She was to describe him as rather shy and clumsy in his attempts to turn their relationship into something more than she wanted it to be. It was during those six months that she dated Hughes, but nothing much came of it. She kept forgetting her lines and studio head Harry Cohn replaced her. Columbia tried her in the film “Coast Guard” with Randolph Scott. She signed, went to Hollywood and sat around. O’Brien Entertains.”įrom that she got an offer from Columbia Pictures: six months at $350 a week. She impressed an agent by reading for him in an Irish brogue, and he got her a tryout with producer George Abbott, who hired her for a part in the play “Mrs.

In return for her willingness to forgo Hollywood for the time being, finish her senior year at Miss Porter’s School and make her social debut, her father agreed to then take her to New York agents’ and producers’ offices. At Warner Bros., director Anatole Litvak was fascinated by the beautiful girl with the high cheekbones and sensuous overbite and told her she should be in movies.īut Howard Tierney refused to allow his daughter to accept, so she went back to Connecticut. They toured several studios by presuming upon some of Howard Tierney’s business contacts. She was 17 when she visited Hollywood with her mother, brother and sister. She attended private schools in Connecticut and Switzerland. Miss Tierney was the daughter of Howard Tierney, a prosperous New York insurance broker. She stayed there, remaining active in local politics and in such causes as helping retarded children. She lived with him in Houston until his death in 1981.

Howard Lee, the former husband of actress Hedy Lamarr. In 1961, she married millionaire Texas oilman W. Her last acting role was in 1980 in the TV-movie “Scruples,” in which she portrayed a magazine editor. The last was “The Pleasure Seekers” (1964), in which she had a cameo role. In the early 1960s, she managed to pick up a few pieces of her career, appearing in a television drama and in three films. I didn’t know who Elvis Presley was, or the names of any new books or songs or movies.” I didn’t know that Russia and the United States had fired rockets into space. I didn’t know who was running the government. That memory was just about the last I had until I woke up one day and wondered how it happened to be 1959.

“I had been invited in 1956 to the inauguration of President Eisenhower. She had no recollection of many events in her life during the late 1950s, she said in her 1979 autobiography, “Self Portrait,” and had to recover details from relatives, friends, scrapbooks and letters.

Self portrait by gene tierney