Eva Marie Saint: Celebrating the Oscar winner on her 100th birthday
Just as most young actors who headed to New York post World War II, Eva Marie Saint was a staple on live television. In fact, her first TV appearance was in 1947 in a production of “A Christmas Carol” starring John Carradine as Scrooge. Saint, who celebrates her 100th birthday on July 4, told me in a 2013 L.A. Times interview that she didn’t appear on screen in her first TV gig that same year on NBC’s “The Borden Show.” She was hired to simply supply applause off-camera and called her parents to tell them the good news. “After the show, they called me and mom said, ‘Honey, we just love the show, and Dad thinks he heard you applauding.”’
Doing live TV got the lithe blonde actress a lot of exposure. One time it was way too much exposure. Between 1950-52, Saint appeared as the daughter of a high-powered San Francisco banker on the NBC soap opera “One Man’s Family.” In one scene, she was sharing a small pool with the actor playing her twin brother when she realized “someone was doing something offstage. You learn not to look away from what you are doing because you can be distracted.” Ultimately, she was distracted and noticed a man pulling his shirt up and down. “I looked down and my boobies were showing coast to coast. I just kept in the scene and slid under the water. What else could I do? It was live television.”
Within a few years, Saint would make her film debut in Elia Kazan’s powerful 1954 drama “On the Waterfront,” which opened in New York 70 years ago this month. She received one of the film’s eight Oscars for her supporting role as Edie, the innocent shy sister of Joey Doyle killed by the goons of the New Jersey mob boss (Lee J. Cobb) who rules the docks. She ends up falling for the rough-hewn Terry (Marlon Brando), a former boxer who lured Joey to the roof of a building. Thanks to her goodness and moral compass, Terry turns his life around and decides to take on the mob.
Kazan had seen her on TV in early 1953 the live dramatic presentation of Horton Foote’s “A Trip to Bountiful” opposite her mentor Lillian Gish. The piece was so well-received, Foote expanded it to a play which opened on Broadway in November 1953. Saint, in fact, was doing the play at night during its month’s run while shooting “Waterfront” during the day.
Though she didn’t have to do a screen test, she noted in a 2010 interview with the Santa Barbara Independent: “Kazan had put Marlon and I in a room together. We were improvising and Kazan told me, ‘Now Eva Marie, you have a sister. She’s not at home but her boyfriend is coming to visit her. Don’t let him in the house. You are alone’ I don’t know what he told Marlon; all I know is that he got in. He put the radio on, and when we started dancing he did something to flip my skirt. I was so embarrassed I cried a little bit afterward. It was too much. But Kazan saw the chemistry and he could see it could work for the movie. After I was picked up, I began crying and Jeff [her husband, director Jeffrey Hayden] put his arm around me and said, ‘Honey, there’s nothing to worry about. You’re in good hands. Kazan is your director.’”
She was about to give birth to her first child when the Oscar ceremony was held March 30, 1955. Her husband told her: “Now, honey, if they call your name, sit there and count to 10.” Saint had the star-studded audience laughing at her acceptance speech: “I may have the baby right here.” Thankfully, her son Darrell waited for two days. “When people say, “Wasn’t winning the Oscar the greatest?,” she told me in 2004. “I say of course it was wonderful, but the baby kind of overshadowed the Oscar.”
The Oscar win led to a stellar film career appearing opposite such leading men as Paul Newman (“Exodus”), Montgomery Clift (“Raintree County”), Warren Beatty (“All Fall Down”), Gregory Peck (“The Stalking Moon”), James Garner (“36 Hours”) and even Bob Hope (“That Certain Feeling,” “Cancel My Reservation”).
Besides “On the Waterfront,” Saint is best known as the cool, sophisticated blonde who falls for Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s delicious-and sexy-1959 suspense thriller “North by Northwest.” She didn’t even have to audition for the Master of Suspense. “I started filming that three weeks after Laurette (her daughter) was born,” Saint noted in my 1990 LA. Times interview. “I had only gained about 21 pounds and was back to my normal weight. Helen Rose had designed the dresses and none of them worked. Hitchcock didn’t like her creations at all. So, he took me to Bergdorf Goodman’s in New York. He said, ‘Eva Marie, we are going to bring out the models and pick whatever you like.’ I loved a dress with red roses, and he loved that. It was $2,000, which was expensive back then. It’s expensive even now. From then on, I called him my sugar daddy.”
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