By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Friday was a good day to be a theater student at Bowling Green State University. Eva Marie Saint was in the house.
The house was the theater that bears the name of the Oscar-winning actress and 1946 graduate of BGSU.
Saint established tone for what a conversation with an acting legend would be like. “Hi, everybody,” she announced as she walked to the dais. “This is really fun, maybe. We’ll see.” Laughter.
It was fun. When the first reference to her age, 93, was made. She popped up from her seat. “She stands. She sits.”
Eva Marie Saint gestures during appearance Friday.
Saint had the students, who she described later as “bright, serious, and funny, and adorable,” laughing, leaning forward to catch her words of wisdom, and silent as she struggled to hold back tears when she talked about her late husband, Jeffrey Hayden, who died Christmas Eve, 2016. Hayden was an esteemed and prolific producer and director.
Lesa Lockford, who chairs the Department of Theatre and Film and who conducted the session with students, said Hayden directed many of the TV shows that she grew up watching. The couple’s 65-year marriage defied Hollywood odds. This was Saint’s first trip without him, she told the press later in the day, and only possible because their two children, Laurette and Darrell, accompanied her. She returned to participate in tonight’s Bravo! BGSU activities.
Being married to a director, not a fellow actor, was one key to the longevity of their marriage. Actors, Saint said, even if they’re not vying for the same roles, tend to be very competitive. She recalled living with another actress in her early days in New York. Her roommate was going for radio roles, while Saint was going for theater and TV work. The roommate kept getting calls for work. Saint said she found herself hating this woman, even though they were good friends, until of course, she started getting calls.
Saint did not set out to be an actor. She followed her older sister to BGSU from Albany, NY, intent on becoming a teacher like her mother. Her father had heard about BGSU, and it was a less expensive alternative to schools in the East.
Living in Shatzel, the students, all women, would put on their pajama-clad shows. Saint sang “I’m Just a Girl who Can’t Say No.” She loved the laughter and applause that greeted her song.
The next year she was living in the Delta Gamma sorority. The husband of their housemother, Betty, was speech professor Elden T. Smith. He asked her to try out for a play. She demurred. He liked her voice, and promised to help her.
She agreed so she was cast as a “sexy lady from Hollywood” in “Personal Appearance” – “not typecasting at that point,” she said.
With a tight-fitting dress and makeup, her friends didn’t recognize her. “They weren’t very imaginative.”
Her other roles at BGSU included playing Rosalind in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” This is the only Shakespeare she’s ever done, she said. When a student told her he would be spending the summer in a Shakespeare workshop, she asked whether she was too old to do a Shakespeare workshop. The students assured her, she wasn’t.
These forays on the stage led her to change her major and career plans. She was concerned how her parents would take this change of course.
Elden Smith wrote her a letter spelling out all the possibilities, and pitfalls, of pursuing an acting career in New York with television just starting to take hold.
She showed that letter to her father, knowing she’d do whatever he recommended. He read the letter.
Saint described the scene later for the press: “He took my hand, and said, ‘honey, whatever you want to do, do your best.’”
If asked to advise parents leery of their child going into acting, she said: “I would say I hope that the parents would really act responsibly in the sense that this is what the child wants to do” and has some experience in the field.
So Saint went to New York, living at first with her parents in Queens. Her deal, she told the students, was that she would live with them for a year and if at the end of that period she wasn’t earning enough to live in the city with a roommate, she’d return to teaching.
Saint landed the role of the nurse in the Broadway play “Mr. Roberts,” starring Henry Fonda. The show went out of town for previews. Saint’s family and friends got to see her on stage. The show returned to New York, and before opening night, Saint was fired. It wasn’t her acting, she was told she looked “too innocent.”
Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister, took the role.
“I’ll never be that disappointed in life again,” Saint said.
She went to her dressing and sobbed uncontrollably. “Hank Fonda came down and talked about the times he’d been fired,” she said. One by one all the cast members came and shared their stories of disappointment.
She got on the train to head home, still crying. She told herself: “You can never, ever allow yourself to feel like you feel right now. You’ll never make it in acting. You’re not going to make it in life. I couldn’t survive feeling like I did losing that part.”
She told herself she had to make a decision before she reached Queens on whether she’d continue to pursue acting or return to teaching.
She told herself: “I’m going to be strong. I’ll get that part, and I’ll never allow myself to be crushed. It was a life changing experience.”
Saint went on to win awards for her TV and film work including an Academy Award for best supporting actress for “On the Waterfront.”
Saint told students when they graduated they needed to seek further training and keep in contact with other actors. She trained first with Herbert Berghof and then at the legendary Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg.
She recalled once leaving the studio to head uptown to do a commercial for Admiral TV. She was dismissive of the job. Strasberg asked her: “You like to eat? You like to have a roof over your head?”
She had to be practical. After that she was looking forward to doing the commercial.
These were the days of live TV. The commercial touted the antennae on the TV set and how easy they were to pull up. Addressing the women in the TV audience, she said: “Even you can do it.”
Then, on live TV, she raised one of the antennae. And then she tried the other. “I couldn’t get it up,” she said. “I giggled and giggled through it. They never asked me again.”
It was during this period that she met her husband.
When Lockford asked how they met, Saint tearing up at first demurred, then said she wanted to tell the story.
Hayden had seen her on the train with her modeling portfolio. Only the rear view, she said. When he saw the “front vision” at the union office, he asked her for coffee.
“I don’t drink coffee,” she told him, and checking her appointment book, said she didn’t have time. He asked her some days later, and got the same answer.
The third time, he asked her to lunch. She did eat lunch. “I’m a gold digger,” she said.
They went to a deli on Fifth Avenue, though he always insisted it was on Sixth. “That’s the only thing we disagreed on.”
Coming back to BGSU without him was difficult. He loved the university as much as she did, just like she loves his alma mater, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
At an event at the Gish Theatre Friday night, Ralph Wolfe, a professor emeritus and the driving force behind the creation and development of the Gish Theater, credited Hayden with getting Saint to return to her alma mater for the first time in 1982.
Wolfe called her about coming to reunite with Lillian Gish, with whom she performed on television and stage in “A Trip to Bountiful,” for the dedication of a display of framed photographs in the lobby of the theater.
At first, she said she couldn’t, she was planning to travel with Hayden to Hawaii where he was directing an episode of “Magnum, P.I.” She’d never been in Hawaii. Then Wolfe told her, they intended to, as a surprise, award her with an honorary doctorate. Still she said no.
Five minutes after the call ended, Wolfe said, she called back. “Jeffrey said I should go.”
“You’ll have to act surprised when we give you your degree,” he told her.
“I am an actor,” she responded.
That was the first of her nine visits back to campus, most with Hayden. In 2001 they performed “Love Letters” and in 2007 they presented works by Willa Cather.
Her appearance in the Gish comes as the theater’s time in its Hanna Hall location are coming to the end. The building is being renovated and expanded to create a new home for the College of Business.
The Gish will be moved into the theater in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union.
Those are the kind of changes life brings, Saint said in her remarks at the Gish. “We have to accept those changes.” And she knew that Wolfe, who has expressed disappointment at the move, will accept it.
During her press conference earlier in the day, she reflected on being on campus without her husband. “It’s a little hard. I had a moment of such sorrow… because he died last year. It’s like a wave that comes over you, then you get through it. I can’t control it, it just subsides.”
Since his death, she told the press, she has not entertained any work. If the right project came up, she may act again, but she’s not sure. “You have to play it by ear, by heart, by soul.”
