By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Evelyn Keyes, 91, a leading lady of dozens of Hollywood films who wryly dismissed much of her career, noting that she was most remembered for a bit part as Scarlett O'Hara's younger sister Suellen in "Gone With the Wind," died July 4 at a care facility in Montecito, Calif. She had uterine cancer.
Ms. Keyes wrote two memoirs that brushed by her appearances in more than 40 movies. Instead, she spoke at length about her marriages to director John Huston and bandleader Artie Shaw, as well as sexual conquests that included Kirk Douglas, David Niven and Anthony Quinn.
"I was always interested in the man of the moment," she once said, "and there were so many such moments."
She was discovered by producer Cecil B. DeMille, then had a long career at Columbia studios in the 1940s and early 1950s. She never reached the front rank of performers but proved a versatile and appealing female lead.
Her light touch graced comedies ("Here Comes Mr. Jordan") and musicals ("The Jolson Story," "A Thousands and One Nights"), and she could convincingly adapt to the required accent, whether Georgia peach ("Gone With the Wind") or English cockney ("Ladies in Retirement").
She also proved more than adaptable to hard-boiled dramas ("99 River Street," "Johnny O'Clock") and several westerns, despite her allergic reaction to horses. Among her favorite, if lesser-known films, was "The Prowler" (1951), about a woman seduced and harassed by a rogue cop (Van Heflin).
Still, she told film scholar Eddie Muller: "I never got the part, the starring role that sends you shooting way up there, into the top ranks. I thought that would come. I obviously wasn't going to marry and have a family and give it all up.
"I was married, sure, but those weren't marriages -- they were legalized love affairs. So we wouldn't have the big stink -- Oh my God, they're living together! So what do you do? You get married."
Evelyn Louise Keyes was born Nov. 20, 1916, in Port Arthur, Tex., where her father was an oil-platform laborer. She was a toddler when he died because of an infected carbuncle on his chin.
Her mother moved her and four older siblings to Atlanta, where she described a neglectful upbringing. She found pleasure only in movies. Determined to crash Hollywood, she began dancing as "Goldie Keyes" and found her way to Los Angeles in 1936.
She was spotted by DeMille, who placed her under exclusive contract and cast her in minor parts in his major productions, including "The Buccaneer" (1938), with Fredric March, and "Union Pacific" (1939), with Joel McCrea.
She said a breakthrough eluded her because of her ill-timed affair with Anthony Quinn, who soon became DeMille's son-in-law.
Her greatest opportunity to score with audiences was in "The Jolson Story" (1946), a big-budget production with Larry Parks as the legendary entertainer and Ms. Keyes playing a renamed version of Jolson's wife, actress Ruby Keeler.
She said studio head Harry Cohn cast her in "The Jolson Story" in hopes that she would finally relent and sleep with him. When she did not, he refused to lend her to another studio for a plum role.
Several mediocre roles later, she fled in frustration to South America and Europe, taking up with a jai alai sports star along the way.
She played Tom Ewell's wife in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955) and, winding down her career, had a cameo in "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1956), a production of then-companion Mike Todd. He soon left her for Elizabeth Taylor.
Ms. Keyes was an advocate of psychoanalysis and said she had a fascination with father figures. Most of her affairs and marriages were with much older men. Her first husband, alcoholic businessman Barton Bainbridge, killed himself in 1940. She then married Charles Vidor, who had directed her in several films.
After divorcing Vidor in 1945, she married Huston, a difficult man who once brought home a Mexican orphan while filming "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) and announced that he would be their son. Ms. Keyes, who never wanted children, was not amused, and the boy left.
She later reprimanded Huston for purchasing a chimpanzee.
"One of us has to go. It's the monkey or me," she said.
"Honey," he said, "it's you."
In 1957, she became the eighth wife of bandleader Shaw, and they spent many years in Spain and Connecticut. Though long separated, they remained married until 1985.
Ms. Keyes settled in Los Angeles in the 1970s, wrote a chatty column for the Los Angeles Times ("Keyes to the Town") and spun out three books, a semi-autobiographical novel and two autobiographies. One of the memoirs, "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister" (1977), a title her published urged, was a bestseller.
Largely self-educated, Ms. Keyes amassed pre-Columbian art from her divorce from Huston and became fluent in French and Spanish. She left no immediate survivors, and that seemed to suit her.
"God knows, I've never been homesick one day since I left Atlanta," she told the New York Times in 1977. "I have no roots. I deliberately set out to destroy them, and I did. If there's any such thing as a hometown for me, it's Hollywood. I was formed here as an adult."