INTRODUCTION

HER STORY

QUOTES

She liked champagne for lunch in her dressing room.

In the last years of her life, Miriam retreated more and more to her bedroom with its blackout shades, where she would listen to yesterday's music-- Mildred Bailey and Maurice Chevalier, especially-- read omnivorously and drink champagne. Increasingly she slept through the day, staying up all night. When bored, she telephoned friends, no matter what time of the day or night, and chattered away for an hour or more. They facetiously dubbed her The Midnight Caller, although she often phoned them at 2, 3 or 4 A.M. But if anyone dared awaken her, she would fly into a rage.

During the filming of "The Woman I Love" Miriam cried for a total of nearly 50 hours (She had to cry in four different scens.) Miriam can bring tears to her eyes at will.

Upon her mother's death she is alleged to have buried her in a fur coat, maintaining, "Mama always wanted a mink. Now she's got one."

She firmly believed that the apartment she rented at the Shoreham in Los Angeles was haunted by former tenant Ronald Colman.

Most of her guests were chosen from the world of intellect, and they were there because Miriam knew them all, had read their work, had listened to their music, had bought their paintings. They were not there because a secretary had given her a list of highbrows.

In 1932 she adopted a five-day-old boy she called Michael from the Cradle Society of Evanston, Illinois, a rather elegantly appointed private agency, which also served as a refuge for 'respectable' young pregnant women. The movie colony was able to establish connections to it through a few knowing West Coast lawyers.

Her first husband was stage actor Brandon Peters. In later years, Miriam denied ever having been married to Peters. Her adopted son Michael was to learn of the marriage only when he read her obituary.

In a 1937 letter to Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote from Hollywood that Ernest Hemingway was in town to raise money for the Spanish War Relief, and that Miriam Hopkins, in support of the effort, had been seen handing Hemingway thousand-dollar bills as she won them at the gaming tables.

She had relationships with literary figures John Gunther and Bennett Cerf (whom Sylvia Sidney married).

She spent freely on her family. She provided her mother Ellen with a Fifty-Seventh Street apartment and a generous allowance. She suggested placing Ruby, her sister, on her payroll, and when Ruby refused, Miriam instructed her lawyer to advance her sister money should an emergency arise.

Her father, Homer Hopkins, was an insurance salesman.

Even though she read palms and cards at parties for fun, Miriam relied heavily on psychich advisers. She abided by their decisions on scripts, and would avoid certain film locations, as well as addresses and hotel rooms, if they were unfavorable numerologically.

Miriam was an expert scene stealer. She knew every trick in the book and added a few of her own. In her autobiography, Bette Davis described some of Miriam's methods, "Miriam used and, I must give her credit, knew every trick in the book. I became fascinated watching them appear one by one... When she was supposed to be listening to me, her eyes would wander off into some world where she was the sweetest of them all. Her restless little spirit was impatiently waiting for her next line, her golden curls quivering with expectancy." Davis also gives the example of a two-shot (a shot in which both characters appear) which was supposed to favor them both equally. Hopkins kept easing farther and farther onto a couch so that, in order to look at her, Davis would have to turn away from the camera.

Edward G. Robinson's autobiography, All My Yesterdays, is another treasure trove of Miriam Hopkins prima-donna stories. On "Barbary Coast," Robinson complained, she was always late, would never speak a line as written (thus not giving him his proper cue), would make everybody stand around while she fussed about her costume, and would indulge in every trick she could to cause confusion and delay-- and to prove that she was, after all, the real star. Eventually, Robinson could tolerate this no longer. Breaking an unwritten rule of studio etiquette, he berated her in front of the entire company, telling her that temperament had gone out of fashion and that she was defeating her own ends by attempting to hog the camera. The scene they were about to play was one in which he was supposed to slap her. Speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, she said, "Eddie, let's do this right. You smack me now so we won't have to do it over and over again. Do you hear me, Eddie? Smack me hard!" When Robinson did as she asked, there was a resounding burst of applause from the entire cast and crew.

Some scenes between Mr. Hyde (Fredric March) and Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins) in Paramount's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" were randomly cut by local censors. The film's negative lost fourteen minutes for a June 1935 reissue, but Turner Entertainment Corporation restored it for release by MGM-UA Home Video in 1989.

She shared none of the film buff's fascination with cinema history or trivia. It was something she had been a part of, and it was not, in her opinion, worth discussing.

The infamous rape in "The Story of Temple Drake" was reduced to a fade-out and a scream, but it outraged reformers. The movie became a cause célèbre.

She was notorious for her aversion to sitting for the obligatory studio portraits and would do everything in her power to obstruct the shoot. Paramount photographer William Walling walked out of his first session with Miriam and told Publicity that they weren't paying him to take this kind of abuse.

A notorious incident involving director Anatole Livak, Miriam's third husband, and a rising glamor girl is reputed to have occured under the table at Ciro's. Undoubtedly sensing that it would become a chapter in the oral history of Hollywood, Litvak called Miriam and cautioned her not to believe what she heard.

She scolded writer John Kobal for daring to even mention one of her films in connection with Mae West. "They don't belong in the same conversation or category," she ranted.

One of her last public appearances was in 1972, when New York's Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of films made by Paramount Pictures. After sitting through a showing of her 1933 vehicle "The Story of Temple Drake," Miriam voiced her disappointment in the movies to her companion. Next, she headed to the ladies room where she found a long line. Still an impatient queen at heart, she quipped to the queued-up women, "I've suffered more than any of you. So let me in." They did.

"Becky Sharp," (1935) a retelling of William Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, was the first feature-length picture to be made in the newly developed three-color Technicolor process. Among the group of extras who appeared in a ball sequence in the film was a young woman who later became the wife of Richard M. Nixon.

During the filming of "All This And Heaven Too" Bette Davis had a brief affair with director Anatole Litvak, Miriam's husband. The two spent weekends at Litvak's beach house in Malibu (the same house where Joan Crawford, as Mildred Pierce, would allow herself to be seduced by Zachary Scott).

In one of their annual polls the Harvard students named Miriam Hopkins as "the least desirable company on a desert isle."

Old lovers were an endless fascination. When with close friends, she enjoyed reminiscing about the many men in her life, mostly concentrating on the pleasant moments and forgetting the bad ones.

Miriam could drive men to distraction. One fevered beau threatened to slit her throat in public. Another, actor John Gilbert, burst into her bedroom one morning and fired a bullet into the bedboard over her head. Instead of screaming or hidding under the covers, Miriam said, 'Oh, John!", swept out of bed and took the smoking gun from his hand.

On one occasion a minister contacted her to report that her father, whom she hadn't seen since she was seven years old, needed expensive dental care. She immediately wrote out a check. "I barely resisted writing across it, 'Daddy, here I come!'" she said.

When Hopkins was hired to costar with Davis in "The Old Maid," Bette commented, "She'll be trouble, but she'll be worth it." On the first day of shooting, Miriam showed up wearing an exact duplicate of the dress Bette wore in "Jezebel." "It was a grand entrance to end all grand entrances," said Bette, "and was calculated to make me blow my cool."

There were two men in her life to whom she was loyal: Michael, her child, and Austin Parker, her second husband and the love of her life. Even after their divorce, Miriam and Austin remained extremely close, and Miriam was at his bedside when he died in 1938. According to his wishes, instead of holding conventional funeral ceremonies, she presided over a champagne party at the mortuary where his body rested in an alcove. The highlight of the occasion was Ronald Coleman's reading of Billy's farewell letter.

When "Old Acquaintance" was completed, Hopkins packed her bags, sold her house in Beverly Hills, and moved to New York. She was through with Hollywood she said. This last experience with Bette Davis had ended her desire to work in films again. Five years later she would return, as a character actress in supporting roles.

"The perfect off-screen bitch to play the perfect on-screen bitch," Jack Warner said when Miriam landed the role of Millie Drake in "Old Acquaintance."

Miriam was the star of "Jezebel," the stage version of the tale of the tempestuous Southern Belle. She thought her contract specified that she would star in the movie version. It only said she would be "considered."

Writers on Miriam's pictures were bombarded by notes suggesting alterations in plot and dialogue. They called her Helpful Hopkins behind her back. Many directors were overwhelmed by her suggestions-- which, when rejected, could cause Miriam to throw a tantrum that ended with her stalking off the set and retreating to her beach house until whatever displeased her had been rectified.

Like Myrna Loy, Bette Davis and Margaret Sullavan, Miriam rejected the role of the spoiled, flighty millionairess and runaway bride in "It Happened One Night." Claudette Colbert got the part and would pocket the Oscar for Best Actress.

During much of her later life her existence was made more comfortable by two black manservants, who were friends as well as employees. In New York there was Perry. Whenever she arrived in Manhattan for any period of time, she would call him, and he would turn in his notice and come back to work for her. In Los Angeles there was Charles.

Hopkins was one of the actresses who auditioned to portray Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, having one advantage that no other leading lady had: she was a native Georgian. However she was considered too old and did not get the part, which went to Vivien Leigh. Miriam was the choice of readers in polls conducted by the New York Daily News and Photoplay.

Miriam has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for motion pictures at 1701 Vine Street, and one for television at 1708 Vine Street.

The inscription on her gravestone reads, "Goodnight Sweet Princess and Flights of Angels Sing Thee to thy Rest."