In her autobiography (the title is above) Keyes said she would be noted for two things: playing that part in GONE WITH THE WIND, and her many marriages and liaisons, which included directors Charles Vidor and John Huston, Mike Todd, and Artie Shaw. But she had a pretty steady career, which included BEFORE I HANG, THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK, HERE COMES MR. JORDAN, LADIES IN RETIREMENT, THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK, 99 RIVER STREET, and THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, henpecking Tom Ewell. She and Bette Davis bowed out from the big screen in 1989's WICKED STEPMOTHER.

If I had to cite three films of hers where she was just excellent (in addition to GONE WITH THE WIND), they'd be Robert Florey's THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941), where she plays a blind girl who attracts the love of a disfigured Peter Lorre; Joseph Losey's THE PROWLER (1951), where she played an unhappy suburban California housewife who becomes embroiled in an affair with cop Van Heflin; and Phil Karlson's 99 RIVER STREET (1953), where she plays an aspiring actress who winds up helping out embattled hero John Payne, a boxer-turned-cabbie accused of murder. Her first scene with Payne is a classic. I don't want to give away its twist, but it's quite original.

When her book, Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister, came out in 1977, it got a lot of press because of its catalog of marriages and love affairs. When she came on The Mike Douglas Show to promote it she said, about the men she met in Hollywood, that "If I didn't marry them, I knew them, in the biblical sense." And Truman Capote sat there chuckling and said, "I wondered how you were going to say that."

Well, I eventually read the book and was a bit alarmed at how it had been somewhat misrepresented, not least by the author herself. It's quite a moving account of how a small-town Southern girl came to Hollywood, carrying all the attendant prejudices of her upbringing, and quickly transformed herself and got an education about people and society and became quite an intelligent and somewhat politically active person. (She moved to Europe for a spell in the 1950s, partly as a reaction to the blacklist.) She described being shocked at a party she went to, early in her Hollywood tenure, when she witnessed a black woman, the great dancer, Katherine Dunham (who died two years ago at the age of 96), acting with great familiarity around white people. Her companion and future second husband, Charles Vidor, noting her reaction, took her out of the party and began the process of, in essence, de-programming her. She had a tendency to be attracted to accomplished, creative, intelligent men who could teach her things.

At one point in the late '40s, she was pregnant and she didn't know if the father was husband John Huston, current fling Kirk Douglas or a famous black singer whom she didn't name. Fearing what having a black child could do to her career at the time, she had an abortion. Too bad. No matter which father, what a child that would have been. Not that she ever really wanted to have children anyway.

There's a great anecdote about a horse race that she tells in her book and that Huston recounts in his own autobiography, An Open Book, in which Huston and all his buddies, including William Wyler and Anatole Litvak, emptied their bank accounts and gave the money to Evelyn to bet on a long shot at the track, having gotten a tip that it was a sure thing. Well, she gets there and winds up sitting in the box of the charming Latino who owned the favorite in the race and who assures her the horse she was to bet on hasn't got a chance. So she bet the money on the favorite and lost it all, of course, when the long shot won. The particulars are the same in each account, but it's interesting to note the way that each describes the other's reaction to this catastrophe. It's very funny either way, especially when you imagine their distinct voices telling the same story in counterpoint.