She shook her head. “I have my car. Thank you for a lovely evening.” She started to head for the door.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Will you have dinner with me one night?”
She thought about it. “All right.” There was a definite lack of enthusiasm in her answer.
I called her the following morning. “Are you free for dinner this evening?”
For the first time she said, “Yes.”
“I’ll pick you up, seven-thirty.”
That was the beginning.
We had dinner at Chasen’s. My experience was that when having a conversation with an actress, the talk usually consisted of: “So I said to the director . . .” and “I told the cameraman . . .” and “My leading man . . .” Dinner with an actress was all about show business. With Jorja, show business was not even mentioned. She talked about her family and friends. She had come from a small town—Mena, Arkansas—and still had her small-town roots. She was the antithesis of any actress I had ever met.
As we came to the end of the dinner, I said, “Jorja, why were you so reluctant to go out with me?”
She hesitated. “Do you want a straight answer?”
“Of course.”
“You have the reputation of dating too many women. I don’t intend to be just another one on your list.”
I said, “You’re not just another one. Why don’t you give me a chance?”
She studied me a moment. “All right. We’ll see.”
I began seeing Jorja every evening. The more I saw of her, the more I knew that I was in love. She had a wonderful, wicked sense of humor, and we laughed a lot. We became closer and closer.
At the end of three months, I took her in my arms and said, “Let’s get married.”
We eloped to Vegas the next day.
I arranged for Natalie and Marty to come to Hollywood to meet Jorja, and they all got along beautifully. Natalie asked Jorja a hundred questions, then decided that she was thrilled for me.
I planned a honeymoon for us in Europe. I had bought a small house off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills.
Otto and his wife, Ann, were living in Los Angeles, and when I told Otto the news about Jorja, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “That’s wonderful. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. As a wedding gift, I’m going to put siding on your house.”
Otto’s latest occupation was the siding business, putting aluminum siding on the outside of houses. It was a generous gift because siding was expensive.
“Great. Thanks.”
I told Kenneth McKenna that I was taking three months off, and Jorja and I sailed to Europe. It was a dream honeymoon that included a tour of London, Paris, Rome, and one of my favorite places in the world—Venice. I had never been happier. The dark cloud was behind me.
Finally, it was time to return home. When we arrived back in Los Angeles, Otto was waiting for us. As we drove up to our house, he said, “I think you’re going to love this.”
He was right. The house looked beautiful, completely covered with shiny aluminum siding.
“. . . And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Otto added magnanimously. “I’m going to give you this at cost.”
Jorja was doing a lot of television. She seemed to go from one top show to another.
One night, Jorja had a dream that she was making an impassioned speech to save the life of a man a crowd was about to lynch. She woke up in the middle of the dream and sat straight up in bed. She enjoyed her speech so much that she finished it, wide awake.
Back at MGM, late in the spring of 1952, I found a project that I liked. It was called “Dream Wife,” a short story written by Alfred Levitt.
The plot was about the battle of the sexes. A bachelor was engaged to a beautiful State Department official who was too busy with an oil crisis in the Middle East to have time to marry him. Fed up, he decides to marry a beautiful young princess he met in the Middle East. Because of the world oil crisis, complications begin.