Eva Marie Saint’s smile can be heard over the phone as she talks about her lengthy and celebrated Hollywood career and its modest origins on a theater stage at Bowling Green State University.
And so can her heartache when she mentions her husband of 65 years, Jeffrey Hayden, who was with her through almost all of it.
Hayden, a director, producer, and writer in television, film, and theater, died in the couple’s Los Angeles home on Christmas Eve, 2016, at the age of 90 after a year-long battle with cancer.
“The first year of grieving is very difficult,” says the 93-year-old Miss Saint, as she refers to herself and prefers to be called, during a nearly 90-minute conversation with The Blade. “I’m just beginning to see more friends, to go out, and I find that it’s helping me a lot.”
She will encounter friends old and new at 6 p.m. next Saturday, April 7, when she receives the BGSU Lifetime Achievement Award in the Wolfe Center for the Arts. Her family will also be there.
Hayden was in her thoughts during her recent appearance at the 90th Academy Awards, where she presented the Best Costume Design nominees. Walking out to a standing ovation by her Hollywood peers, Miss Saint stole the show with her moving and unscripted remembrance of her husband.
“Thank you so much,” she told the theater audience and millions of viewers worldwide. “That means so much to me having lost my husband last year after 65 years. We would come to this Academy every year, and I miss him and that made up for it. And that was so loud I know he heard it,” she said as she pointed to the sky. “I just realized something; I’m older than the Academy. Plus four months or maybe five. I’m very proud of that. Just keep moving.”
The next day, even the Internet cast aside its antagonistic propensity to celebrate the Miss Saint Goes to the Oscars moment and to explain to younger readers that she is an Oscar and Emmy-winning actress whose storied career links the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1950s (On the Waterfront, North by Northwest) to its current era of superhero blockbusters in the 21st century (Superman Returns).
The fetings predictably noted that Miss Saint has acted alongside Lillian Gish, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Angela Lansbury, James Garner, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Carl Reiner, Gregory Peck, Bob Hope, Martin Sheen, Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Burt Lancaster, and Colin Farrell, in her most recent film appearance (2014’s Winter’s Tale). And that she’s been directed by the likes of Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, John Frankenheimer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Vincente Minnelli, Norman Jewison, and Garry Marshall.
She is only the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. (The first were Bob and Ellen Thompson in September, 2016, for their philanthropy to BGSU.) Miss Saint received a Distinguished Alumna Award from BGSU in 1980 and an honorary doctorate of performing arts in 1982 and has a theater named after her, the Eva Marie Saint Theatre.
That Miss Saint is a BGSU alum is included even in cursory biographical sketches, along with the fact that she was born on Independence Day, 1924, in Newark to Eva Marie Rice Saint and John Merle Saint.
As with most movie stars whose light never dimmed but burned brightly for decades, Miss Saint has answered almost every question pen-and-paper and microphone-and-camera reporters can think to ask. And not just once but twice times 20.
What’s often lacking in these same stories, though, are the stories and history of her life pre-Hollywood that contextualizes her career as more than a series of roles and colors a profile with more than, “What is/was so-and-so like?”
And that’s where the conversation began, with her recollection of being an incoming BGSU freshman taking her first train ride: the Pacemaker, an all-coach service from New York to Chicago, which included her stop in Toledo.
“They had a women’s coach. I thought, ‘Isn’t that exciting? That’s kind of nice.’ It was a nice trip [but] it was so depressing. All the women wore robes, and their faces had cold cream and [there were] curlers in their hair. And I just sat up all night; I didn’t get in my pajamas. I was on a train, who does that? But it was a good night.”
From Toledo she took the bus to Bowling Green and cried all the way as she watched the terrain roll. It was flat and unfamiliar as someone who grew up in Albany, N.Y., and spent most weekends with her family in the nearby Adirondack Mountains.
“That bus ride to Toledo to Bowling Green, I’ll never forget it ... it was so flat. I just looked out that window, all by myself, with tears rolling down my eyes,” she says. “But when I got to campus, I never looked back and I never looked for the mountains because I knew they weren’t there.”
Miss Saint says she was certain she would become a third-grade teacher like her mom, who taught in a one-room classroom in Vineland, N.J. In fact, Miss Saint was an elementary education major when she was cast in the lead role of the theater department’s production of Personal Appearance. In a twist worthy of her future North by Northwest writer-director Hitchcock, Miss Saint, in her first acting role, played a “sexy actress from Hollywood” who strutted across the stage in a slinky gown with her hair up and face made up.
Her friends didn’t recognize her on stage, but the drama department’s director, Elden T. Smith, could see her potential as an actress after first suggesting that she audition for Personal Appearance because of her “low-pitched and pleasant voice.” He encouraged her to try out for more theater productions, including As You Like It. And Miss Saint, in turn, sought his advice over the summer of her sophomore year in a letter asking whether she should change her major to drama and pursue a career in acting.
Smith wrote back a two-page typed letter in which he says of her potential: “On the whole I am pretty well impressed ... I think you have some talent as an actress, but how much, I don’t know. We have merely scratched the surface.”
The fact that Miss Saint still has that letter, dated Aug., 9, 1944, speaks to its importance to her and how much her life outside of Hollywood means to her.
Of course, there still was the matter of telling her hard-working parents: Her father was a B.F. Goodrich Tire and Rubber company man whose traveling required Miss Saint’s mother to quit teaching and become a stay-at-home mother to take care of her and her older sister, Adelaide.
“I had to approach my dad and my mom,” Miss Saint remembers. “We were sitting there and I said, ‘Dad, I’m thinking of changing my major from education. I would like to be an actress, but how do you feel about that?’ My dad just took my hand in his and said, ‘Honey, what ever you want to do you should do.’ And so he gave me his blessing, and that was very important to me.”
It was more important to her father that Miss Saint and her sister, who was a science major at BGSU, graduate and then work at least two years before getting married.
“A lot of my friends did marry young,” Miss Saint says. “My father had asked my sister and myself for, it wasn’t a contract, but a promise that when we graduated ... we would work at least two years before we married. He would send us to college if we would work in our chosen [field] for at least two years out in the world until we got married.”
Mr. Saint’s daughters did honor their promise to him. In fact, Miss Saint made little time for dating while trying to break into the business, much to the chagrin of her future husband, who first spotted her from the back of a subway wearing a purple coat with long blonde hair and holding a book with her name on the cover.
Sometime later, Hayden was introduced to Miss Saint by a friend and asked her to join him for coffee. She declined, saying she didn’t have the time and didn’t drink coffee.
A month later he asked again, with the same results. For his third and final attempt, he changed tactics, slightly, and asked Miss Saint to join him for lunch. This time she accepted.
Miss Saint stops to read from a journal she kept of her early days as a struggling actress and says she hopes she can read it without crying before mentioning the entry’s date: Feb. 20, 1949. A Sunday.
“I wrote ‘fun with Jeff.’ I started dating my husband then,” she says. “And then on June of ’49, Wednesday, the 29th, in my dear husband’s handwriting it says, ‘Jeff’s here to stay.’”
The couple were married a little more than two years later in October, 1951. The biggest disagreement they had in all their years together, Miss Saint says, was the location of that first lunch together.
“I [would] say it was Fifth Avenue, and Jeff would say ‘Honey, you are so wrong. It was on Sixth Avenue.’ But thank God that was the biggest argument that we ever had.”
In the years and decades that followed, the couple supported each other’s careers, raised two children, and moved to Los Angeles — but not Hollywood.
“I don’t think of myself in Hollywood,” she says. “And of course we have lived in Los Angeles all these years. It’s where I work and where I have friends. But when you’re here you don’t constantly think, ‘Oh, Hollywood, Hollywood.’ It’s your profession. I’ve never been distracted by it or that impressed with all of it. It’s been my profession, and this is the hometown for that.”
Miss Saint was fortunate not to have a “casting couch” story and says as far she knows none of her actress friends did, either.
“But if they did, they didn’t talk about it. Well look, women didn’t talk about it, did they? But it’s really wonderful” that the #MeToo movement has come out, she says. “I think it will make things more relaxed in certain situations, especially [for] young actresses who think maybe this is what you do to get a job.
“There’s strength behind this,” she adds. “It’s all out in the open and that’s always the best place to be with problems, whether it’s this or marriage. As long as you can talk about things that’s out in the open and people don’t have horrible experiences and memories.”
Later in the conversation, as she discusses how the grief over her director-husband’s death has subsided enough that she would consider acting again, Miss Saint makes an unintentional joke about sleeping with directors.
“After being with a director, I always loved saying, ‘It’s fun to sleep with your director,’” she says, and then laughs as she considers only minutes ago she was talking about her support of the #MeToo movement.
“Talking about women’s rights, right?” she jokes. “That’s how we’ll end the piece. ‘And her last words were, ‘It was fun sleeping with your director.’”
Tickets to the BGSU Bravo! celebration of the arts event are available for $125 at bgsu.edu/bravo.
Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.
First Published March 31, 2018, 7:33 p.m.
