Medicine: Reborn Star

Staring carefully at her face in the mirror, smoothing the glossy black hair and shading the lids above expressive grey-green eyes, the coolly beautiful woman saw that she was still as the world once knew her. Last week Cinemactress Gene Tierney was back in a Hollywood dressing room—back from a mental institution. Was that foreboding phrase a shame to hide? Not a bit. To ex-Patient Tierney, 37, Topeka’s famed Menninger Clinic was an exultant experience.

What sent her there was “my lack of understanding of what I could cope with and what I couldn’t cope with. I learned that carrying on while you’re broken is not the answer. I tried to work harder and harder, thinking that work would cure everything. All it did was make things worse.”

Breezy Rise. In 1954, when she suddenly fled Hollywood after starring in 30 major movies since 1940, it hardly seemed possible that glittering Gene Tierney might be “broken.” Born well to do, the daughter of a prosperous Manhattan insurance broker with an estate in Connecticut’s fashionable Fairfield County, her rise was a breeze. But behind the beauty and breeding, behind the mask of confidence, she hid too much to handle alone. There was quite a bit.

When she eloped at 20 with thin-lipped Oleg Cassini, a dress designer and erstwhile Russian count, her beloved father threatened to sue her for $50,000. Charge: breach of contract with the family corporation formed to control her earnings. (Legally of age by marriage, she had signed a new contract with 20th Century-Fox.) Though eventually settled with a tearful reconciliation, the threatened suit was a severe shock, soon followed by the unexpected divorce of her parents after 25 years of marriage.

Doll’s House. Then came an even harder personal blow. Pregnant with her first child in 1943, Cinemactress Tierney went to the Hollywood Canteen to entertain the troops, almost immediately afterward came down with German measles. In the often-expected result, her newborn daughter Daria was physically beautiful but so mentally retarded that she will require lifetime institutional care.*

Though a second Cassini daughter, Christina, was born normal in 1948, Gene’s agony over the first child left a deep scar. “That was my war effort,” she says.

In her marriage to Cassini, Gene could find no emotional stability. In 1953 she got a divorce, soon found herself in another romance with Aly Khan. Marriage appeared to be close, but it didn’t work out. He rebuffed her plea to quit intercontinental fun and games; his father, the Aga Khan, sternly opposed another movie-actress marriage after Aly’s divorce from Rita Hayworth. With her need for stability unmet. Gene’s anxiety grew worse. In New York she walked out on a TV commitment to play Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the part of a woman squashed by the strictures of society and an overbearing husband. The anxiety had reached the point of making her really sick, soon led to a critical emotional breakdown.

“I tried to overcome it. I tried painting.

I talked to friends about it. Everyone suggested psychoanalysis, and I always resisted. It was too Hollywood—everyone was being analyzed. I was afraid of the word psychiatry. But finally I just couldn’t go on, and it took three years for me to get well. The longer you delay, the longer it takes. I should have gone to a doctor three or four years earlier.”

God & Menninger. Gene first went to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., was discharged after 18 months in the care of her mother, who, Gene says, firmly told her that she was empowered to commit her. if necessary. Her mother’s “courage” gave Gene strength to go to Topeka’s Menningers when she felt ill again. There she settled down to learning how really to face the problems that had given her such deep anxiety. “They thought it would take two years to cure me,” she says with deep admiration, “but it took only eight months.

“I learned so much, particularly discipline and patience. I didn’t undergo analysis. It was psychotherapy and counseling that I needed. The quiet in a sanatorium slows you down, and you begin to understand things that puzzled you. I learned that the mind is the most beautiful part of the body, and I am so grateful to God and the Menningers to have mine back.

“I was so fortunate. My illness was a curable one, not cancer or something worse. It was something that I was responsible for, not anyone else’s fault. It was up to me to do something about it, and I did. Now I’m looking for a movie part. I want to go to work, and the doctors think that I should never give up acting. You know that phrase, ‘The past is prologue’? It’s so wonderful and true. Perhaps some day I’ll marry again and have a quiet, happily married life. But I’m in no rush. Whether it comes or not, I have more peace of mind than I’ve ever known.”

* About a year later, a woman marine came up to Gene on a tennis court, reminded her that they had met at the canteen. “You didn’t happen to get German measles, did you?” asked the marine. “I so wanted to see your show that I broke quarantine to come.”