Screen Classics

Maria Montez in Hollywood

Tom Zimmerman

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813182582
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Best known for her appearances in the six Technicolor "Neverland" movies, Maria Montez is a film icon. Growing up as one of ten children in the Dominican Republic, her rise as a film star in the United States seemed unlikely. In 1939, Montez set off on her own to New York City to fulfill her aspirations of movie stardom. Despite having no substantial acting experience, Montez managed to sign with major agent Louis Schurr who helped her secure a contract with Universal Studios before she moved out to Hollywood.

Following her arrival in Los Angeles, Montez began cultivating the larger-than-life persona for which she is known. Her beauty, personality, and series of publicity antics, including dramatic restaurant entrances, endeared her to the press. She even created her own fan club—The Montez for Stardom Club. Her ambitious self-promotion bolstered the success she found with her first big lead in Arabian Nights, released in 1943. From then on, the studio referred to her as "The Queen of Technicolor."

Author Tom Zimmerman puts Montez's life in historical context, including her role as a cultural icon and a living representation of the United States' Good Neighbor Policy with Latin American countries. With her thick Dominican accent, Montez struggled to make herself intelligible to an American audience. However, unlike some of her Latin contemporaries, she did not present a caricature of her culture or use her accent for comedic purposes, giving her credibility with a Latin American audience. Zimmerman skillfully recounts the story of Montez's fiery ambition and her ascent to Hollywood fame, giving her the opportunity to live on in public memory.

1

The Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern side of Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Caribbean Sea. The western side is Haiti. It has one of the longest histories of any place in what would come to be called the Americas. Columbus stopped there on his first voyage in 1492. Santo Domingo, founded in 1496, is one of the first European settlements in the New World. The Tainos were the predominant people of the Caribbean islands. As was common with the native inhabitants of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, European diseases, especially smallpox and influenza, enslavement, and open warfare largely wiped them out. Spanish colonial demands that destroyed the natives’ culture and self-determination finished the job. Those who remained largely intermarried with African and European peoples. Starting in 1503 African slaves who were put to work in the cattle ranches, agricultural fields, and mines on the island replaced the native population.

Haiti achieved its independence from France through a prolonged rebellion of slaves led by Toussaint Louverture. He was lured for talks by French forces, captured, and died in prison in France in 1803. The revolution was completed under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, with Haiti declaring its independence from France on January 1, 1804. The Dominican two-thirds of the island was part of the Spanish Empire until 1821. The intention after declaring independence from Spain was to join with the proposed country of Gran Columbia, which encompassed most of northern South America, but Haiti annexed the rest of Hispaniola. It took another war of independence for the Dominicans to free themselves from the Haitians in 1844. The age of the caudillos followed. Caudillismo refers to the complete domination of a region or state by a particular cacique, or chief. When two or more such individuals arose in a country there was nothing but infighting over ultimate control. The Dominican Republic suffered several such periods of turmoil through the mid- to late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

Various European countries and the United States vied to control the sugar and mining markets in the Dominican, which fluctuated wildly as world markets ebbed and prospered. This lasted into the new century as the country’s economy and population suffered while the foreign debt reached untenable amounts. France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands all sent warships to the Dominican to collect money owed to their citizens. This prompted US president Theodore Roosevelt to issue his 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The original document was aimed at keeping European nations from trying to establish or reestablish colonies in the Americas. The Roosevelt Corollary held that the US government would take the responsibility that the nations of Latin America would meet their financial obligations. For those who continued on the path of “chronic wrongdoing,” the United States would be forced “to the exercise of an international police power.”

The continuing political and economic chaos on both sides of Hispaniola caused the US Navy and Marine Corps to occupy Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican in 1916. Needless to say, the US attempt at nation building did not go over well among the people at whom it was directed. The Marines were finally withdrawn in 1924. Stability arrived in the Dominican at quite a price. Horacio Vásquez was elected president and the country entered into four years of prosperity. But he extended his reign by two years and then threatened to change the constitution so he could run for office again. This brought on another revolution, which led to Rafael Trujillo being elected president with a suspicious 95 percent of the vote. He would remain in office from 1931 to 1961. His friends would prosper, his enemies suffer. He even changed the name of the capital from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City) in 1936.¹

While all this political and financial chaos was sweeping so much of the country, the isolated southwestern part of the Dominican was beginning to grow. Isidoro Gracia Garcia arrived and began buying land to grow and harvest guayacan trees, whose hardwood was much appreciated in Europe and the United States. He was the quintessential early twentieth-century young man on the make. His family was originally from Teruel in the Aragon region of northeastern Spain. His soldier father was posted to Las Palmas, the largest city of the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. Here his two sons were born. Isidoro left the Canaries with his brother, Joaquin, first landing in Cuba and then moving on to the Dominican. They were not looking for day labor. They wanted to find land and set up their own business. Isidoro did exactly that in Barahona, where he met Teresa Maria Vidal Recio.

Her family had Dutch roots and was from the Dominican town of Bani. The family found themselves on the wrong side of a local political dispute and was forced to move west to Barahona. This fact would often be used by Universal Studios in its promotion of Maria Montez during World War II. Teresa was often referred to as a Dutch refugee. To World War II readers, that equated escaping from the Nazis. That was, of course, not the case. Political problems were endemic to the Dominican Republic all through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was one of these upheavals that sent Teresa and her family first to Enriquillo and then on to Barahona.²

Fulfilling her father’s request, Maria arranged for her three sisters Lucita, Adita, and Consuelo to join her in the United States, August 1944. Only the youngest, Teresita, remained in the Dominican.

Isidoro and Teresa eventually wed and had ten children. Their second child and first daughter, Maria Africa Gracia Vidal, was born at 8:00 p.m. on June 6, 1912, in Barahona. The Africa part of her name was a salute to the Spanish city of Las Palmas on Grand Canary Island off the coast of Africa where her father was born. Her five brothers were Isidoro, Aquilino, Joaquin, Luis, and Jaime. Her four sisters were Adita (sometimes called Ada), Consuelo, Lucita (Luz), and Teresita. Isidoro and Maria were born out of wedlock as their father had to disengage himself from a relationship formed in Cuba before he could formally marry their mother.³

Once Maria Montez became a Hollywood star there was considerable interest in where this bundle of energy and aggression had come from. Charles Samuels set out to write the definitive article on Maria for Motion Picture magazine in 1946. He had been a newspaperman, news service reporter, press agent, and would eventually write biographies of Jackie Gleason, Clark Gable, and Evelyn Nesbit as well as co-author the autobiographies of Ethel Waters and Buster Keaton. In Samuels’s 1946 essay on the life of Maria Montez he set out to find “the real secret of the success of the startling senorita who became famous as the most eccentric flower in the garden of wacks and wizards, goofs and geniuses, called Hollywood.” To understand how Maria achieved success in the film capital, Samuels thought it was important to learn about her childhood and the events that formed her ambition. Like so many writers of the time he caricatured her accent in print. She told him, “But dolling, my youth was so dool. . . . It would be of no interest to anyone.” But the writer was persistent, and after “much wheedling” he was sure he got the answers he was after. What he got was a lot of nonsense about her nonexistent life in the Canary Islands.

Maria told Samuels the story of the Sacred Heart convent school she supposedly attended from eight to seventeen. Suitably, in accordance with her Hollywood dreams, she claimed to have acted in and directed plays. Some of her summers were spent in the castle-like villa her father owned in the Canaries. She said she saw little of her parents as she grew up since her father was in the Dominican consular service and was assigned to one great European city after another. None of this is true, but it is a perfect example of her father’s tremendous influence on her imagination and her enormous desire to make her life story sound more compelling, romantic, and cosmopolitan to US audiences than it actually was.⁴

Her widower, Jean-Pierre Aumont, finally got to the Dominican Republic in 1954, three years after his wife’s death, after he had presented his recent films at a festival in Punta del Este, Uruguay. He met four of his brothers-in-law and Maria’s mother for the first time. He spent a week with them in Barahona. Flor de Oro Trujillo, President Trujillo’s daughter, came to one of the many events held in his honor. His reaction to the place is indicative of why Maria invented the Sacred Heart convent and her life in the Canary Islands. Aumont wrote that after seeing Barahona, “I couldn’t succeed in imagining Maria’s childhood in this tropical village.”⁵

In spite of what she told Charles Samuels, Maria lived a life absolutely common for one of her class and place in the Dominican. A dutiful oldest daughter, she helped her mother raise her nine brothers and sisters as well as Teresa’s godson, whom she adopted when his parents died. She went through the eighth grade at a local school and married a safe, wealthy man at age twenty. It is not that she did not stand out in her hometown. She was always known as a smart, very expressive girl. When she was in third grade Maria was asked by her teacher to give a presentation on the three heroes of the Dominican revolution against Haiti—Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, and Matías Ramón Mella. Not content merely to recite, the nine-year-old gave a performance featuring physical and facial gestures. This got her thrown out of class but the kids loved it. When she was fourteen, Maria was chosen to welcome the pastor to the inauguration of Barahona’s new Catholic church. She gave a short speech and presented the priest with a bouquet of flowers. She also gave performances on a stage she set up at her house. Her father was always one of the most enthusiastic audience members.

The young Maria dedicated herself to learning English. In her mind she planned to eventually move to Hollywood and get into the movies. To do this she simply had to speak English. She studied it in school and constantly read American movie magazines. Like many of her classmates, she sought out English speakers, especially those who worked for the local West Indies Sugar Company and lived in the Batey Central colony near Barahona. Knowing that her goal to reach Hollywood would also require a fetching figure, from grade school Maria was always dedicated to exercise, especially long walks around her hometown and playing baseball—in which, of course, she was the pitcher.⁶

Nice childhood memories, to be sure, but not the youth of the woman of the world Maria thought herself to be and wished to project. The Barahona of the early twentieth century was connected to the rest of the country only by ship. A road would not link the small city to Santo Domingo until the 1930s. This was simply not how Maria wished to portray herself and her surroundings. Her father’s stories of his childhood in Las Palmas were so much more interesting.

Gracia was a very successful grower, so successful that he was appointed an honorary vice consul of Spain to the Dominican Republic. This was strictly an honorary title and was given due to his business success in the Dominican and because he was formerly a resident of Spain. It did authorize Isidoro to periodically perform official functions on behalf of Spain. But this was not enough for Maria. She claimed he was a member of the diplomatic corps, which is how he was portrayed in Universal’s publicity machine and his daughter’s fantasy re-creation of her youth.

William Gourley MacFeeters became the second important man in Maria’s life in the Dominican Republic. He was the local representative of the National Bank of New York (now Citibank), a key economic partner of the Dominican government. He lived up the street from the teenaged Maria, and though he was twice her age, he came to love her and asked her father for her hand in marriage. Her father consented, seeing MacFeeters as a good and stable man who would take care of his favorite daughter, now twenty. She had been raised to be the wife of an upper-class husband and that is exactly what she became. They married by proxy on November 28, 1932, while MacFeeters was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, having been transferred there by his bank. The union must have pleased Isidoro. His daughter’s future was secure. He traveled with her to Puerto Rico, where the couple was married in a Presbyterian church, that being the religion of the husband. Isidoro was suffering from a weak heart and lived only a short time after the marriage.⁷

Perhaps to make sure she had her own money, perhaps because he had listened to his daughter’s hopes of becoming an actress, Isidoro left his eldest daughter $20,000 ($381,505 in 2021) in his will. It was this nest egg that allowed Maria to pay for her trip to New York in 1939 when she left her husband to become a movie star. She told a British interviewer that had her father lived she would never have pursued a film career. Her mother did not approve of her daughter seeking a career. Maria would have stayed married to MacFeeters and been the wife her social class demanded. But her father did die and his favorite daughter eventually felt free to chase her Hollywood dream and had the money to do it.⁸

William MacFeeters is the perfect example of what happens when a Hollywood star sucks all the air out of the room. In all accounts of Maria Montez, he is dismissed as the old guy from Ireland who married the nubile seventeen-year-old Maria. She had to be seventeen because Universal shaved eight years off her life to make her twenty when she signed her initial contract. His name is usually inaccurately given as McFeeters, a small difference but indicative of how unimportant he is deemed to be in the tale of Montez. He is often identified as an Irish soldier who became a banker. Sometimes the couple is described as living in Belfast, other times in Santo Domingo or San Juan, Puerto Rico. It didn’t really matter where. In the Hollywood story of Maria Montez, he was presented as just a deluded middle-aged man discarded by Maria after a year or so because she had been too young to know what she was doing when she married him. Plus, he stood in the way of her becoming a movie star.

MacFeeters could no more play a part in Maria Montez’s life in Hollywood than James Dougherty could have a significant role in Marilyn Monroe’s myth. They were both dismissed as guys who took advantage of young women, Maria at seventeen, Marilyn at sixteen, by marrying them. Reality so often has nothing to do with the created universes of movie stars. It was claimed in many articles that Montez got her start doing plays when she lived in Belfast with her husband. This is not true. She was in Belfast only briefly when he took her to meet his family in 1936. If nothing else, MacFeeters certainly helped open the world to a young, inexperienced Maria. During their seven-year marriage they traveled extensively by first class to New York and Europe and lived well in various cities in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

This dismissal of MacFeeters is very unfair to one of the most substantial men in the Dominican Republic. He was a key representative of the National Bank of New York, which was critically involved in the finances of the island nation. William Gourley MacFeeters was from Raphoe, a small town in Donegal near Belfast. He was born March 13, 1893, the oldest of five children of William and Elizabeth MacFeeters. He became a part of the Irish d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Dominican Republic
• 2. Universal City
• 3. National Stage
• 4. Arabian Nights
• 5. Queen of Technicolor
• 6. Sudan
• 7. Maria on the Home Front
• 8. Suspended
• 9. The Exile
• 10. France
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Screen Classics