For a long time, Marlene Dietrich was the studio’s signature actress. She was hired as a Garbo competitor and proved to be more adaptable and far hardier in the bargain; for one thing, she had a more approachable brand of sexuality; for another, she had genuine humor.
Paramount’s major discovery in the last half of the 1930s was Dorothy Lamour; their big star during World War II besides Betty Hutton was Veronica Lake, who didn’t last long, for reasons that had little to do with talent. Lake was very difficult, had problems with alcohol, and was given to anti-Semitic outbursts. Otherwise, she was a sweetheart.
RKO and Columbia, the studios that stood near the bottom of the list of majors, were rarely able to gather enough top talent to have a particular style or approach to actresses. RKO had Ginger Rogers for a number of years, and they did very well for each other, while Columbia had Jean Arthur, and ditto. But there was never a sense of actorly identity at those studios, largely, I believe, because neither was run by people with a bent for long-term thinking, which was quite the reverse at MGM and Warners, which consciously built their operations to last.
Ginger started out as a gum-cracking chorus girl, but revealed her inner swan when she was paired with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. They made nine more movies together. Forests have been felled trying to explain their particular chemistry. Simply put, they looked—and danced—as if they belonged together, as if they hadn’t been matched up by a movie studio, but by God. When Astaire and Rogers were in motion, they had the easy camaraderie of a couple that had met in grade school and had had an understanding ever since.
That amity didn’t always extend to their relationship offscreen. Fred and Ginger dated briefly in New York before the movies called, but there hadn’t been anything in particular between them. In later years Fred could be a little grumpy about Ginger, and he wasn’t crazy about her mother, who was omnipresent. He was very funny about Ginger’s penchant for scene-stealing costumes. He felt such gestures were self-defeating and rather silly, because they took attention away from the dancer’s body, which was, after all, the point.
But he never said a word against her work ethic or her skills as a dancer. Nor could he, because the basis for their shared magic was their dancing. One critic noted that they seldom kiss in their movies, but they don’t have to—their sex life takes place when they dance, and those scenes are among the most rapturously convincing love scenes ever filmed.
That Fred and Ginger respected each other as professionals more than they loved each other as man and woman is a testament to the strange alchemy of performance. People talk about the magic of the movies, but there’s also a mystery to them, and it’s personified by Astaire and Rogers.
• • •
As the 1930s were ending, Fox was unleashing a new queen of the studio: Betty Grable. She was born in St. Louis but came to Hollywood at an early age, where she graduated from the Hollywood Professional School. After that, Betty went to work in the chorus. You can see her as the third girl on the left in Goldwyn musicals with Eddie Cantor, such as Palmy Days.
A few years later, she was getting leads in RKO B movies, and then Darryl Zanuck brought her to Fox as a means of keeping Alice Faye in line. (Alice and Darryl heartily disliked each other, but then Alice wasn’t all that crazy about show business in the first place.) I seriously doubt that Darryl had any idea that Betty would become as huge a star as she did.
When Alice had to have some minor surgery, rather than wait a month to start a picture called Down Argentine Way, Darryl simply substituted Betty as the star. The picture turned out to be a huge hit. Most Fox musicals were, but they were never as ambitious as the musicals Arthur Freed made at MGM. That just might have been the reason the Fox vehicles were so reliable—with the exception of the Mickey and Judy shows, MGM musicals were rarely the same, while the Fox musicals were heavily patterned. If you liked one, you’d like them all. Even the titles had a geographically similar bent: Down Argentine Way, Tin Pan Alley, Moon Over Miami, Springtime in the Rockies, and so on.
Two things worked in Betty’s favor: Technicolor and World War II. The former showcased her luscious peaches-and-cream complexion, and the latter made Betty into the pinup of pinups. Besides that, her sunny personality was a perfect respite for wartime audiences. Harry Brand, the head of publicity at Fox, insured Betty’s legs for a million dollars, or at least he said he did, and by the end of the war not only was she Fox’s highest-paid star, she was the movie industry’s, as well.
Betty’s films were undemanding and made great amounts of money for the studio. Darryl’s only complaint about her was her habit of closing down production for a day to take in a particularly hot horse race. Nobody but a hugely successful movie star could have done such a thing, but Darryl put up with it. I suspect he was actually a little embarrassed by her pictures, as he went out of his way to produce a given number of projects each year that might be termed the anti-Grable movies—startlingly downbeat efforts like The Ox-Bow Incident or Gentleman’s Agreement. He even tried to broaden Betty’s own appeal by casting her in a noir drama called I Wake Up Screaming, but she seemed uncomfortable with it, and so did the audience—our Betty, menaced by a killer? The only thing that could threaten Betty Grable was falling off her platform shoes.
After World War II, Darryl seemed to sense that Betty’s heyday might be passing, so he upgraded her collaborators; he got her a posthumous Gershwin score for The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, and he hired Preston Sturges to write and direct a film for her called The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, a Western parody that died the death, and deserved to.
But audiences continued to love her, and justifiably so—she ranked in the top ten box office stars for ten consecutive years, from 1941 to 1951, something no other female star has ever accomplished. (Doris Day placed ten years on the list, but not consecutively.)
As I found out when I got to know Betty, she was a totally sincere and kind person who refused the easy alternative of an ironic view of the world. She was beloved around the studio; the crews adored her because she was one of them—an unpretentious girl who never forgot her days in the chorus. Betty worked hard and liked to have a good time, and people responded in kind.
Even comedians liked Betty. Take Lucille Ball. Comedy was Lucy’s profession, not her personality. Lucy wasn’t particularly funny offstage, but she appreciated people who were, and she always said that if she needed to laugh she simply spent some time with Betty Grable.
Betty Grable
Betty’s film career ended early; she made her last movie in 1955, when she was only thirty-nine—young by modern standards, but Betty was a song-and-dance girl, and the feathers-and-sequins vehicles that were her specialty were heading toward the exit in favor of lavish versions of big Broadway musicals. She was up for the part of Miss Adelaide in the movie version of Guys and Dolls, but lost out to Vivian Blaine, who had done it on stage. A hit like that would have propped up Betty for a few years, at least, and given her a second wind. Instead, she kept her hand in doing nightclubs and theater, and she never stopped following the horses.
Her end was unhappy. Her husband, Harry James, was a degenerate gambler and spent most of her money, and then she got cancer. I remember visiting her in the hospital not long before the end; she was very ill, but she still had that bright spirit that endeared her to millions of people all over the world. She wanted her friends as well as her audiences to have a good time. As I sat there with her, I was so moved—she was trying to get me to laugh, trying to make me feel comfortable. This darling woman was only fifty-seven when she died.
“I can sing a little, dance a little, and act a little,” she said. “I was just lucky, I guess.” Actually, those of us who flocked to Betty’s musicals in glorious Technicolor were the lucky ones. And we knew it.
• • •
Betty Grable’s losing a star role in Guys and Dolls is the sort of thing that’s part of th
e business—the factors that determine a career are often just a matter of good breaks and bad breaks.
For instance: Ann Sheridan. Warner Bros. publicity department dubbed her “the Oomph Girl,” and yes, she was sexy and all that. But she also had a very real quality on-screen, that of a good-hearted dame, which was her real personality coming through. Ann Sheridan played characters who could dish it out as well as take it. They weren’t exactly tough but could be if you pushed them too far.
Ann was born Clara Lou Sheridan in Nowheresville, Texas, but she won a beauty contest and made it to Hollywood by the time she was eighteen. She was beautiful, but needed something to break her out of the pack of the ten thousand other girls who were beautiful, too.
Ann told me that it was a Warners’ publicist named Bob Taplinger who had George Hurrell take some photos of her that reeked of sex. He posed her in a silk robe that was provocatively sliding off her shoulder and with rumpled hair, as if she’d just gotten out of a very active bed. There was nothing overt in the image, but the lighting and the look in her eyes told you everything you needed to know.
Those photographs changed everything for Annie. Before that, she’d been just one of the girls playing throwaway parts, but now she started getting real roles in real movies (Angels with Dirty Faces, City for Conquest, Kings Row). Despite this, the studio’s attitude toward her never changed; Warners was a Darwinian environment where only the strong and the loud survived. Ironically, Ann was never cast as the sexpot the Hurrell stills implied.
“I had to fight for everything at Warners,” Ann once told me. “Everybody had to fight. Cagney, Davis, Flynn, everybody. A knock-down, drag-out fight.” Ann spent a lot of years at the studio at a time when it was very difficult to be a female star there.
Bette Davis was in uncontested first position, and then came Joan Crawford. Olivia de Havilland was there for years as well, which left actresses like Ida Lupino and Ann struggling simply because the premiere scripts were always going to be earmarked for the biggest stars.
Ann Sheridan
In 1947, Ann left Warners, and it looked like things were going to be fine. She signed for Good Sam opposite Gary Cooper and director Leo McCarey, and that was followed by I Was a Male War Bride with Cary Grant and Howard Hawks. Marion Marshall, who would become my second wife and the mother of my daughter Kate, was in the latter picture, and had nothing but good things to say about Ann. But Good Sam was a flop, and I Was a Male War Bride did nothing for her because all anybody talked about was Cary Grant in drag, an image that was so hilarious and overwhelming that no one even noticed that Ann was in the picture.
After that, she couldn’t command A-list projects and went from studio to studio, appearing in films of gradually diminishing importance and budget. And there was another factor: Annie was a hard-drinking, hard-living woman, and the effects of the scotch began to show on her face when she was still young. She was doing a TV series when she died of cancer in 1967 at the age of fifty-two. What a loss—a great lady.
Throughout all this, Ann was a well-liked woman. But she couldn’t catch a break when she needed one—she never nabbed the Margo Channing part that would make people sit up and take notice, or even a TV series that would lead to a reassessment of her career. Look at what I Love Lucy did for Lucille Ball after a midrange movie career that came to a screeching halt when MGM tried to make her a glamour-puss when she was really a clown.
Ann needed some luck, but didn’t get any.
• • •
There were any number of other actresses whose careers were not as successful as they should have been. On some level, their expectations weren’t met, and many of them closed down a little—or a lot. Acting became the equivalent of a love affair that ended badly—a source of disgruntlement and dissatisfaction.
I didn’t know Lauren Bacall terribly well. Spencer Tracy took me to Bogart’s house once before Bogie died, and a year or so after Bogie’s death Bacall was heavily involved with Frank Sinatra, who was close to Natalie and me. Frank lavished Betty with all of his immense charm and generosity. After nursing Bogie through a dismal cancer that took more than a year to kill him, Betty was in desperate need of positive reinforcement, and Frank supplied all that and more.
Frank had been a good friend of Bogie’s, and had really admired him. Somehow or other, Betty assumed that they were going to get married, and the story leaked out. Frank thought the information came from Betty, and he cut her off, which rocked her.
A few years later, Betty married Jason Robards Jr., who resembled Bogie and was like him in another way—Jason was his own man and didn’t care overmuch what anybody else thought of him. He also drank even more than Bogie, and that’s saying something. The marriage turned into a nonstop battle fueled by Jason’s drinking. (He later dried out.)
I used to go surf fishing with Jason. He was a hell of an actor, devoted to his profession, and a good guy . . . when he was sober. The contentious atmosphere bred by drinking attracts me not at all; I don’t want to be around it, let alone in it, so I grew slightly apart from Betty when she was married to Jason.
After they divorced, she never remarried, although there were a few long-term relationships. She had a couple of successful Broadway shows and wrote a good memoir, although her movie career remained a sometime thing. In later years, whenever I saw her, there was a sharpness to her, an undertone of bitterness. I don’t know if it was her inability to find an equivalently happy relationship with anybody else after Bogie died, professional frustration, or both.
But in the years when we saw each other regularly, I liked Betty a lot. She stood firm, she let you know what she thought, and you ignored her at your peril.
• • •
I think it’s important to note here how isolated actresses were at this point in the 1940s. As I mentioned, at this time there was precisely one woman director in the business: Dorothy Arzner, and she didn’t have a lengthy career—only fifteen years or so. All the studio heads were men, and, with the exception of my friend Minna Wallis, the vast majority of the agents were men as well.
There were precisely three women producers: Harriet Parsons at RKO, Joan Harrison at Universal, and Virginia Van Upp at Columbia.
Harriet was the daughter of Louella Parsons, so everybody figured her position was a patronage job, although if you look at her credits, it’s clearly an unfair charge. Joan Harrison had worked with Alfred Hitchcock for years, cowriting the script for Rebecca and some other pictures, and was certainly a talent. Years later, Hitchcock would hire her to oversee his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which she ran like a Swiss watch for ten years. After that, she married the novelist Eric Ambler and retired to England. As for Virginia Van Upp, she was Harry Cohn’s right-hand woman and produced Gilda, among other movies.
Add to that reality the fact that most women’s starring careers were quite short. Men could go on playing leads until decrepitude, but for actresses, turning forty was typically a death knell for leading parts. It had been that way since the silent days for reasons both technical—the early film stock tended toward the harsh and was merciless on even minor signs of aging—and cultural.
It seems to me that women were also regarded in a more overtly sexual way than men were. Bogart, Cagney, and Wayne were never typical romantic leading men, so they could age. Nobody thought anything of it unless their screen pairings verged on the absurd, such as Bogart and Gary Cooper both taking a run at a dewy Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon. Bogie and Coop may have only been old enough to be her father, but they looked old enough to be her grandfather.
Women had a much narrower window of opportunity. Actresses as varied as Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, and Norma Shearer all saw their careers decline either just before they hit forty or just after. Cases such as Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis, who sailed on into middle age and beyond, have always been the exceptions.
Actresses with any degree of self-awareness know the clock is ticking, and it lights the fire of urgency in many of them to get as much work as they can as soon as they can, if only because nothing’s as cold as the movie business when you’re considered passé.
Women also faced financial hurdles. Jimmy Stewart got a percentage of the profits as early as 1950; a woman wasn’t granted that until Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra, more than ten years later. Men were in control, and women had to fight just to stay even. A woman like Barbara Stanwyck was strong, and had to be; otherwise, she would never have been able to flourish for as long as she did.
In order to gain leverage within the industry in which they worked, actresses dealt with the situation in different ways. Some, like Irene Dunne or Claudette Colbert, would be ladylike but very firm—Colbert’s shooting day ended at 5 P.M. and not a minute later. Joan Crawford would often sleep with her director. Bette Davis could be a holy terror, and since most men try to avoid angry women, they would give her de facto control as a means of placating her. John Huston stated the truth: “The studio was afraid of her.”
What made Bette mad? Mainly, deceiving her or lying to her. But on a deeper level, almost everything, up to and including the fact of being under contract to a studio. As Bette once told me, “I could be forced to do anything the studio told me to do. They could ask a contract player to appear in a burlesque house. The only recourse was to refuse, and then you were suspended without pay. When you were under suspension, without salary, you couldn’t work in a Woolworth’s. You could only starve.”
Actually, she omitted one detail: The length of time you were suspended was added to the back end of your contract.
In essence, being under contract meant that the studio owned you and could do as it wished with you. From the studio’s point of view, the appropriate response of its employees should have been “Be grateful and shut up.” They had taken nobodies and made them into somebodies, and those nobodies had been exposed to no financial risk whatsoever in the process. But from Bette’s point of view, the terms of the deal amounted to servitude, and the very fact of it was an abiding irritant.
I Loved Her in the Movies Page 9
