![]() “‘MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies,’” Jane Ellen Wayne quotes Gardner saying in The Golden Girls of MGM. ![]() Ava Gardner, too, expressed a similar sentiment when discussing her abortion, which she had when married to Frank Sinatra-unbeknownst to him. “A child could wait her career could not.” That’s the reasoning Jean Harlow’s mother gave about her daughter’s own abortion at age 18. She never tired of reminding that she could be a mother and an actress.” As biographer Whitney Stine notes in I’d Love to Kiss You: Conversations with Bette Davis, “she was proud of the fact that, after her abortions, she could have a baby at last and a career, because her mother had always insisted that she couldn’t have both. Her first child, Barbara Davis Sherry-known as B.D.-was born when Davis was 39. “But I didn’t miss any of these roles, and I didn’t miss having a family,” she said. Other great parts-“Jezebel, Judith, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Margo Channing”-may not have followed, either. If she’d had a child in 1934, she told her biographer Charlotte Chandler in The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, she would’ve “missed the biggest role in her life thus far”-that of Mildred in Of Human Bondage, which earned Davis her first Oscar nomination. Davis was the breadwinner for her entire family-her mother and sister, and her husband, Harmon Nelson, whom she married in 1932. Jean Carpenter” entered Good Shepherd Hospital “to get some rest.” She was seen only by her private doctors and nurses in room 826, the same room she had occupied the year before for an “appendectomy.”Ĭrawford’s rival Bette Davis also willingly chose to have abortions for the sake of her career. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, “Mrs. When Harlow became pregnant from the affair, she called MGM head of publicity Howard Strickling in a panic. According to Petersen, rumor had it that “Blonde Bombshell” Jean Harlow couldn’t wed William Powell because “MGM had written a clause into her contract forbidding her to marry”-a wife couldn’t be a “bombshell,” after all. These clauses may have extended to an actress’s right to marry. “t was a common assumption that glamorous stars would not be popular if they had children,” writes Cari Beauchamp in her book on powerful women in Old Hollywood, Without Lying Down. Consequently an unintended pregnancy would not only bring shame to these top box-office earners-it would violate studio policy. Hays Hays collaborated with studios to introduce mandatory “morality clauses” into stars’ contracts. Birth control, including prophylactics, were about as new as “stars” themselves-movie performers who went overnight from being “Little Mary” or “The Vitagraph Girl” to “America’s Sweetheart” or “Sex Goddess.”Īnd so it became necessary for the studios to implement reformatory measures to prevent stars from destroying their value through scandal. And if you happen to be a woman, better not mention it to anybody.”įrom the very infancy of America’s film industry, abortions were necessary body maintenance for women in the spotlight. As Aubrey Malone writes in Hollywood's Second Sex: The Treatment of Women in the Film Industry, 1900-1999, “If you want to play in this business, you play like a man or you’re out. Much like today, in Old Hollywood, the decisions being made about women’s bodies were made in the interests of men-the powerful heads of motion pictures studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and RKO. How and why did a procedure that was taboo and illegal at the time become so ordinary-at least, among a certain set? While patriarchal political powers connive to block women’s legal access to abortion in 21st century America, in Old Hollywood, abortions were far more standard and far more accessible than they often are today-more like aspirin, or appendectomies. ![]() ![]() “Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s.
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