In All About Eve (1950), George Sanders’s columnist Addison DeWitt tells us that Bette Davis’s Margo Channing made her debut as a toddler in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was Helen Hayes who appeared in a production of that Shakespeare play at the age of five. Born to an Irish-Catholic family, Hayes performed on stage regularly all through her youth, playing in Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1911, The Prince and the Pauper in 1913, and as Pollyanna in 1917, and she never really lost that sense of being a winsome child actress doing a “turn” for her audience, nor was she above relying on a sense of “I’m small and cute!” at all ages.
In her early twenties, Hayes attempted to broaden her range by playing the flapper Kittens in Dancing Mothers on stage in 1924, a part that was played on screen by Clara Bow, and she had a hit as a Southern belle in Coquette, a wretched play that was parodied by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in Twentieth Century (1934), which is doubly funny because MacArthur had married Hayes in 1928 and stayed married to her up until his death in 1956. It was a difficult marriage, but Hayes on stage and eventually on screen made her name as a forbearing wife and then mother and then grandmother.
Producer Irving Thalberg was raiding the theater in the early 1930s to bring some prestige to MGM, and he had Hayes make a mother-love vehicle called The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) that went over only when MacArthur and Hecht did some re-writes of the script. She is billed under the title, and her first scene as an ardent young girl is played in a very hasty and artificial manner, but once she settles in Hayes runs the gamut from kept woman to convict to thieving hag, and all with some of her “charm” mannerisms thrown in, irresistible to some, very resistible to others. She will throw a little hand up in the air and keep it there before saying, “Hurrah!” amid other behavioral peculiarities and ditherings; there were many times in her career when Hayes gave charm a bad name.
But in the scene after she gives birth to an illegitimate child, Hayes unveils her ace in the hole: a talent for morbid self-pity and emotional hysterics, which she can inhabit very deeply, so that even though her stage repertoire eventually included Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill it seems a shame that she never tried her hand at Samuel Beckett. But then again, she is easier to take on screen in her youth, when she had a fling with the movies for a few years at MGM and won a best actress Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet, which would be justified if only for the lovely moment when Hayes’s Madelon is released after a ten-year prison sentence and she gently touches the leaves on the trees in wonder.
At the least, Hayes had better luck than another theater star trying the movies at this time, Tallulah Bankhead, who got stuck in almost nothing but duds that took no advantage of her charisma and flair for naughtiness, whereas Katharine Cornell never tried the movies at length, and Lynn Fontanne only did one picture, The Guardsman, for Thalberg the same year that Hayes won the Oscar for her Madelon Claudet.
She was a faithful and doomed wife to Ronald Colman in the prestigious Arrowsmith (1931), which was adapted from a Sinclair Lewis novel, but Hayes got her best film role in another literary adaptation, Frank Borzage’s swooningly romantic version of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), in which there is a sense that Borzage and her gorgeous leading man Gary Cooper are gently and tenderly getting her to drop her mannerisms and her need to “act” for us and instead enter into the spirit of the love story with all her heart and soul. And Catherine Barkley’s line about the rain, “Sometimes I see me dead in it,” suits Hayes’s gift for morbidity.
Borzage loved pairing short women with tall men and making the man very vulnerable, and so Hayes fits into his world and she has chemistry with Cooper. Hayes later said that she fell in love with Cooper while making this movie, or developed a crush on him, and she never said a word about it, and this comes across on screen, even if the heavy eye-make-up and long false eyelashes don’t help her in her still-moving death scene, which is exactly the sort of thing she played so well. Borzage gets through her technique in this picture and gets to her, the real her, in close-up for his camera; she does real movie acting here for the first and only time.
Hayes thrived in the striking theatrical adaptation Another Language (1933) opposite Robert Montgomery, where she faces off against his difficult family, and she preserved one of her 1920s stage hits with a movie of J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows (1934), where she keeps saying she has no charm and is plain, but she’s plucky, and all that sort of thing, while aiding the political career of her pretty husband (Brian Aherne). Her performance in that picture has a very set quality to it, as if she has worked out every moment of it. Hayes’s worst weakness on screen is a tendency to narrow her eyes to assume a smug “noble” look, and this is the sort of thing that a director would have to help her avoid, like someone weeding a garden with her.
Hayes’s well-known quote about why she stopped making movies in 1935 goes like this: “I’m leaving the screen because I don’t think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I’m elegant on the stage.” Maybe those mannerisms of hers were meant to be viewed from a distance, and with a sympathetic audience egging her on to be as shameless as she wanted to be. Maybe that’s why she stayed for three years on Broadway in the late 1930s in another through-the-years tour-de-force, Victoria Regina, where she played Queen Victoria from youth to old age.
Hayes returned to movies years later in Leo McCarey’s horrible but fascinating anti-Communist movie My Son John (1952), in which he seems to push her into doing her most over-the-top “charm” mannerisms so as to expose them as the front of an oppressed woman who is breaking down, pressing her to do all her tricks until we have to wonder, “What is wrong with this woman?” Neither McCarey nor Hayes seem to understand the full implications of what they are doing in the rather upsetting and ambiguous scenes that Hayes shares with her son (Robert Walker) in the first hour of this movie, and she gets worse and more theatrical as the film itself worsens and she tries to put over its crazy message.
Hayes was pretty bad as the Grand Duchess in Anastasia (1956), but the film itself is poor, and director Anatole Litvak ruins her one good line reading (“Don’t ever tell me!” she cries at the end of her big scene with Ingrid Bergman) by immediately and inexplicably cutting to a noisy floor show right afterward. But Hayes was an institution by then, known by most as the First Lady of the American Theatre, and she was given a second Oscar, this time in the supporting category, for her shameless performance as a cutesy stowaway in Airport (1970), where she is shown up and outclassed by the agonized Method reality of Maureen Stapleton as the wife of a terrorist with a bomb onboard. Theoretically she makes sense more as an old woman than as a young one, yet Hayes’s cute old ladies for Disney in the 1970s are to be avoided if at all possible.
She lived to be 92, did three memoirs, did admirable charitable work, and had a theater named after her. It has since been shortened to just the Hayes Theater, for some reason, and there cannot be many who still remember her antics on the boards, but she got away with the murder of scenery for many years, and for this Hayes should still earn at least an indulgent smile.