Susan Hayward won her Best Actress Oscar for portraying unjustly accused and executed Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958).
She could relate — coming as she did from the same gritty world and possessed of the same volatile temperament, a product of both nurture and nature. But unlike Graham, she was determined to overcome bruising poverty, debilitating handicap, and searing personal problems through hard work, chutzpa, and faith:
“As long as you believe,” her father always told her, “an angel sits on your shoulder and protects you.”
No problem seemed too big — if she “believed.” But, as her problems mounted, she drifted from that childhood certitude only to rediscover her faith on the cusp of her Oscar-winning performance — in a clearer and surer way. God was there every step of the way.
Family life
She was born Edythe Marrenner on June 30, 1917, in her family’s Church Street Brooklyn flat nestled among a sea of tenements that housed poor Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants. The neighborhood, though close-knit and warm, was also dirty and foul smelling.
Her petite mother, Ellen Pearson, born in 1888 to financially secure Swedish immigrant parents, reeked of ambition and snobbery. Her father, Walter Marrenner, also slight of stature, was handsome but lacked ambition. Born around 1880, to parents of Irish and French Huguenot origins, he loved the theatre.
The couple wed on April 14, 1909, against both their parents’ wishes — the Episcopalian Pearsons despising Walter’s Catholicism; the Marrenners, fearing their son would lose his faith by marrying outside the Church. Walter, with nervous green-gray flitting eyes, dabbled in theatrical jobs, but with children arriving — Florence in mid-1910, Walter Jr. (Wally) in late 1911 — his domineering, taunting wife insisted on steady work, and he was hired as a guard at IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), which became his lifelong work — that and guiding Edythe, born six years after Wally.
Edythe, sensitive and shy, with a fiery temperament, idolized her father.
“You must be like a rubber ball,” he always said. “The harder they hit, the higher you’ll bounce.” One day, after a boy beat her up for borrowing his bike, he said, “Next time, you stay there and hit him back.”
Her mother maintained a façade of material comfort, but they could not even afford to buy near-sighted Edythe a pair of glasses.
Near death tragedy
One bright summer day shortly after her seventh birthday as she was playing with her three-penny paper parachute, it flew away. Desperate to retrieve it, she dashed onto Church Street, onlookers screaming in horror as a car hit and nearly killed her.
Months of recovery were just what the doctor ordered for this intense little girl, whose imagination soared as she read magazines and dreamed of becoming an actress, free of poverty. But there was no money for drama classes, let alone a suitable wardrobe — her favorite gray linen dress stained with chocolate for months and her worn shoes patched with cereal box cardboard she stuffed inside.
All this character-building — including merciless teasing at Public School 181 and a heavy load of chores at home, her limp notwithstanding — while seemingly thwarting her ambitions, was, in fact, forming an actress.
Thus was the stage set for Susan Hayward’s development into an amazing star, about which I write in Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends.
Heaven
By the time she was 38, Susan, a divorced mother of two, was determined to get back on track spiritually and morally, and soon met Floyd Eaton Chalkley, a former FBI agent, turned used car dealer. Eaton, though previously married, was a Southern gentleman with all the right pedigree, and they wed on February 8, 1957, in a civil ceremony in Phoenix, Arizona.
Vowing “to be a full-time wife,” she sold her California properties and moved to quiet Carrollton, Georgia, population 10,000, where Eaton had bought a 400-acre estate. The small Georgia town radiated “community” — something Susan had not experienced since her Brooklyn days.
Only the right role could lure her back to Hollywood. That role was the story of Graham.
So, nine months after vowing to play only Mrs. Chalkley, Susan began filming I Want to Live! (1958). While on location, Eaton sent her a dozen yellow roses each day.
Soon, Oscar in hand, now at the pinnacle of her career, she was content to return to her life in Georgia, and was soon building a church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, with Eaton, across the street from their estate. She was living an idyllic life. Then one day in mid-October, her husband woke up dangerously ill from hepatitis.
Early on the morning of January 9, 1966, as the end neared, Eaton expressed concern for Susan’s soul and asked her to convert to Catholicism so that they might be together in Heaven. In tears, she told him she would.
Susan began taking instructions from family friend, Fr. Daniel J. McGuire, and on June 29, 1966, she traveled to Pittsburgh incognito and was received into the Church the next day — her 49th birthday. The ceremony took place in the beautiful all-wood interior of St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church.
Susan continued life without Eaton while enduring one tragedy after another – a fire, lung tumor, then brain tumor — one of many actors on The Conqueror (1956), filmed near a nuclear test site, who developed cancer.
Days before her death, barely able to swallow, she became unconscious — all the while her right hand held the crucifix Pope John XXIII had given her 15 years earlier.
Susan died on March 14, 1975, and was buried at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Carrollton, Georgia, next to Floyd Eaton, her engraved epitaph reading: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
