Past Issues
Faith Domergue
Part 1
By Paul Parla
The exotic beauty of Faith Domergue has been traced to the French
Quarter of New Orleans and to that city's unique ethnic blend.
Her on-screen presence enhanced many action and science fiction
films, some of which have become fantasy classics, such as This
Island Earth (1955), It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), and
Cult of the Cobra (1955). Others, such as Vendetta (1950) and
Where Danger Lives (1950) are still admired by film buffs and
critics.
Once billed as "One of the most exciting personalities to reach the screen," Faith Domergue arrived in motion pictures as a protegee of millionaire industrialist-producer-director-aviator Howard Hughes in the late 1940s. With the RKO boss sparing no expense in promoting her beauty and talent, the sultry brunette's career prospered in such other films as The Young Widow (1946), Duel at Silver Creek (1952), The Great Sioux Uprising (1953), This Is My Love (1954), The Atomic Man (1955), Esc ort West (1959), California (1964), Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966), Track of Thunder (1967), L'Amore Breve (Italian 1969), The Gamblers, Man With the Icy Eyes (1970), Legacy of Blood (1970), Una Sull' Altra (1970, Italy, France, Spain) and House of Seven Corpses in 1974.
Long before Faith blossomed into womanhood, the Louisiana-born actress, adopted daughter of Annabelle Ouimet and Leo Domergue, moved to California in the early 1930s. This fit in perfectly with her dream to become an actress. Before she began to pursue her acting career, she finished her schooling at Beverly Hills Catholic School and St. Monica's Convent School. Upon completing her education in 1942, Faith started down the challenging road towards interviews and auditions singing and playing piano. She became fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish.
Faith's career hopes were temporarily dashed when she almost lost her life in an automobile accident. Eventually Faith would pull through the ordeal, and while still recuperating, her lucky break came.
While attending a party aboard the yacht of Howard Hughes, her striking beauty captivated her host, and she was signed to a long term contract. Faith's three years of studying voice, diction, and drama landed her the female lead in Vendetta, a tale of Corsican murder and intrigue.
Three frustrating years would pass before the completion of
Vendetta in 1950. At that time, Faith and her husband of three
years, Argentine-born director Hugo Fregonese (The Raid, 1954;
Black Tuesday, 1955; Decameron Nights, 1953, etc.), went to South
America. It was in Argentina that Fregonese had directed Pampa
Barbara in 1943, with Lucas Demare as co-director; Donde Mueren
Las Palabras in 1946; Apenas Un Delincuente in 1947; and De Hombre
a Hombre in 1949. Faith and her husband traveled to Trini dad,
Brazil, and Argentina. After giving birth to her daughter Diana
in Buenos Aires in 1950, Faith returned to Hollywood and landed
a memorable starring role opposite Robert Mitchum in Where Danger
Lives, alternately titled A White Rose For Julie. But Fa ith became
unhappy with the lack of work in Hollywood and left for London
and Spain. Returning once again to the United States, she became
a freelance actress after her contract ended at Universal Pictures.
Although still active in motion pictures at that time, Miss Domergue
returned to Europe living in London and Rome. After divorcing
Fregonese, she married international agent Paolo Cossa in 1966.
Through the years little has been heard of Faith Domergue. Recently,
however, she granted an interview, sharing many stories and anecdotes,
some of them printed here for the first time.
The eloquent Miss Domergue, who is of Irish and English descent,
first recalled the earlier years of her life "Much to my
surprise, I've just discovered that I was an adopted child. I've
also just discovered my family and my true ethnic roots which
I'd always thought to be Spanish and French. I was adopted at
six weeks of age, and my foster mother was a lovely woman. She
was married to a very wealthy man who owned the Monteleone Hotel
... Frank Monteleone, whom she later divorced. Well, she then
married a wonderful man by the name of Leo Domergue, and when
they both learned that there was a baby girl they could adopt,
they adopted me as they did not want me to be placed through the
usual channels. They were very loving, wonderful parents to me.
She never told me that I was adopted, and this was all meant to
be, I guess.
"We came to California in the early 1930s, and that's where
I was raised. I came to consciousness in California. I am actually
of Irish-English descent ... brunette Irish. Black Irish, as we
call it, and my English roots go back to the Revolutionary War
times. My ancestors settled in Virginia. Domergue was my adopted
name, and I do not have any French or Spanish-roots, but, of course,
I always thought I did.
"I was just a child when my foster mother put me into a speech program at the Beverly Vista grammar school. This was a program for children who had speech defects, and I lisped very badly. Well, when my speech teacher finally realized that I could recite, she realized that I could act as well, and so did my foster mother. So, I did all kinds of children's theatrical productions.
"For a while I was with the Bliss-Hayden Theatre and later went under contract. My mother joined a club in Santa Monica called The Delmar Club, and someone there who was an agent said to me that I was a beautiful child and that I had a lovely voice and did I ever consider being an actress? Well, my mother wouldn't hear of it, so I was then sent, by myself, to talk to Henry Wilson at the Zeppo Marx Agency. Henry took me over to Warner Bros. to meet a man named Solly Biano who was the head talent scout. He liked my appearance and then introduced me to Sophie Rosenstein who was head of drama. Sophie brought me in to meet with the head of casting, and they gave me a test and signed me. I immediately had to go back into high school because I was under 18 years of age. I went into the little school at Warner Bros. that Miss Horn had. I didn't get to do anything really at this time except meet twice a week, and I believe this is when I first met Lance Fuller, whom I later starred with in This Island Earth.
"At this time, Howard Hughes came in and bought my contract from Warner Bros. and the Zeppo Marx Agency and stopped all production on my career and made me finish my high school education with a private tutor. Although I never did theater, I did do a lot of dramatic preparation at this time and afterwards did Vendetta, which made me hate motion pictures."
Faith's introduction to motion pictures was not a happy one, and she obviously found it unpleasant to recall, but she continued, saying "I don't talk much about Howard Hughes and think it is quite sad that it's the negative side of someone's life that is so interesting to the public and not the fact that he was one of the great contributors to aeronautics in this country since the beginning of the century. All my memories of Howard are good ones. He was a nice man and made great contributions to his country. His life has been so maligned, and that's sad to me. Well, Howard wanted to make a film with me after I graduated from high school. This would be Vendetta and would eventually turn out to be a tortured, horrible experience for me.
"Howard had formed a company with Preston Sturges called California Pictures, and Preston had an idea to do what was then called Columba [Prosper Mérimée, who wrote Carmen, also wrote the original story to Vendetta, which was called Columba]. Preston Sturges, who was part French and lived in France, was also very well versed in French literature and quite brilliant. Preston approached Howard wanting to do Columba and told Howard that he wanted to do a film with his girlfriend, Francis Ramsden, and Harold Lloyd called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock [1947; cut to 79 minutes and reissued in 1950 as Mad Wednesday]. He said to Howard that if Howard would let him produce and direct Sin, Preston would produce Columba with me and told Howard, `I will make a star of her.' Well, this is what one likes to hear, of course.
"Preston took Max Ophuls as the director on this film originally and worked with Max on the script. It was heavy with dialogue, and it was a beautifully done script. I also worked with Max a great deal on the script before shooting started and just before we were all ready to get to work, Howard crashed into the house on Whittier and remained between life and death for weeks to come. He couldn't be reached, and production on Sin of Harold Diddlebock had been finished, and we had started out to begin shooting way out in the Valley for Vendetta, and when this occurred with Howard, we all thought he was going to die. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Howard was not going to make it, and now Preston had total control of the whole production. Well, at this point something happened to Preston. He lost his bearings. So much hubris came into his actions -- this arrogant pride, and he and Francis would go off on horseback for hours, and the whole company would have to just sit around. We would get only one shot before the sun went down and call it a day!
"Now, I had not made a picture before, so I'm thinking that this is the way it's done. Then Preston wouldn't allow Max to direct any scenes. Max would only be allowed to yell `Action,' but that was it! He never allowed him to say `cut' or instruct any of the actors, and Max was suffering terribly over this.
"This situation kept getting worse and worse, and people
were wanting to leave, and the technicians didn't want to work
anymore. Max had been a Jewish refugee from Germany and would
have been killed if he had remained there, and here he is [after
the war] getting this awful treatment. He was such a wonderful
director, and I felt so badly for him. And Nigel Bruce was getting
short tempered with it all, and he and George Dolenz wanted to
leave. This was to be for my benefit, and it was going down the
drain.
"Finally, when it was all about to explode one Friday, when
we were closing up shop, Max came into my dressing room and asked
me if I could get a message to Howard to inform him as to what
was going on, but I couldn't. We had been out there shooting for
six weeks, and we didn't have one completed scene. I once made
95 takes of one little short scene!
"I truly lost the `sacred fire' making this picture which was my first film, and so I wrote a letter about all this to Howard's secretary, Toni Guest, and when I came to work Monday morning, all of Preston's people were packing up and leaving. The entire company had been dissolved; and, alas, Max was with Preston's company, and he was fired too. There remained George and myself and Howard's people, and the money they had put up for the film. Then they hired a nice gentleman named Stuart Heisler to direct. Then we laid off. Then we went back and shot some closeups. Then we laid off again and went back two years later and shot some really nice stuff with Mel Ferrer as director, and he took credit now and shot six weeks of retakes.
"Now, by this time, I had married (laughs) and totally lost the enthusiasm of being a star, and I never got it back. I wanted to bail out totally from the industry because I did all that I could do and left for South America with my husband Hugo."
Wanting nothing to do with Hollywood and its let-downs and lunacy, Faith left for South America. "Hugo had been under contract to MGM by this time. He [had come] up from Argentina in the late `40s, that's when we met and we married. Hugo was the only one in his family born in Argentina but was of Northern Italian descent.
"One Way Street (1950 with James Mason and Marta Toren) was the first film Hugo directed when he arrived in America. Then followed Saddle Tramp with Joel McCrea and Blowing Wild with Gary Cooper and My Six Convicts with Stanley Kramer, and numerous others.
In 1947 when we were married, Hugo had been under contract for about a year or two at MGM in the Joe Pasternak unit and was very unhappy there. He turned down a picture called The Kissing Bandit (1948) with Frank Sinatra, and they were so angry with him they dropped him. He wanted me to go back with him to Argentina; and, still being very pissed off about Vendetta, I was doing one of many series of retakes for Vendetta when I told Howard's company that I was leaving after six weeks of retakes. They didn't believe me, but I had a plane ticket to leave the morning after the night of the six weeks were finished, not knowing I was pregnant.
"Not feeling well at all, we arrived in Buenos Aires, and soon after Hugo started work on a film called Hardly a Criminal (Apenas Un Delincuente). He wanted me to do a little part in the film. Suddenly I started looking very pregnant, and there is a scene where I'm seated at a gambling table, and the table came up to my waist so my pregnancy wouldn't show. A famous Argentinean producer had been there and rushed over to my husband and said, `I want to star that girl in my next film!' When I stood up, he saw my condition and yelled, `No, no, no, I won't!' [laughing]
"I had wonderful times there but just wanted to go away from motion pictures and be left alone with my husband. The Vendetta experience was still fresh and thought of all that time, and money wasted. What you see in Vendetta is bits and pieces of everything with nothing of what Preston shot at all except a couple of long shots.
"But by the time this was all over, I had no drive left,
and to be perfectly frank, I lost a child with Vendetta. My first
child. I had a miscarriage, and this was very heartbreaking. The
only other person I've told this to regarding what went on with
Vendetta was a professor of motion picture history in Germany
who was doing research on Max Ophuls and wanted to know of that
particular part of his life, and only I knew it.
"Vendetta is not a good film, but we all were quite good.
Unfortunately, all of the performances that Max and I worked on
were out the window.
"I do want to mention one scene I did in a film for Hunt Stromberg in 1946 called Young Widow. Mr. Hughes wanted me to get familiar with the camera and performing this way, and this was mainly for the experience. It was one day's work."
Miss Domergue's memories of her next film, Where Danger Lives (1950) somewhat of a noir classic, are equally as vivid and interesting. Starring with Robert Mitchum, Claude Rains, and Maureen O'Sullivan, Where Danger Lives has Mitchum romantically tangled within a web of intrigue. Miss Domergue delivers an excellent performance, with the right touch of seductive menace needed to complement John Farrow's direction. Faith recalled "When I returned from South America with my baby, I, of course, reconsidered and returned to films and went under contract with Howard Hughes and RKO, and he gave me Where Danger Lives. This was an interesting film. John Farrow was a very impressive fellow and had a great personality. He was a very attractive man who was beautifully educated and beautifully spoken. He carried a swagger stick. We became good friends. After we finished the picture, he and Robert sent me a little gold medal, and on the back of it there was written, `From the other men in your life.'
"I do remember clearly that we did the scene in which I attempt to smother Robert Mitchum in one take. There may have been one cut that was made once it was mounted, but it was done in one take, and then we did one closeup so that the entire scene which ran about 12 minutes was done in just one take. We were all very proud of ourselves on this film. You couldn't miss your mark or flub, and it wasn't easy, but it turned out very well. I loved the role. It expanded my range, but Vendetta turned out to be a good lesson in histrionics. I feel that I was better in Where Danger Lives than in Vendetta. Robert Mitchum was wonderful. We had a marvelous time making this film. He was my best friend on Where Danger Lives.
"I had some very difficult scenes to do with Claude Rains, and Mr. Rains was, indeed, a very formal man. You didn't call him Claude! He always came in very prepared with his lines learned right down to the last apostrophe. We would run through the scenes at night on the set with new lines added. We would have a fresh scene written every night, and we would rush to our dressing rooms to relearn the newly added lines because this had been done at night and we were doing the scenes in the morning. Claude Rains found this difficult to adapt to. He was never bad tempered but was a very structured actor, a splendid actor. He brought nuances to the part of the husband which were just incredible.
"Just prior to the scene where I'm to smother Claude, there was supposed to be violence between us both before, and I'm hysterical and the scene involving my hysteria took two days to shoot. It was high hysteria, and in this scene I pull an earring out of my ear and declare that `he's done it,' and it was difficult for me somewhat. I didn't know how to approach it exactly, and Robert said to me, after we finished the scene, `You know, I like you. You don't know what you're doing, but you are in there doing it with all your heart!' [laughing]
Robert threw every scene he could to me. He watched the camera. He watched the shadows. He was fantastic. The fight that came after Where Danger Lives was not so fantastic. I had a big fight with RKO. I had an enormous publicity campaign afterwards, and millions of dollars were spent on this campaign. I had practically every cover there was at this time -- 15 pages in Pageant magazine, 4 pages in Life magazine, and the cover of Look magazine -- you name it. Howard Hughes wanted to do a $5 million pub licity campaign once he knew Vendetta and Where Danger Lives were `in the can.' Perry Leiber was in charge of this, and this was a lot of money at the time (1950). I also did this one year prior to the release of the film and disliked the campaign intensely. It was very consuming.
"I started to become difficult and gave it a lot of thought. I wanted another child, a brother or sister for my little daughter and thought that this was the time to do it. I was traveling all over the country and presenting myself in a way that I was not. David Selznick, at one point, wanted to sign me and thought he might have been better for me since Selznick had actresses which I thought were more my style. Howard had types like Jane Russell, and I didn't feel that I could have been fed into that frame of actress. By the end of 1950, I was very difficult. RKO had scheduled an opening for both films at the same time in New York, and I'd just come off of a 10-city tour, and I was tired, angry, pregnant , and six weeks late! Well, I told them that I wouldn't go, and then Howard phoned me and told me that there was a lot of money tied up in the campaign. Then I told him that I was going to have a baby, and he replied, `OK, goodbye, Faith.' And that was the last time I ever heard his voice. Both films came out and were not successful.
"I had my baby, and he loaned me out once to do Duel at Silver Creek (1952), and then I asked to be let out of my contract, and they did. I still had five years to go. My husband was going to Rome to do a film with Mike Frankovich. We then left for Europe When I came back from Europe, I signed my two pictures per year contract with Universal, and I was free to do independents."
Faith's excursion into science fiction has resulted in a vast following of devoted admirers of This Island Earth (1955), Cult of the Cobra (1955), It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), The Atomic Man (1956), and Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet (1965). Although This Island Earth and It Came From Beneath The Sea have earned themselves much praise, Miss Domergue would rather have not done them. She felt that working in the genre was not to her liking, though she acknowledges the success of these films, saying "This Island Earth seems to have attained more popularity than anything else I've done; and this, like with It Came From Beneath The Sea, was certainly not a film for an actress. They were films for the technicians, and it's all the spe cial effects and tricks of photography that take center stage and the actors second place to them and the sets.
"It's a beautifully done film and was amazing for the time it was made. At the time (1954), it had been done on the biggest set in the world, the old Phantom of the Opera set. They built the whole surface of Metaluna on the Phantom set. They didn't shoot it in matte or with tricks. They shot it right on this huge set. It was extraordinary and quite dangerous at times because I remember all of the lightning, explosions, and fire that you saw were, of course, under control but were actually happening right there on this enormous set.
"This Island Earth was part of my two-picture-a-year deal with Universal, and I wasn't too pleased about it. I had left RKO in a rather abrupt way, and Robert Goldstein, a good friend of mine and twin brother of producer Leonard Goldstein, were both at Universal. Robert often tried to get me on loan from RKO for other films, but they wouldn't let me go. The first picture I did at Universal for the two picture a year deal was The Great Sioux Uprising (1953) with Jeff Chandler. I didn't like doing this film. The second one of the two was This Island Earth, and my agent came to me and told me that if I did the two a year, there was one other film they would give me, and then I could get out of my contract with them if I wanted to and vice versa.
"So, I asked, `What is it called?' They replied `This Island Earth.' I was surprised and told them that this was not what I had in mind! Well, I signed and did the picture. My agent told me that it had a lot of money behind it and an interesting director (Joseph Newman) who was very bright and very keen on the script, and I wouldn't be sorry and that I had no choice anyway! [laughs]
"Then we started work, and I shot every single day that the film was shooting. I was on the set every day with the exception of one short portion at the beginning, and I was never so weary in all my life. We worked six days a week. I'd go in at 6 AM and get out at 6 at night so they wouldn't go overtime with me, but they did once in a while. When we shot the exterior scenes on the back lot in the lake and other shots, I'd work 13 or 14 hours. The coldest lake in the world as far as I'm concerned because we shot when the sun went down and, knowing that I had to get into the water, I spent a lot of time trying to keep the technicians from spitting into the lake! [laughing] No mishaps or accidents, thankfully, and no, I never sprained my foot as it's been rumored. I was very agile.