Barbara Loden
Barbara Ann Loden was an American actress and director of film and theater. Richard Brody of The New Yorker described Loden as the "female
counterpart to John Cassavetes".
Born and raised in North Carolina, Loden began her career at an early age in New York City as a commercial model and chorus-line dancer. She moved to New York after high school, using money she had received from being in a car accident to buy her railroad ticket. Loden earned a living through cheesecake modeling and posing for romance and detective magazines for a handful of years. Loden became a regular sidekick on the irreverent Ernie Kovacs Television Show in the mid-1950s and was a lifetime member of the famed Actors Studio. She appeared in several projects directed by her second husband, Elia Kazan, including Splendor in the Grass. Her subsequent performance in the 1964 Broadway premiere of After the Fall earned her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress.
In 1970, Loden wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda, a groundbreaking independent film that won the International Critics Award at the 1970 Venice Film Festival. Throughout the 1970s, she continued to work directing Off-Broadway and regional theater productions, as well as direct two short films. In 1978, Loden was diagnosed with breast cancer, of which she died two years later, aged 48.
Life and career
1932–1954: Childhood and early years
Loden was born on July 8, 1932 in Asheville, North Carolina. Her father was a barber, and she described herself as a "hill-billy's daughter" coming from a "broken home" Upon her parents' divorce in her early childhood, Loden was raised by her religious maternal grandparents in the Appalachian Mountains in rural Marion, North Carolina. Her mother worked in a different town, her father moved away, and her brother was sent off to school elsewhere, leaving Loden alone. She described her childhood as emotionally impoverished. Loden had no childhood friends and was quoted saying, “I spent most of my childhood hiding behind the stove”. She described her childhood as emotionally impoverished. Loden was described as a shy, humble, statuesque and soft-spoken loner. She attended high school in Asheville and did not fit in with her peers, stating that people viewed her as cheap because of the makeup and tight clothing she wore in an attempt to emulate the women she saw on the film screen. At age 16, she moved to New York City, where she began working as a model for detective and romance magazines. Loden found minor success as a pin-up girl, model, and dancer at the Copacabana nightclub before studying at the Actors Studio, intending to become an actress. However, Loden did not believe she would find success in the acting field due to the way she spoke with her her rural upbringing. At the time, she professed to hate film, saying, "People on the screen were perfect and they made me feel inferior."1955–1959: Early theater and television work
Loden made her New York theater debut in 1957 in Compulsion and also appeared on stage in The Highest Tree with Robert Redford as well as Night Circus with Ben Gazzara. She joined the cast of The Ernie Kovacs Show as a "scantily clad" sidekick to Kovacs, a job that her first husband, television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, helped her obtain. On Kovacs' show, Loden’s job was to walk around in bathing suits, and she is quoted saying that back then she believed this earned her the nickname "Dumb Barbara". She said she owed a lot to Kovacs, as another producer on the show had initially vetoed Kovacs's decision to hire her. In interviews, Loden said, "Ernie felt sorry for me" and gave her another job as a stunt sidekick, rolling around in a rug or getting hit in the face with a pie.1960–1966: Film; marriage to Elia Kazan
In 1960, Loden appeared in Elia Kazan's film Wild River as Montgomery Clift's secretary. Loden believed she was given the part because of Wild River’s setting, Tennessee, and its relative closeness to where she grew up. Wild River evidently helped her land her role in Splendor in the Grass, in which she played Warren Beatty's sister.She famously portrayed Maggie, a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe, in Kazan's Lincoln Center Repertory Company stage production of After the Fall, which was written by Monroe's former husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Loden received a Tony award for best actress for her performance in After the Fall as well as an annual award of the Outer Circle, an organization of writers who covered Broadway for national magazines. After the Fall reviews called Loden the "new Jean Harlow" and a "blonde bombshell." Loden recalled in 1980 that she was drawn to the part because the script reflected her own life experiences. Reviews raved about Loden’s performance in After the Fall, even stating, “It is sometimes hard to tell where Barbara Loden begins and Marilyn Monroe leaves off". This however was not because of their physical likeness, but instead "in their approach to life, in their philosophy, in their desire to move up life’s social and intellectual ladder". Although Loden never met Marilyn Monroe, she argued that this is what made her performance work the way it did. Interviewers said that Loden’s own personal insecurities and rough married life bore similarities to Monroe’s; however, Loden denied this. Loden argued that her critically acclaimed performance was derived instead from her five years of acting classes, even though at the time of being a classroom actor she did not have the nerve to fully pursue it.
Loden married her first husband, film and television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, in the 1950s, and they had a son, Marco. Loden was quoted saying she always wanted children, but never wanted to marry and "disapproved of marriage” due to her troubling childhood. After an affair while they were both married to other people, Loden married film director Elia Kazan, who was 23 years her senior, in 1966. She had another son, Leo, with Kazan, and though estranged and considering divorce, they were still married at the time of her death from breast cancer at the age of 48.
Kazan could be contemptuous when describing his relationship with Loden. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, he revealed his desire and inability to control her. Kazan wrote about Loden "with a mix of affection and patronization, emphasizing her sexuality and her backcountry feistiness." In a "condescending" way, Kazan bemoaned that Loden had depended on her "sexual appeal" to get ahead and that he was afraid of "losing her." But Kazan was also, in his words, "protective" of Loden. In turn, Loden felt inferior to Kazan.
Her acting career on film had a troubled history. Her first major film role was to be in the Frank Perry-directed The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, but during post-production there was a dispute about the scene between producer Sam Spiegel and the film's writer-director team, the Perrys. According to notes by screenwriter Eleanor Perry, Spiegel began showing the troubled rough cut of the film around Hollywood, polling several of his famous film director friends about what he should do with it. Kazan was a major film director who had great influence. He had also secretly been shown a private screening of the film by his friend and producer Spiegel and had reportedly interfered with the final cut. Perry was ultimately fired from the film. Several of the film's scenes were recast and reshot by Sydney Pollack, who was hired to replace Perry, with Lancaster reportedly paying for some of the reshoots himself. Among the scenes that were entirely recast and reshot was the notorious Loden scene, with Broadway stage actress Janice Rule replacing Loden. Neither Loden nor Pollack was credited on the film. All that remains of the lost scene are still photos taken on set, which appear in Chris Innis's 2014 documentary The Story of The Swimmer.
1967–1980: Film and theater directing
At some point during her acting career, Loden came across a newspaper article about a woman who, when on trial for accomplice to bank robbery, thanked the judge for her own sentencing. Intrigued by this story, she eventually wrote the screenplay for Wanda, a rumination on a poverty-stricken woman adrift in Pennsylvania coal country who becomes embroiled in a similar plot. The film begs the question, “what pain, what hopelessness could make a person desire to be put away? How could imprisonment be relief?” After sending the script to a number of potential directors, Loden felt that they "didn't seem to understand what this woman was about." Loden stated that she was too afraid to say she was directing the film herself in the beginning because of the reaction people had to women directed films. Despite the film's meager budget, Loden still struggled to raise money for Wanda. While looking for funding, Loden said, "...when I went around and took people my script I’d never hear from them again". Fortuitously, her friend Harry Schuster had offered Loden financing for the film, so she directed it herself in collaboration with cinematographer and editor Nicholas T. Proferes on a meager budget of $115,000. Reviews at the time discussed how unusual it was for a woman to direct, and Loden herself was quoted saying, “I really don’t like to think of myself as a director, though, though I'd rather think of myself as a filmmaker”. Wanda was made as a non-union film in order to both keep costs down and also Loden’s artistic vision intact. She worked with only one cameraman, one sound person, and one assistant on the film.Wanda is a semi-autobiographical portrait of a "passive, disconnected coal miner's wife who attaches herself to a petty crook." Innovative in its cinéma vérité and improvisational style, it was one of the few American films directed by a woman to be theatrically released at that time. Film critic David Thomson wrote, "Wanda is full of unexpected moments and raw atmosphere, never settling for cliché in situation or character." The film was the only American film accepted by the Venice Film Festival in 1970, where it won the International Critics' Prize, and the only American film presented at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. In 2010, with support from Gucci, the film was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
Although Wanda never received proper distribution, screening briefly in New York and at universities but never nationally on the theater circuit, it was noted for its groundbreaking anti-Hollywood view of a woman adrift in the American underworld. Loden said of her title character, "She's trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence, but she doesn't have the equipment"—an independent-minded idea for a cinematic heroine at the time, making Wanda an anti-heroine. In 2017, Wanda was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
While Loden never made another feature film, she directed two educational short films for the Learning Corporation of America. The first one, The Frontier Experience, was released in 1975. It depicts a widowed pioneer woman, played by Loden, in Kansas attempting to survive the harsh winter with her children. Described as a "political prequel" to Wanda, the short explores similar themes. The second, The Boy Who Liked Deer, was released in 1978. It is a cautionary tale about vandalism, in which two boys accidentally poison a deer.
Four months before her death, Loden was interviewed in Katja Raganelli's 1980 documentary I Am Wanda. The film documents Loden's final months, when she taught acting classes.