A weekly feature in which my five-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier. There are five categories on the Walk of Fame: motion pictures, television, radio, music and theater but Charlie tends to favor the movies.
As a classic movie lover, I’ve always felt that talented and gorgeous Paulette Goddard has been given short shrift. If she’s talked about at all today, it’s often in connection with her long-time lover Charlie Chaplin. Wait, is the jury back on whether those two were actually married? I remember a time when that seemed very much in doubt but many sources today seem to claim with confidence that Goddard and Chaplin were married (in secret) in Canton, China, some time in 1936. Neither of them ever commented publicly on their relationship status, other than Chaplin referring to Paulette as “my wife” at the premiere of The Great Dictator in October 1940 (slip of the tongue?). I don’t blame them for wanting to be secretive, especially since Goddard had moved into Chaplin’s Beverly Hills home long before the alleged wedding, but despite the confusion, most newspapers reported that the couple was granted a Mexican divorce in 1942.
So much about Paulette Goddard seems mired in uncertainty based on the various tales that have been spun over the years — even her real name and birth year. Some say it was Marion Levy, others add a Pauline in there. The year of her birth ranges from 1905 (possible) to 1914 (no way) but most accounts today say she was born on June 3, 1910 in Queens (or Manhattan) so let’s go with that! Her parents separated when she was very young and Goddard did not see her father again, Jewish cigar manufacturer Joseph Levy, for several decades. When she was a teenager, her uncle introduced her to theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld and she made her stage debut in 1926 as a dancer in Ziegfeld’s No Foolin’, using the name Paulette Goddard for the first time. She appeared in a few more New York productions before briefly marrying Edgar James, the wealthy owner of a lumber company, and then hightailing it to Hollywood where she began appearing as an extra in films.
The actress became a Goldwyn Girl in 1932 but had some altercations with Sam Goldwyn and left the studio. She did a series of small roles in Hal Roach films before she met and began a relationship with the legendary Charlie Chaplin. He recognized her potential and cast Paulette as the orphan girl in his 1936 classic Modern Times. Goddard received excellent reviews and Chaplin made plans to feature her in his next film. In the meantime, she appeared in two 1938 films, The Young in Heart with Janet Gaynor and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Dramatic School with two-time Oscar winner Luise Rainer.
But it was the actress’s next film, George Cukor’s The Women, the brilliant all-female MGM film based on the Clare Boothe Luce play, that features my favorite Paulette Goddard performance, even though it’s far from her biggest role.
As Miriam Aarons, Goddard doesn’t even show up until more than midway through the film when several of the stars of this glittering ensemble (which included Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine) head to Reno to divorce their philandering husbands. While it’s never stated explicitly in the script, I’m not alone in assuming that Goddard’s Miriam was one of the few Jewish movie characters from that era, at least one of the few without a shawl and a Yiddish accent. When Rosalind Russell’s deliciously awful Sylvia Fowler arrives at the Reno ranch to split from her hubby, she quickly discovers that Goddard’s Miriam is the woman Howard Fowler is leaving her for. The catfight that ensues may make modern-day feminists grimace, but it’s a glorious scene. Goddard reportedly got a permanent scar as a result of Russell chomping down on her leg in the scene, but she took it good-naturedly, and the two were friends in real life. “You made Howard pay for what he doesn’t want. I make him pay for what he wants.” Oy, and yet every second Goddard is on screen in this film is sheer heaven.
Just prior to The Women, Paulette Goddard came extremely close to getting a role that would have dramatically changed her life, her career, and how she would be forever be remembered. While the infamous Search for Scarlett O’Hara involved nearly every actress in Hollywood, for much of that time Paulette was the leading contender. She was the only potential Gone With the Wind star who merited a Technicolor screen test and several columnists jumped the gun and announced that she was signed for the role. And she most likely would have been if Vivien Leigh hadn’t suddenly appeared on the scene on the arm of producer David O. Selznick’s brother Myron as David was busy burning down old sets for the burning of Atlanta scenes.
While it’s hard today to contemplate anyone but Leigh in that role, I do believe Goddard would have been a great choice — infinitely more suited for the role than some of the other more acclaimed contenders such as Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. I can imagine Paulette’s chemistry with Clark Gable (indeed, the two dated for a while some time later and they obviously made a stunning couple). I’ve watched Goddard’s screen tests and she’s fantastic — in one test of a scene between Scarlett and Mammy, Goddard does both parts — and she’s almost as good as Hattie McDaniel! Some reports claim that Selznick hesitated because Goddard couldn’t come up with a marriage license to prove she was married to Chaplin. That would be ironic since at that time Vivien Leigh was carrying on a hot and heavy romance with Laurence Olivier while both were still legally married to other people.
Paulette was understandably devastated when she was passed over for that role of a lifetime but her movie career was still going strong. After The Women, she starred in The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers with Bob Hope and then appeared in Chaplin’s next movie, The Great Dictator, playing her second Jewish character after Miriam Aarons. A bunch of interesting films followed including Second Chorus (1940) with Fred Astaire, Pot O’Gold (1941) with James Stewart, Hold Back the Dawn (1941) with Charles Boyer and Olivia de Havilland, Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942) in which she had a fun musical number, and So Proudly We Hail (1943), a wonderful movie about military nurses during World War II. Goddard starred opposite Claudette Colbert and Veronica Lake in that film and received her only Oscar nomination for her role as Lt. Joan O’Doul (she lost to Greek actress Katina Paxinou in For Whom the Bell Tolls).
Later roles included Kitty (1945), Jean Renoir’s The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), Cecil B. DeMille’s Unconquered (1947), and Alexander Korda’s version of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1947). Goddard worked only sporadically in the 1950s, appearing on television as well, including a 1955 TV version of The Women in which she played her old rival Sylvia Fowler. She attempted a movie comeback in 1964 in Time of Indifference with Rod Steiger and Claudia Cardinale but it turned out to be her last appearance on the big screen. After marrying and divorcing actor Burgess Meredith, Goddard’s final husband was German novelist Erich Maria Remarque who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. They remained married until Remarque’s death in 1970. By then, Paulette was a wealthy socialite and divided her time between New York where she hung out with the likes of Andy Warhol, and her home in Ronco, Switzerland. Paulette Goddard died in Switzerland on April 23, 1990, at the age of 79.