LONDON—Occasionally, not only men are disgraced in Hollywood. Gloria Grahame, for example, scandalized the movie business by seducing her 13-year-old stepson by her marriage to the director Nicholas Ray. Hollywood purported to be shocked, shocked! They didn’t like carnality of that power in a woman. The rules were and remain different for men and sexual hypocrisy still runs deep.
Graham’s real life was often as wanton as the roles she played as the greatest of the 1950s film noir sirens. When she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1952 (for The Bad and The Beautiful) she sashayed up to the podium, took the Oscar, said “thank you” and walked right off—a brilliant piece of cheeky theater that seemed true to character.
But by the 1970s her career had gone into a long slide, though she was still working.