Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 18, 1993 TAG: 9303180210
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ACTRESS HELEN HAYES DIES
Helen Hayes, the diminutive and demure grande dame of the American theater, whose 87 years of stage, film and television performances - as tots, ingenues, queens, nuns and matriarchs - earned her the enduring affection of four generations, died Wednesday. She was 92.She had been in Nyack, N.Y., Hospital for treatment of congestive heart failure. Her family was with her when she died, said a hospital spokeswoman.
Hayes' twin careers entranced her public: her acting, which brought her two Academy Awards and Broadway's highest acclaim - a theater named for her - and her exemplary personal life as wife, mother, Catholic and a dedicated volunteer for medical research and the elderly, a campaign she embarked on after her only daughter, Mary, died of polio at 19.
Her husband, journalist-playwright Charles MacArthur, died in 1956.
Perhaps the last of America's great ladies of the stage, the Washington-born actress, who stood 5-feet tall and once described herself to a magazine as "a little Irish biddy," also managed, without tiger skins or tantrums, to outlast and usually out-act Hollywood's ferociously slinky glamour queens on their own film turf.
Offstage, Hayes' life was every bit as ladylike - although not always such smooth sailing - as her conduct in front of audiences. It was an appeal she was at a loss to explain, except, she wrote, "I sometimes think that I am the triumph of the familiar over the exotic."
It may have been that familiarity that enabled her to become one of the very few actors to cross comfortably between film and stage, although she always preferred performing in the presence of an audience.
With her disciplined stage technique and personal uprightness (she once lost an alphabet game among New York's 1920s literati because she did not know swear words), she was never entirely at ease in Hollywood. She came to loathe the star system and "arrogance" she encountered there, especially after the less-than-kind treatment accorded her screen-writing husband.
She nonetheless beat Hollywood at its own game, winning two Oscars almost 40 years apart: as best actress in her first major film role, "The Sin of Madelon Claudet," in 1931, and as best supporting actress in "Airport" in 1970.
In between the films was the stage work that really mattered to her. From her professional debut at age 5 in "The Prince Chap," well attended by her father's Elks Club and her mother's bridge group, to a Broadway career that began four years later with "Old Dutch," Hayes snagged some of the best roles the theater could offer.
One of her most memorable stage roles was "Victoria Regina," a part she acted 969 times. Years later, seeing tapes of her national tour, she remarked scornfully, "Phony, totally overdone . . . all those Shrine auditoriums where you worked so hard to reach the balcony".
Her long affair with the theater was forced to an end in 1971. She was allergic, doctors learned, to the common dust that clings so densely to theater seats and scenery.
It was a reluctant parting. "For 60 years," she wrote, "I've heard, `Two minutes, Miss Hayes,' and I've sprinted onto the stage. It's become a reflex. Pavlov's actress, that's me."
She turned zealously to movies and television, bringing to them all - a "Love Boat" episode with her adopted son, actor James MacArthur; a documentary on aging; "The Snoop Sisters" with Mildred Natwick; even a Walt Disney trifle like "Herbie Rides Again" - the stage dignity even those minor roles could not impede.
She studied voice and took acting classes of varying value. Even her aging, fat French poodle taught her something. As she watched him loll on the floor and lap up his owners' kind words, Hayes decided that was exactly how her Queen Victoria should respond to Prime Minister Disraeli's high-flown flattery.
Hayes - whom one studio mogul found "sexless" - held serenely fast to the public's heart. "I had learned to be an actress," Hayes wrote. "I never learned to be a star."
Hayes' "only rebellion and a most unlikely change of script" was her marriage to the wayward, hard-drinking, quicksilver, witty, divorced MacArthur, who with Ben Hecht wrote "The Front Page."
It was a marriage of opposites that critic Alexander Woollcott likened to "hanging some chintz curtains on the lip of Vesuvius and calling it home."
"He saw the woman lurking in the girl," she wrote. "It was Charlie who gave my life reality, who handed me my sovereignty, the identity that completed my education as an actress and began it as a woman." It was a marriage "crammed with abysmal moments and glorious hours."
After MacArthur's death in 1956, Hayes ended her "painful exile" and returned happily to the Catholic fold she had left just as happily to marry him, a divorced man. It seemed, she wrote, "that it was going to have to take the whole Roman Catholic Church to replace him."
She was awarded the oldest Roman Catholic honor in America, the Laetare Medal, in 1979.
The woman who called herself a "fighter" and a "survivor" chaired groups combating polio. "Jonas Salk told me I was one of the biggest assets he had in getting his vaccine to the world," she said.
In 1987 she told an audience of health-care workers that she had come in at the turn of one century, and had no plans to leave until the turn of another. And she was finding in old age its own rewards.
"Strangers on the street say I'm an inspiration to them. . . . Youth and middle age are much harder."