Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 266: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 3]

Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) looks guilty in this scene from Ed Wood.

It just isn't true, okay?

The "Dolores Fuller" character in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood (1994)—the temperamental, ambitious-to-a-fault ingenue played by a peroxided Sarah Jessica Parker—is not a fair or accurate depiction of Indiana-born actress and songwriter Dolores Agnes Fuller (1923-2011) who dated Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the early 1950s and appeared in three of his best-known movies. In transforming Eddie's messy, complicated life into a tidy, two-hour biopic, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski streamlined certain aspects of the story and exaggerated others. Somehow, along the way, Dolores got turned into a cartoon. I honestly think the culprit was this extended quote from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992):

Dolores Fuller explains why she left Ed Wood.

This quote reveals two things about Dolores Fuller: 

1. She was not comfortable with Eddie's cross-dressing
2. She had loftier career ambitions than Ed could have possibly offered her. 

This doesn't exactly make her a hero, but does it necessarily make her a villain? In the long run, she had to do what was best for her. Her dislike of Eddie's cross-dressing is easy to forgive. We all have the right to decide what we're okay with sexually and what we're not. As for Dolores' ambitions, consider what she says about the life she would've had if she'd stayed with Eddie: "We would have starved together." This is accurate. Eddie lived in miserable poverty for the rest of his life and physically abused the woman who became his second wife. If you want to know what Dolores Fuller's life would have been like if she'd stayed with Ed, I will point you toward Bob Blackburn's book Kathy Wood and I: How I Fell Down the Ed Wood Jr. Angora Rabbit Hole (2024). By getting out when she did, Dolores was spared all that. Frankly, good for her.

Dolores tells her story.

Understandably, Dolores was not at all happy about how she was portrayed in Ed Wood. Unlike the other living figures depicted in the biopic, for instance, she did not get to spend any time with the person playing her. This is an issue she brings up repeatedly in her candid autobiography, A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood and Me (Bear Manor Media, 2009). She largely blames actress Sarah Jessica Parker, whom she dubs "Sarah Jurassic Parker." But I think Sarah was just portraying the character as it was written in the script.

Let me reassure you that I am not criticizing Ed Wood for its less-than-accurate depiction of Dolores Fuller. The screenwriters' goal was to turn Eddie's life into an entertaining, satisfying, and coherent story, and they did that. Dolores Fuller just happened to be collateral damage. But does the movie portray her in an entirely negative way? Far from it. I'd say that Dolores, the character, has good moments and bad in the finished film. 

When we first see her, she is acting in one of Eddie's plays at a small Los Angeles theater, gamely allowing herself to be suspended by wires above the stage in order to portray an angel. Later, as the cast and crew gather at Boardner's cocktail bar, she is understandably hurt when a local theater critic makes an unkind remark about her appearance in his printed review. (For the record, the real-life critic never made any such remark; Dolores wasn't even in the play.)

The first indication that Dolores Fuller and Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) are a couple comes in the very next scene, which takes place at Dolores' apartment. She and Eddie are lying in bed, presumably after coming home from Boardner's. It's still raining outside. Ed can't sleep. He's worried that he'll never be a success in show (or any) business. He compares himself to his idol, actor-director Orson Welles (1915-1985) and says that Welles made Citizen Kane (1941) at the tender age of 26. "I'm already 30!" he whimpers.

Being a kind and supportive girlfriend, Dolores assures him that everything will be alright. However, she laments that she has to wake up so early for work. It's still pitch black outside. She climbs out of bed and goes looking through her closet. "Where's my pink sweater?" she asks. "I can never seem to find my clothes anymore." Then, in one of the most memorable shots in the movie, Eddie rolls over on his side, turning his back to his girlfriend. He has a distinctly guilty look on his face, like a kid who's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. End of scene.

So how accurate was any of this? Orson Welles was indeed 26 when Citizen Kane was released. He may have been as young as 25 during principal photography in 1940. Meanwhile, Edward D. Wood, Jr. turned 30 in October 1954. The L.A. production of Ed's play, The Casual Company, occurred in October 1948, the same month that Ed turned 24. And Ed's first theatrically-released feature film was released in 1953, when Eddie was 29. So let's say our protagonist was approaching 30. As for Ed Wood's obsession with Orson Welles, you might think it was a recurring theme in Nightmare of Ecstasy, but the only one who really brings it up is Conrad Brooks' brother, Henry Bederski:

"He would talk about Orson Welles."

Number of times Citizen Kane is mentioned in Nightmare of Ecstasy? Zero. Don't believe me? Look for yourself.

But back to Dolores Fuller. There are some pertinent facts about her that Ed Wood does not tell you, likely because they would clutter the narrative the film is trying to present. By the time she made Glen or Glenda (1953) with Eddie, for instance, she was already a married mother of two sons. Fuller is actually the surname of her first husband, Don, whom she wed when she was only 18. Dolores' last name at birth was actually Eble. In her autobiography, she describes Don Fuller as being too controlling. She left him in 1951, but their divorce did not become final until 1955.

In A Fuller Life, the actress describes a peripatetic childhood, being shuffled around between caretakers, including some nuns, before establishing herself in her teens as a model and actress in California. The most dominant figure in her early life was a control-freak grandmother who treated Dolores like a "princess." This seems to have had a longstanding effect on her. It must be said that Dolores Fuller grew up to be a woman who valued herself highly. (And who can blame her? If you don't value yourself, believe me, no one else will.)

Although Dolores had no involvement with The Casual Company in 1948, she and Ed Wood did work together on a stage play in the early days of their relationship. In the early 1950s, Dolores was going out on a lot of auditions, occasionally snagging film and television roles. She met Ed when she responded to a Variety ad for a casting call. Accompanying her that fateful day was her roommate and close friend, Mona McKinnon, who also became a key member of Ed Wood's repertory company and social circle. (One of the best reasons to read A Fuller Life is to get to know Mona a little better. She emerges as an interesting character in her own right.) 

As she writes in her autobiography, Dolores was immediately taken with Eddie's green eyes and winning smile, and they were soon a couple. Eddie was impressed by the fact that Dolores wore an angora sweater to the casting call. Utterly smitten with the statuesque blonde, Eddie arranged for her to have a role in the play he was directing at the time, a hoary melodrama called The Blackguard Returns. She didn't think much of the play (or the pay), but did it for Ed's sake.

And, just as it says in Ed Wood, they did move in together fairly early in their relationship. Eddie had been living with his business partner, Alex Gordon, whom Dolores derides as prudish. Against her better judgment, having just walked away from a ten-year marriage, Dolores moved in with Eddie into a little apartment on Sunset. One thing you don't see in the biopic is that this apartment building had a swimming pool, something Dolores' two sons very much appreciated. (The boys were splitting their time between Dolores and Don.) Although Dolores and Eddie were never married, Ed did refer to Dolores as his wife.

What's curious about the Dolores/Ed relationship in Ed Wood is that it seems extremely chaste, more like the polite, sexless marriages you see in 1950s and '60s sitcoms. They might as well be sleeping in twin beds, like the Ricardos or the Petries. If you've read A Fuller Life, however, you know that Eddie and Dolores' relationship was intensely physical. In fact, this was part of Dolores' motivation for moving in with Eddie in the first place. Another aspect of the relationship that doesn't really come through in the biopic is that it was Dolores' acting career that was paying the bills in those early days, particularly her television work on shows like Queen for a Day. (Ed's many failed ventures certainly weren't bringing in much dough.) So Dolores' later impatience with Eddie is quite justified.

I realize I've now spent many paragraphs analyzing a single, brief scene in Ed Wood. But that's really what this series-within-a-series is about. I'd say that, at least in the early passages, the biopic gives a simplified but not entirely inaccurate depiction of Dolores Fuller. We'll see how that develops as our journey through the film continues.