About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.
As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.
Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.
Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.
Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.
Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.
Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.
Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.
Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.
For Miss Dietrich, I dressed in my very best.
For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.
Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.
Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.
I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.
I always tried to play my hunches.
I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.
I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.
I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?
I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.
I did go to the Menninger Clinic hoping, or expecting, to be released quickly.
I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.
I had been forced to give up one daughter, born retarded, and had lately neglected another.
I had been in two mental hospitals in three years.
I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.
I had fallen in love twice with the wrong men.
I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.
I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.
I had traveled across Europe at 9, and returned at 15 to spend two years at a Swiss boarding school.
I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.
I have always believed that having an outlet for their products would do wonders for the self-worth of inmates.
I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.
I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.
I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
I listened to Desi, over dinner, tell me how much he loved Lucille Ball.
I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.
I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.
I remember being surprised when Grandfather Tierney and my grandmother, Nellie, were divorced.
I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.
I simply did not want my face to be my talent.
I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.
I used up every cent I earned as an actress.
I was badly shaken by my parents' divorce.
I was fighting myself. I felt dull and spiritless, and I told my mother I thought I needed to see a psychiatrist.
I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.
I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.
I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.
I was not allowed to date at 15, and this led to sometimes tearful protests on my part.
I was not cut out to be a rebel.
I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.
I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.
In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.
In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.
In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.
It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.
It was in London that I met Noel Coward, whose plays I had read.
It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.
Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.
Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.
Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.
My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.
My father demanded obedience from his children.
My father sent me to school abroad because he wanted to give me the best possible education.
My mother was a gymnastics teacher.
My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.
On location, I enjoyed the company of Jeanne Crain.
Otto Preminger was a fine actor in Europe who went on to become more renowned as a director.
Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.
Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.
The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.
The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.
The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.
The part of Laura brought my only nomination for an Academy Award.
The studio bosses liked that I was not difficult. The public perceived me as a nice person and held me blameless.
The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.
There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.
Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.
Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.
Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.
Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.
We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.
We lived in the Connecticut countryside and spent our summers on Long Island in neat, rented bungalows.
Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.
What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.
Whatever the reasons, Laura had the chemistry. The movie became a cult favorite.
When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.
When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.
When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
Gene met Clark Gable in 1953, and he fell in love with her, only she wasn't interested and turned him away.
Gene's hobbies included painting and writing poetry.
Gene was described as "unquestionably the most beautiful woman in movie history" by 20th Century Fox founder Darryl F. Zanuck.
Gene appeared twice on the cover of Life Magazine; on November 10, 1941, and September 24, 1951.
Gene was offered the lead role in MGM Studios' National Velvet (1944) but because the production on it was delayed, she instead signed on with Fox and the part went to newcomer Elizabeth Taylor.
Gene has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6125 Hollywood Boulevard.
Gene was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Leave Her To Heaven (1945).
Gene appeared in magazine ads for Royal Crown Cola in 1945.
Gene's measurements: 35B-25-36 (Source: Celebrity Sleuth magazine)
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