There’s an old joke in certain theatre circles about how easy it is to confuse Chita Rivera with Rita Moreno and vice versa. Well, I feel the same way about Cornelia Otis Skinner and Ilka Chase. Both were witty and popular authors who occasionally acted in films. Both were the daughters of famous people. Both were engaging speakers who had devoted followings. Both cut their teeth on the stage. Both were statuesque brunettes whom one might label belle laide rather than beautiful. They were born a year apart, and died a year apart. Sometimes when I am singing their praises, I get them mixed up. Was it Ilka Chase who played Bette Davis’s stylish sister-in-law in Now, Voyager or was it Cornelia? Was it Cornelia who played the spooky Miss Holloway in the classic horror flick The Uninvited? Or was it Ilka? Well, thanks to IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, one can answer such troubling questions immediately. But comparing their life histories at this site only underscores their similarities. Both were to the manner born, with a high style hauteur and glamour, as evidenced in the scene below, from Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, showing Cornelia Otis Skinner with Cecil Beaton and Miss Penelope Dudley-Ward, shot by Horst.

The other night I finally got to see a film I’ve wanted to watch for decades, the elusive The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, featuring Cornelia Otis Skinner in a small but significant role. Based on the scandalous murder of architect Stanford White, it has been reissued in a restored DVD version as part of The Joan Collins Collection. Collins had played the title role. For years the movie had been out of my reach. But now courtesy of Netflix, it’s easy to find. The finished picture is a storied flop, primarily due to its archaic direction by Richard Fleischer and creaky script (co-written by Charles Brackett of Billy Wilder fame). But I think the bulk of the burden of failure belongs on the shoulders of Ray Milland who plays Stanford White as a sort of aging popinjay. His performance is merely phoned-in, as we like to say today, and his scenes showing him kissing Joan Collins are frankly sickening to watch. His performance is stiff and awkward, as if he were terrified that his toupee might fall off at any moment, particularly in the bizarre scene in which he pushes Joan Collins on the eponymous red velvet swing. The look in his eye is one of demented ecstasy. Farley Granger is his usual charming self, but ultimately unconvincing as the demonic and deranged Harry K. Thaw.

But Joan Collins is surprisingly good as the seductive beauty Evelyn Nesbitt. Marilyn Monroe was rumored to be up for the part, but Joan Collins, coming off her triumph in The Virgin Queen, opposite Bette Davis, captures better the spirit of the times. It would be hard to imagine the Playboy pin-up Marilyn Monroe as a Gibson Girl. It’s a shame Joan Collins’ career suffered due to the lackluster reception of this picture. She could have made some wonderful films and really given Elizabeth Taylor a run for her money. But she was relegated to horror films and pop tripe such as The Bitch and The Stud, born from the pen of her equally divine sister Jackie Collins.

The person who steals the picture, however, in my opinion, is Cornelia Otis Skinner who portrays Harry K. Thaw’s mother with equal parts gravitas and pathos. In a chilling bedside scene, Skinner cajoles Nesbitt into promising to take the stand in defense of her lunatic husband Thaw in order to get him acquitted of murder. Rather than play Mrs. Thaw as a harpy who browbeats Nesbitt into submission, Skinner manages somehow to imbue her character with an almost tragic nobility, recalling an incident when she accidentally smothered her other child to death while taking him into her bed one night. It was her favorite son, Harry’s older brother, and because of her sense of shame and guilt, and terror that it might happen again, she figuratively smothered Harry K. Thaw and turned him into the mentally maimed mama’s boy who became a murderer. Ironically, the melodramatic point she makes is salient for in real life Harry K. Thaw later became a notorious sadist who used to beat up rent boys and bell hops during homosexual liaisons in London’s swanky hotels.

Cornelia Otis Skinner was born in 1901 in Chicago. Her father Otis Skinner was a well-known actor. After attending Bryn Mawr, she sailed to France and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Back in the States, she wrote clever short pieces for the fabled New Yorker, eventually writing several books that won a wide audience. Her specialty was the wry memoir which she honed in books entitled Nuts in May, Dithers and Jitters, Excuse It Please!, and The Ape In Me, among others. On Broadway she produced and starred in several “monodramas”, one-woman shows, including Mansion on the Hudson, and The Wives of Henry VIII, both of which she also wrote.

As an author, she penned best-selling biographies of Sarah Bernhardt and the theatrical team Lindsay and Crouse. One of her finer efforts was Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, a tony retailing of the Belle Epoque. With Emily Kimbrough, she wrote the hugely successful Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, which chronicled their travels throughout Europe as young girls. This was later made into a film starring Gail Russell. It was not, despite its title, the lesbian romance many hoped it would be. Cornelia Otis Skinner did marry Alden S. Blodget and had a son. She died in 1978.

In Hollywood, Cornelia Otis Skinner made only three films, distinguishing herself in small roles, unusual character parts, such as Mrs. Hammar in The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster, and the aforementioned Mrs. Thaw. But it was as Miss Holloway in The Uninvited, also starring Gail Russell and Ray Milland, that she will perhaps be best remembered. Without question, the finest ghost story ever filmed, The Uninvited is a masterpiece of mystery and menace, primarily because of Skinner’s eerie performance as an evil spinster, dressed in masculine attire, who heads a sinister institute for girls. Skinner maintains a strange hold over the young Gail Russell and is finally revealed to be a murderess who killed the woman she adored in a jealous rage. The lesbian overtones are subtle but obvious and quite shocking for a movie made in 1944 at the height of the Second World War.

Who can forget the creepy scene in which Skinner is sitting alone in her enormous office, listening to Wagner’s Liebestod (the Love Death theme from Tristan und Isolde) while staring at the portrait of Mary, the woman she killed? Apparently lesbians across the country fell in love with this movie and used to go to the theatre en masse dressed as Miss Holloway! Watching Cornelia Otis Skinner weave her magic in it, I can see why. She oozed an aura of intelligent elegance.

So did the indomitable Ilka Chase (1900-1978), above. Like Skinner, she excelled in small roles in just a few pictures. Ironically she appeared in a film called The Floradora Girl which was based on the theatrical troupe in which Evelyn Nesbitt had first made her mark. Her performance in Now, Voyager as Lisa Vale, the chic sister-in-law who helps pull Bette Davis out of her ugly duckling doldrums is the key to the film’s success. She makes the perfect foil to Gladys Cooper, who plays Bette Davis’s cruel and heartless mother. Ilka Chase was the daughter of Edna Woolman Chase, the fabled editrix of Vogue magazine (below).

It could not have been easy for young Ilka to follow in her mother’s stylish footsteps. Ilka was no beauty. But she compensated for her lack of looks by carrying herself with a kind of haughty grace and a disarming sense of humor. After making her society debut in 1923, she took to the stage, playing an assortment of roles. Her biggest success was in 1938 in the Broadway debut of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women. Ilka tackled the part that Rosalind Russell had in the film version. Ilka had a lot in common with Russell, but lacked her sex appeal. She was relegated in Hollywood to cameo parts in forgotten flicks with intriguing titles like Free Love, Fast and Loose, Soak the Rich, The Gay Diplomat and On Your Back. What Ilka had in spades, however, was common sense. She was always dispensing good sound advice, kind of like a high society Eve Arden. She later had her own radio program entitled “Luncheon at the Waldorf.”

Not to be outdone by her cinematic clone Cornelia, Ilka also published several books, most notably Past Imperfect, an autobiography that summed up her elegantly checkered past perfectly. She also co-wrote Always in Vogue with her mother Edna. It’s one of those clever chronicles of the haut-monde that collectors continue to clamor for. To many of my generation, however, Ilka Chase will always be best remembered for her portrayal of Julie Andrews’ wicked stepmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella which was first shown on television in 1957. Despite her disagreeable character, she was a joy to watch, especially in her scenes with the hilarious Kaye Ballard.

Ironcially, in terms of the Ilka Chase/Cornelia Otis Skinner confoundment, Joan Collins called her own memoir Past Imperfect. I wonder if she chose that title as a nod to her old friend Cornelia, thinking it was she rather than Ilka Chase who had used it before. It makes perfect sense considering how easy it is to confuse the two!