Few neighbors realize that Sonia Darrin, who at 92 has lived in the same building on West End Avenue for more than half a century, once traded insults with Humphrey Bogart in one of Hollywood’s greatest noirs.
Seven decades ago, she unforgettably played Agnes, the elegant femme fatale who tangles with Bogart’s private eye Philip Marlowe in the 1946 classic “The Big Sleep.’’
In the course of her four scenes, Agnes — a grifter mixed up with a gang of blackmailers — watches one boyfriend shot to death and is later informed by phone by Marlowe that a guy who wanted to marry her has died rather than give her address to a hit man.
“I got a raw deal,’’ the pitiless Agnes tells Marlowe in their final meeting in a car — trading some crucial information for $200 from him so she can blow town.
“Your kind always does,’’ Marlowe replies.
Darrin’s was the kind of showy performance that sometimes leads to big things — Dorothy Malone, who has a smaller part as a bookstore clerk who flirts outrageously with Marlowe, had a long career that included an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
But Darrin — who, unlike Malone, is mysteriously not billed in the credits of “The Big Sleep’’ — disappeared from the screen in 1950 after appearances in just four more movies.
But why? For the 70th anniversary of the film’s release, I tracked her down through one of her sons, former child actor Mason Reese, who in the 1970s achieved the kind of stardom that once eluded his mother.
Darrin, who would only agree to a very rare interview on the phone, says she has turned down “many” invitations to appear at screenings of “The Big Sleep.’’ The feisty nonagenarian professes she’s baffled as to why she continues to get mail from fans of “The Big Sleep,’’ which will make its Blu-ray debut Tuesday from the Warner Archive Collection. And she’s aware of her burgeoning popularity on social media.
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“Maybe they have me mixed up with Dorothy Malone!’’ Darrin laughs, referring to the only other surviving cast member of “The Big Sleep.’’ Malone, who is 91, lives in Texas — where, coincidentally, Darrin (her last name was originally Paskowitz) was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in 1924.
“When I was 6 years old, I fell in love with the movies,’’ Darrin says in a strong voice. “My father had a business right next door to a theater in Galveston, and every time they had a new movie, I would go in and see it for free.’’
The family moved to Pasadena, Calif., during her teenage years.
“I cut classes to go to the movies every day. The most amazing thing was the Orpheum Theatre. For 10 cents, you’d see an A movie, a B movie and vaudeville acts. I saw everything!’’
Her entree to the movies came from dancing lessons — her teacher, “the very famous Adolph Baum, was asked to do the movie ‘The Corsican Brothers,’ and he took the whole class with him.’’ Including Darrin and future Warner Bros. star Alexis Smith.
This was in 1941, and Darrin lied about her age to get an interview with LeRoy Prinz, head dance director for Warner Bros., “who was a notorious womanizer. He agreed to hire me, and then he said, ‘Oh, by the way, I have some bankers coming in from New York City. Would you go out with them tonight?’ I was so naive I said yes, but when my mother said, ‘Absolutely, no!’ Prinz hired me anyway to appear as a chorine in ‘The Hard Way’ with Joan Leslie and Ida Lupino.”
Darrin wasn’t credited for this or “many’’ other musicals she made in the early 1940s. “Mostly I worked for Fox, sometimes for MGM, usually less than five days on any picture. You can spot me in the chorus line in ‘My Gal Sal’ (1942) with Rita Hayworth. I also danced as a Russian peasant in ‘The North Star’’ (1943) and I went to Paramount for ‘Lady in the Dark’ (1944).’’
She also did some unbilled extra work — as a nightclub patron in the musical “It Started with Eve” (1941) with teenage superstar Deanna Durbin (“I can tell you she really hated making movies’’) and as a villager in the horror classic “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’’ (1943). She says of the latter, ‘When I wasn’t screaming at the monster, I was hiding and reading a book or writing poetry.’’
Then one day she was called in to do hair and makeup tests for the crucial role of Agnes in “The Big Sleep.”
“All of the other girls were very aggressive, and I wanted to show them what a nice girl I was,’’ Darrin recalls. Producer-director Howard Hawks “hated my test, which usually meant you were in the trash. But then he personally supervised the hairdo for another test and I got the part.’’
“Bogart was very kind, polite and helpful to me,’’ she says. The then-22-year-old acting novice holds her own with Bogie in all four of her scenes, the first of which runs just under a minute but is one of the film’s comic high points.
Marlowe meets Agnes while posing as a lisping, effeminate book collector. The overdressed Agnes, meanwhile, is pretending to be a salesclerk at a bookstore that’s a front for a pornographer blackmailing one of Marlowe’s clients.
The two of them instantly size each other up as phonies. “You do sell books, hmm?’’ Marlowe asks Agnes, who has signaled her employer that Marlowe is looking for him. “What do these look like, grapefruit?” she snarks before also correcting his pronunciation of “ceramics.’’
In Darrin’s longest sequence — nearly seven minutes — Agnes spars not only with a sarcastic Marlowe, but her boyfriend (played by Louis Jean Heydt). He’s a two-bit criminal who, she tells Marlowe, “gives me a pain in my —’’ before the boyfriend cuts her off. When Marlowe mocks the boyfriend’s ineptitude, she says in exasperation: “Never once a man who’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.’’
When Marlowe asks Agnes if he “hurt you much, sugar?’’ as he wrests a gun from her hands, she replies: “You and every other man I’ve ever met!’’
Darrin says there were no rehearsals and that she received minimal direction from Hawks for her tour de force as Agnes.
“One time he asked me to make it a little sharper,’’ she says. “Hawks was very accommodating and complimentary,’’ she said. “But I got into a lot of trouble for being a wiseass.”
One time the filmmakers were arguing about who committed one of the murders in the film’s famously confusing plot. They called novelist Raymond Chandler, on whose novel the film was based, and he said he didn’t know either.
Darrin says she then burst out with: “Howard Hawks did it!’’
The director, she says, was all business on the set — but not in private life.
“Howard was known as a womanizer, and he had these wild parties with lots of drinking and drugs every weekend,’’ she says. “I politely said no, but Monday mornings were pretty rough after their Sunday night soirees.’’
Bogart had fallen in love with co-star Lauren Bacall — they had just done Hawks’ “To Have and Have Not’’ together — but was still waiting for a divorce from his third wife, Mayo Methot, with whom he had a famously volatile marriage.
“He would come to the set with bruises from his arguments with Mayo, and one time he showed up with a black eye,’’ Darrin recalls. “He said he ran into a door, but everybody knew what was going on. They covered it with makeup.’’
Bogart married Bacall after principal photography on “Sleep” wrapped in January 1945, but the film’s release was delayed because of World War II, and the two of them were called back a year later for retakes to build up Bacall’s role and emphasize their sizzling chemistry.
When the film finally opened in August 1946, Darrin was shocked to see she hadn’t received an on-screen credit for a fairly prominent role. It took her 15 years to find out why.
“My agent had gotten into some kind of argument with [studio chief] Jack Warner, and Warner was so infuriated that he told the agent he was never to come on the lot again and he wouldn’t use any of his clients,’’ she says. “Warner couldn’t cut me out of the movie, but he could get even with my agent. That was unheard of, to be featured in a movie and not even be listed.’’
Hawks tried to hook her up with famous agent Henry Willson, who suggested Darrin change her first name to “something less Russian,’’ like his client Rock Hudson. “I joked, ‘How about calling me Pebble Beach?’ and he threw me out of the office,’’ Darrin says. “I was so sassy!’’
When Darrin finally landed another part, “it was a woman who ends up in a coffin [in 1947’s ‘Bury Me Dead’], and after that I was basically being asked to do the same role over and over. It was boring. There was a lot of waiting. That’s when I decided I was no longer interested in making movies. So I moved to New York and had a fairly successful career as a model” working for Eileen Ford’s renowned agency.
Along the way there were a couple of divorces and she raised four children. It was the youngest, Mason Reese, who was her unlikely entree back into show business in the 1970s.
Beginning at the age of 4, the precocious Reese did 72 TV commercials over the next decade and was a frequent guest of TV talk-show host Mike Douglas. When Mason co-hosted a week of shows with Douglas in 1973, Darrin appeared on one without any reference whatsover to her famous screen role.
“He was a joy and raising him was a joy,’’ she says of Reese, who currently owns several Manhattan restaurants. “That was a lot more important than making movies!’’
Of his mother, Reese says that “in a lot of ways, she’s a very private person,’’ but Darrin made a short appearance in the 2007 documentary “Surfwise’’ about her older brother Dorian Paskowitz, a famous California surfer and health guru who died in 2010.
“I love New York, the tempo, the attitudes, it’s my city,’’ says Darrin, who regularly watches Golden Age flicks on Turner Classic Movies. “I’ve lived in this apartment building for 53 years!’’
She appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 1967, photographed running an elevator during a building workers strike (“a terrible picture’’). The former fashion model adamantly refused to pose for The Post, though she allowed her son to give us a recent shot from his cellphone.
“I try to keep a cheery outlook, but at 92, everything finally gets to you,’’ she says. “The wrinkles come in like rivulets. Marlene Dietrich had the right idea — at a certain point, you keep photographers away from your door and let people remember you like you were.
“I wrote this poem: ‘They say that getting old is a curse/But not getting older is worse.’ ”