Vera Miles

Vera Miles: The Star Hitchcock Could Not Keep

In 1957 Alfred Hitchcock signed Vera Miles to a five-year personal contract and set about making her his next Grace Kelly. Within months she was pregnant, the lead in *Vertigo* went to Kim Novak, and the grand design quietly dissolved. Only a few years earlier she had been so broke that a colleague had to lend her a coat for a scene because she could not afford to buy one and was, by that colleague's account, living on beans and rice. Between those two facts lies one of the more instructive careers in the American studio era: an actress good enough to be chosen by Ford, Hitchcock and Disney, and never quite permitted to become the thing any of them had in mind.

Boise City, Kansas, and a Sash

She was born Vera June Ralston on 23 August 1930 in Boise City, Oklahoma — a town in the far panhandle, at the dead centre of the Dust Bowl — and grew up in Kansas. The route out was the one available to a good-looking girl from the plains in the late 1940s: she was crowned Miss Kansas in 1948 and went to Los Angeles on the strength of it.

What followed was four years of nothing much. Her first credited film role came in *The Rose Bowl Story* (1952), and the beans-and-rice period around it is worth holding onto, because the placid, well-scrubbed wholesomeness she would spend three decades projecting on screen was a performance, not a biography.

Ford's West

John Ford took her first. She played opposite John Wayne in *The Searchers* (1956), the film most critics now consider the greatest Western ever made, and returned to Ford and Wayne for *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance* (1962). In both she occupies the same difficult position: the woman who represents the settled world the men are fighting over, the civilisation that arrives after the violence and makes the violence pointless. It is a thankless assignment, structurally — she is what the story is about rather than what the story follows — and Miles gave it a spine. The Oklahoma Historical Society's summary of her screen identity is fair and slightly damning: a fair-haired innocent, or the all-American woman of the West.

Hitchcock's Project

Hitchcock cast her as Rose Balestrero, Henry Fonda's wife, in *The Wrong Man* (1956), and it remains the most demanding thing she ever did. The film follows a musician wrongly accused of robbery, but the real disintegration is his wife's: Miles plays a sane woman collapsing by degrees into mental illness under the pressure of an injustice she cannot fix. There is no glamour in it and no relief. It is the performance that proves she could have had the career she didn't get.

She also appeared in the pilot of *Alfred Hitchcock Presents*. Then came the contract, the pregnancy, and *Vertigo* going elsewhere. Hitchcock's enthusiasm for grooming her as Kelly's successor did not survive the interruption, and what remained of the relationship was professional rather than proprietorial.

Lila Crane

Which led, in 1960, to the role that outlasted everything: Lila Crane in *Psycho*. Lila is the sister who will not let it go. Janet Leigh is the film's star for forty minutes; Miles is its engine for the rest, the person who drives to Fairvale, asks the questions, and finally walks down the steps into the fruit cellar with a torch. The part demands stubbornness rather than fear, and the audience's terror in the last reel works precisely because she is not screaming — she is investigating, which is the only way that scene could function. In 1983 she returned as Lila in *Psycho II*, one of only two original cast members to come back, playing the same woman twenty-two years on and considerably more damaged by what she had found.

The Working Actress

The rest was the long, unglamorous middle of an American acting life. Walt Disney used her wholesome register in pictures such as *A Tiger Walks* (1964). Television used everything: *The Twilight Zone*, *Gunsmoke*, *The Fugitive*, *The Outer Limits*, *The F.B.I.*, *Magnum, P.I.*, *Murder, She Wrote*. Her final screen role came in *Separate Lives* (1995), more than four decades after the borrowed coat.

She married four times — to Bob Miles, whose name she kept, from 1948 to 1954; to the actor Gordon Scott from 1956 to 1960; to Keith Larsen from 1960 to 1971; and to Robert Jones from 1973 to 1975 — raised three children, and remained a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Why Vera Is Called a Genius

No serious critic has called Vera Miles a genius, and it would be dishonest to manufacture one. The claim that can be made for her is narrower and more interesting: she possessed an uncommon technical command of ordinariness. Playing a plausible, unremarkable, decent woman is far harder on camera than playing a glamorous one, because there is no style to hide behind and nothing for the audience to admire — the performance either reads as a real person or it collapses into blandness. Miles could hold that register and then apply pressure to it. Watch *The Wrong Man*, where she takes a wife's reasonable anxiety and lets it curdle, without a single overt breakdown beat, into genuine psychosis. Watch her in *Psycho*, where the entire third act depends on the audience believing that a normal woman would keep asking questions after every sane person would have stopped.

The counter-case is substantial. She was never nominated for an Academy Award. She was typed early as the wholesome wife and sister and never escaped it; her most cited career facts are the roles she lost — *Vertigo* above all — rather than the ones she got. Hitchcock's plan to make her a Kelly-scale star failed, and it is not obvious that the star quality was ever there, as opposed to the acting quality, which plainly was. Ford and Disney both used her as an emblem rather than a character. Her achievement is that three of the most exacting filmmakers in the business kept hiring her, and that in the two films where she was given something real to do she was better than the material required.

Legacy

*The Searchers*, *The Wrong Man*, *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance* and *Psycho* is a run of four pictures that most actors of her generation would have traded a shelf of Oscars for, and Miles is essential in each. She has become, in retrospect, the case study cited whenever anyone discusses how the studio system handled a capable actress who did not fit its blonde-star template: courted, contracted, redefined by a pregnancy, and then quietly redirected into decades of reliable work. Lila Crane going down those cellar steps is the image that survives — the ordinary person who refuses to leave, which is a harder thing to play, and a rarer thing to be.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Warner Bros. Entertainment
• Worked as film actor, television actor and actor