hollin hills heart throb

There’s just no denying Jeanne Gayler’s beauty.  She nearly became Miss America, after all, and spent her twenties destroying men’s hearts as a gorgeous Hollywood starlet.  But there’s more to this particular beauty than just good looks; armed with a formidable mind and a relentless drive to change the world, she left Hollywood and became an extremely influential figure in the nuclear disarmament movement (with a legacy, you could argue, that includes the continued existence of the planet). Now, at 90, this long-time Hollin Hiller – she’s lived on Mason Hill Drive since 1974 – is still as beautiful – and formidable – as ever.  

Born Jeanne Vaughn Malette in 1931 in the little town of Marksville, Louisiana, glamour didn’t seem to be in Jeanne’s future.  “My mother grew up picking cotton,” she says, of her rural childhood. “I wouldn’t have traded it for anything –  but I was quite sure I was going to college as fast as I could.” She ended up graduating at 20 with a degree in French, with only a vague notion that she might become a translator at the United Nations.

But one afternoon in 1951, her life suddenly turned upside down.  As she relaxed at the beach with friends, a photographer asked to take her picture.  “I said, ‘but I don’t even know you!’ And he told me that it was for a contest – and if I won, I would win $1,000.  So I said, ‘take my picture!’”

The ‘contest’ turned out to be the Miss Louisiana Pageant, and Jeanne promptly won it (after improvising a ‘modern dance’ while wrapped in a tablecloth).  She quickly went to California to compete in the Miss America contest, and Universal Studios offered her a three-month contract.  That changed her life,  she says, and she fell “totally in love” with acting.  

“This was when Hollywood groomed people they thought could turn out to be interesting,” she says. “I had a marvelous acting teacher, I learned to ride a horse, and I had an English teacher who worked on my accent. There was even someone worrying about my teeth.”

But there was a dark side to the glitz.  After switching from Universal to RKO Studios, she was awoken suddenly by a call at 2:30 in the morning.  “It was a man who said, ‘Mr. Hughes is …’ and I said, ‘Who is Mr. Hughes? What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘My boss, Howard Hughes, would like to meet you.’  He wanted me to come meet him right then and there.”

The eccentric, famously-reclusive Hughes was, of course, the head of RKO Studios, so Jeanne threw on a dress, and a car sped her to a studio on Sunset Boulevard in the middle of the night.  “I walked in, rigid with fear, and there was a tall man with unkempt hair.  I said, ‘Mr. Hughes, please,’ very formally, and he said, ‘I’m Howard.’”

Hughes brought her to a room with a sunken, Playboy-style conversation pit, and told her he had heard that she lived in a rather small apartment. “You deserve better,” he told her. “We have these scripts from Jane Russell, and you’d be perfect.”

“I told him, ‘Mr. Hughes, I’m endowed … but I’m not that endowed!” she says with a laugh.  “And he said, ‘I think you’d enjoy this, and you shouldn’t be living in such a small apartment.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Hughes, it was so nice meeting you, thank you so much but this is not going to work out.’ And the next day I opted out of my contract with RKO.”

“Mr. Hughes, this is not going to work out!”

She still had to make a living, so she began modeling, gracing the covers of dozens of magazines (in, she says drily, “about a thousand bathing suits.”)  Meanwhile, the beauty contests were continuing.  She won the Miss Louisiana title a second and then a third time – and nearly became Miss America in 1953.

“Miss New York and I tied for Miss America,” she remembers.  “The judges were locked for 40 minutes, and finally decided to flip a coin. She won.” 

Jeanne walked off with the Miss Congeniality award and settled into Hollywood, taking acting classes and doing theater productions. Soon, work began to come in. “I just started getting job after job,” she says.  “Westerns, comedies, detective shows – I must have done 85 different shows.”

As Jeanne Thompson (she had taken her stepfather’s surname), she  had parts in everything from ‘Abbott and Costello Go To Mars’ to ‘Have Gun Will Travel.’ She appeared in ‘Gomer Pyle,’ ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ ‘Love That Bob’, ‘Princess of the Nile,’ ‘The Wild Wild West,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,’ ‘The Untouchables,’  and dozens more hit shows and movies from the 1950’s and 60’s, playing everything from a Venusian sexpot to a brainy Calamity Jane.  

“It was a glamorous life,” she admits.  She married actor Harry Landers (a star of the tv series ‘Ben Casey’) in 1957 and had two children, and found herself rubbing shoulders with Hedy Lamar at the hairdresser and Elizabeth Taylor at parties. 

“I met a lot of stars playing poker and bridge,” she says, laughing.  “There was a casting director who would say, ‘You guys have to come over and play bridge tonight – Burt Lancaster is coming!’” 

But in the mid-1960’s, Jeanne began tiring of the glitter. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and she wanted to do more than just join protest marches.  She talked her way into a job with a business group opposed to the war, but as the conflict wound down, she started looking for a new, even more meaningful, step to take.

“I thought, what’s the most important thing I can do with my life now?” she says. “And I decided that I would do something about nuclear weapons.”

In 1968 she divorced Landers, re-married, and moved to Washington, settling in Hollin Hills in 1974 for its agreeable politics. She raised money for US senators opposed to nuclear proliferation, then became director of development for the Federation of American Scientists.

And as her political contacts and organizational skills grew,  she teamed up in 1977 with Carl Marcy (former Chief of Staff to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to form her own organization, the US Committee on US-Soviet Relations – which a few years later would become the American Committee on East-West Accord, a hugely influential voice in the country for nuclear disarmament. 

Clockwise from top left: McNamara, Watson, Kennan, Galbraith

Under her direction, the Committee rapidly grew into a powerhouse. Jeanne convinced many of the country’s top names in foreign  policy, science, academia and business – including Robert McNamara, Thomas J. Watson, George F. Kennan, and John Kenneth Galbraith, to name just a few –  to join. She arranged speaking engagements for them, raised funds, and led a delegation to Moscow.  

And in 1979, virtually single-handedly, she wrote and produced the 24-minute documentary, “Survival ... or Suicide” – a devastating indictment of the nuclear arms race.  Distributed around the country, it was an immediate success; PBS showed the film more than a dozen times, and it won a Silver Award from the International Film and TV Festival of New York.

Admiral Noel Gayler • UPI

Then her life turned upside down, once again. She met Admiral Noel Gayler, who had been commander of the American forces in the Pacific and later Director of the National Security Agency.  Gayler had seen Hiroshima just six days after the first atomic bomb was dropped, and it had turned him into an ardent (and eloquent) advocate of nuclear disarmament.

Jeanne convinced Noel to join the Committee, and soon they were working together. Love blossomed, and in 1981 they started seeing each other – despite both being married at the time. “I’m not proud of it; it was very difficult for both of us,” she says. “But it was inevitable. We were the loves of each other’s lives.”  

They married five years later, and had, she says, “a wonderful life together.”  But Noel began to act oddly at times, often staring blankly into space. “At first I thought, ’Oh, he’s just deep in thought.’ But he got progressively worse and worse.” Tragically, Noel was developing epilepsy. They continued to work, despite the difficulties – “I knew every emergency room from here to Walter Reed,” she says – until the disease made it impossible, and Jeanne spent much of their 25-year marriage taking care of Noel.  “Which I gladly did,” she says, with a smile. “We were beautiful together.”

Noel passed away in July of 2011, at 97.  Since then, says Jeanne, she’s led a full life, including working as an interior designer for a few years.  Now, at 90, she’s still full of life, and she’s still strikingly beautiful.  Would she ever marry again, after losing Noel?  

“I do miss male company,” she says after a moment, before brushing the idea aside. “But I’m sure I’d never have that love again.  Our life together was magical.”