Zuzu’s Wonderful Life: The Story of the Child Actress Who Starred In Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life”

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 2: Our next storyteller has the privilege.

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Speaker 1: Of being in one of the most beloved movies of all time, while at the same time and from the same movie, also has one of the most famous lines in movie history. Her story is as wonderful as both of these accomplishments.

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Speaker 2: Let’s take a listen.

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Speaker 3: My name is Carolyn Grimes, and I was a child actress, and I lived in Hollywood, and my mother was a stage mom. She felt like I should be in the movies. So I was an only child, and she truly put all her energies to that end. And I had all kinds of lessons: dancing, singing, elocution, dialogue. I mean, everything was given to me, and I had the opportunity. I’ll never forget when I did dialect. I practiced so hard. “Give me please a piece of chocolate.” It was so fun. I mean, I really had a good time growing up, and that was hard work to do all that. I played the violin at five. I played the piano at three. So all I did was practice pretty much most of my free time, practice something.

But this was in the 1940s, so back in the day, Hollywood was pretty much all people in the industry. It was the main way people made a living, was working in the industry in some form, so it wasn’t any big deal. Everybody, all the kids were involved in that, so I never really realized it was special or that I was special. So my mom took me to see an agent, and the agent liked me. Her name was Lola Moore, and she had the biggest stable of kids in Hollywood, and she sent me on an interview and I got a part. So I was in. That was the end of that. I started when I was four years old. I was in a movie called “That Night With You.” That was my first. But I did advertising. I did all kinds of things throughout that time in my life. I advertised Buster Brown shoes and all kinds of things. So that’s kind of how I got started, and I really had a good time.

By the time I did “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I was six and I’d already done four movies, so “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the flagship for me. That’s the movie that everybody remembers and everyone wants to hear about. Back in the day, we didn’t have auditions. We had interviews, and that was usually one-on-one with the casting directors. So you went to the casting office, and maybe there were five or six of us, and you just waited your turn. Then you went in, talked to the casting people, and boom, boom, boom. That’s it. So it wasn’t like an audition. And most of us, I would say almost all of us, were representing Lola Moore, that one agent who had children all over L.A. that were in the movie business. So we’d just go there, and my mother would take me to interviews. And she took me to this interview, and I sat there, and we were just kind of talking with other kids, and this mother accidentally spilled coffee on me, on my dress, because we wore dresses back then, always, you know, and they were up to your butt, I mean, they were so short. So I had a soiled dress when I walked in there to talk to the casting director, and lo and behold, when I got in there, Frank Capra was in there. And so I had an interview with him and the casting director, and, you know, I don’t know what the mother thought she was going to do, but I ended up. It gave me something to talk about, so I was chatty Kathy, you know. And when we were leaving, this is when I found out, I heard my mother talk to another mother and she said, “Well, you know, she thought she spilled that coffee on purpose, so, you know, screwed me up when I went in to do my interview.” But that was how I got the part.

Eventually, I got all these parts. I played with Bing Crosby, and I played with some of the greatest people of all time. I was in “Rio Grande” with John Wayne, and that was a huge movie, and I was on the set in Moab, Utah, as a little kid, and I just. That was my favorite of all the movies I ever did, because I got to ride in covered wagons with Indians chasing me on horses, you know. I got to do all these fun things, and it was just great. And, you know, the Indians were brought in from the reservation, and I was with Pat Wayne, who was John Wayne’s son, and he had both Mike and Pat for the summer. They were there during the filming, and they were actually in the film. So Pat was my age, and we played and had a really good time. But we were told, “You can never go around the Native Americans. Don’t go there.” Well, of course, we went right there, and we spied on them, and it was just, you know, it was really an interesting time, and I really had fun. The Sons of the Pioneers were there, and they’d serenade us, and then I turned ten while we were there. And the Korean Conflict broke out at that time, and they confiscated a lot of the planes, so it was a little difficult for them to get shipments of food and things like that flown in. But John Wayne happened to be able to get three hundred dollars worth of fireworks. And my birthday was the Fourth of July. He had that all shipped in. He had a big cake made, and we went out to the Colorado River bluffs, and it was “Happy Birthday, Little Miss Carolyn.” It was a great time.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Carolyn Grimes share her story as a child actress, and my goodness, to be on an interview, not an audition, an interview, and have Frank Capra in the room. Surreal. When we come back, more of Carolyn Grimes’ story and just her personality and her wit and her memory, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Carolyn Grimes’ story. She was six years old when she starred as Jimmy Stewart’s daughter, Zuzu, in the 1946 Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” although, as she told us before the break, her favorite movie was “Rio Grande,” released in 1950, starring alongside the great John Wayne.

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Speaker 2: Here again is Carolyn Grimes.

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Speaker 3: I liked doing the Westerns because there were horses involved. There was always excitement. In Albuquerque, I got to ride on a stagecoach right at the top, and the horses, you know, were pulling us, and it was really great. And Gabby Hayes was in that movie, and he went to the director and complained and said it was very dangerous for me to do that. He wouldn’t even do it. He had a stunt double do it. So I was up there. You’re not tied in or anything, you know, you’re not secure, you’re just there, and the horses could lurch and you go, you know, who knows. But that was a lot of fun. And because the director didn’t pay attention to Gabby Hayes, so I got to do it. But I enjoyed that so much. And I made a really good friend on that set, and that was Lon Chaney Jr. You remember Lon Chaney Jr.? He was the Wolf Man, very scary dude. Well, I liked him a lot because he was nice to me, and he took time to talk to me. I mean, I was shocked because I thought he’d be real scary, and he kind of was scary, but I didn’t care. He was. He was kind of. I liked him because he told me I was ugly, and I said, “Well, why am I ugly?” And he said, “Because you have freckles.” And I agreed, I had freckles. I hated the damn things. I hated freckles. So yeah, I began to like him right away. And I watched every scene that he did in fighting and things like that. He did one fight scene with Randolph Scott. The entire scene, he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He told me before he did the scene, he said, “Now, Carolyn,” he said, “I am, I’m just going to tell you that I’m going to bleed, and you’re going to watch this.” And he said, “This is what I have: a capsule. This capsule, I’m going to put it in my mouth,” and he said, “I’m going to hit my cheek in some way and break that capsule, and the blood’s going to come out of my mouth. But I’m not hurt. It’s just fake. Isn’t that great?” He took the time to tell me that, and I thought that was really super. I don’t know, I really enjoyed doing that a lot.

And then I loved “Blue Skies” with Bing Crosby. He was so great. He sent me my wardrobe that was in the movie for after the movie present. Back in the day, the big star sent the members of the cast a gift as soon as the movie was over, and he sent me my clothes from the film, which I thought was pretty cool. So I just really enjoyed doing those kinds of things with these stars, and they were so down-to-earth. The ones that weren’t down-to-earth, us kids were told at the very beginning, “Don’t have anything to do with them,” and so we were warned, and we didn’t. David Niven was one. There were quite a few that didn’t like children and didn’t want to be bothered, so we didn’t bother them. That was just the rule. And if you did bother them, or you forgot your lines, or you did all these things, you wouldn’t last long, because you’d get. There’s a lot of people that would take. Would take your job from you, a lot of kids.

So the other movie that I really had fun with was “The Bishop’s Wife.” It was nominated for an Academy Award, and it didn’t. Didn’t win an Academy Award, but it was a wonderful film. I mean, “It’s a Wonderful Life” was nominated for five Academy Awards, and it didn’t win anything. And so it got special mention for the making of the snow. That was it. And that was ivory soap flakes that Frank Capra actually mixed them together with fau mite and made the solution himself. He actually had a degree in chemical engineering, and so he made that snow. He created it, and they still use that technique in some of the movies today. It was pretty remarkable because before that the snow had been cornflakes made with kind of a white concoction, and the problem was they crunched when you stepped on them, and Frank Capra wanted silent snow, so that’s how they got the silent snow. But if you’ll notice, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George is on the bridge and he jumps in to save Clarence, there’s all this soap suds around in the water. It’s all over where. It goes all over their faces. When George pulls him out, it’s all over their faces. So it’s kind of a funny thing. And the guy that’s in the bridge keeper house, he comes out, and he’s got this flashlight. Now it’s an ordinary flashlight, just, you know, regular, and he shines it down on them, and it’s like a beam from heaven, you know. It’s a giant beam coming down on. You know, you don’t pay attention to things like that when you’re watching the movie, but I think it’s a lot of fun to kind of think about things like that. The movie was shot in the hot, hot summertime, and it only took three months to shoot the film. They started in April, and they finished up the end of July, and it was beastly hot, really. But the inside part of the bridge was done on a stage, and they were able to keep that area fairly cool. So they had a lot of crushed ice for snow that they used as well, you know, on the sides of the road and things like that, on the roads, and that was all shot inside a stage. There was a location on the studio ranch in Encino for all the outside scenes and the buildings and things like that, but for the most part, the whole thing was shot on a stage or in the backlot. That’s where the water was, was built in the backlot, and so it was all right there. But it was really hot, and we were wearing winter clothes. And when there’s a scene where Jimmy Stewart gets a real close-up as his eyes are big and you can see the sweat running off his face, it’s because he’s hot. He’s really hot with his wool, scratchy suit on, and it’s like ninety-some degrees, and that was extreme weather for L.A. at the time. So working with Capra was a dream. He was very particular. He was meticulous. He handpicked everybody that was in that movie, even the extras. He handpicked them. There was a young woman who was a. What do you call it? In “The Wizard of Oz,” she was one of the little people, but she was just a young girl, and she danced and ended up having a dance career as a teacher, and so she was brought on the set for “It’s a Wonderful Life” when they had the scene where they’re dancing at the high school gymnasium. So she came and she taught all the kids how to do the Charleston. And her name was Priscilla Montgomery, and well, it is. She’s still with us. But she had on a purple dress, and so she was the first person to jump in the pool. So she got fifty dollars extra tacked onto her check because she was the first one, and the other kids that jumped in got twenty-five dollars for jumping in.

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Speaker 1: And we’ve been listening to Carolyn Grimes share the stories of being on set as a child actress in the West, places like Albuquerque, in some of our great national parks, and also in the backlots of Burbank and Encino, making “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And who would have known? I did not and could not have imagined that was all done in a backlot. And my goodness, to hear about Frank Capra, and I’ve read so much about how he worked, and my goodness, every detail, down to not only interviewing the children actors, but hand-picking the extras and directors. My goodness, the good ones and the great ones. The details matter. More of Carolyn Grimes, her stories about “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and so much more here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and Carolyn Grimes talking about “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

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Speaker 2: The movie she starred as Jimmy Stewart’s daughter, Zuzu.

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Speaker 1: She was discussing the dance competition at Bedford Falls High School and how the young actors were taught to Charleston from one of the girls who played one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz.” The actors turned dance instructor, Priscilla Montgomery, earned an extra fifty dollars for being the first to jump into the swimming pool during the dance scene, but she quickly found out that that money was not easy money. Here again is Carolyn Grimes.

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Speaker 3: But she had this purple beaded dress on, and when she jumped in, she told me that the weight from these beads pulled her down under. And she said it was all she could do to keep her head above water because it was so heavy, and they had to help her get out because she couldn’t get out on her own. She couldn’t pull herself out because the dress was so heavy, beaded. So it was an interesting story. Oh my goodness, there are so many interesting stories. So I enjoyed doing all these movies. And I was taught that these people were normal, ordinary folks. These stars were not, I mean, they weren’t stars. I mean, I didn’t even know what a star was. My mother and father kept me in the dark about a lot of things like that so that I would act normal, I guess. So I just thought they were my friends. I had no idea that these were stars. So I really enjoyed it.

And then about the time I did “The Bishop’s Wife” with Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven, my mother started getting sick. And that’s when I realized is that my life was going to take a different path, because she had early-onset Alzheimer’s, and she started slipping, and it took her five years, but she died when I was fourteen. So during that time, it was hard for my father to be with me on the set. He was a manager of a Safeway store, and he had to hire somebody to take me to an interview, and then he’d have to hire somebody to be my guardian on the stage if I got a job, and so he wasn’t that interested in having me in the movies anyway. And of course, by that time, I discovered boys, and so I wasn’t that greatly interested in acting either. So when I was fourteen, my mom died, and then a year later, my dad was killed in a car accident, so my life kind of changed. At that point, I was an orphan, so the court took over because my father didn’t leave a will. So I had a mean aunt and uncle from Missouri. It was my father’s brother and his horrible, mean wife. They came out and they got me, and they took me back to a little town of Missouri. I’d gone to L.A. High. There were nine hundred kids in my class at L.A. High. There were eight hundred people in the whole town, so I had thirty-six other kids in my class in my high school. But, you know, I thought I’d been sent to hell, and I didn’t think I would recover from that. And I tried every way possible to think of how I could run away, but I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have any way to get out, and I didn’t have any, anybody to help me with that. So she commandeered all my mail, so I couldn’t ask for help for anybody from anybody in California. And eventually she stopped all the communication from California, so I couldn’t talk to any of my friends or anything that I had grown up with over the years. After about a year, I realized that these people in that town, my teachers, the merchants, my friends at school, everyone really rallied around me, and they knew this woman was the devil, my aunt, and they made me realize that there are loving and caring people in this world, and that’s when I decided that I never wanted to go back to Hollywood again, because it’s kind of dog-eat-dog, and people take advantage of you and they use you. And I can see how this happened after I saw what real people were about, and they had no reason. They didn’t want anything out of our relationship like they did in California. All they wanted was to give love and be friends. And so I never went back to California after that. Of course, I lost all contact. My aunt had made me do that. But I graduated in high school. I went.