Verna Bloom
Bar Harbor's Famous
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After a life full of fame and acting, Verna Bloom died in Bar Harbor in 2019. She died of complications from dementia.
But before that? She really lived.
From playing Marion Wormer in Animal House or Jesus’s mother Mary in The Last Temptation of Christ, Verna embodied her characters.
She was a Broadway actress as well, playing big roles in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (1967) and Blanche Morton in Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983)
She first married Richard Collier before marrying Jay Cocks, a film critic and screenwriter who had been nominated for Oscars twice for The Age of Innocence (1993) and Gangs of New York (2002).
“She was not only a wonderful actress, she was fearless,” said writer and director Haskell Wexler.
Wexler worked with Verna in his semidocumentary Medium Cool, which focused on the 1968 Democratic Convention, which had been full of violence. There’s an iconic image of Verna’s character looking for her son as armed soldiers and protestors clash. It became an emblematic image and during the filming, Verna, cast, and crew were trying to avoid being gassed and firebombed.
According to her costar, Marianna Hill, Verna was arrested during the riots after they were walking through the park. She relays the incident in a 2016 interview with Medium Cool.
“So Verna Bloom and I were walking in the park and both of us had these shapely figures. We couldn’t help it if we were born that way.
“Anyway, this policeman came running after us.
“He said, ‘OK, you two, you’re going off to the police station!’
“And we thought, ‘What? Are you talking to us?’
“And he said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to have to come with us...We’re going to have to jail you girls.’
“And we asked, ‘What for? Because we were walking in the park? What are you thinking?’
“He said, ‘Well, we know that you’re...’
“ I don’t know what he thought! I think he thought we were call girls, I swear to God, because we had these shapely figures. And then Verna--who is a very intellectual girl, she’s far more intelligent than me--started trying to speak some reason into this man, but he wasn’t exactly the brightest penny or the sharpest knife, right? She was so idealistic that she thought she could have a proper conversation and reason with him. So she started saying, ‘Gee, officer, I’m just here doing a film,’ and he put his handcuff on her.
“The other part of the cuff was hanging loose from Verna’s wrist and I thought, ‘I’m not going there!...You’re not going to put me in the slammer!’
“So being an instinctual type of person, I just took a run for it! As I was running, all of these Chicago people were saying ‘Go, baby, go!’ because they thought I was a bad girl or a revolutionary since the dress I was wearing was one of those types of dresses people wore then. It had different colors and all kinds of patterns, and it probably looked like a provocative dress. It was just that kind of look that people had then.
“So I went for a run and then everybody was mad at me when I got back to the hotel about 2 hours later after running around Chicago thinking, ‘Oh, no! I hope nobody’s after me!’
“I show up at the Sherman House and I got all these calls and Haskell said, ‘Where have you been? Marianna, have you abandoned Verna?’ and I said, ‘She should have run! Did you really want me to go to jail, Haskell?! I am not going in there! Where’s Verna now?’ and Haskell said, ‘We’ve got to go bail her out!’ and I said, ‘She did nothing! All we did was take a stroll!’
“So it was a big scandal and then Studs Terkel, who was consulting and advising Haskell during the making of the movie, wrote a whole story about what happened to me and Verna like we were some sort of ‘Gretel in the Park!’”
In her own interviews, Verna said she was handcuffed for an hour before one of her friends got her released.
The brave actress continued to shoot the movie. She was born in Lynn, Massachusetts to a homemaker (Sarah Damsky Bloom) and Milton Bloom. The owned a grocery store together and divorced. She had a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and founded a Denver reperatory theater with him.
After their divorce, she went to Broadway, first working the box office before taking a starring role in the revival of the play where she’d worked the box office.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/obituaries/verna-bloom-dead.html
http://hillplace.blogspot.com/2016/12/medium-cool-marianna-hill-interview.html