The Latest Bloomer in Hollywood

When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.

--From “Gloria Stuart: I Just Kept Hoping,”

by Stuart and Sylvia Thompson

Gloria Stuart admits to feeling a little stiff when she wakes up. She laments that she’s no longer able to run. But those are the only times the sprightly 89-year-old actress ever thinks about age.

In fact, since her Oscar-nominated turn two years ago as Rose, the feisty 101-year-old survivor in the blockbuster “Titanic,” the still striking Stuart has become something of an inspiration.

“I have received so many letters, mostly from women saying, ‘You’ve helped me so much,’ ” Stuart said in a recent interview. “ ‘When I saw you at 87 doing movies and everything, I decided I’d get out of my chair and do something,’ a lot of them said; ‘It was wonderful to see somebody my age moving around and accomplishing things.’ ”

Stuart is still riding high on the success of “Titanic.” Since becoming the oldest performer to be nominated for an Oscar, she’s completed two movies and is filming a third for cable’s Lifetime. An accomplished book artist and printer, she’s hard at work designing her latest miniature book of “Titanic” director James Cameron’s acceptance speech.

And this month, Little Brown released her autobiography, “Gloria Stuart: I Just Kept Hoping,” which Stuart wrote with her 65-year-old daughter, Sylvia Thompson. Stuart acknowledged that she was asked to write her autobiography because of “Titanic.”

“I didn’t hear from anybody for 33 years,” she reflected. “I was around, but nobody knew it.”

Her memoirs are a fast-moving account of her early years growing up the rebellious “flapper” daughter of Santa Monica Republicans and her life in Hollywood in the ‘30s and ‘40s as a performer.

Though most of films she starred in are forgettable, Stuart did appear in James Whale’s classics “The Dark Old House” and “The Invisible Man,” the Eddie Cantor musical “Roman Scandals” and two Shirley Temple vehicles, “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

She is candid about her often difficult 40-year-plus marriage to screenwriter Arthur Sheekman, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1978, as well as her 13-year relationship with the late master printer Ward Ritchie. Stuart, a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, also offers funny stories and anecdotes about her friends Groucho Marx, who was her husband’s mentor; Dorothy Parker; Charlie Chaplin; Bette Davis; Humphrey Bogart; and Robert Benchley.

And in her book--as well as in person--Stuart is more than open about her sex life:

Arthur once said that he fell in love with me because I could eat peppermints while making love, chocolate peppermints. It’s close to the truth. They were an addiction.

From “I Just Kept Hoping”

Sitting in the den of her cozy Brentwood house, Stuart laughed when her love life was mentioned.

“We didn’t talk about [sex] back then,” said Stuart, dressed in a purple pantsuit with matching purple flats.

“My mother was frightened of sex,” she explained. “She didn’t know what was going to happen to her. She was terrified. Momma was . . . very conservative, very concerned about her reputation, her identity and mine and my brother’s. I scared the hell out of her.”

But she still doesn’t know why she was such a rebel. “You know, I kicked a teacher in the behind and I was suspended,” Stuart recalled, smiling at the memory. “Nobody ever kicked or slapped me. But authority was always a problem with me.”

Bigotry was also a problem. “We had a sorority in high school, but the minute I got to college, I didn’t know why [the sororities] didn’t take Jews or blacks or Orientals. . . . So I said to myself, ‘I’ll go to their parties, but I wouldn’t join them. I wouldn’t take a pledge and be associated with bigots.’ And I was only 16!”

Stuart said that writing the book was relatively easy for her because she’s kept diaries since she was 14. But she admitted that it was difficult to relive the harrowing seven years she spent watching her husband waste away from Alzheimer’s disease. “To me, that is the most disastrous thing that can happen to a marriage.”

Alzheimer’s was unheard of in the late 1960s when her husband was found to have pre-senile dementia. “As I say in the book, all of a sudden I thought, ‘God, I’m married to a crazy man.’ Now, you’re married to a sick person. Then, it was not like that.”

The only person she allowed to see her husband during the last few years of his life was his best friend, Groucho Marx. “Every time Arthur heard ‘Groucho is here,’ he brightened up. Groucho was the only person who was able to handle it. The other brilliant men that my husband knew, to see the disintegration of a man who Groucho called the fastest wit in the West into nothing was too tough.

“I said to them, ‘Don’t come and see me. He doesn’t know you are here.’ Groucho came right up until the end. Very shortly before Arthur died, he said, ‘Don’t go before me, Sheek.’ ”

No Breaks on Broadway

Stuart talked proudly of how she “pulled the plug [on her movie contract] when it became increasingly evident to me I wasn’t going to get to be a big star like Katharine Hepburn and Loretta Young.”

After she ended her contract with Fox, her acting career came to a virtual standstill by the mid-’40s. She did act sporadically on TV after her husband’s death and had a tiny part in the 1982 film “My Favorite Year.”

Stuart recalled that when she and Sheekman moved to New York in 1939, she thought she would find work on Broadway. But most producers weren’t interested in casting a film actor, so the couple went through a lot of lean years.

“We sold everything,” Stuart said matter-of-factly. “I pawned my jewelry several times. Nobody knew it. I had nothing but rejection [with acting jobs].”

Stuart said she hopes people who aren’t happy in their jobs will have the courage to do what she did. “It gives them an idea that it is possible to pull the plug and still have a great life.” Still, Stuart said, she was disappointed and frustrated that she wasn’t given the material that would make her a star. On top of that, her husband would always tell her, “Give it up, Gloria. You haven’t got it.”

“I knew he was jealous,” she explained. “He didn’t want me to act. I knew he wanted me to be, as Groucho used to say, ‘barefoot and knocked up and in the kitchen.’ I knew that was his idea for me. I fought it. I didn’t believe it.”

‘I Have a Compulsion to Create’

After her acting roles dried up, Stuart looked for something else to do. “I found that I could paint and draw,” she said. “When Ward Ritchie walked into my life as a master printer and book artist and taught me, I found that everything that I had been doing in the arts, like silk screening and painting, came together as a book artist. Most of my friends are doing bridge and luncheon and going to Saks Fifth Avenue. I have a compulsion to create. I use it and nourish it and appreciate it. I thank heaven for it.”

Spending time with Stuart, it’s hard not to see how much she’s like “Titanic’s” Rose. Stuart sees it as well.

“You know, the first time I read the script, sitting where you are, I bonded with that woman instantly,” she said. “I knew that if I got the part, I would give a good performance. Somebody said to me, ‘Weren’t you frightened?’ I wasn’t frightened a bit.”