By Ross Eric Gibson

In Santa Cruz High School, ZaSu Pitts developed her fretful gestures and easily flattered cooing, but could switch to fist-fighting if she sensed mistreatment. Santa Cruz paid her way to Hollywood to act in comedies and dramas. In 1919, director King Vidor needed an extra and tapped the journalist interviewing ZaSu. This was Tom Gallery, who was soon cast as ZaSu’s leading man. They married in 1920, appeared in four movies together, had a daughter in 1922, ZaSu Ann Gallery, and on the death of her friend Barbara La Marr in 1926, adopted La Marr’s orphaned son Don Gallery (also born 1922).

By then ZaSu Pitts had become an international star through popular comedies, and co-starring in the epic 1925 film “Greed,” among the all-time best silent movies. Tom Gallery abandoned ZaSu and the kids in 1926 to become a boxing promoter. ZaSu had played on the girl’s tennis team at Santa Cruz High School, so when she met former tennis champ, John Edward Woodall in 1933, it was “2-Love” so-to-speak. She divorced Gallery for abandonment, and married Woodall, who had a career in real estate. Since Woodall was born in 1901, ZaSu simply moved her birth year from 1894 to 1898, then 1900, to bridge their seven years age difference. (Charles Stumpf, ZaSu Pitts-The Life & Career)

Von Stroheim

Among ZaSu’s daring roles was opposite Adolphe Menjou in a 1925 comedy “The Fast Set,” where she plays a prostitute invited to a society party. When Erich Von Stroheim asked ZaSu to do his 1928 film “The Wedding March,” she was surprised that her lovelorn screen persona was at last getting married, all-be-it in a bit part to one who loved another. Set in 1914 Vienna’s hidebound caste system, Stroheim (Prince Nicholas) falls in love with Mitzi, a commoner (Fay Wray), courted by a brutal hog butcher, Schani. But Nicholas has to abandon Mitzi for a rich heiress Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts), a lame bride, symbolic of the inbred aristocracy. Abandoned by Nicholas, Mitzi won’t marry Schani, but when he threatens to kill Nicholas at the royal wedding, she agrees to marry if he doesn’t harm the prince. Because of its length, the film was cut into two parts, with Part 2 as “The Honeymoon.” This was Cecelia’s (ZeSu’s) honeymoon in the Alps, contrasted with the loveless wedding of Schani to Mitzi. Mitzi faints at her wedding, sending Schani into fits of jealousy. He tries to assassinate Nicholas during the prince’s honeymoon, but Cecilia (ZaSu) jumps in front of the bullet. Then World War I begins and Nicholas fights for his country. When he visits Mitzi at her convent, it is attacked by gangsters, and Schani is killed. Nicholas marries Mitzi in the convent chapel, then dies in battle.

This masterpiece drew little interest in its day, because “The Jazz Singer” had introduced the talkies, and no one wanted more silent dramas, even good ones. It was so ignored, that they only released “The Honeymoon” in Europe. A story about the beginning of the last World War, was being shown in a Germany seeking a new World War. The parliamentary elections of 1928 used the Nazi strategy to violently intimidate left-leaning voters, but it only gained them 2.6% of the national vote. (US Holocaust Memorial Museum). It would take Europe’s own “Great Depression” to make the Nazis popular. As to “The Honeymoon,” the last copy was destroyed in a fire in France in 1959.

But ZaSu soldiered on. She was fortunate to be cast as the hero’s mother in the 1930 anti-war masterpiece “All Quiet on the Western Front.” But in its preview, it was shown just after a ZaSu Pitts comedy, so when ZaSu appeared in the feature, people instinctively laughed at her deathbed scene. The studio panicked, and all ZaSu’s scenes were reshot with a different actress. Many an actor could not make the transition to sound, due to a thick accent, funny voice or poor delivery of lines. ZaSu wondered if she would be one of those casualties. A “Coming Attraction” trailer survives showing “All Quiet” with ZaSu playing the mother. Her voice is perfectly fine.

Yet not exactly fine for singing. As the Great Depression dawned, Hollywood wanted to cheer up a weary world with comedies and musicals. They put ZaSu in several musicals, “Paris” in 1929, then in 1930: “No, No, Nanette,” “Honey,” plus two Jeanette MacDonald musicals, “Monte Carlo” and “The Lottery Bride.” ZaSu had a non-singing role in Busby Berkeley’s “Dames,” then starred in “Sing and Like It,” (1934) in which she portrays an off-key amateur, whose sentimental crooning appeals to a gangster, who forces a producer to put her in his Broadway show.

Comedy team

Hal Roach bought Keystone Studios, and in 1931 wanted to make a female version of his Laurel and Hardy franchise. He thought ZaSu Pitts and Thelma Todd were the two funniest comediennes at the time, Thelma fresh off two Marx Brothers movies. It changed public expectation on whether women could do buddy comedies, since women were supposedly catty with each other and defined their lives around men. Pitts and Todd represented the modern woman, bachelorettes not spinsters, with stories of sharing an apartment, dating, showing off sexy underwear for clients, speakeasies, risque dancing, a ladies’ gym, etc. Their rapport recalls Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. They made 17 episodes together. In one episode, “On the Loose” (1931), every date ends up at Coney Island, even when wearing their most elegant attire. A knock at the door is a cameo by Laurel and Hardy asking them on a date to Coney Island, and the boys were quickly dispatched in a rain of crashing porcelain! ZaSu left the team in 1933 to do feature films again, but Thelma’s maid said, Zasu “was one of [Thelma’s] very closest friends.”

It’s wrong to think ZaSu was restricted to comedies, doing quite a number of dramas. This included Stroheim’s 1933 “Walking Down Broadway,” a study of people trying to connect in an impersonal city, experiencing loneliness and hook-ups. ZaSu’s character shows repressed lesbian attraction to her roommate. (Wikipedia). This was a time when such implications might end a career. But it was to be Stroheim’s last directorial effort, being fired, and his film edited down to an inoffensive story called “Hello, Sister!”

When Popeye and his girlfriend Olive Oyl became an animated series in 1933, Mae Questel (the voice of Betty Boop) made the skinny woman sound like ZaSu Pitts, with her “Oh dear! Oh my!” fretting, accompanied by flailing arms and spunky anger if wronged. The 1938 Walt Disney production “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood,” caricatured W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Laurel & Hardy as pie-men, Katharine Hepburn as Bo Peep, etc. In the “Old Woman in a Shoe” number, ZaSu is in a horn section with Edna May Oliver and Mae West, as Cab Calloway sings in scat “ZaSu-ZaSu-Zaa!” ZaSu was also found among “Looney Tunes” Hollywood caricatures.

“Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe” opened in 1934 in the Pacific Palisades. On Dec. 14, 1935, Todd visited ZaSu, dropping off a Christmas gift for Don. Todd was on her way to a party in her honor at the Trocadero. The next day Todd was found dead in a different car than she drove home in, parked in her garage with the motor running. Her death was called an accident or a suicide, but ZaSu suspected it was murder. Thelma’s ex-husband had mob connections, with evidence suggesting he wanted to extort her into allowing a gambling parlor at her restaurant. (Steve Powell, ZaSu Pitts: A Life of Mystery).

Madge Meredith

In 1941, ZaSu returned to Santa Cruz to preside over the second Santa Cruz Begonia Festival in the Civic Auditorium. In 1944 she made her Broadway debut in “The Ramshackle Inn,” written just for her. It was a hit and ran 216 performances. (Stumpf). In 1947, ZaSu read about Nick Gianaclis, who was hired as the business manager of a wannabe starlet named Madge Meredith. He got her a job at a studio commissary in 1943, giving her direct contact with studio power brokers, which helped her break into the movies. Gianaclis loaned Meredith money to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills. She fired him in 1947 to get better representation. Since his name was on the deed to her house, he was headed up the Hollywood Hills to a meeting with her, when he said Meredith’s car turned and blocked the road, and three men in another car jumped out, beat, robbed and kidnapped Gianaclis and his bodyguard. Meredith was arrested, tried, and found guilty, given five years to life at the notorious Tehachapi state prison in 1949.

But ZaSu had a dream that Meredith was framed. She visited Meredith in prison to hear her side of the story and came away convinced of her innocence. Friends thought this was risky for ZaSu to involve herself in a convict’s defense. But ZaSu contacted Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the “Perry Mason” detective novels, and a lawyer in his own right, who did pro-bono work that established Meredith’s innocence. In 1954, California Gov. Earl Warren commuted Meridith’s sentence to time served, calling the case “a mockery of investigation, of defense counseling, of trial procedure, and of justice itself.” (Powell). Meredith became ZaSu’s lifelong friend. ZaSu appeared as a guest suspect on the “Perry Mason” TV show in 1962, possibly suggested by Erle Stanley Gardner. ZaSu did a lot of radio appearances, at least 15 TV guest spots from 1948 to 1963, including co-starring in 126 episodes of “Oh Suzannah!-the Gale Storm Show” from 1956 to 1960.

Touring

With stage plays written for her, she did Broadway and toured. Steve Powell writes that ZaSu was on tour in New England in 1952 when she discovered a lump in her breast. She had a lumpectomy to remove the tumor, but the surgery caused a pinching when she moved her arms to perform. The cancer returned in 1954, leading to a full mastectomy. Intense pain required her to hire nurse Jean Ellroy to care for her at home. She and Ellroy became close friends, Ellroy calling ZaSu “a sweetheart and a pleasure to nurse.” Then one day Ellroy was murdered and dumped in a canyon, leaving her 10-year-old son with his father. The case was never solved, and the son became obsessed with cases of murdered women. He grew up to be detective novelist James Ellroy, author of “The Black Dahlia,” “L.A. Confidential,” and other crime novels.

Meanwhile, ZaSu’s new nurse was Madge Meredith, so devoted to her hero. Even when it hurt to perform, ZaSu continued touring, for the reason Groucho Marx phrased, “I do it for the applause I can’t get at home.” When she did a benefit performance to help the struggling Pasadena Playhouse, they gave her a standing ovation. She did two last movies in 1963, “The Thrill of It All,” and the great cameo extravaganza of stars, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” To relieve her pain, they had her seated at a switchboard. And for one last time, she was among the firmament of old-time Hollywood stars she knew and adored.