Home >  A & E >  Books

'Gloria Stuart -- I Just Kept Hoping' by Gloria Stuart with Sylvia Thompson

Gloria Stuart’s comeback coming up roses

Thursday, August 26, 1999

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Gloria Stuart -- I Just Kept Hoping By Gloria Stuart with Sylvia Thompson Little, Brown $24.95

In her autobiography, actress Gloria Stuart reveals that she wrote her Academy Award acceptance speech one sleepless night.

She thanked director James Cameron in one variation. In another, she joked: “When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.”

But she never got to deliver the lines. Kim Basinger won the Oscar for her supporting role in “L.A. Confidential” and Stuart, wearing a blue Escada gown and a $20 million necklace, smiled for the cameras. “Titanic” had given her career new life, but it wouldn’t bring her an Academy Award.

The actress’ life is as interesting as anything Cameron invented for his fictional heroine Rose in “Titanic.” Stuart played the older version of Kate Winslet’s character, the one who takes us back to Titanic before its fateful meeting with an iceberg.

Now 89, Stuart made 42 movies in a seven-year period. She and her second husband, writer Arthur Sheekman, traveled around the world -- exhausting their savings in the process -- and socialized with the likes of Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart (who slapped his third wife around) and Ira Gershwin.

While it’s admirable that Stuart chose her daughter, Sylvia Thompson, as her co-author, a writer more accustomed to Hollywood biographies might have been a better collaborator and disciplinarian. Thompson is a writer, but she specializes in cookbooks and gardening books.

Stuart, for one thing, favors exclamation points. I counted four on a single page. Four! The early chapters, especially, are not very well organized, and transitions occasionally are bumpy. And what editor let the following sentence slip by?

“About a year after Gordon and I got married, as the result of a botched abortion, I developed a very dangerous leg infection, was hospitalized, and Mama was sent for.” Now, I’m sure they didn’t get married because of a botched abortion, but that’s the way the sentence reads.

Stuart (who changed her name from Stewart, thinking the six-letter version looked better on a marquee) married her college sweetheart, divorced him and longed to be a theater actress but ended up on the big screen. When she later moved to New York, she was seen as a “tainted” movie star; today, such names are lured to Broadway to help sell tickets.

The blue-eyed blonde starred opposite Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Jimmy Cagney, Boris Karloff, Shirley Temple and Dick Powell and worked with directors James Whale and John Ford. Speaking of the legendary Ford, she says, he “never gave any noticeable direction to his actors -- at least not the two films I made for him.”

It’s “Titanic” that is freshest in readers’ minds, of course, and Stuart was offered $10,000 a week for a guaranteed 3 1/2 weeks to play Old Rose, as she calls the character.

Stuart has only words of praise for Cameron, whose attraction to actress Suzy Amis was evident and who, it turns out, rewrote the ending of the movie.

“In the original climax scene we shot in Halifax, Bill Paxton, Lewis Abernathy, Nicholas Cascone, Suzy Amis and the Russian captain discover me approaching the railing, the fabulous diamond in my hand, and rush me as I threaten, ‘Stay back or I’ll throw it!’ Then followed a scene where I admonish Paxton, let him hold the diamond, then retrieve it slowly and carefully, and drop it overboard.”

Months after the picture wrapped, Cameron (wisely) decided that it would be more powerful if Rose threw the necklace into the sea without any witnesses. So Stuart was summoned for one more day of shooting -- she forgot to remove the red polish she wore on her toes, which added a nice touch to the scene.

Stuart wonders what might have happened if half of her performance had not been cut in the editing room. And she confesses that she might have been responsible for the tie the night of the Screen Actors Guild awards. She and Basinger shared the honors for supporting actress.

Stuart filled out her ballot, placed it on her desk -- and forgot to mail it. “Of course the guild isn’t telling whether the vote was truly a tie or just close. And we’ll never know!”

There’s that exclamation point again!