(bright music) - Many years ago, my dear friend Maria Cooper Janis, who's father was Gary Cooper, he said, Susan, face it, we won the sperm lottery.

We were talking about growing up in the golden age of Hollywood.

My dad was a director, then he went on to be a producer and head of production at Columbia Studios.

So I kind of grew up on the MGM lot.

My dad started out as a comedy director.

That kind of explains my two godfathers.

One was Milton Berle and Red Skelton, who was one of my dad's favorite actors to direct.

Red was like a child.

He said, I'll put Susan to bed at night.

So we'd go upstairs and he would make me laugh so hard that obviously I wasn't ready for bed and my bedroom was on the second floor.

And Red being Red said, well, why don't we crawl out on the roof and wave to everybody?

And I think that was the last time Red was asked to put me to bed.

- He directed Red Skelton in five movies altogether.

And some people say that Sylvan Simon's Red Skelton movies are the five best Skelton movies.

He was very good at working comedians, in part because he was a great audience.

Comedians needed a certain atmosphere on the set to produce the best results.

If they were relaxed and happy and allowed to try things, he generally got better performances out of them, which he understood.

So he became Red Skelton's favorite director.

When he directed Abbott and Costello, they had a reputation of being somewhat undisciplined as performers.

It was somewhat difficult for a director to keep them on the leash and keep them from being totally off the wall.

So he had a really good balance with them.

He understood they needed to be free to improvise, that they might need to do something more than once, that something funny might come up that wasn't necessarily in the script.

And he was fine with all that.

He directed Lana Turner early on when she was not very confident in her herself.

She was beginning to be cast in leads, but she was still fairly inexperienced.

And she recognized that and he knew how to get the best out of her, how to compliment her, make her relaxed, give her hints, and guide her toward the best performance she could give.

So some of her most effective early films were directed by him.

He worked with a lot of people.

He had good experience.

He was often directing B movies earlier in his career, and that was much of what he did at MGM in the 1940s.

But he worked with some people who were on their way up and he worked with them on tight schedules and difficult deadlines and helped them produce some of their best work.

Lucille Ball was asked about his name and began to tear up according to the interviewer, and said, how do you know that name?

He's the one who inspired the crazy comedy that led to I Love Lucy, but no one ever gives him credit for it.

Starting in the 1940s, he actually directed her in a cameo role in an Abbott and Costello film.

And then he directed her in another comedy called Her Husband's Affairs.

And at the same time, she was doing her radio show where people were beginning to realize what a good comedian she was.

- My parents loved to give Sunday barbecues.

Usually my dad would invite the people who were working in the films that he was doing at the time.

So there was Anne Rutherford and Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Milton.

But there were also a lot of the people who were not famous, but who worked on the films like Screenwriter Al Mannheimer and an assistant director who then became a director named Mort Green.

They were always there.

When my parents gave big parties, there was always somebody entertaining and playing the piano.

And I saw a man get down on his one knee, and I always knew when someone was on one knee, they probably want me to go sit on their knee.

So I ran down and sat on his knee and he finished the song.

And it wasn't until many years later, I discovered that was Al Jolson.

I joined the family business, if you wanna call it that, at a very young age.

I think I was three or four years old, and my dad needed a toddler for a movie.

And there I was.

Now, this was before they had casting directors.

And the first movie I was in was called Salute to the Marines with Wallace Beery.

My dad taught me my lines, and Wally Beery was there and you know, would cue me.

And for me, it was fun and games.

There was a story in the LA Times that Wally Beery wanted me in the film.

I don't think Wally Beery knew I existed until my father brought me to the set.

But I was an obedient little girl and I loved to play let's pretend so Wally Beery said, let's use her in the shot.

Among the films that I did.

And mind you, I was a bit player or an extra, were a Southern Yankee with Red Skelton, Cockeyed Miracle with Frank Morgan, Son of Lassie.

And I had a great time with Lassie.

Peter Lawford was in that, the Good Humor Man with Red Skelton, Her Husband's Affairs with Lucille Ball, the Fuller Brush Man, another one with Red Skelton.

It was great fun working with Red and Abbott and Costello in Hollywood.

And Lou Costello would always wink at me kinda like that when we were doing a shot.

And it was hard not to laugh.

When we filmed Bad Bascomb in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Jackson Hole still had wooden sidewalks.

As a child, I just thought it was a vacation.

But because we were there, my mother had a part in the film and I did.

And we went to the set every day.

I was able to be in a covered wagon going across a river.

I was very fortunate.

Margaret O'Brien was in Bad Bascomb.

And that was, I think, where we first met.

- [Margaret] Well, he was wonderful working on Bad Bascomb because there was another little girl.

We both loved it there.

And we became very dear friends.

- You know, one of the things that I learned working with other child actors is while for me it was a lot of fun.

The money I earned was put into a college fund and I didn't have to get a job.

I learned very quickly though that certain friends of mine, when they went on auditions, they really needed to get the part.

Eleanor Donahue's mother held down two jobs.

I got to know Eleanor Donahue on a film called Her First Romance that starred Margaret O'Brien and Eleanor Donahue played her kind of adversary.

And I was just there too as a best friend.

But it was a wonderful set.

The director was Sidney Friedman, and we had a great time because all three of us, mind you we're like 12, 13 years old, fell madly in love, first love with the male lead, who was named Alan Martin Jr.

When we went through our teenage years, we remained friends and you know, we would do overnight at her house or at my house.

And we just remained good friends.

Kind of going through the tough adolescent years.

My dad believed very firmly in education.

First of all, in order to keep working in movies, I had to have an A/B average in school.

And we had a game at home every night before dinner.

He'd say, okay, Susan, go to the dictionary, close your eyes, move the pages, put your finger down, my eyes closed.

That was the word I was to learn that day.

And we would use that word in dinner table conversation.

And it increased my vocabulary incredibly.

I always loved to write.

My father would sit me on his lap, I would type on a typewriter, and that was how I learned my letters.

And then one of the things that I did was I decided to write a neighborhood newspaper.

And I would go house to house, finding out who got a new freezer, who got a new car, who got a new dog, anything that was new in the neighborhood.

I put in my neighborhood newspaper, then distributed it to all the mailboxes.

And people liked it.

And they'd leave me a nickel or a dime or a quarter and they'd say, oh, I love your newspaper, Susan.

Keep delivering it.

One of the great joys was going to the studio with my dad.

And if I wasn't working on the set and I wasn't being tutored, I could just roam around the MGM studio, which was an amazing lot with lots of sound stages.

One of the things that I learned early on, being on a movie set, it's a collaborative medium.

You can't make a movie on your own.

You've gotta have a number of people to set the lights, to run the camera, to do all of the different things.

And so I found it fascinating to watch and to talk to all of them and learn how movies were made.

And then at night, we would show what they called the dailies of what was shot each day.

And I would sit there in the dark with my dad.

I learned to write in the dark, but I would take notes from my dad about which scene worked and why.

And that was a great education.

I learned a great deal, and I didn't realize the history that I could bring to movies as a critic.

And of course, the most exciting night in Hollywood was the Academy Awards.

Forget about New Year's Eve.

The first one I went to, Born Yesterday was nominated.

My dad produced it.

- Columbia had bought the stage rights to the show and they didn't even know who they were going to cast in it.

And some people thought that the stage show was to raunchy, to put into a film.

He took that project on, he produced it.

He obtained the use of a lot of Washington DC locations.

It helped tell the background of that story.

And he campaigned for Judy Holliday to be cast in the lead.

- And Judy Holliday won.

And it was just incredible to be there on that night.

It was one of the most exciting nights of my whole life.

Problem was when we first got there, all the limousines pull up in front of the theater.

I think it was the Pantages Theater back then.

The fans would line the stands, they'd be all the way up.

There was a red carpet.

And when we got out of our car, the fans would all be looking and the the photographers would start to shoot.

And then somebody looked at me and said, oh, it's nobody.

The last film my dad was working on before he died was From Here to Eternity.

And James Jones was staying with us.

And I remember seeing the book, it was a very thick book, and I really wanted to read the book.

And so Jimmy Jones said, well, let me cross out all the bad words.

Well, it was every third word.

- [Narrator] Harry Cohn, who was not known for being a gracious man particularly, actually said that Sylvan Simon was the unsung hero of From Here to Eternity.

Because he had told Harry Cohn the story, persuaded him to buy the rights to the novel and helped work with James Jones, the author on beginning the story treatment and figuring out how this could be adapted into a film.

And he also, from the beginning, envisioned Frank Sinatra playing Maggio, which was not a slam dunk by any means.

Harry Cohn was opposed to this.

And they argued about it.

Unfortunately, Sylvan didn't live to see From Here to Eternity made, but he did much of the pre-production work on it.

- Every life has its tragedies.

Mine came when I was almost 13 years old.

My dad was getting ready to go to work that day.

I was gonna go to school and I heard a loud thunk.

He dropped dead as I was talking to him through the bathroom door.

After my dad died, my mother married another producer in Hollywood named Armand Deutsch, who was at MGM.

And as he told me, MGM had more stars than there were in the Heaven.

He did a lot of films there.

And so once again, we went on location.

But he did not want me to be an actress.

He felt rather strongly about it.

He sat me down and he said, Susan, do you really wanna be an actress?

And I thought about it, and I, my dad had died, and I loved being at the studio with my dad, but I'm not sure I really wanted to be an actress for the rest of my life.

He said, well, let me just ask you something.

Do you realize you're not as beautiful as Elizabeth, meaning Elizabeth Taylor.

Now, who's gonna compare themselves to Elizabeth Taylor?

Well, if you're on the MGM lot and you're sitting there at the commissary, and Elizabeth is at the next table, yes, you get compared to Elizabeth Taylor.

So I was nowhere near as beautiful as Elizabeth, and I wasn't as talented as Margaret O'Brien, who was my dear friend.

And I knew it.

And he said, Susan, if you're not as beautiful as Elizabeth or as talented as Margaret, it's a very tough life being an actress.

I think you're a good writer.

Why don't you be a writer?

I went to Mills College in Oakland, California way back when in the 1950s, and I decided to take a journalism course.

The professor walked in, big cigar in his mouth.

He said, I'm night editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and I'm gonna assign you all stories.

If your story gets in the Chronicle, you get an A.

If we don't use it, you get an F. And we kind of all looked a bit horrified.

And they said that, listen, this is a business.

Either you're a writer or you're not.

He said, I'll teach you the who, what, when, where, and why.

But I can't teach you much more than that.

Either you're a good writer or you're not.

His name was Pierre Salinger.

And he went on to be Kennedy's Press secretary.

But he became a mentor throughout my life.

In 1957, I went to New York with a friend of mine.

I was very excited 'cause I wanted to date a number of New York actors.

And my mother and my aunt insisted that I go out with the son of a family friend of theirs.

We made a date, we went out to Governor's Island.

As a matter of fact, that's where he took me for dinner.

Wow.

I was smitten.

He then wanted me to come meet his parents over the weekend.

This was a Tuesday night, and we went out again Wednesday.

I had another date Thursday, but Friday night he wanted me to go up to White Plains to meet his parents.

On Saturday he proposed, and two weeks later we were married.

My mother masterminded the whole thing.

She had eloped with my father, Sylvan Simon.

And when she married Armand Deutsch, it was a very small wedding in my grandparents' home.

So she wanted to do a big wedding.

She picked the wedding gown and she engineered the whole wedding in our backyard.

Of course, all of their friends came.

They were Nancy and Ronnie Reagan and June Allison and Dick Powell.

The Jimmy Stewarts were there.

Gregory and Veronique Peck, all of their friends in Hollywood were there.

It was a fabulous Hollywood wedding.

I was married at 19, and it was between my sophomore and junior year in college.

So I transferred from Mills College to the University of Pennsylvania.

And it was a shock.

I'd gone from a very small woman's college to an institution where basically I was known by a number.

And it was not the greatest time.

He was in his residency, but I was determined to get my bachelor's degree, which I did, majored in English.

After I graduated from Penn, my husband completed his residency at Yale.

So we moved up to New Haven, then had two children.

I really, really tried very hard to be a housewife.

But one day, you know how the straw breaks the camel's back.

We got in the mail a mortgage payment that came to Donald P Granger et ux.

Now that's Latin for and wife.

But I looked at this and I burst into tears and I said, I wanna be more than an ux.

After many nights of fighting, because my husband did not want me to work.

You know, his idea back when in the 1960s, this was, don't I earn enough money?

And the answer was, of course, he earned enough money, but I needed to feel some self-worth, some self-esteem.

And then I had to figure out what in the world I could do.

I heard there was a job open on radio, WICC radio in Bridgeport.

So I went and auditioned and I got the job.

The only job that was open was giving household hints, which I did.

I mainly cribbed from any magazine that I could find because as I said, I was not a great housewife.

But I did the housekeeping hints.

And then when the elections came around, everyone on staff covered election nights.

So I was able to get my kind of get my feet in news.

But then three men who worked for WICC started a radio station called WCDQ, Ted Quale, Noel Cote and Frank Delfino.

And Frank had been our program director at WICC.

And they took me out to lunch one day.

Two of them were salesmen, one was the program director told me they were starting this radio station.

And did I wanna be part of it?

And I could do anything I wanted.

And of course I jumped at the chance.

They let me experiment and fail and experiment and succeed.

And I had a great time there.

I did get an offer from television and I went on Channel 8 and I started hearing movie critics who didn't know what they were talking about.

And I kept thinking I can do better than that.

And I would say that to the director.

And I think they got very tired of hearing me say that.

And they said, well, why don't you do movie reviews?

So I started doing televised movie reviews.

On Channel 8, I did something called the Connecticut Capsule where I would be interviewing people who were mainly coming through Oakdale musical theater.

There was Rowan & Martin and David Frost and many celebrities came through.

When I left Channel 8, it was very difficult.

And the general manager who will go unnamed made it impossible for me to stay there.

He kept propositioning me.

So I left on a Friday, walked out.

I never told my husband because he didn't want me to work anyway.

And this would've just added fuel to the fire.

But I called Frank Delfino at WCDQ and I told him I'd left Channel 8.

He didn't ask why.

And I started back on CDQ on Monday.

One of my great breaks was when Theo Lindstrom recommended that I be hired as the movie and drama critic at WMCA in New York, which was a big radio station.

Being a New York critic is an entirely different kind of prestige in other people's eyes than I had working just in Connecticut.

And it was a brief glorious time.

It was loads of fun.

I didn't really like working in New York 'cause I didn't like the commute, but did give me a lot of national exposure at the time.

I started writing for magazines and I had a wonderful agent, Jesse Nash, who would negotiate terrific contracts.

Back then, There were a lot of women's magazines, Ladies Home Journal, Red Book, Women's Day, Family Circle.

I wrote for all of them.

I had the first interview with Nancy Reagan that she did in the White House.

I had to interview Jimmy Stewart.

And Jimmy Stewart was a long time family friend.

So I called Jimmy and he said, come on over for lunch and we'll do an interview, which I did.

And we sat there and he said, now at 1:30, I have to excuse myself for a few minutes.

So he kept looking at his watch.

And so came about 1:20 and he said, you wanna come with me?

I've just gotta go outside for a minute.

So we got up from the table and Jimmy walked outside to his driveway and sure enough, a tourist bus came by and he took a picture with everyone.

He signed everybody's autograph book.

The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes, then they all got back on the tourist bus and went on and we went back in the house and I said, Jimmy, that's incredible.

And he looked at me, he said, Susan, those people aren't just fans, they're my partners.

If they didn't want to see me, I wouldn't have this house.

I wouldn't have the life that I did.

They're my partners.

Along with working in New York, my movie reviews have been syndicated through the Hearst Media Group around the country, and actually they were sold around the world.

All movie critics are different and they have a different scale on what they review and how they review.

So let me just tell you the way I review.

Movies are made for specific audiences.

Some are made for a general audience, but some are made for a rather specific audience.

And I try to gear my reviews to tell you, the listener, the reader, however you access them.

Whether the movie accomplishes what it's set out to do.

I think that's my job as a critic.

If it's a mystery, am I wondering all the way through who done it?

Or do I know the butler did it right from the beginning?

Which takes away the mystery.

If it's a comedy, am I laughing?

Is other people around me laughing?

If it's a romance, am I really taken with these two people and I want them to have a future together.

So I try to review how well does a film succeed in what it set out to do.

Whether I personally, Susan, like it or not, is somewhat irrelevant.

People have called me a kind critic because even if I don't particularly like a film, I know if it succeeds.

- She's what I would like to describe as a common sensical down to earth movie reviewer.

She really judges each movie on its own terms.

- I think who she is is reflected in how she writes her movie reviews too, because she's basically such a positive person.

You know, she's not out there to make a name by being clever and witty and snarky and tearing a performance down, or tearing a director down.

- I was lucky when I was a full-time reviewer for Hearst, I had more of a say in which movies I was going to write about each week, you know?

And I would avoid many of the movies, frankly, that came out that I just thought, what is there to be said?

Susan has always plunged right in and tried to see every movie and say something about it.

So the fact that she's been able to do that for so many years without burning out and still displaying the enthusiasm she displays, I think is quite remarkable.

- One of the great advantages I had growing up in Hollywood is seeing what a collaborative art movies are.

And one of the things in my reviews that I've tried to do is acknowledge what the production designer has done, what the art director has done.

You have to acknowledge, I think the contributions of the various people who make it happen.

They all contribute equally to making a movie a success.

Another area that's been open to me is doing lectures.

I started out with doing a lecture that I still do called Hollywood Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

Hollywood has always existed in phases.

I remember way back in the 1940s when we got our first television set, my dad turned to me and said, you know, we're gonna see movies on TV one of these days.

They'll open on television just when they open in theaters.

I love talking about it with audiences because I get the feedback from them about what they're really interested in and getting feedback from audiences informs a lot of what I write.

- She enjoys, like I do, hearing people's opinions about movies, you know, and not just having everybody agree with her.

You know, she believes in the conversation of movies.

- I haven't made any secret about it.

I'm 85 years old, so I've been able to continue to work in the business that I know and that I love.

And as our family internist said to me, well, you're great in everything, but you failed retirement because I don't know how to retire.

Do I stop seeing movies?

Do I stop writing?

I don't think so, I love doing both.

(bright music)