Jennifer Jones

Women Coined The Phrase

While we were talking, Jennifer Jones got a phone call from her son.
She said, into the phone, "Dear, if it's any trouble I won't come, but shall I come and help anyway?" Then she hung up.

"I've just been uninvited to dinner," she said, grimacing.

One of the elite among the movie stars, Jennifer is the wife of producer David O. Selznick. They have one child, Mary Jennifer, seven. She has two sons from her first marriage to the late Robert Walker: Robert, Jr., 21; and Michael, 20. Both boys are studying acting in New York, and Robert is already working in Winter stock.

"Bob just broke the news to us a few days ago that he was secretly married last summer," Jennifer said. "He married a young actress, Ellie Wood. I saw her work. She's good. Very good."

Last Friday, Jennifer's latest film, "Tender Is The Night," (20th Century Fox, not her husband's) opened simultaneously at the Paramount and the Plaza theaters. Her last film was "A Farewell to Arms," four years ago. Two pictures in four years hardly makes her a working girl.

"I'm spoiled," she said. "And I like to feel I contribute something to a picture. But I can never be objective. I avoid my pictures. Never saw them. Except two."

She did go see "Duel in the Sun," because her husband had made it, and earlier, in 1943, before she knew better, she went to see "The Song of Bernadette."

"I sat behind two women," Jennifer recalled. "When it was over, one asked, 'What do you think of her'" The other said, 'She's self-pitying," and I fled in tears. It was exactly opposite what I thought I was."

Whatever she was in it she won the Academy Award as the year's best actress. It was her first major film.

She has an arrangement with 20th Century Fox which does not commit her to any picture, but she'd like to do two: One about India "because I like the country and could spend some time there," and the other, the story of Eva Peron.

"But no one is interested in doing Eva," she said. "To many she was a saint. To many others, a devil. But that makes a provocative part."

Devil or saint? Tell me, which are you?

She grinned. "How many days do you have?" she asked.

She's a trim 5'7" with large, sad brown eyes, dark hair, round face. She's not famous. She's lovely, and has great and natural charm, except when she gets wary of her words. Then she's a Hollywood actress. She didn't want to reveal her age.

"But I suppose you can find out," she said. "because I didn't start lying when I should have. Nobody told me."

She was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 2, 1919. Her parents then ran a tent show, and at ten she stated touring with them during the summers. She also sold candy and took the tickets. Her father now runs a chain of movie theaters. From Benedictine Convent she went to Northwestern for a year, then persuaded her parents to let her attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. A fellow student at the Academy was Robert Walker.

Thirteen weeks after they met they were married. In two years they had their two sons, struggled together, and managed to reach recognition together. Walker on radio, then in movies; Jennifer as a "Selznick find." They separated in 1943.

When her sons turned to the stage she told them to do anything else they possibly could unless they were positively driven to acting Was she?

"It's different with a woman," she said. "A woman can be a mediocre actress and still lead a satisfying life. Not a man. It's natural for women to act. They do it all the time. My daughter has been acting since she was born. It's amazing how even at seven she's a woman. And I know it in my own case."

But that's only two out a billion or so women.

"It's startling to read what men think of women," she said. You build strange, high walls around us. And it's so difficult for us to get over the walls."

Why get over them? Why do women have to win?

"We don't. Because if we win we lose. Once we win we're all men. How horrible without the difference. Woman coined the cry, "Vive la difference!"

"And women let men think they coined it."