Norton and Jennifer’s house in Malibu, I remember seeing Mary Jennifer. I knew her very well from when I was a child. I looked up to her. I’d always admired her just because she was older than me and she seemed cool. I was going to say, “Hey, you’re here in your new house, your mom just got married, you know, starting over.” And then I just saw that she was covered in these thorns, and I thought, “Wow.” When you’re a child, you don’t know why, but you sense disaster. And she was completely unravelled.  She was wearing a black cashmere sweater, jeans, and these really divine cashmere socks. I remember touching her feet because I thought her socks looked so fabulously soft. But she had those stickers that you get from a plant, like donkey’s tails, the little buds that get stuck – thorns, I guess. She was covered in them. And I thought, “Are you all right? Is everything OK?” And she said, “I’ve had this terrible day, I’ve had, oh my God, I’ve had this terrible day. I haven’t been feeling well.”  She had gone on a walk in the hills. I said, “Were you walking without your shoes?” and she said, “I went hiking without shoes.” She had taken her shoes off to go hiking in the mountains. I said, “You’ve got this stuff in your socks, and they’re so beautiful, the socks! Why would you want to walk without your shoes and ruin your socks?” And she said, “I’m very angry with my mother.”  FABIENNE GUERIN [friend of Mary Jennifer Selznick]: I’d never seen anybody fight with their mother the way they did. I mean, I’d lip off, and my mother would whack me, or I’d get a spanking for being naughty. But Mary Jennifer would disappear into her room with claw marks on her from Jennifer. And big Jennifer often wouldn’t come to dinner because she had battle scars. I mean, they were at each other physically. I never saw it happening, I just saw the aftermath. I’d sit in Mary Jennifer’s room waiting for her to come back from her mother’s room.  She’d come back out, and her hair would be all dishevelled, and then we wouldn’t see Jennifer that night for dinner. She’d have invited people for dinner, they’d arrive, and she wouldn’t come out. I discovered years later that before little Jennifer was born, David idolised big Jennifer. She was the ultimate, she was everything for him, and he worshipped her, loved her, adored her. Then Mary Jennifer was born, and the love shifted. He was taking Mary Jennifer to Cannes and to New York, he was bringing her presents back, and big Jennifer was just not around. So I think Jennifer loathed Mary Jennifer, because Mary Jennifer took away her husband.  BOB WALKER: I think Mary Jennifer had very high expectations, just like a lot of people, but I think her life just turned into a huge disappointment and frustration. She was, you know, so enamoured of her mother, and so in awe of her mother, and wanted to be like her. She was a very pretty girl, but not movie star pretty. Nowadays, she’d be hired because they hire people that look real. But she got very self-destructive. She couldn’t handle being young and almost beautiful.  DR BEATRIZ FOSTER [a Los Angeles-ased psychiatrist]: Mary Jennifer came to me through Jennifer’s therapist, Milton Wexler. When Mary Jennifer turned out to be very crazy, he sent her to me. Mary Jennifer was with me for two and a half years, and she was a real spoilt brat. She got everything she wanted, and she was a very unhappy child. I think she was very bipolar.  Mary Jennifer wanted more than anything to have a relationship with Jennifer, but there was a lot of competitiveness there and that didn’t make it easy.  She had this habit of going to high-rises, even walking on the roof, and together we tried to figure out her obsession with high places. As a psychiatrist, I’ve known a lot of people who go up onto roofs. It’s a way of contemplating the idea of death. I said to Mary Jennifer, “One day the wind is going to be very hard and it will throw you over,” but she said, “I’m a very strong woman.”  One very stormy day, after I’d gotten back from a vacation, Mary Jennifer didn’t come to her hour. And the next thing I knew I had a call from the morgue. Mary Jennifer’s mother was in Dallas because her father was dying in a hospital there. I called Norton and said to him, “There’s a mess here. The people from the morgue called me and told me she’s dead.” And Norton said, “Beatriz, don’t take this personally. You’re talking to somebody who had a son that did the same thing.” I said, “But I take it very personally.”  At about three or four in the morning, Jennifer called and said, “Oh my God, Beatriz, what you must be going through.” And then we talked for a while. The fact that she would think about me in a situation like that, I’ll never forget that.  I remember calling the morgue and asking if I could view the body. The guy said to me, “Lady, wake up. She fell 22 stories, how much do you think we have?” It was horrible. I had to go through all her clothes and all her stuff. I took them to my house, where Norton and Jennifer collected everything.  I remember how windy it was the day Mary Jennifer died. When I’d seen that her time for the appointment had come and she wasn’t there, I looked out and saw the wind and thought to myself, “There goes Mary Jennifer.” Those California winds, they’ll blow you away.  Extracted from West of Eden by Jean Stein, published on February 4 by Jonathan Cape at £20, © Jean Stein 2016. To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Hollywood mogul David O Selznick plucked Jennifer Jones from obscurity and made her a star. But at what price?