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As Todd’s interest in Miss Blondell heated up so did Dick Powell’s in June Allyson, a hoofer from the Bronx who had been billed sixth in Powell’s MEET THE PEOPLE (’44), the film in which he was co-starred with Lucille Ball. The Powells divorced on July 29, ’45, and less than three weeks later Powell married Miss Allyson.

There were three Blondell films in ’45 and the first of them, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, contains he favorite performance. She played Aunt Cissy, the live-n-let-live ineffectual who is a “family problem.” When that film was telecast in Los Angeles recently Miss Blonde arranged to watch it with her name sake granddaughter. “I wanted my grandchild to be proud of me,” say the unflappable Blondell, “but they had cut so many of my scenes I was scarcely in it at all. The cutting was senseless, brutal, and I felt quit sad. I remember that one with fondness.”

Todd’s courtship of Miss Blondell, if such it can be called, was tempestuous and Louella Parson reported several times that all was over. But they married in Las Vega on July 5, ’47, and Todd moved his headquarters from NYC to Los Angeles. Miss Blondell continued to act – in such things as THE CORPS CAME C.O.D.; NIGHTMARE ALLEY and CHRISTMAS EVE.

The Todds soon moved to the East Coast and Todd bought an estate in Irvington-on-the-Hudson next to that of Averill Harriman. A staff of servants was augmented by guards lest Michael Jr. be kidnapped. These were lavish outlay in what, essentially, were lean years for Todd. Miss Blondell not only returned to the stage to help out but lent her husband $80,000 which was never repaid. She obtained a divorce in Las Vegas on June 8, ’50, and Todd went through bankruptcy four months later. (Todd married Elizabeth Taylor on February 2, ’57; their daughter Elizabeth Frances, was born August 6, ’57. He was killed in an airplane crash on March 22, ’58.)

Miss Blondell’s return to Hollywood was in a supporting role as a lady playwright in a programmer starring Joan Bennett and Clifton Webb called FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE (’50). Said Variety: “Blondell is so good you realize she’s been absent from the screen far too long.” For her performance in her subsequent film, THE BLUE VEIL, in which she played the mother of Natalie Wood, she was nominated for an Academy Award.

Nevertheless, she came to the conclusion that television and the stage would be better for her than the movies, and for five years she was off the screen. She was able to get a lot of tv work, and she toured in such stage productions as Come Back, Little Sheba; The Time of the Cuckoo; Call Me Madame; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.

In ’56 MGM released THE OPPOSITE SEX, it’s wretched re-make of THE WOMEN. Miss Blondell was cast as the matron who makes a career of motherhood, and should have had the role in which Agnes Moorehead was miscast, originally played by Mary Boland. After using her as the whiskey-drinking aunt of psychotic Eleanor Parker in LIZZIE, and as the bumptious stage mother of Julie Wilson and Neile Adams in THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT, MGM put Miss Blondell in THE DESK SET, and she and Katharine Hepburn expertly played off each other as two librarians. Miss Blondell was ill in hospital while THE DESK SET was being made and she says Miss Hepburn took care of her dog and saw to it that MGM shot around her until she got well.

“I really don’t have envy in my gut but I admire Hepburn a helluva lot,” says Miss Blondell. “I have great respect for the way she maps things out. She’ll lay into you if she thinks you’re not doing the right thing, but we had a good feeling going between us and I have great respect for her. And it was a pleasure to watch her work with Spencer Tracy. They never kissed on the screen yet did some of the tenderest love scenes there have ever been. And they’d tease each other. He’d always call for another actress when they finished a scene together, and she’d occasionally call him ‘a dirty old man’. They had a lovely, divine relationship.”

In ’57 Miss Blondell returned to the stage. After she had agreed to appear in Copper and Brass, a Nancy Walker vehicle, re-writing reduced her part and she withdrew – amicably. She then obtained a part in The Rope Dancers, which starred Siobhan McKenna and Art Carney. Brooks Atkinson said: “It’s small, but it’s gold.” Miss Blondell acknowledges it was well written but she adds: “It’s an awfully depressing play to do.”

The following year she went into Crazy October, a play by James Leo Herlihy which didn’t reach Broadway but enabled Miss Blondell to make the acquaintance of Tallulah Bankhead. “My part was better than hers,” Miss Blondell says, “and I grabbed it. At first Tallulah really bothered me – I didn’t think she was professional. Once in a while she’d take some thing, a pill or a bottle or something. I was very nervous when we started and kept away from her. But after we’d played a half dozen cities and I’d gotten the applause and the notices I realized she never complained and she hadn’t, even though she was billed above me and Estelle Winwood. In fact she’d often say after a performance, ‘I think I moved on your line,’ or ‘I don’t think I did it right, you didn’t get the solid laugh you did before, let’s rehearse and see.’ She was fantastic Her sarcasm, drunkenness and misbehavior in public were all some thing she put on so as to be talked about. She was a sensitive, lonely woman and I think she wanted to die. I was sorry she died before she had one more crack at something glamorous and got to be the toast of Broadway once again.”

In the last decade or so Miss Blondell’s roles in movies have been the unimportant kind “it takes all of your guts to play.” In ’65, after she appeared in THE CINCINNATI KID, the National Board of Review voted her the year’s best supporting actress “more as a sentimental tribute to her entire career than a carefully weighed appraisal of her bit part in that particular picture.”

A few years ago she was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of the bartending earth mother in the teleseries called “Here Come the Brides,” which was loosely based on SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS.

She hasn’t seen the last film she acted in (SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GUNFIGHTER), and in fact has only seen half of all her movies. “I was always working, from early in the morning till late afternoon, and on Sundays I wanted to be home,” she says.

She now lives in NYC and is finishing a non-autobiographical novel, for which a publisher has contracted. She regards herself as “a four-wall dame”, by which she means she’d rather be home than “on public display”. She says she has earned the right to do the things “I want to do.”

One of the things she most doesn’t want to do is appear in the pornography Hollywood has turned to since television’s capture of the mass audience. “In the last seven months I’ve been sent five alleged scripts,” Miss Blondell says, “which had dialog that was nothing but the rattle talk you get these days and filth involving even a dame my age They were pointless, rotten and unnecessary scripts and I said no. I still like to act – but not in anything that disgusts me.”

Late last year she contracted to do a 3-month stage stint in Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on the Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. She does not pretend to understand what, if anything, it’s about, and says: “My whole day, waking and sleeping, is spent trying to make the character of the mother explicable, so I guess inside I’m quite a serious actress. At least I want audiences to get their money’s worth. The character of the mother I play is demented and the long monologs have no cues or other helps. Each night I try to make it make sense.”

Miss Blondell has no regrets having spent her life in show business. “No matter what happens to the world people want to be taken out of themselves, to be entertained,” she says, and adds: “I take pride in being in a profession that isn’t going down the drain.”

She does regret, however, the decline of Hollywood. “Nobody ever imagined it’d be a ghost town, she says. “It was so beautifully run, by such genuinely capable people. There were silly ones, I admit, but the majority knew their business and protected it.”

Miss Blondell says that although living alone is “a miserable kind of life” she isn’t thinking of marriage “at this point.” “Barnes provided my first real home,” she says with the down-to-earth honesty audiences like in her, “and Powell was my security man and Todd was my passion. Each was totally different. If you could take a part of each one of them and put them into one man you’d have a helluva husband.”

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