But instead of being scared, she turns back towards the house, facing the house and declares, “Haunted! How perfectly fascinating.” At that moment her eyes are sparkling and intent. The realtor runs out of the house terrified Mrs. Muir is taken to visit a cottage on the coast by a reluctant realtor and during the visit there are loud voices and gusts of wind inside the house. There’s one moment in the film where I immediately understood the magic I saw on her face. In the film, Gene Tierney plays a widow who is looking for a cottage to rent for herself and her small daughter.
The first time I fell truly in love with Tierney, before I knew any of the details of her biography, was when I saw The Ghost and Mrs. She speaks frankly and directly about how her mania and depression affected her relationships with her partners, her parents, and her work. Vanity saved me that day.” This matter-of-fact assessment of the drama of her own life - that the charming conceitedness of a Hollywood glamour girl would save her life at the lowest moment of a suicide attempt - marks most of the anecdotes of her biography. If I was going to die, I wanted to be in one piece, a whole person, and look pretty in my coffin. When she eventually decides to return to safety, the precipitating factor of her decision was the thought “I don’t want to end up on the pavement like so much scrambled eggs, my face and body broken. She stood on a ledge, outside her mother’s New York apartment, for twenty minutes, contemplating jumping. The book opens with her reflecting on a suicide attempt in December 1957.
In her autobiography, Self-Portrait, published in 1979 and written with Mickey Herskowitz, Tierney writes candidly about her mental health symptoms and treatment, including electroshock therapy which permanently altered her memory. Her career effectively ended when she was hospitalized six times in three years and she was diagnosed with and treated for bipolar, called at the time manic depression. That both of these work so well is predicated by Gene Tierney being incredibly, hauntingly beautiful - so much so that it is easy to write off her abilities and performances as being only based on this beauty. In these roles, she played two poles of the femme fatale trope: the New York dame who isn’t really all that fatal and the housewife who really really is. Gene Tierney worked at Twentieth Century Fox between 19, most notably in the film noirs Laura and Leave Her to Heaven.
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