Glenn Ford: A Life Review

• 16th Nov 2011

Author: Peter Ford

Any biography about a family member or by an ex-spouse is invariably open to question as the reader tries to find a motivation for writing the book in the first place: it may be to dish some dirt having felt you had had an abused upbringing (most famously in the biographies of Bing Crosby and Marlene Dietrich by their offspring) or maybe that it is a way of keeping a loved one close who has recently passed away by writing their life story. In this biography of forties and fifties Hollywood star Glenn Ford, his son Peter tells the story of the life of his father with the rather uninspired title of ‘Glenn Ford: A Life’. He talks about his father’s indiscretions with other actresses with some candor while married to his slightly older and conservative wife, former Hollywood star Eleanor Powell. Little focus is given to Powell, despite the fact that for many years she was more famous than Ford and did the thing that was done in those days that once a female actress, no matter how talented or famous she was retired from the big screen fairly early on. It is only later on in the book that Ford the younger recalls what a wonderful woman she was and makes an impassioned dedication to her after she died. However, this book is about his father.

For the majority of the book, Peter writes about his father as a fan, even if he did feel abandoned growing up. Peter Ford uses quotes by his father and many of those who starred with him and were close to him giving their impressions of the Glenn Ford that they knew. These people include such people as his good friend Debbie Reynolds, films directors like George Marshall and other big names of the stage and screen like such as Russ Tamblyn. For the majority of the book Peter gives a standard story from the son of a star growing up in the forties through the sixties plotting the golden age of Hollywood and all its glamour through to its decline by the late sixties, pretty much mirroring Ford’s own career. He lists and gives brief descriptions to all of Ford’s films, both personal reminiscences as well as those he was unaware of the time; needless to say the western was one genre Ford clearly loved to always appear in. Son Peter gives details of Ford’s fractious relationship with Columbia studio head, the notorious hot headed Harry Cohn and how Ford protected his lifelong friend and confidante, Rita Hayworth. Hayworth and Ford starred in Gilda together in 1946 and this was a real breakthrough for Ford, having appeared in minor films and B westerns for years. Following Gilda Ford became a star and Hayworth an icon and Ford and Hayworth enjoyed an on-off affair before becoming firm lifelong friends. For the first part of the book, and probably the biggest part of any biography/autobiography are the lurid and juicy gossip stories. Peter talks candidly about his short lived on-off affairs with Rita Hayworth behind his wife’s back (which incurred her understandable jealous rages) and most draw dropping of all when Bette Davis exposed her breasts in an attempt to seduce Ford. As the book rolls on it seems throughout that Ford slept with the majority of the actresses he worked with. Peter Ford for the most part only dedicates a page or so to each film, but he does mention almost all of the eighty plus films that Ford appeared or starred in, including such classics as 3:10 to Yuma (1957) or Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), both of which get no more mention than the forgotten B films. Only one film is given any more than a couple of pages and this is reserved for The Blackboard Jungle (1955), as Peter Ford makes the claim that it was his playing of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ that became the inspiration for using it as the opening soundtrack to this very first rock and roll film.

This biography of Glenn Ford only really ignites and becomes a book that can’t be put down once Ford’s career is all but over. Without giving too much away, Ford’s life tailspins out of control in his later life just as his career is winding down. He doesn’t take to old age well – not because of any psychological issue – although it does seem he needs to be in a loving relationship, or needs the attention of women to function, but rather because of some poor personal judgments that cause his life to go into what psychoanalysts would call the ‘death drive’. Still he lived until he was 90-years-old before dying in 2004. His relationship with his son (and only child) was clearly a problematic one: Peter felt abandoned by his father as a child, grew hot and cold with him, had at times an irrational temper, froze him out of his life for many years, until both seemed to find redemption right at the end of his life. This book is worth reading if only for the last fifty pages of the book. Yet, like any good movie you need the prologue and the main story to get you to the point.

Chris Hick