ELAINE STEWART

"Why isn't Elaine Stewart busy making movies?" asked Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky in 1955. It was a good question at the time, and fifty years later, Elaine's admirers are still waiting for an answer.

In terms of combining publicity with career building, Elaine Stewart forms a triangle with Kim Novak and Tina Louise. All three gained enormous media attention in the 1950s, and all three aroused considerable - and loyal - enthusiasm from the general public. The careers of all three demonstrate that having substantial parts in good movies is essential for a career to prosper. Kim Novak, backed by a major Hollywood studio, was given substantial roles in movies and became a big star. Tina Louise was never promoted by a major studio, did not work in grade A movies, and did not become a big star. Elaine Stewart had a contract with MGM, but was never given large parts in their big productions despite public interest in her, and her career did not fulfill its potential.

Elaine was born in New Jersey in 1929 as Elsy Steinberg, the daughter of a police sergeant. Little is known about her early life, but it is generally agreed that while still at school she worked as an usherette in a local cinema and graduated to the cashier's office.

On leaving school she decided to become a model. She worked as a doctor's clerical assistant while making the rounds of the model agencies in New York. In 1948 Elaine was taken on by Harry Conover's model agency, one of the biggest in New York at the time, and her proper career started. 

Elaine was very successful as a 'Conover Cover Girl', earned good money, and was given such soubriquets as 'Miss Cover Girl' and 'Miss Billboard'. She also began to secure work in television and allegedly became very busy as an actress, until her television work came to the attention of Hal Wallis.

Wallis gave Elaine a small part in Paramount's Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis picture, "Sailor Beware", as a nurse who advises Jerry Lewis to take a horse pill!

For reasons that have never been explained, MGM, not Paramount, gave Elaine a contract. As MGM were already covering all the glamour bases with Grace Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, it is not obvious why they needed to sign another glamorous actress at a time when the cold winds of television were blowing through Hollywood. Predictably, MGM had little for Elaine to do, and at first she was given tiny parts, sometimes without credit. Eventually she was given the very noticeable part of Leila in "The Bad And The Beautiful", and Elaine made the most of her opportunity.

Leila is a Hollywood 'bit' player who keeps her foot in the door by being the girl of a big star. Being a jaunty cynic, she notices that Georgia has made more progress by being the girl of the producer, Jonathan Shields. After the successful premier of her latest movie, Georgia deserts her celebration party and takes a bottle of champagne to Jonathan's house. He tries to get rid of her and tells her he needs to be alone. Suddenly a shadow moves across them. Georgia looks up and sees on the stairs a very glamorous Leila in a black, off-the-shoulder dress. In a flash, all is clear to Georgia, but Leila rubs salt in the wound. "The picture's finished, Georgia. You're business, I'm company . . . . Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you Georgia, I saw the picture . . . . I thought you were swell."

It was a part actresses dream about, and Elaine was superb: the embodiment of glamorous impropriety. Every-one in the audience understood why Jonathan preferred the 'bit' player to the star. 

The public now realised that Elaine was a formidable screen presence but, seemingly, MGM did not. They kept her either in minor movies lasting about 70 minutes or in small parts in major films. MGM did, however, know about publicity. They went to work for Elaine but, with the benefit of hindsight, their efforts seem half-hearted. Most of Elaine's publicity photographs were in black and white, in contrast to those of Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor. There was also something curiously vague about the material MGM supplied to the show business press. In the various articles about Elaine that appeared in magazines during her period with MGM, there is almost no mention of her work, her strong points or her future movies. Instead, there are stories about this or that frustrated love affair, and ludicrously unbelievable accounts of her start in movies:  apparently - quite by chance, of course - Hal Wallis himself was watching television and was so impressed by Elaine that he personally dropped everything and rang the T. V. studio . . . . . . just to cast a 'bit' part!

As this kind of drivel was also being printed about every other Hollywood hopeful, it did not give Elaine any individuality, and it was her film performances that struck a chord with movie fans. Elaine was therefore heavily reliant on the film roles given to her by MGM, but not until 1954 did they give Elaine a real chance to shine, in "Take The High Ground", an interesting but flawed movie that today is rarely screened.

Directed by Richard Brooks in the period before he acquired a grasp of narrative, ("The Last Time I Saw Paris" and "The Brothers Karamazov" are also structurally weak) "Take The High Ground" is inconsistent and self-contradictory.  Elaine's character, Julie Mollison, in particular is bewildering, and her relationship with Sergeant Ryan (Richard Widmark) is incoherent. Is Julie a sex-hungry, camp-following slut or a nice girl gone astray? The film does not explain. Is Sergeant Ryan a decent man confused by his own romantic longings or a dangerous man driven by a violent, sex-filled resentment of women? It is never clear. However, thanks in part to her co-stars and her cinematographer (John Alton demonstrating yet again how good he was at filming glamorous women) Elaine showed that she could hold the audience's attention for the duration of a movie.

MGM responded by continuing to give Elaine small parts, as in "Brigadoon". Away from MGM, Elaine took the female lead in "The Adventures Of  Hajji Baba", which a few people like but which most find unwatchable. Then there was a gap of about eighteen months during which she seems not to have worked, even in television. Her absence evoked comments from fans and columnists.

In 1956 Elaine returned with blonde hair and a fuller figure at Universal, who gave her bigger parts but in fairly modest movies. In "The Tattered Dress" Elaine played a woman caught in a compromising situation by her husband who is then accused of murdering his rival.  In "Night Passage", an under-rated western, Elaine played Verna Kimball who, in the back-story, had not stood by Grant MacLaine (James Stewart) and who is now married to his boss. She is taken hostage by the outlaws whose unstable leader (Dan Duryea) has obvious carnal designs on her. She does not panic, and plays one outlaw off against another. Once again Elaine showed that given reasonable material, she was a strong screen presence, more than capable of holding her own against James Stewart and Dan Duryea. 

Elaine demonstrated this again in another western, "Escort West" - in monochrome Cinemascope - where she was far more forceful than Faith Domergue, one of Howard Hughes' creations, and in "The Rise And Fall Of Legs Diamond", a stylish gangster film, written and directed with wry cynicism by Joseph Landon and Budd Boetticher respectively. Although Elaine had a skin blemish at the lower left side of her mouth in this movie (make-up or a personal problem during filming?) she is still sexier than the other two actresses, Karen Steele, who was Boetticher's wife at the time, and Dyan Cannon (spelt "Diane" in the credit titles).

Thereafter Elaine's movie career petered out with very minor Italian films that now are never shown. In 1961 Elaine married, apparently for the first time, and this may have persuaded her to abandon her film career.  (The October 1959 issue of "Playboy" said that Elaine had substantial investments in oil, real estate and the stock market, and did not need to work if film roles were uninteresting.) She made no films after 1962.

Several years later she married again, this time to a television producer, and during the 1970s appeared in two of his T V game shows, "High Rollers" and "Gambit".

Elaine Stewart's career, like that of Tina Louise, provides clear evidence that without the right type of parts in movies, it is impossible for an actress to become a top film star, even if she has looks, ability and screen presence. Elaine had all three, and never disappointed her cinema audience, which is why she still has loyal fans. What she did not have was the kind of roles that provide a foundation for major stardom. 

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