The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Did actors become big stars because they seemed to incorporate their own opposites? Shirley Temple, that adorable little tot, was also a bossy brat who faked her way forward. If you met a kid like that in real life, you’d want to smack her. Robert Walker seemed shy and innocent, but Hitchcock brought forward some disturbed quality that made him perfect as the evil Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951). Barbara Stanwyck was tough but vulnerable. Tyrone Power was masculine yet feminine. Carole Lombard seemed like a fun pal, but she was the ultimate in sophisticated glamour. Maybe it was that a star had to find the perfect on-screen mate to supply some “other half.” As Katharine Hepburn famously said about Astaire and Rogers, “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” Was it some perfect co-starring that made magic and solidified the career? Would Flynn have made it without de Havilland? Eddy without MacDonald? Walter Pidgeon without Greer Garson? What could Abbott have been without Costello? Without Dorothy Lamour, the Hope-Crosby Road pictures wouldn’t have worked as well. On-screen, Hope and Crosby were essentially disrespectful. They mocked the plot, the characters, the audience, and themselves in equal measure. They thumbed their noses at the filmmaking process itself, breaking the fourth wall and making self-referential and topical gags, but Lamour was always present to ground them. (They called her “Momma.”) She was beautiful, of course, and her songs broke their tension, but she dealt with Hope and Crosby calmly, in an unflappable manner. She was a gorgeous 1940s Margaret Dumont to leaven their Marxian antics, a center of cheerful gravitas.*

  Maybe stardom wasn’t about co-stars or other actors at all. Maybe it was a director’s keen eye that saw possibilities in an actor that no one else saw—as Josef von Sternberg claimed for his “star-making” skill with Marlene Dietrich? (William Holden said that without director Billy Wilder to shape his acting career, “I would have been Henry Aldrich.”) Maybe lighting could make a woman a star (Claudette Colbert), or a costume (Joan Crawford’s famous Letty Lynton tea dress and, later on, her shoulder pads and ankle-strapped shoes), a memorable song (Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame”), or an appearance in the movie version of a legendary best seller (Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, 1939). Or maybe stardom was linked to some totally unpredictable minor little personal trait? Was it Elvis’s hips or Harlow’s platinum hair? Did Joan Bennett’s dye job (from blond to brunette) change her from just another pretty girl into a seductive movie queen? Gary Cooper was a great kisser. He always did it right, bending his co-star back, holding on, and kissing the devil out of her.* He was a great-looking guy with lots of talent, but was it kissing that put him over? With Gable, was it all in the mustache?

  In the end, the business forgot about questions and answers, and just kept its options open, realizing there would always be an unknown, abstract, and unpredictable part to the star-making process. They would always be reconciling opposing elements and taking big chances, treading a fine line between objective business plans and subjective audience response.

  “A star was born, not made,” writes W. Robert LaVine in In a Glamorous Fashion: The Fabulous Years of Hollywood Costume Design. He was right, but also wrong. “You don’t manufacture stars,” said Joan Crawford (who was in a position to know). “You manufacture toys.” She was wrong, but also right. Studio moguls—men such as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn, et al.—understood this contradiction and faced up to it daily. They succeeded because they accepted that there was no need to define stardom—anything that worked was all the definition they’d need. “She’s got something!” would do just fine. Since they were in business, they knew they’d need to control as many things about creating movie stars as possible, but they’d gamble on the rest. The intelligence of the Hollywood businessmen who came to this conclusion—and their astounding nerve—is seldom acknowledged.

  And so Hollywood, with its factory-like studio system, cheerfully made a living manufacturing a product it couldn’t define, confident that someone out there (“the little people”) would do it for them—and pay them for the privilege. They busied themselves looking for a Judy Garland to put up on the screen so the audience could find her and say “She’s got that little something you can’t define but we can recognize when we see it because it’s that little something extra.” They would look for actors and actresses who could project the mysterious “x factor” of stardom. It was a crackpot idea, all right, but against all odds, they made it work because whatever it was, the x factor was viewable.

  In fact, there are examples of the x factor popping off the screen all over film history. It’s the infrared in the dark of the movie house.* Bette Davis, even in her fake-blonde days, outshines everyone around her in forgotten movies like So Big (1932), Housewife (1934), and Ex-Lady (1933). Jimmy Cagney’s animal magnetism wipes everyone out of the frame even in small parts in Doorway to Hell (1930) and Other Men’s Women (1931). A young Esther Williams jumps out in an MGM wartime short entitled Inflation, which she made after her initial screen test and just before her first feature assignment. She’s a beginner with no acting experience—a swimmer, for heaven’s sake—paired with a terrific actor, Edward Arnold. Arnold plays the devil, tempting Williams to break the rules of rationing and buy herself a fur coat. He gets totally lost when Williams confidently struts around in the coat, flashing her x factor. (Pressed to explain why such an inexperienced swimming champion could be turned into a big box office movie star, Arthur Freed searched hard for reasons. Finally he came up with “She’s cheerful!”†)

  A good example of how easy it was for audiences to spot the x factor is demonstrated by Ava Gardner’s 1945 film She Went to the Races. Gardner was cast as the second lead, and the star was the lovely Frances Gifford, who was being heavily groomed for the top rank at MGM that year. Gifford had charm, talent, beauty—everything she needed—but she was no Ava Gardner. The audience saw the truth in a revealing scene in which Gifford and the leading man (James Craig) are arguing outside an elevator in a hotel corridor. Suddenly, the elevator doors open and out steps Gardner. She moves into the frame, delivers a line or two in her low, husky voice, and walks off. It’s not much, but it’s everything. The minute Gardner appears, she takes it all away from both Gifford and Craig. It’s not just that she’s fabulous looking. So are they. It’s not just that she’s been carefully costumed and made up. So have they. It’s not just the careful lighting, the framing of her medium close-up. No, it’s the x factor. Gardner’s got something extra—a lot of it, in fact—and it’s fully on display. She’s got star written all over her, and within a year, she was one.

  Gardner and others like her proved that nobody really needed to know what the x factor was as long as the fans thought they saw it. It could be happily vague and emotional. Mae West understood. “It isn’t what I do,” she explained, “but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it. And how I look when I do it and say it.”* (All things considered, it’s as good an overall definition of movie stardom as anyone’s ever come up with.)

  Ava Gardner on the brink of stardom, her glamour already secure, with James Craig in She Went to the Races.

  One thing was concrete, however. Whatever the x factor might be, it had to show up on the screen and it had to be seen by more than one person. Movie stardom might be undefinable—the business could live with that—but it couldn’t be a secret. One other thing was also concrete: It didn’t need to be connected in any way to who the star actually was offscreen. Clark Gable, one of the greatest, reached a level so legendary in his lifetime that he could be mythologized inside his own movies. In The Tall Men (1955), Gable’s nemesis, played by Robert Ryan, speaks what could have been Gable’s eulogy as Gable exits the frame: “There goes the only man I ever respected. He’s the man every boy thinks he’s going to be when he grows up…and wishes he had been when he’s an old man.” Ryan articulates what the audience saw in Gable. About the real Clark Gable, Ava Gardner said, “If you say, ‘Hi ya, Clark,’ he’s stuck for an answer.”*


  The reconciliation of the offscreen/on-screen discrepancies like Gable’s, as well as the contradictions of the business part of shaping star presences for audiences to “discover,” were well known behind the scenes. Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the studio years, was one of the greatest of all the “star makers.” (MGM was described as having “more stars than there are in the heavens.”) Mayer knew it was good business to let the public feel they were the most important part of the star selection process—that stardom happened without calculation. Speaking to general fans on one of Louella Parsons’s weekly radio broadcasts in 1946, Mayer gave all the credit to the audience: “I don’t discover stars, Louella. I am only the talent scout who brings the public talent presented in what I think is the proper manner. It’s the public who pays its money, chooses, and makes the star.” Behind the scenes, Mayer had something different to say. In a 1958 industry article entitled “What Is a Star?” Mayer talked like a businessman. “The idea of a star being born is bush-wah. A star is created, carefully and coldbloodedly, built up from nothing, from nobody…Age, beauty, talent—least of all talent—has nothing to do with it…We could make silk purses out of sow’s ears every day in the week.” And that is what they did. Or what they tried to do.

  This book is about the “star machine” Hollywood created with which to manufacture their silk purses. It’s a somewhat scary story about how a really tough-minded business would do pretty much anything to make money. Lots of money. The dreams, the fantasies, the escapes movie stars brought to the audience—those were the means to the end. “Star power” was, for the film business, just a saleable illusion. Judy Garland’s stardom was ethereal, undefinable…but also quotidian and unglamorous. That something as evanescent, as memorable, as durable as a Garland could be the product of a cut-and-dried business process is truly fascinating—and very mysterious. The “star machine” was the process Hollywood used to invent some Judy Garlands—or at the very least, to be able to recognize one when they saw her even before they knew who or what she was or could be.

  * Actor Frederic March didn’t much like Joan Crawford, but asked to define stardom, he mentioned her name and said: “She was a star.”

  * In talking about movie stardom, it’s important not to confuse the old studio system in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s with the one that exists today. “Star” history has to be divided into “then” and “now” because the importance of stardom has diminished over time. The stars of silent film and of the great studio system were gods and goddesses. The public revered them, but they had to earn their stardom. Today anybody’s a star who can get his or her name in front of the credits by negotiating for it. The next-door neighbor in a sitcom is a star. The term is the bottom rung of show business, and to compensate for its devaluation, there is a tarted-up power system of star levels—an upping of wattage. Above “star” is “superstar” and above “superstar” is “megastar.” By this standard, Bogart and Davis and Cooper and Cagney are gigastars. As Baryshnikov said about Fred Astaire, “He’s dancing. The rest of us are doing something else.”

  * Lamour’s sense of humor can be seen in On Our Merry Way (1948), in which, playing a movie star who does jungle movies (i.e., herself in a spoof of herself), she sings the unforgettable “I’m the Queen of the Hollywood Isles.” Lamour was on top of things. She understood how the business worked and was known as “the girl who never made an enemy.” Today her sarong is in the Smithsonian.

  * One of his leading ladies, Laraine Day (The Story of Dr. Wassell, 1944), said, “Gary kisses the way Charles Boyer looks like he kisses…Well! It was like holding a hand grenade and not being able to get rid of it. I was left breathless.”

  * The observable “glow” of potential stardom was present from the very beginning of film history. Clara Bow pops off the screen in her earliest films (such as Down to the Sea in Ships in 1922). She’s vivid, alive—a breath of fresh air that is the very definition of “screen presence.” In his first silent film, The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), Gary Cooper shoved even star Ronald Colman aside. Audiences responded to his presence and Variety confirmed his charisma, saying he was “a youth who will be heard of on the screen.”

  † Williams’s good cheer was so tangible that MGM felt comfortable referring to it as a joke. “Who’s the picture of health?” sneers Carroll Baker in Easy to Love (1953), when she first spots her rival, Williams.

  * Dustin Hoffman gave his version of this elusiveness when he described Jimmy Durante: “He couldn’t sing, but he sang. He couldn’t dance, but he danced. His jokes were corny, but he was hilarious…because he was magical.”

  * Stars often had their images ridiculed by peers. Restaurateur Dave Chasen said, “Bogart’s a helluva nice guy until 11:30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart.” Director John Frankenheimer put Kirk Douglas down by sneering, “He’s wanted to be Burt Lancaster all his life.”

  THE FACTORY

  Louis B. Mayer, legendary head of MGM, at his famous curved white desk, surrounded by everything a mogul needs: awards, family photos, libations, and someone to be molded into a star.

  The Hollywood studio system of the period encompassing the 1930s through the 1950s doesn’t get credit for much of anything, except for destroying the nation’s morality, threatening our educational system, discouraging people from reading, turning women into sex symbols, and making fun of minorities. However one feels about all that, credit must be paid to old Hollywood’s astonishingly efficient business practices. The moviemaking industry had—and still has—an ability to protect itself from economic disasters (the Depression), exploit historical opportunities (World War II), reinvent itself if needed (as in “movies are bigger than ever” when television threatened), and adapt rapidly to changing technologies (selling DVDs and streaming trailers onto the Internet). Hollywood has always been efficient.

  Most people think that old Hollywood was populated with idiots. The stereotypical mogul is a heavyset man with a big cigar who sits behind an aircraft-carrier-sized desk, shouting to his employees a series of stupid (but amusing) remarks while he makes clear to his newest protegée that if she wants to make it big, she’ll have to sleep with him. Or worse. The fact is that in 1939, the year most people think of as the high point of Hollywood’s former glory, more than 51 percent of its top echelon were college educated. It’s just more fun to talk about ruined artistic projects, sexual exploitation, out-of-control behavior, and a world populated with the “include me out” and “don’t say yes until I finish talking” kind of guys. No doubt there was plenty of ludicrous action, overweening greed, heavy accents, and bad grammar around in those days, but can old Hollywood match the Enron debacle or the savings-and-loan scandals? No Hollywood mogul—a sharp, hardworking bunch—ever crashed quite the way Martha Stewart or Leona Helmsley crashed. Unless they shot their wives’ lovers, they at least kept out of jail, and the distribution of motion pictures into the small towns of America never destroyed local economies the way the arrival of a Wal-Mart store can do today.

  Hollywood at work was quite different from the inefficient, money-wasting comedy version we often envision—that crazy place where no one had any idea what was going on and stupid decisions were made on a whim. A movie studio in the so-called golden era was a well-oiled machine with everything needed to make movies right in place on the “studio lot.” These lots were huge. Warners had its own ranch. Twentieth Century–Fox sat on 108 acres, and was half a mile wide and nearly a mile long. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on February 10, 1949, Louis B. Mayer proudly said, “Today we have thirty-one modern soundstages, sixty stars, and five lots covering one hundred seventy-six acres.” They also had a four-story administration building (air-conditioned long before that was fashionable); a huge warehouse in which to store acres of props, costumes, and furniture; a security force with nearly fifty officers, a chief, and two plainclothes officers; a dentist’s office; a foundry; a commissary that could
feed employees around the clock; a prop shop; an electrical plant; a research department to provide any kind of information; a clinic; and back lots created for specific uses. “It was a complete city. You could live there,” said actress Janet Leigh, who arrived at MGM in the late 1940s. The studios were positive environments, with well-paid, glamorously employed personnel working together in a sealed-off space that was hard to penetrate. (The studio gate police were legendary.) Inside the studio, employee needs were taken care of by a big-daddy employer that tried to provide them with everything they might need, because it was cost-efficient to do so. Time away from the studio was time lost, which meant money lost. Joseph Mankiewicz, a successful producer-director-writer, said that “you never left the studio for anything. When you were at the studio, you were not only safe from the outside world, you could participate in any part of the outside world you wanted to. If you wanted to register to vote or renew your driver’s license, they came on the lot. At Christmastime, the department stores used to bring stuff over to your office to show you.”

  The old Hollywood was a factory system. (There is nothing like these studios in filmmaking today.) Back then, MGM could complete a full-length motion picture every nine days. In the year 1950 alone, it made 16 cartoons, 12 “Travelogues,” 9 “Pete Smith Specialties,” 8 “People on Parades,” 104 “News of the Days,” and released 41 features, among them Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines, Royal Wedding, and The Asphalt Jungle. The business complexity and efficiency of the studios are easily demonstrated by a look at records kept by any one of the big seven (MGM, Warners, Paramount, Columbia, 20th Century–Fox, RKO, or United Artists). There were departments for everything: an administration department, with all the executives and their assistants; the story department, the art direction department, the makeup department, the cinematography and lighting departments, the sound department, the music department, the casting department, the publicity department, the costume department, the library and research department, the special effects department, the legal department, the purchasing department, the payroll department—but why go on?