Nancy Olson Livingston shares stories of her star-filled life in a new autobiography

Nancy Olson Livingston's life has been full of pretty big moments and big personalities since she left the west side of Milwaukee to become an actor.

Her second movie, the 1950 classic "Sunset Boulevard," earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Her first husband wrote, during their marriage, "Paint Your Wagon" and "My Fair Lady" (and she helped on the latter). Her second husband ran the record label that guided (and sometimes sparred with) Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. For more than three decades, she earned accolades for her performances on the big screen, the small screen and the stage. She also fended off sexual advances from Howard Hughes, William Holden and John Kennedy.

And she wrote all of it down.

Reading Olson Livingston's new autobiography "A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour" (University Press of Kentucky), you get the sense of a life of celebrity and struggle, of you-are-there moments blended with relatable family challenges.

But you also get the story of a life told by someone who, at age 94, still is grounded in a Midwestern sensibility — something Olson Livingston takes pride in.

“I think people sense that about me. They either like it or they feel threatened by it, or they don’t like it,” she said, laughing, in a recent phone interview from her home in California. "But it’s inbred. I care about my neighbors. I am interested in my community, I am particularly interested in the educating of my community, and those were all the things I grew up around. …

"Living and growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is probably one of the gifts of my life."

From Milwaukee to Madison to Hollywood

Born at Deaconess Hospital in Milwaukee, Olson Livingston grew up on the 4800 block of Woodlawn Court. In "A Front Row Seat," she recounts a childhood marked by a degree of privilege, along with a complicated relationship with her competitive mother and an aversion to Wisconsin winters that continues to this day.

"Every morning, I check not only The New York Times but the Los Angeles Times, and I look at the weather," Olson Livingston said in the phone interview. "And I always look at Milwaukee, because I grew up there, and I walked to school every day. And I looked at what it was today (in the mid-30s, with wind chills in the teens), and I remember so vividly those winds coming off of Lake Michigan and literally, literally going through my bones."

She developed an interest in acting in the ninth grade, and her parents had her transferred to Wauwatosa High School, which had a bigger theater program. From there, she went to the University of Wisconsin and, when her aunt and uncle moved to Los Angeles, she followed to check out the summer theater program at the University of California, Los Angeles — and liked it (and the weather) so much she decided to transfer.

During one school production, a talent scout from Paramount Pictures saw her onstage and offered her a screen test. In late 1947, she signed a seven-year contract. She was 19.

"And I kept going to school, and nothing changed," Olson Livingston said. "I did not receive the $300 a week (salary), I was under 21, and it was put into a trust, and I had the same allowance and the same car, and I lived with my aunt and uncle in the Palisades with a beautiful view of the ocean. And I drove to school every day on Sunset Boulevard."

Paramount lent her to Twentieth Century Fox for what would be her first movie, the 1949 Western "Canadian Pacific," playing a fur trapper's daughter opposite 51-year-old star Randolph Scott.

It was not what she thought she'd been doing — or who she'd be portraying.

"I thought it was bizarre that I was going to play a half-Indian Canadian girl with a movie star who was my father’s age," she said. "On the other hand, what it did was, it gave me (an understanding) of how they use the camera, the difference between doing a scene and moving in and doing close-ups separately."

In 'Sunset Boulevard,' a part written for her

Which all came in handy on her second movie.

Writer-director Billy Wilder was already considered one of Hollywood's sharpest filmmakers when he began putting together "Sunset Boulevard," a dark drama about a faded screen legend (played by real-life screen legend Gloria Swanson) who convinces a cynical screenwriter (William Holden) to help craft her comeback vehicle. A key character in the story was going to be the script reader, who had dreams of becoming a screenwriter herself and before falling for him.

Wilder knew Olson Livingston from the Paramount lot, and began asking her about her life and experiences, and drew from their conversations to create the character. The part was, literally, made for her.

Wilder “wanted to find someone young and not necessarily yet a star but he could make a star — that always interested him — that you’d believe was an aspiring young writer," Olson Livingston said.

Generating some buzz with her performance, Olson Livingston was pushed into several more movies in quick succession, "Union Station" (again with Holden, who after fumbling a pass at her remained a lifelong friend) and "Mr. Music" (with Bing Crosby). While clearly a star on the rise, she had other priorities.

She had been dating Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist behind the acclaimed Broadway musical "Brigadoon" who was working on the screenplay for "An American in Paris." When Lerner asked her to marry him, she had finished shooting "Sunset Boulevard" and the follow-up movies, but none of them had been released yet.

So to her, leaving the movies for marriage and a family in New York City was a no-brainer.

"I said to Paramount, 'I don’t want to be a movie star anymore.' Well, I didn’t say that. I just said, 'Hey, I’m not available to make movies for a while.' And they said, ‘Wait a minute. We’re paying you,'" Olson Livingston recalled. "I said, ‘Well, you can stop paying me. It’s OK. But I’m moving to New York, I’m going to be married, I’m starting a family, I’m going to build another life. … I’m not available, I’m not at your command.'

"And then 'Sunset' was released, and oh my God, the pressure."

'The brightest and most creative people in the world'

Olson didn't completely walk away from acting, but she did cut back her workload to focus on her family and her marriage. Her husband's world brought with it a social life that meant rubbing elbows with New York's theatrical, literary and political elite.

And she wasn't just listening in. In her memoir, she recounts how Lerner, struggling with writer's block while writing "My Fair Lady," came up with the lyrics for "I've Grown Accustomed to Your Face" while reminding her how pretty she was.

"I was with the most interesting, the brightest and the most creative people in the world," Olson Livingston said. "And I was sitting there watching them create. For me, that was like being the gift of heaven."

But that world had a dark side, too. Lerner's creativity masked an addictive personality with major commitment issues (Olson Livingston was his third of eight wives). The couple divorced in 1957.

Five years later, she married Alan Livingston, president of Capitol Records. She was still making movies, including co-starring with fellow Wisconsin native Fred MacMurray in the Disney favorite "The Absent Minded Professor." But acting increasingly took a back seat to family and home. Unlike her first marriage, her second to Livingston lasted 46 years, until his death in 2009.

A few years later, film historian Alan K. Rode interviewed her about "My Fair Lady"; entertained by her stories, he urged her to write her own book. She told him she already had. He helped get the manuscript to University Press of Kentucky.

"That kind of surprised me," she said. "To actually finish my life with a book that’s published … I don’t know, it’s hard to absorb."

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Nancy Olson Livingston's star-filled life, from Milwaukee to Hollywood