Jeanette MacDonald - Controversy

Controversy

A controversy exists concerning the private lives of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. John Kenneth Hilliard, a sound engineer backstage at MGM from 1933 to 1942, reported in 1981 that though Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were a screen couple, they "hated each other with a vengeance". Hilliard worked on Naughty Marietta and it is common knowledge that MacDonald's initial iciness toward Eddy almost caused Eddy to walk off that film. There were three film sets on which they battled off-screen: the second half of Rose Marie, after MacDonald's refusal to elope to Reno with Eddy; The Girl of the Golden West, filmed immediately after MacDonald's marriage; and New Moon, filmed after Eddy's marriage. Nevertheless, an off-screen affair was verified from another MGM sound engineer who built Eddy's home recording equipment, and other MGM staff such as makeup artists William Tuttle and Fred Phillips.

Contemporary magazine writer Sandy Reiss reported that a private trailer was set up for the two on Maytime and that the crew called them "the lovebirds." Other MGM co-workers claimed that Eddy and MacDonald were closest during the filming of Sweethearts and I Married an Angel. After the MGM years, their private lives fell off the Hollywood radar. Baritone Theodor Uppman, who won the Atwater Kent opera auditions and later sang at the Metropolitan Opera, saw Eddy and MacDonald at a 1947 party together, where the talk of the evening was the fact that MacDonald was pregnant with Eddy's child but he could not get a divorce.

In the biography Sweethearts by Sharon Rich, the author presents MacDonald and Eddy as continuing an adulterous affair after their marriages. Rich claims the relationship lasted, with a few breaks, until MacDonald's death. Rich also interviewed about 200 others including celebrities who also spoke candidly. Apparently, Rich additionally had access to hundreds of pages of personal letters, some of them handwritten by MacDonald, others part of a correspondence between Eddy's mother and a close friend. Another biography, Hollywood Diva by Edward Baron Turk, denies there was any such affair. An erroneous rumor has been floated that "Hollywood Diva" is an "authorized" biography. Turk states that this was not the case, that he was the only MacDonald biographer to have interviewed Gene Raymond at length; but that neither Raymond nor anyone else vetted the book.

In MacDonald's autobiography (the 1960 typewritten manuscript published as a facsimile edition in 2004), MacDonald writes: "I remember seeing Nelson for the first time and thinking he fulfilled most of my requirements in a man." She later mentions an "attraction Nelson and I might have had for each other" prior to marrying Raymond and also devotes several pages to marital problems immediately after her honeymoon (pages 337-99, 344) and again in the post-war years.