European Film Star Postcards: Evelyn Keyes

28 October 2021

Evelyn Keyes

Evelyn Keyes (1916-2008) was an American film actress. She is best known for her role as Suellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and for the female lead in the blockbuster hit The Jolson Story (1946). Her final film was The Seven Year's Itch (1955) starring Marilyn Monroe.

Dutch postcard, no. 3199. Photo: Europa Columbia.

British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 264. Photo: Columbia.

Scarlett's whiny, bratty sister

Evelyn Louise Keyes was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1916, to Omar Dow Keyes and Maude Ollive Keyes, the daughter of a Methodist minister. After Omar Keyes died when Evelyn was two or three years old (the sources differ). Keyes moved with her mother, her only brother, and her three sisters to Atlanta, Georgia, where they lived with her grandparents.

As a teenager, Keyes took voice, piano, and dancing lessons. She was hopeful of becoming a ballerina. Instead, Evelyn performed for local clubs such as the Daughters of the Confederacy and entered beauty pageants. A chorus girl by age 18, Keyes moved to Hollywood and was introduced to director Cecil B. DeMille who in her own words “signed me to a personal contract without even making a test”.

She was groomed as a starlet and initially placed in bit roles. De Mille first gave her a small part in his pirate epic The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille, 1938) starring Fredric March, then placed her in his sprawling railroad saga Union Pacific (Cecil B. DeMille, 1939). After a handful of B movies at Paramount Pictures, she landed a minor role in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), that of Scarlett O'Hara's sister, the whiny, bratty Suellen, who loses her beau to the more calculating Scarlett.

This led directly to her signing with Columbia Pictures. In 1938, just prior to the filming of GWTW, she married businessman Barton Bainbridge, her first of four. The marriage soured within a year or so, however, after she took up with Budapest-born director Charles Vidor. Bainbridge committed suicide by gunshot during the final separation period. Charles Vidor directed three of her pictures: The Lady in Question (1940) - her first at Columbia, Ladies in Retirement (1941), and The Desperadoes (1943). This second marriage lasted about as long as the first (1943-1945), supposedly due to Vidor's infidelities.

At Columbia, Evelyn hit pin-up status and sparked a number of war-era pictures. She played Boris Karloff's daughter in the crime horror Before I Hang (Nick Grinde, 1940) and a blind woman who befriends the hideously scarred Peter Lorre in the excellent The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941). She also played an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941) with Robert Montgomery. Gary Brumburgh at IMDb: "No shrinking violet this one, but despite her talent, vivacity and sheer drive, lovely and alluring blonde Evelyn Keyes would remain for the most part typed as a "B" girl on the silver screen."

Vintage postcard. Photo: Columbia.

British postcard by Real Photographs Co., Ltd, Southport. Caption: Evelyn Keyes, vivacious blonde beauty in Columbia Pictures, has an impressive credit list of appearances in The Jolson Story, The Thrill of Brazil, Renegades, A Thousand and One Nights, and many others. Married to Hollywood writer-director John Huston, she comes from Georgia.

Tom Ewell's vacationing wife

Evelyn Keyes spent most of the early 1940s playing leads in many of Columbia's B dramas and mysteries. In the post-war years, a third tempestuous but highly adventurous marriage (1946-1950) to John Huston made the tabloid papers practically on a weekly basis. They divorced after four years.

She did some of her best work during this period. Keyes appeared as the female lead opposite Larry Parks in Columbia's blockbuster hit The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green, 1946). She followed this up with an enjoyable minor screwball comedy, The Mating of Millie (Henry Levin, 1948), with Glenn Ford. She was then Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike (Louis King, 1949).

Keyes' last role in a major film was a small part as Tom Ewell's vacationing wife in The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. Keyes officially retired in 1956, but she continued to act. She married bandleader Artie Shaw (1957–1985). Keyes said of her many relationships: "I always took up with the man of the moment and there were many such moments." While married to Huston, the couple adopted a Mexican child, Pablo, whom Huston had discovered while on the set of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Very much the traveler, Evelyn lived sporadically all over the world, including France, England, and Mexico, and spoke Spanish and French fluently. Evelyn returned to the acting fold every once in a while. She joined up with Don Ameche in a 1972 tour of the musical 'No, No, Nanette' and also would show up on an episode of The Love Boat (1977) or Murder, She Wrote (1984) every now and then.

In 1977 she published her autobiography 'Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood'. Wikipedia: "Keyes expressed her opinion that Mrs. Mike was her best film. She also wrote of the personal cost she paid by having an abortion just before Gone with the Wind was to begin filming, as the experience left her unable to have children." Among the many Hollywood affairs, Keyes recounted in 'Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister' were those with Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven, and Kirk Douglas.

She also became involved with flamboyant producer Mike Todd for three years during his preparation and filming of Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956). She even played a cameo role in the movie and helped with publicity. During the filming, he broke things off after falling in love with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he later married. The positive thing that came out of it for her was that she had invested most of her money in the picture and was financially set for life as a result.

In 2005, she sued Artie Shaw's estate, claiming that she was entitled to one-half of Shaw's estate pursuant to a contract to make a will between them. Shaw died in 2004. In July 2006, a Ventura, California jury unanimously held that Keyes was entitled to almost one-half of Shaw's estate, or $1,420,000.

Evelyn Keyes died in 2008 from uterine cancer at the Pepper Estates, an assisted-living residence in Montecito, California. She was 91. She was cremated with her ashes being divided among her relatives with the remaining half sent to Lamar University in Port Arthur, Texas, and the last of the cremated remains being buried with her relatives in the family plot at The Waco Baptist Church Cemetery, Waco, Georgia, with a small tombstone with the epitaph 'Gone with the Wind', where her ashes were buried in 2008.