Still, she’s tough enough for you to wonder if the titular iron mistress is Bowie’s knife or his lady. He didn’t know how to write.” (She was referring to James R Webb, whom she said she tried to get fired from the project). On this picture I think the author couldn’t write enough though for my character. Virginia blamed the writing of The Iron Mistress more than the director: “I liked Buzz a lot. He was capable of a quality Western, as he would later show – Fort Dobbs with Mayo in 1958 was a minor picture but pretty darn good – but neither of his other oaters with Mayo – The Iron Mistress or the 1957 The Big Land – was in the ‘really good Western’ category – partly, I’m afraid, because of Ladd. Douglas was a director who’d do what was handed him and he was the first to admit that not all the pictures were great. It’s a carriages-and-crinoline yarn set in New Orleans, with Alan Ladd an unconvincing Jim Bowie. Once again, The Iron Mistress was no great work of art – though it was popular. Her next Warners Western was in 1952, this time directed by Gordon Douglas. I wasn’t an ingénue.” When you watch her shooting it out with nasty Morris Ankrum in Colorado Territory or with a rifle in Along the Great Divide, you agree! Anything that was physical, I enjoyed it. She said, “I wanted to do everything kind of gutsy and tough. She was a tough cookie riding along with the men and ready to use a firearm if needs be. It’s just a little spat but he was always fussing and he wasn’t pleasant.”īut in both these Westerns Virginia was not just some saloon gal or docile wagon trainer. It wasn’t actually Walsh’s greatest work, though it has its moments, and Kirk Douglas, who was new to the genre, wasn’t the easiest colleague – Douglas himself said in a later book, “I was not a nice person to work with in those days.” Virginia agreed: “He was hard to work with. Virginia’s second Western was also with Walsh, Along the Great Divide in 1951. You always just got it right on the first time. She said of Walsh, in an interview with C Courtney Joyner in The Westerners: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers, “He was a wonderful man and he was a great director.” She added, “He trusted me he never said much to me either.” And, “Raoul was so good in his direction. She went to Warners, where Walsh didn’t find her difficult at all. However, in 1948 she fell out with director Howard Hawks on A Song is Born (rumor had it because she rejected his advances), Hawks spread the word that she was ‘difficult’, and Goldwyn let her go. She was regarded as a classic voluptuous Hollywood beauty and it was said that she “looked like a pin-up painting come to life.” Apparently, the Sultan of Morocco declared her beauty to be “tangible proof of the existence of God.” She did really well as an unsympathetic gold-digger under William Wyler in Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 (which was the highest-grossing film since Gone With the Wind) and for Norman McLeod in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty the following year. She’d been spotted by a talent scout on Broadway and signed by Samuel Goldwyn, who gave her a big build-up and some great roles. It was a superb performance, in one of the great classics of the genre – from that first shot of her washing her hair when she looks up at Joel McCrea in close-up. She was a natural.”Īnyone who watches Mayo as James Cagney’s promiscuous wife in White Heat will agree about her acting talent, and Western-lovers will think immediately of her Colorado Carson in Colorado Territory, Walsh’s remake of his 1941 noir High Sierra. Raoul Walsh called her his favorite actress.
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