In the early 1940s, Gene Tierney was one of the most luminous young stars in Hollywood, a Brooklyn-born actress with striking green eyes, a refined European education, and the kind of beauty that studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck would later call “unquestionably the most beautiful in movie history. ” But behind the glow of the Technicolor sets and the glossy magazine covers, her life was being quietly destroyed by a stranger’s careless decision one wartime evening in 1943. Tierney was born on November 19, 1920, into a wealthy, socially ambitious family in Brooklyn.
She was not running from poverty or obscurity; she had been raised in private schools and Swiss finishing academies, and her path was supposed to be a comfortable society marriage to a Yale man. But she wanted to act. As she later put it, “In my circle, you married a Yale boy after school. I wanted to be an actress.
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Her family initially resisted. On a West Coast trip, Warner Brothers wanted to sign her at seventeen, but her parents advised against it. Instead, she made her Broadway debut in 1938 in “What a Life,” in which her only task was carrying a bucket of water across the stage. A Variety critic, bewitched by her presence, declared she was “certainly the most beautiful water carrier I’ve ever seen.
” By 1940, she was the toast of Broadway, starring in “The Male Animal. ” One night, Darryl F. Zanuck was in the audience. Later, at the Stork Club, he spotted a young woman on the dance floor and told his assistant, “Forget the girl from the play.
See if you can sign that one. ” The woman was Tierney herself. He hadn’t recognized her; she possessed several distinctly different looks. She signed with 20th Century Fox.
At 20, she made her film debut in Fritz Lang’s “The Return of Frank James,” then moved through a punishing schedule of pictures. She worked with demanding directors, broke their tempers, absorbed their lessons, and grew into a confident actress. By 1943, she was appearing in major films and was pregnant with her first child, deeply happy about it. That happiness would not last.
In 1941, Tierney had eloped with Oleg Cassini, a charming Russian-Italian fashion designer and a titled count, to the horror of her family and the studio. Her father, who had managed her finances, had secretly squandered a significant portion of her savings, leaving the couple to live on her earnings. She said later that in her circle, a woman married a Yale boy after school, but she wanted to act, and she had chosen her own path. In June 1943, while pregnant, Tierney contracted rubella at the Hollywood Canteen, a club where servicemen came to mingle with celebrities.
The illness caused catastrophic congenital damage to her unborn daughter. Daria Cassini was born prematurely, weighing 3 pounds 2 ounces, deaf, partially blind due to cataracts, and severely mentally disabled. She required institutional care for the rest of her life. Howard Hughes, an old friend and former suitor who had been gently rebuffed but remained close to her, quietly paid all of Daria’s medical expenses.
Tierney never forgot his kindness. About a year later, at a tennis party, a young woman approached her, smiling, and reminded her they had met at the Hollywood Canteen. The woman then admitted she had broken a quarantine for German measles to come meet the stars. “I broke quarantine to come to the canteen to meet the stars,” she said.
“Everyone told me I shouldn’t, but I just had to go. ” Tierney stood there, stunned, and walked away without a word. She later wrote in her 1979 autobiography, “Self-Portrait,” that she wanted to hit the woman but instead turned and left. Agatha Christie, disturbed by the moral complexity of the story, later built the novel “The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side” around it.
Amid this private devastation, Tierney made the film that would define her legacy: “Laura” in 1944, directed by Otto Preminger. She played Laura Hunt, a woman the detective falls in love with before discovering she is alive. The shot of her walking through a doorway, rain-drenched, when everyone thought she was dead, became one of the most iconic frames in Hollywood history. The film was a massive critical and commercial success, and it made her a major star.
Then came “Leave Her to Heaven” in 1945, in which she played Ellen Berent, a chillingly possessive woman. It earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, though she did not win. In 1946, while filming “Dragonwyck,” she met a young Navy lieutenant with what she described as the most perfect blue eyes she had ever seen on a man. John F.
Kennedy was a charismatic World War II veteran, not yet a senator, and she was technically still married. They fell into each other anyway. They shared a particular grief: Kennedy’s sister Rosemary had been institutionalized with intellectual disabilities, just as Daria had been. Kennedy told her about Rosemary.
She understood completely. But the romance was doomed. Oleg Cassini warned her that Kennedy could never marry a divorced woman. In 1947, Kennedy broke it off, telling her she would not fit into the political life he was building.
She was devastated. Her divorce from Cassini was finalized in 1952. Later, she became engaged to Prince Aly Khan, who was going through a divorce from Rita Hayworth. But his father, the Aga Khan III, opposed the match, and the engagement was broken.
Twice she had been told the same thing: you are wonderful, but you do not fit. By 1953, her mental health was deteriorating. Diagnosed with what was then called manic depression, now understood as bipolar disorder, she began forgetting lines. She was slated to star in “Mogambo” but had to withdraw, and the role went to Grace Kelly.
While filming “The Left Hand of God” in 1955, Humphrey Bogart recognized what was happening. His younger sister had struggled with mental illness, and he knew the signs. He fed Tierney her lines quietly, without humiliating her, and warned the studio she was sick. She later said it was an effort every day not to give up.
She entered the Harkness Pavilion in New York, spent a year and a half at the Institute of Living in Hartford, and eight months at the Karl Menninger Clinic in Topeka. At Menninger, she took a job as an anonymous salesgirl at a local dress shop, folding clothes, helping customers, trying to remember how to exist as a person rather than a persona. In 1957, she stepped out onto the ledge of her mother’s apartment building, 14 floors above a New York street. She later wrote, “I felt tired, lost, and numb, but unafraid.
I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to take my own life. ” She came back inside. She underwent 27 electroshock treatments, which she later said erased significant portions of her memory. In September 1958, she returned to Hollywood, speaking with unusual directness about having had a breakdown and been in a mental sanitarium.
Fox had continued paying her salary throughout her absence, and executives, actors, and crew members hurried to welcome her home. She appeared in “Advise and Consent” in 1962, directed by Preminger. Her final feature film was “The Pleasure Seekers” in 1964, and her last screen appearance was in 1980. In 1958, she met W.
Howard Lee, a Texas oil baron who had recently divorced Hedy Lamarr, another of Hollywood’s celebrated beauties. They married in 1960, and she moved to Houston, where she described her life as preferable to her years of stardom. She became active in civic causes, helping children with intellectual disabilities. She died of emphysema on November 6, 1991, at 70, having taken up smoking decades earlier to lower the pitch of her speaking voice.
She left behind a body of work that includes two masterworks, an Oscar nomination, and a place in the National Film Registry. But her most underappreciated legacy may be her willingness to tell the truth about her illness, long before it was fashionable or safe. As she once said, “I had no trouble playing any kind of a role. My problems began when I had to be myself.
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