The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  ONCE SECURED, A STAR’S TYPE needed to be maintained. Things could become problematic when the studio messed with the type it so painstakingly had established. This might be done by mistake or even by design. The business could get greedy. After all, there would be even more money to be made if actors with types could then be heavily publicized as “playing against type” in what the publicity flacks called “a departure.” Usually, this simply meant trying to put stars in genres they weren’t typically associated with. Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century–Fox, was always trying to get more out of his box office queen Betty Grable. He made it work once when he cast her in a nonmusical murder mystery, I Wake Up Screaming (1941), opposite Victor Mature. However, the film wasn’t all that much of a departure for her. She was playing her own familiar type—just not singing and dancing—and she does show off her famous legs in a bathing suit at a YMCA pool scene. (The film was also released in 1941, early in her Fox career, just before she reached the top of the heap and had not become fully known as “the Pinup Girl.”) In 1946, after Grable had become a top box office musical star, Zanuck wanted Grable to play a dipsomaniac whose dead body turns up in the Paris river in The Razor’s Edge (1946). She reportedly told him, “Are you kidding? Fans would expect me to rise up out of the water with lily pads in my hair, singing ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’”

  Another star who understood what he had and didn’t have was the intelligent Edward G. Robinson: “Some people have youth, some people have beauty, I have menace.” In fact, many stars often had shrewd understandings of who they were and were not. “I’m no actor,” said Victor Mature, “and I have sixty-four films to prove it!” He knew he’d found stardom because of his looks. Gable said, “I’m no actor and I never have been.” Meg Ryan once said, simply and rather bitterly, “I twinkle.” (Grable herself said, “I became a star for two reasons, and I’m standing on them,” paraphrasing a famous line spoken to her character in Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshow [1945]. Grable appropriated the words as her own self-evaluation.*)

  Typecasting was a powerful box office tool. Once a star was labeled or defined, it was dangerous to try to extend the actor too far—and very dangerous to “cast against type.” The public didn’t like it and let everyone know about it. Cary Grant gave a great performance in the stark Clifford Odets drama None But the Lonely Heart (1944), but no one liked him as a tragic Cockney with a dying mother (Ethel Barrymore). Gene Kelly fought the Mafia in the noirish Black Hand (1950), but everyone waited for him to start hoofing. Garbo was successfully forced to laugh in Ninotchka (1939), but she met her Waterloo when she had to dance the chica-choca rhumba in Two-Faced Woman (1941). Even Katharine Hepburn, at the height of her “you know I am not like those other women in the movies but a reahhly, reahhly serious actress” quality, played a Ninotchka-like role in a goofy Bob Hope comedy, The Iron Petticoat (1956). Her fans hated her for it—and so did Bob Hope’s. Sometimes the determination to cast actors in anything just to keep them working was ludicrous. Actor Pat O’Brien was firmly associated with his Irish name. He played Irish priests, cops, naval officers. When he was suddenly cast in Crack-Up (1946) as an art historian lecturing to a museum crowd and successfully X-raying paintings to prove them fake, no one really knew what to make of it. It seemed just plain wrong.

  A classic example of casting against type is Clark Gable’s enormous failure playing Charles Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader of the late 1880s. The ill-fated Parnell, released in 1937, co-starred Gable with Myrna Loy and remained throughout his lifetime one of Gable’s greatest embarrassments. He is awful in it, but Parnell would be a dull and stodgy film with or without him. Characters enter rooms and greet one another. “Hello, Charles.” “Hello, William.” “Hello, Aunt Ben.” It’s like a Bob and Ray routine. Gable, wearing muttonchop sideburns and trying to be grand, is stripped of everything that makes him exciting. He plays a noble politician who speechifies, who accepts defeat, and who woos his woman carefully and by the rules,* seriously violating his own well-established image. In his final scene, Gable languishes on a chaise longue beside a roaring fire that has more energy than he does. “It’s no use,” he says, seeming to play Walter Pidgeon, not Parnell. He walks around, calmly smoking his pipe, seldom raising his voice. His plan of attack? “I’ll wait.” His attitude toward himself? “What am I?” His response to failure? “Now that I am overthrown…” This isn’t the Gable people had grown to love. His one big moment of action, in which he socks a fellow politician, is performed almost apologetically and in a highly dignified manner, deliberately and without passion. Gable is supposed to be the guy who kicks down the door to get to the girl, the guy who punches his way out of problems, the man’s man. As Parnell, he is playing a man “who brought reason out of hysteria…the uncrowned king of Ireland.” Talking reason? That wasn’t Gable’s style. And the only royalty that Gable represented was King of Hollywood, a man of the people. In Parnell, Gable is desexed, all his fires tamped down.†

  Something similar happened to Greer Garson. During the war, she became an American sacred cow. She successfully created roles that are still beloved, such as her romantic heroine in Random Harvest (1942), her touching childless wife in Blossoms in the Dust (1941), her delicate and lyrical Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1940), and her solid portrait of a liberated scientist, Madame Curie (1943). In particular, she had become iconic in her title role as Mrs. Miniver (1942), the stalwart British housewife who stood strong against the Germans. All these roles convinced America that she was noble, brave, reverent, maybe even dull, but noble, brave, reverent. In real life, however, Garson was known for not taking herself too seriously on the set. She had a tart, fairly saucy sense of humor. (No less a cutup than Errol Flynn, who worked with her in That Forsyte Woman [1949], paid tribute to her in his autobiography by saying, “Greer Garson was the first actress I worked with who was fun.”) And so a bad decision was made. In 1948, Garson was put into a screwball comedy called Julia Misbehaves. Because MGM thought the highly popular Garson could do anything and get away with it, they didn’t worry that Julia was a “big change of pace” for her. The film turned out to be Greer Garson’s Parnell. But whereas Gable had actually given a really bad performance in his flop, Garson, sadly, didn’t. She actually could play comedy: She had excellent timing, and she could sing and dance passably. However, to audiences of the late 1940s, Garson was Mrs. Miniver. Seeing her jigging around onstage with a load of drunken sailors and riding the curtain like a burlesque queen was akin to seeing their moms join the circus. They did not want to see Greer Miniver doing pratfalls in tights, sitting in a bubble bath, or on top of a pyramid of acrobats. (Walter Pidgeon, playing her former husband, watches Garson’s acrobatic act and cries out, “She’ll get hurt!” That’s exactly how the audience saw it.) Julia Misbehaves was not welcome at the box office, despite pairing Garson with her most beloved co-star, Walter Pidgeon, and despite the presence of the exquisitely beautiful teenaged Elizabeth Taylor (as Garson’s daughter). MGM learned something: The fans wanted Garson to keep her dignity. They would accept her as delicately comedic if she were playing in Pride and Prejudice opposite Laurence Olivier, but not if she were flailing around in screwball territory. Once a Mrs. Miniver or a Madame Curie, always a Miniver or a Curie. Garson was denied versatility.

  Sometimes actors were said to have been “cast against type” when, in fact, they were taking their type beyond its limitations. For instance, when he was thirty-eight years old and an established leading man, Ray Milland won an Oscar (and was hailed for his “departure from type”) for portraying a serious alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945). Milland, born in Wales as the elegant Reginald Truscott-Jones, had been seen on-screen for more than a decade as the epitome of the handsome aristocrat, or the easygoing young bon vivant with perfect manners, or the devil-may-care man-about-town, or even the charming con artist who has to learn to go straight—all variations on a theme. Whatever the shading, movies presented Milland as i
f he had been born to wear a tuxedo and deliver an acerbic line while smiling his devil of a smile and winning the leading lady over despite his little touch of cruelty. All done with a drink in his hand. Milland worked this type steadily throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, averaging three or four films per year. He often played a drunk scene—for laughs—and behaving in a naughty and rude manner was one of his skills. Lost Weekend used Milland’s established type to allow him a performance depth that he hadn’t been thought to possess. The role of an alcoholic, self-loathing journalist gave him reasons for his insolence, revealing tragedy behind his sarcasm, unmasking his “happy-go-lucky” disguise. Milland’s young drunks had always been charming, and Billy Wilder understood that drunks often were charming. Wilder also understood that Milland’s ability to deliver a zingy line was related to an inherent sense of meanness beneath his surface.* He allowed Milland to play his usual charming drunk for a truth that earned him an Oscar. The role was not a departure. It was a maturation.†

  Audiences liked a stiff-upper-lip and noble Greer Garson, as in Mrs. Miniver, not a “Hi, ya, sailors” kind of babe in Julia Misbehaves.

  Ray Milland evolved over his long career from playing tuxedoed rich boys whose worst problem was “Should I kiss her now?” (with Barbara Read in Three Smart Girls) to a desperate drunk who only had “Can I pawn my typewriter for a drink?” on his mind in The Lost Weekend.

  There were maturations that broke with the original basic type and became permanent. Actor Dick Powell stopped playing boyish songsters in 1930s musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933, 1935, and 1937 and happy-go-lucky lovers in early 1940s comedies like I Want a Divorce and Model Wife. In 1945, he was cast as detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, and for six years he appeared in hard-boiled noir films like Pitfall and Johnny O’Clock. Powell felt he had matured past his juvenile musical persona, and he became a serious businessman who ended up directing movies as well as producing television series. Similarly, the supra-handsome John Payne changed his movie image from leading-hunk who supported Fox blondes like Alice Faye and Betty Grable to hard-boiled film noir protagonist in movies like 99River Street (1953) and Kansas City Confidential (1952). Payne, like Powell, was a first-rate businessman who moved into controlling his own projects, eschewing his background as a Hollywood pinup boy.‡

  For the most part, studios stuck to what they knew worked. Once a star’s type was set, the studios went out and sold it offscreen as well as on. They nailed star definitions down in the fans’ minds by spelling them right out in movie magazine articles and photo captions. Star types were not secret or mysterious. They required no highfalutin interpretation. If you’d like to know what any single movie star’s “persona” really was back then, all you have to do is read a movie magazine. The 1941 issue of Movie Play tells the fans that Veronica Lake is “a second Harlow.” Spencer Tracy is “better with men than women…get him in a masculine crowd and he can swap stories and indulge in mantalk with the best of them.” Rosalind Russell “regales a smart dinner party with her scintillating comments” because she is “sophisticated, exotic.” Thus, fans were told Lake was going to be promoted as a sex symbol, Tracy was more popular with male fans than female, and Russell was a sophisticated comedienne.*

  Further proof that the business understood typecasting also exists in movies that make jokes about it. When Warner Bros. made a lightweight satire about the movie business, It’s a Great Feeling (1949), they riffed on the concept. Using their popular “Two Guys” stars,† Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan, they told a story about a girl, Judy Adams, who was trying to become a movie star. She is played by Doris Day, but Carson and Morgan play themselves. The setting is the real Warner Bros. studio. The movie opens with four real-life movie directors all refusing to direct a picture that stars Jack Carson: Raoul Walsh, King Vidor, Michael Curtiz, and David Butler. (The first in-joke is that Butler is the director of It’s a Great Feeling.) As the “two guys” try to develop Day into a star, they move around the studio lot encountering various big-name Warners stars who make fun of their own studio images. Joan Crawford, knitting like a madwoman (which she did in real life while waiting to be called on set), suddenly slaps Carson and Morgan both hard on the face after telling them off. When they demand to know why, she cheerfully explains, “Oh, I do that in all my pictures.” Edward G. Robinson begs a studio cop to help him look tough. (“I’ve got a reputation!”) Gary Cooper has a long conversation with Morgan at a soda fountain in which all he says is “yep!”

  The greatest joke of all is the finale. Fed up with promises and failure, Day decides to go back to Gurkey’s Corners, Wisconsin. She has been threatening from the beginning to “return home” and marry her high school sweetheart, Jeffrey Bushdinkle. Carson and Morgan follow her, watching her at-home wedding from the window. When Day kisses her new husband, the camera reveals his identity: It’s Errol Flynn! After a moment’s double take and shock, Carson says, “What some girls will go for! He’s got nothin’!” “Nothin,’” solemnly echoes Morgan. When Warner Bros. made this movie in which the premise played with the specific types of their stars, there was no question but that the audience would get the jokes.

  Throughout the Hollywood golden age, stars were occasionally asked to appear as “themselves,” which was, of course, a role—a star pretending to be his developed star identity. This could be just a straightforward walk-on. Ava Gardner gets off a train in The Band Wagon (1953) as Fred Astaire’s character Tony arrives. They say hi to each other, and Ava poses for photographers. She’s Ava the person (also the star) playing Ava the star, with no layers other than the obvious one. Other times, the star appears as a sly little wink-wink joke for the audience. At the end of Do You Love Me? (1946), bandleader Harry James, playing the guy who didn’t get the girl (Maureen O’Hara, who falls for Dick Haymes), has the final scene. Heartbroken, James walks out, a cab pulls up, and in the backseat sits the new girl for him—Betty Grable, in an unbilled cameo. There was no one in the audience who wouldn’t recognize Betty Grable, the pinup queen and box office champion of World War II—and also, as it happens, the real-life wife of Harry James!*

  In her glamour period, Lucille Ball plays herself in a full leading role in Best Foot Forward (1943). Ball is a movie star nicknamed “the Bathing Suit Girl,” a title she was never actually known by. Yet her character is named Lucille Ball, and she is ostensibly playing herself. Her career is in the dumps, so she tries to give it a publicity jolt by going to a cadet military school to be their “senior prom girl.” As her agent says, “You’re the wonder girl from the never-never land. Who knows your option wasn’t picked up?” Ball’s real-life option had, of course, been picked up. At this point in her career, Ball is slim and spectacular in Technicolor, her red, red hair tucked into a leopard-skin hat, her red, red nails inches long, and her red, red mouth wide open in a high-wattage smile. She swans around in harem pants, waving a cigarette holder, and she’s everybody’s idea of what a 1940s glamour girl should look like. (People tend to forget how beautiful Ball was.) It takes guts to play yourself as a washed-up star who needs help to “crawl back from the end of the limb.” Ball does it with great style and credibility, but she plays it as comedy, gently spoofing herself and the system that made her while looking too good for any of it to seem true. If she hadn’t been a secure star, the role would not have worked, and if her type hadn’t been “Lucille Ball, successful movie star,” neither would her character.

  Playing yourself as a concept bottomed out with the ultimate example—the spectacle of a drink-ravaged, aging John Barrymore playing a parody of himself in The Great Profile (1940). At a time in his life when the public knew Barrymore couldn’t remember his lines, he plays ham actor Evans Garrick, who can’t remember his. Barrymore is a cartoon version of the public’s awareness of “himself.” As the credits roll, a jolly chorus of male voices sing, “Oh, Johnny, how you can love,” spoofing the star’s reputation as “the Great Lover.” The play he is supposed to be appearing
in is Beloved Infidel, a parody of his own Beloved Rogue. When the movie was released in 1940, critics bemoaned its painful humor. People knew then that Barrymore had toured in a play version of the story, and that he had barely been able to get through each show. The movie uses that knowledge and stresses the chaos such circumstances create onstage. Seen today, it’s funnier than it has any right to be, largely because, even half-dead and looking terrible, Barrymore could still chew scenery like a master. Always a small, neatly proportioned man, perfect in size for stage and screen, he looks shrunken, hypothalamic, and ill. He is a ruin, but a magnificent one. As his big blond wife (a former acrobat) walks out on him, he pulls together whatever dignity he can locate and accepts a glass of water and two aspirin from his Chinese servant. Trying to stop his hand from shaking, he intones magnificently, thoughtfully, “In many ways, she was the best of them all.” Barrymore might be shredding himself for money, but he accepts defeat with a glory worthy of Robert E. Lee.

  What looked smart on-screen, however, was often not so funny in real life. To a ludicrous extreme, studios began to believe in their own creations and even get confused about them. Lucille Ball claimed she once tried to get a role in which the script described the character as a “Lucille Ball type.” The producer turned her down, saying she wasn’t right for the part. A publicity flack once explained to an interviewer that when people went to Gone with the Wind, “they went to see Clark Gable, not Rhett Butler, because Rhett Butler was really Clark Gable.” When Greer Garson married the co-star who had played her son in Mrs. Miniver (Richard Ney), Louis B. Mayer freaked out. “What will people think?” he is supposed to have bellowed at her. “You’ve married your own son!” When she reminded him that Ney was not her son* and that they were eager to wed because Ney was going to war, Mayer allegedly perked up and said, “Well, maybe he’ll be killed and our problem will be solved.” (It didn’t actually turn out to be that much of a problem. The public accepted the marriage, assuming that if their own dignified British heroine did it, it must be okay.)