ALL SCREAMS AND BRAS
Born Marilyn Joan Watts in Santa Monica, California, her father, Emerson, had many jobs during the Great Depression including chauffeur, launderette owner, auditor and, ultimately accountant. Her mother, Shirley Wood, was a stenographer – although had previously been a bootlegger.
Her grandfather was a Shakespearean actor.
As a little girl, Marilyn was obsessed with show business. She told her mother, “I don’t have to go to school because I will marry a movie star.” She spent whole days at the cinema with her older brother, Richard.
Aged fifteen, Marilyn was lying on a beach when a seventeen year old boy asked if he could use her as a model for a photographic competition he was entering.
She agreed – and the photo won first prize. Marilyn considered a modelling career.
She began working as an usher at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles.
Her mother got fed up with Marilyn talking about show business, so after seeing an advertisement entitled ‘Looking for New Faces’, she was taken to auditions for Earl Carroll’s revue at a Hollywood nightclub.
Marilyn was just seventeen, so her mother forged a birth certificate to pretend she was a year older. She passed the audition and became a showgirl, initially dancing in the chorus line.
Pretty soon it was realised that Marilyn was sharp and witty, so she was promoted to perform comedy sketches with the comedian Pinky Lee.
Marilyn needed a stage name.
The house band at the Mayan Theatre were the Lecuona Cuban Boys, and their bongo player was in love with Marilyn. He always called her Marita (Little Mara), so she took Mara as her first name. Her favourite perfume was Corday – hence Mara Corday.
Within a year, Earl Carroll died in a plane crash. Mara was out of work.
She moved to Las Vegas and danced in a variety of shows before getting her first acting role at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. She appeared in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, an Anita Loos play.
Shortly afterwards, Mara was signed to Universal – International Pictures, both as an actress and to model bikinis. She was featured in many magazines and by the mid-1950s, it was estimated Mara had been photographed 50,000 times – supposedly the most of any woman in the world.
Mara was voted the second most popular pinup by men in the American armed forces, losing out to Marilyn Monroe.
She was also voted the ‘Go Girl’ by the 33rd Marine Air Wing.
Mara’s first film appearance was in ‘Two Tickets to Broadway’, starring Janet Leigh. Mara played a showgirl.
Mara appeared in other films including ‘Sea Tiger’ and ‘Money from Home’ (starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis). She also played a sexy French cashier called Yvonne in ‘So This is Paris’. It was her favourite role and earned Mara a publicity tour.
She was elected Honorary Fire Chief of Universal City, California. Fellow actor, Tony Curtis, was voted honorary mayor.
Mara played opposite Lex Barker in the western, ‘The Man from Bitter Ridge’ and the two of them had a brief affair. Lex broke up the relationship when he met (and later married) Lana Turner.
During the filming of ‘Drums across the River’ with Audie Murphy, he took her out to dinner. Whilst driving to the restaurant, two teenage boys gave Murphy a two-fingered gesture. He stopped the car, got a gun out of the boot, and started shooting at them. Mara terminated the date.
She appeared in ‘Man Without a Star’ with Kirk Douglas. She found him utterly humorless. In one scene, Mara was nearly choked when Douglas grabbed hold of her necklace.
Mara called Steve McQueen, “The most unprofessional actor I have ever worked with.”
Mara appeared frequently in sci-fi thrillers. They included ‘Tarantula’, where, as a female scientist, she fled from a one-hundred-foot-tall spider who had escaped from the laboratory. She said, “The whole world is after him. He’s a pretty unhappy spider.”
Tarantula also featured a very young Clint Eastwood in a bit-part.
Mara played a mathematician in ‘The Giant Claw’, about a very large bird that tore down buildings and flew at supersonic speed. She was pregnant during the filming but kept it quiet for fear of being sacked.
There were more outsized insects in ‘The Black Scorpion’, set in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. It was filmed in Mexico.
A newspaper review said Mara was constantly chased by ‘Bugs from Hell’. It reported that she was the expert at screaming and thrusting out her chest – ‘All Screams and bras’.
However, there were limits for her. She refused to act with rats or mice.
One day, after filming in Mexico, Mara returned to her hotel room to find a coral snake in it. The bellboy rescued her. She said, “After working with scorpions all day, I’m in no condition to combat snakes at night.”
Mara admitted the success of these ‘Horrorwood’ films (as they were nicknamed), was due to the quality of the special effects and not the standard of the acting. “There was not much plot.”
In October 1958, Mara featured as Playboy’s ‘Playmate of the Month’. The pictures had been taken years earlier when she was a struggling model. She threatened Playboy with a lawsuit, but the pictures were published anyway.
She withdrew her threat, saying philosophically, “I’ve thought about it but you know Hollywood. Maybe I want to work as a model again someday and I don’t think it would be a wise move. But I’d sure like to stop them.”
Mara married actor Richard Long, star of the television programme ‘The Big Valley’. His first wife of just sixteen months, actress Suzan Ball, had recently died of cancer.
The wedding ceremony was at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Richard’s best man was a passing insurance salesman, whose wife was their only other guest.
It was a tempestuous marriage. Mara left Long and moved back with to mother after two weeks, and within a month Hollywood gossip columns were speculating about their relationship being in trouble.
Mara went to the cinema and found Richard sitting in the aisle opposite her. “He looked so lonesome that we made up right in the theatre.”
They separated on many occasions, but always returned to each other. She said, “I divorced him ten times the first year of our marriage, getting a lawyer and everything – and thirteen times the second year. He’d plead literally on his hands and knees, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t know why I did it. Give me another chance.”
Long forbade his wife from acting and he turned down many roles she was offered ‘on her behalf’, without her knowledge or consent. This included the very successful show ‘The Oregon Trail’ and the lead role in the TV film ‘Who is the Black Dahlia’ (a role given to Lucie Arnaz). Mara’s last screen appearance was in 1961.
She said, “I thought when we married we would make a great showbiz team, but Richard didn’t want me in the business.”
Despite everything, Richard and Mara had three children: Valerie, Greg and Carey.
Richard Long had been jailed in 1961 for beating up Mara. He strangled her and kicked her whilst he was drunk. She withdrew all the charges, but he was prosecuted anyway.
The couple finally separated permanently in 1969, after Long threw her to the floor and poured water over her.
Subsequently, Mara found out that Long had a gambling addiction and had spent all their savings.
Richard Long died five years later, after a heart attack, aged just 47 years old.
Despite everything, Mara said, “I loved him and I am still in love with him.”
Two years later, Mara returned to acting as she was extremely poor and needed money to pay for health insurance. She played a very small part in one episode of the crime drama ‘Joe Forrester’, which starred Lloyd Bridges as a policeman.
It was this appearance that gave Mara her big break. The programme was watched by her old friend Clint Eastwood, who contacted her and said, “Why aren’t you working?”
Clint, who was now directing films, offered her a job. She appeared in ‘The Gauntlet’, ‘Pink Cadillac’ and ‘The Rookie’. Mara called Eastwood, “A Godsend.”
Her most famous scene came in ‘Sudden Impact’ one of Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ films.
Mara played a waitress in a coffee shop. ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan comes in for his daily take-away drink. He doesn’t realise the shop is being held up by robbers and Mara (and the seated clients) are hostages.
Mara put loads of sugar into his coffee, and he leaves. He doesn’t normally take sugar. When Dirty Harry returns to the shop to complain, he finds the hostage scene. He shoots three of the robbers and holds a gun to the head of the fourth, uttering the famous line, “Go ahead punk – Make my day.”
Mara stopped acting in 1990.
In later years, she went to a psychic, to try to contact her dead husband. Mara said that from the grave, he had asked her to forgive him.
Her youngest son, Carey, died in 2008.
Mara lived her last few years under the name Marilyn Long.
She died of heart problems at her home in Valencia, California.
RIP – Repeatedly In Photographs
