Today would have been the 81st birthday of elegant actress JEAN SIMMONS … but sadly she died just nine days (02) short of celebrating it with us! As this New York Times obituary began: “Jean Simmons, the English actress who made the covers of Time and Life magazines by the time she was 20 {actually 21} and became a major mid-century star, died Friday at her home in Santa Monica, California. She was 80.” And quite a lady …
“Jean Simmons was the most beautiful actress I ever saw in the movies,” a fan wrote to Parade magazine in the 1980s … and Sleuth concurs. But after countless costume dramas in the Fifties such as playing Napoleon’s nymph in Desirée—where Sleuth managed to unearth a wardrobe test in which Jean’s costume was decidedly see thru {blow it up for maxi•mam exposure}—she derisively dubbed such roles “poker-up-the-ass parts … very boring.”
One playboy who found Simmons anything but boring was billionaire Howard Hughes {with Ginger Rogers}, who made it clear he’d like to poke•her up the ass … alas, he was overheard by her then-husband, actor Stewart Granger: “I’d sure like to get my teeth into that,” Hughes drooled to Cary Grant in the men’s room. “That Granger is a goddamn lucky son of a bitch.” The reclusive romeo was unlucky again, when he told Jean over the phone: “When are you going to get away from that goddamned husband of yours? I want to talk to you alone, honey.” Granger grabbed the phone and shouted: “Mr. Howard Bloody Hughes, you’ll be sorry if you don’t leave my wife alone!” As for Hughes being “sorry,” it was only a matter of Time.
And it was only a matter of time before the straight-laced Simmons would strip on screen: “I hope I don’t shock anybody,” Jean wondered when news leaked she’d skinny-dip in 1960’s Spartacus. “I must say I shocked myself a little in consenting to do it.” The nude swimming scene “was not in the original script,” the actress revealed, “but director Stanley Kubrick and Kirk {Douglas} both suggested that it would be more effective if played nude {and we’re betting Kubrick didn’t keep his Eyes Wide Shut!}. I kept agreeing, and then realized: ‘What have I said?’” What she’d done was prove her beautiful buoyancy … but only on HER side of the pond … as American audiences only saw her bare back before “doing” Douglas.
Yet unlike Spartacus, Sleuth is no slave to the censors … so he rebelled by importing these European exposures of Jean’s elegant epidermis from an overseas print of the film: Sipping some bubbly while her boobies bobbed below the surface, sultry Simmons showed a pair of flotation devices that might have saved the Tit•anic!
Jean would get along swimmingly for the next five decades … remarkably reprising the 1946 Great Expectations debut that made her famous forty-three years later … only this time as the malicious Miss Havisham! In her later years, the actress said she continued to receive fan mail but that younger writers “often confused me” with someone else: “One day a letter arrived from a 10-year-old,” she recalled. “It was the usual fan letter, saying things like, ‘I think you’re wonderful.’ Then I got to the P.S.: ‘I love it when you spit blood!’ That’s when I realized,” joked Jean Simmons, “the letter wasn’t for me.”
But Sleuth’s favorite story concerns the time amorous Ava Gardner—then the lover of “Simmons-smitten” Howard Hughes—burst into Stewart Granger’s bedroom at 2 a.m. while on location in Africa in 1956 filming Bhowani Junction and demanded to know why he didn’t find her attractive. “Ava, you’re probably the most attractive woman in the world,” Granger gasped, “but I’m married to Jean.” Griped Gardner: “Oh, fuck Jean!” Grinned Granger: “I’d love to, darling.” Who wouldn’t …