Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 13

July 20, 1982 5tt I Shadow Girl, husband reflect on decades in Hollywood Minneapolis Star and Tribune Jr-' i ducer named Henry Blanke. We'd be screaming and pounding fists and calling each other names, and somebody would notice It was lunchtime. So we knock it off and go to lunch hr I f-Jlri Jones after last night togetner. a nice inenaiy tuncn. Then, after lunch, back to the fight ing and name-calling.

"And as for the studio bosses, it's funny how we now appreciate all the guys we used to hate. At least they were showmen. There are no showmen in those jobs now. They all come from conglomerates, where they never had any reason to learn Girl. The movie was Mark Robson's first as a director, with Lewton as his tutor.

"The shadow girl got killed in some terrible way, and I never was seen on the screen," the actress said. used to get killed a lot, because I played parts that were more character parts than ingenues. I got killed in 'The Chase' with Michele Morgan. In Tarzan and the the last When I asked him about studio boss Jack L. Warner's involvement in such films as "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," for example, he was even in a mood to bristle.

"That's a Jack Warner title, but that's about all he had to do with that film," Krims said. "In the beginning, only three people at the studio knew it was being done. Warner, naturally, was one of them, because it was his money. The others were Hal Wallis, his executive and me. Warner wasn't even sure the movie should be made, not because it was political, but because he didnt know it was going to be a good movie that would make money.

"It was Wallis who made that movie, and it was Wallis who brought me to Warners. "When you worked with these people, you had a home. When you went-to' work for. Wallis, he sort of arranged for your continuity by teaching you to make films. You went into the editing rooms and learned how to cut.

You learned to produce, to direct. It's been said that any Warner Bros, writer of that period could do virtually any job in the studio. "We used to fight with each other and scream and holler, but it's not like today. Those, weren't ego fights. That was how we worked.

I remember fighting all the time with a pro After his movie-studio days, Krims spent some years under contract to CBS, where he wrote a lot of "Perry Mason" scripts and also wrote and produced a short-lived TV series of his own, "Hotel de Paree," which that serves a number of other clients. For some years she has been arranging tours and entertainment for queens from the Minneapolis Aqua-tennial during their Hollywood visits at Rose Bowl time, and this year she was invited to come sample the Aquatennial for herself. The trip is nicely timed so that she can get to her high school graduating class's 40-year reunion in Rochester this weekend. Milton Krims was busy in Hollywood a full decade before the arrival of the woman who Is now his wife. After some early newspapering in Oregon, he had success as a magazine journalist, short-story writer and novelist He was living in New York early in the '30s when Paramount bought one of his novels and sent for him to come to the studio as a contract screenwriter.

In the mid-1 930s he moved to Warner where his first assignment was the screenplay for the best-selling novel "Anthony Adverse," which starred Fredric March. That script won him an Academy Award nomination, as did later scripts for "The Sisters" with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, and "We Are Not Alone," with Paul Muni, which also won a nomination for its star. Krims's contract with Warner had a unique clause that allowed him to take leave from the studio any time Collier's magazine needed him for an important assignment. Thus he was able to take off to cover a portion of the Spanish Civil War, the Munich conference and the Battle of Britain. His journalistic background had a lot to do with his being assigned to such political films as "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" starring Edward G.

Robinson in 1939 and, a decade later, the first big anti-Communist film, "Iron Curtain," starring Dana Andrews, at If Shirley and Milton Krims ever were to have such an urge, they could celebrate Just about any week of the year as a family film and TV retrospective, simply by checking the TV logs for late-Iatehow offerings and reruns. Shirley O'Hara Krims grew up in Rochester, Minn.7 as Shirley Har. She arrived in Hollywood not long after her graduation from high school in 1942, and soon achieved the dream of a screen test, followed by a contract with RKO Pictures. Those were the days when a studio could change a young contract player's name on a whim, and the wisdom of the times dictated that Har' was not a suitable name for a starlet: "It was a name nobody knew. It sounds like something was cut off it I had an Irish grandmother named Hart, but I went all the way and turned the German Har into O'Hara." Within a few years, Shirley O'Hara had been in 30 movies at RKO.

Her first film was a 1943 Kay Kyser musical, "Around the That same year she was in the musical "Higher and Higher," in which Frank Sinatra made his acting debut (He had had some songs in earlier flicks.) O'Hara was in a Val Lewton movie when they didn't even know they were making film noir: "We just usea a iancy watenng-noie in Creek, as the central setting for tales of the Old West It was not working for the old-time movie moguls, but in televlson, where Krims learned about meddlesome, destructive interference from the top. "It wasn't so bad with 'Perry but after I was working on my own show, I couldn't understand why the guy in charge of toilets in New York was calling me in Los Angeles to ask me what I was doing," Krims said. movie that Johnny Weissmuller did as Tarzan, I was Athena, the native princess. I did that with a Russian accent, and I got killed." She was the subject of more starlet puffery when a special hairdo, "the O'Hara Bob" was named for her to. help hype a movie called "Seven Days Ashore." When television came along, she got parts in such early series as "Racket Squad," "Fireside Theater," "Perry Mason" and "The Millionaire." She left acting after she married Jimmy McHugh II, son of the songwriter, and moved to England, where McHugh ran the London office of Music Corporation of America.

"For a while I was Mrs. MCA England, with all that implied," she said. "We lived in Deborah Kerr's flat and entertained all the important clients who were passing through." the past 23 years, she has been married to screenwriter-journalist Milton Krims. She now serves as director of publicity for the Burbank Studios, the rental-studio facility that formerly was Warner Bros. Studios, and she heads a public-relations firm I I I Mt When favorite eyes avoid your face Shirley O'Hara In 1943.

20th Century-Fox. Despite an attack of Parkinson's disease, which has slowed the 78-year-old Krims's writing career of late, he was enjoying watching the Aquaten-nial scene and, during a quiet moment between events, was in a mood to reminisce. called them pictures. In "The Ghost Ship," a Lewton production, O'Hara was seen only as a shadow, and she was featured in a Life magazine layout as The Shadow Ullmann Continued from page IB JAN ILL, Consultant have stray hairs removed permanently. Regardless of how bewitching your other charms are, they cannot distract attention from even a few scraggly hairs growing where they should not.

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You are thrown to the media and people make up the most appalling stories about you. Talk about ghosts! The whole publicity machine revolves around someone else. It may be a good you, or It may be a bad you. But it isn't the real you." The real Liv Ullmann, she lets it be understood, is still in the making. Open 10AM to 7PM Monday through Friday ELECTROLYSIS SALON TV Week, Sundays Suite 318, 6750 France South 922-4475 Ttxre Driiikiiig Driving May No More Driving If you're one of the millions of people who drives after using alcohol or other chemicals, you could easily lose your right to the road as a result of stiffer drunk driving legislation recently passed by Minnesota lawmakers.

Her function, as she has come to see it is to collect the stories of refugee women and starving children and then relate them as simply and directly as she can at fund-raisers, on television, to newspapers wherever money for aid programs can be pried loose. the public at large, Liv Ullmann has been one or more of the following: a gifted actress, the woman who bore Ingmar Bergman's daughter out of wedlock, the sometime date of Henry Kissinger and not all that long ago the Great Scandinavian Hope of Hollywood. If there was one moment when that changed, it came in February 1980. Along with such notables as Joan Baez, Elie Wiesel, Alexander Ginzburg and Winston Churchill III, Ullmann marched to the border of Cambodia and Thailand, with medical supplies and personnel. The event organized by the IRC, was calculated to focus international attention on the plight of Cambodian refugees.

It also profoundly affected Ullmann, who found herself giving blood for the first time in her life in an army tent in a border camp, while journalists fought to take pictures of her looking wanly courageous. "Of course, I was aware that there were refugees and hungry people," she says calmly. "But they were numbers. Never did I have the exact feeling that they were my mother, my sister, my grandmother so enormously close or that their destiny was so completely out of hand. The woman with a starving child is no different from me.

It only happened that war came into her life. "I also know now those people have so much to teach us about sharing. That is not dramatic or idealistic. It happens to be the truth. We all are living like outcasts, looking for ourselves.

We all want to be touched. I know I do." For the past two years, Ullmann has juggled the demands of her career and motherhood (her daughter Linn is now 16) in order to globe-trot often on a moment's notice, for UNICEF and IRC. "Travels have exorcised some of my most killing ghosts," she notes. "I know that more and more my happiness has nothing to do with my belongings. In the past I made some films for the wrong reason for the money or the excitement and I know that I cannot afford to do that anymore.

My time is not unlimited. Sometimes I think that if everything went beautifully and I could manage, I would love the safety, the warmth, the comradeship of a family. I seem not to have managed that very well, although I have seldom lived alone. And Linn and I we are a family. "I also know I am more alive when I am writing.

After I have to sit down and try to finish a second book telling what I've seen and understood in my travels without it being 'Changing No. I have only the title, which is If I could make a living out of writing, I think I would do that I think my life could have more impact if I were not pretending so much as I have in the past." Pretending is what Ullmann has done best from her days as a resident ingenue, playing Anne Frank in a provincial repertory theater in Sweden, to the intense personal and professional collaboration with Bergman, which resulted in such memorable films as "Cries and Whispers," "Scenes From a Marriage" and "Autumn Sonata." She's even had a fling at a Broadway musical, Richard Rodgers' last show, "I Remember Mama," although even her rare radiance couldn't keep it afloat. Only Hollywood has proved resistant to her special presence, despite a big buildup In the early 1970s that merited her a cover story in Time magazine and such ripe prose as, "Liv: the name rhymes with believe, achieve or grieve. Also Eve." "I think they thought that because they had this artsy, Scandinavian actress in Hollywood, they would make artsy movies themselves," she says. "But sometimes it seems that if Hollywood likes what it gets, it doesn't always know how to use it I had played older women with Ingmar, terribly neurotic and sad.

I'm sure they thought 'We know better. We'll show her young and And then they come up with (the musical remake of) 'Lost Horizon') A total flop. "But still they want to groom me to be a star. So next they give me 'Forty even though I was 30 and Norwegian and the character was 40 and a New Yorker. After 'Lost half the people at Columbia had to go, It was such a disaster.

And then after 'Forty the rest of the people in charge left Really!" During her Hollywood heyday, Ullmann also harvested a bumper crop of publicity for her occasional sorties with then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger slipped away from a state dinner for NATO delegates in Oslo in 1976 to pay her a two-hour visit reporters clustered outside her apartment and one newspaper speculated in a frontpage story on the "Nocturnal Summit" "I couldn't believe how I was criticized for that," says Ullmann. "My house was going to be burned! Here were journalists all over the world queuing up to get half an hour with this man, and I had this fantastic opportunity to see him, speak with him and everything. Why was my seeing him so different from anyone else? This is a man who has observed so many aspects of the world, and whether his views are your views or not it's been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn something I otherwise wouldn't" Ullmann's friendship with Kissinger, she suggests, may well have helped her break out of the tight shell of acting. "At least I had to start thinking about the world so as not to make a fool of myself, although I wasn't supposed to say anything.

I was just supposed to keep my ears open. For some reason, Kissinger finds it fun to be with actors and actresses. But I must say, if he was romancing the others as little as he was with me She lets the sentence trail off. After all, I could have a son in his early 20s. That doesn't worry me.

Being Norwegian, I think I understand a lot about Mrs. Alving." Ullmann has firsthand knowledge of the sort of narrow-minded Norwegian community her countryman was profiling in "Ghosts." One of the triumphs of her career was her performance as Nora, the dutiful wife who, at the end of Ibsen's "A Doll's House," stalks out of a stifling marriage, slamming the door on convention. Ullmann has slammed a few of those doors herself. Like the title of her best-selling autobiography a few years back, she is a fierce partisan of "Changing." "Ideas," she says, pouncing eagerly on the word, "ideas are the real ghosts of society the ideas we were brought up with and were expected to conform to. I grew up in a small community in Norway with so many rules about what was right and what was wrong.

The religion there is Lutheran and the whole scene is guilt, guilt, guilt. You never get away from it entirely. "I was expected to be a nice girl, to get married and have children. And I have been divorced. I've lived outside of marriage with others.

I had a child without being married. My becoming an actress was even considered such a scandal in my family that a large portion of them never Invited me home again. "Each time, I got that pang of guilt for not being the nice little girl, for wanting something else. Until recently, I never realized that people actually use guilt as a way to get you to do something. That had never dawned on me before.

It has made me a wonderful target for others. "But on the other hand, I also grew up at a time in society when women were supposed, suddenly, at 17, to be free, to seek what was right for themselves, to try to fulfill themselves. But when I did that, I felt guilty, too, even though I truly believe in the freedom of the individual. "Today, it has maybe gone the other way. We're told so much to be free.

It's pushed upon us. We have so much choice that in the end it's no choice. We are losing our sense of belonging. People don't believe in family. They don't believe in God.

They don't believe in the future. That kind of freedom is also a ghost It is making us inhuman. "Two years ago, I would not have talked like this. Until then, there was nothing else in my life except acting. I went from one job to another.

I never had holidays. I knew only the people I met In first-class hotels through my work and whenever I traveled to another country, it was to go on location for a movie. A lot of things I thought I needed then-security, comfort, a career, especially a career I have found I could do wonderfully without "Now I want to act only If it's real, important if it can say something." What Ullmann now calls "the most Important part of my life" is her volunteer work, as an international spokeswoman for UNICEF and IRC (tSe International Rescue Committee). According to the new drunk driving law.your license can be revoked within seven days after a drunk driving incident if you fail or refuse to take a blood alcohol test. No ifs, ands or buts.

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