Jane Russell RIP

Jane Russell: 'An immense, impervious beauty'
David Thomson salutes the work of Jane Russell, star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who has died age 89

David Thomson
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 1 March 2011

For decades, wherever she went, Jane Russell was the subject of dirty jokes. She knew this in advance, and she continued to meet fate and fortune with good humour and the kind of sassy grin that keeps hope alive in the guys who tell the smutty stories. But she must have known how in Hollywood innuendo can kill you as easily as the official diseases. After all, Russell had worked with one of the great victims of the dirty joke. In Howard Hawks's gorgeous and very witty Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she had done immaculate routines with Marilyn Monroe.

You can still feel Jane's sisterly care for Marilyn on screen, and Gentlemen was one of Marilyn's happier outings. Russell had opportunities to see how Marilyn might get to be a wreck one day, yet she gave her the confidence and the cues to stride through some dazzling numbers.

Marilyn didn't last, but Jane got to be 89, dying at her California home on Monday. She hadn't done any serious screen work for a long time, and in her whole career didn't make that many movies.

There are kids who don't know who she was. But for anyone over 50 the loss of Jane is more touching than the list of her credits. That shot of her reclining in the hay is the money shot from The Outlaw, her blouse artfully off the shoulder and sustained by … well, there is a question that might have fascinated Isaac Newton and the string theorists of another day.

It was in 1940, when Jane was 19, out of Bemidji in Minnesota. She had worked in a chiropodist's office; she had modelled for photography studios; and she had studied acting. Howard Hughes, among his many interests, had it in mind to make a western in which Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett and Doc Holliday all get together. Now, in the history of the west, these three were never in the same room. But in case scholars were upset, Hughes resolved to put a lovely girl in the room (or the barn) with them, and since he had in mind not a wide-open-space western but an interior picture, with small and cramped rooms, he had the idea to find an actress who made any room feel crowded. What he wanted was a substantial, super-fortress bust, and the sexual attitude to go with it. Or, maybe he just went moony over Jane.

He hired Jules Furthman to do the screenplay and Howard Hawks to direct. And in the first instance it was Hawks who hired Russell – he liked her looks and her humour – and Jack Buetel, their Billy, and the love interest. They started to shoot in late 1940, and noticed a tall, thin man on the set just watching. This was Hughes. A few weeks later, Hawks was removed, he went away to do Sergeant York (a big hit for him) and after a hiatus, the picture resumed with Hughes himself directing.

What really happened during those years is beyond reliable discovery now, and no one really wants the facts any more.

The legend prevails, and it is that as Hughes watched Jane he became more fascinated and inched his way towards one of America's greatest studies in adoration of the breasts. Hughes wanted her to look great and natural and sexier than anyone had a right to be in 1941.

He designed a brassiere; he was a great aircraft designer, as you may know, and he loved all things that flew free. The picture dragged on then ran into great troubles with the Code [the industry censorship guidelines of the time]. It was released in February, 1943, then withdrawn. It came out again, briefly in 1946, and then again in 1950. It was the subject of lurid publicity campaigns – "How would you like to tussle with Russell?"

Hughes filmed her over and over again and he ended up paying her $1,000 a week for life. It's fairly clear that long after everyone else was bored to death, notably Jane, Hughes was not. Were they an item? Of course they were an item – and so they are in the obituaries – with a helpless, crazed and oddly innocent man beholding an immense, impervious beauty. If anything had actually happened it would have ruined the dream. Looking can be so much more naive, indecent and powerful than any real action. And in the early 1940s, the movies were all about looking and desiring and not getting there. We'll never know. But the fact that we wonder suggests to me a gaze that never knew how to be realised.

What we can be sure of is that Jane was never swayed or altered by the nonsense. She was wry, down-to-earth and fun, without pretension or heightened prospects. She married her sweetheart, the football player Bob Waterfield, in 1943 and they seem to have been happy (though his thoughts might make a paranoid novel).

If you want to appreciate Jane Russell, of course you have to see The Outlaw and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but don't ever forget the two films she made with Bob Hope – The Paleface and Son of Paleface. Hope had the lewd wit that knew he was with a national monument while being scared of heights.

She went on and on. Waterfield died. She re-married and the next husband was dead after three months. In the 70s and 80s, she did some TV commercials for bras meant for "us fuller-figure gals".

But here's the truth: she was 38 inches, which is OK but it's not Mount Rushmore. The rest was in our minds, and that's where the movies lived.

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-gentlemen-prefer-blondes

See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-outlaw-gentlemen?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-obituary?intcmp=239