I consider myself a fan of the Golden Years of Hollywood but I never knew that much about Kay Francis - unlike say Bette Davis her films were not played that often on TV growing up and she didn't have a great legend around her like say Joan Crawford. In fact the only Kay Francis movie I can recall seeing is Another Dawn with Errol Flynn.
So while I'm not usually a fan of movie plots being recapped in biographies, I was glad that Francis' movies were given brief synopsizes here. It's an excellent book and I enjoyed it a lot. O'Brien was fortunate to have an ace in the hole - Francis diaries which are joyfully indiscreet. There's lots about her career, friends and love life - including rating lovers and all the abortions she had (I lost count after six).
Francis was a modern woman in many ways - she enjoyed sex a lot and was not afraid to show it, taking numerous lovers; financially savvy and independent (she hung on to her money and died a millionaire, she didn't want to have children); secretly loyal; sexually experimental (she was rumoured to be a lesbian, but the diaries show she had several lesbian experiences but mostly partnered with men); was suspicious of the press.
Francis didn't set out to be an actor at first and might never have become a star had her first marriage not ended - but it did, and she wanted adventure, and acting was in the family blood (mum was an actor), so she gave it a shot. Her rise was relatively rapid - she was in a few plays before striking a hit, Elmer the Great with Walter Huston who became a fan; this led to a screen test and Hollywood contract and she quickly established herself as a glamorous clotheshorse at Paramount, and then Warner Bros.
There are some classics on her CV - One Way Passage, Trouble in Paradise - and for a few years Francis was Queen of the Warners lot, but most of her films appear to have been lush formula melodramas which involved Francis wearing a lot of clothes. The White Angel seems to have been a turning point of her - Francis as Florence Nightingale, but the resulting movie disappointed and she lost favour with the front office. They tried to get rid of her but she wouldn't budge and thus made her play out her contract in B pictures - which seems sadistic, and was, though it also would have been a warning to any other contract players who got out of line.
Francis pushed on, and some of those Warner Bs were pretty good (King of the Underworld, My Bill from John Farrow) - and she continued to have an alright career. She never got the chance to make a Joan Crawford type comeback but she kept getting some decent roles, including a stint as producer (for Monogram, but still), then when Hollywood offers faded, as they did for everyone, she had a good run in theatre.
It was a good life, sometimes more than that - she made a lot of money, had good friends, was very independent. She also did genuinely useful and hard war work with her tours (filmed as Four Gals and a Jeep). She had a lot of lovers (some of whom received harsh reviews in her diary), including Delmer Daves, Otto Preminger and Aussie Ivan Goff.
There were some health issues - she badly burnt herself against a heater leading to a painful operation, suffered poor eyesight (due in part to studio lights), became an alcoholic and died of cancer. And I think she would have been a great mother. But anyway, a full life lived to the utmost and O'Brien gives her perfect tribute, full of affection and impressive research.
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