The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  It’s one thing when the machine works its voodoo but malfunctions and a talented person doesn’t become a star. It’s quite another when the machine malfunctions because it promotes an untalented star who does succeed. The business would never call that a malfunction because, to them, it wasn’t. (It’s more a malfunction of public taste.) For instance, although Claire Trevor didn’t totally make it, the relatively untalented Alexis Smith did. Although she was beautiful, photogenic, and could wear clothes well, she had a frozen quality that couldn’t get her within four miles of an acting Oscar. But there was a reason Smith broke through despite her limitations. She was at Warners when they needed an elegant leading lady who wasn’t too sexy or tough (like Sheridan), too neurotic (like Davis), too edgy (like Lupino), or too determined to break free of them (de Havilland). They needed a pliant everyday beauty—an Alexis Smith—to star opposite Bogart, Flynn, Cary Grant, Charles Boyer, and Dennis Morgan. Smith was in the right place at the right time, a benefactor of a kind of “trickle-down” stardom. All she had to do was wear clothes, look good, and cooperate, because she would be paired with the best. Later in life, she would prove she could sing and dance, appearing onstage in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but in her movie roles, as she said, “Jack Warner…saw me as a decoration.” And that’s how he used her. She became a decorative movie star, a calm in the Warners female-star storm.

  Another trickle-down stardom example that should have malfunctioned was the inexplicable Vera-Ellen.† She couldn’t act. She was a mediocre dancer. Her singing had to be dubbed. And she was anorexic. Yet she became a star. Not a big star, admittedly, but still, a star. Like Alexis Smith, Vera-Ellen fulfilled a function. MGM made a great many musicals, and they needed more than one leading lady dancer; Cyd Charisse couldn’t do it all. So Vera-Ellen danced on film with Astaire and Kelly, and by virtue of the company she was keeping, became a star at a top studio.

  Many people who know film history believe that the ultimate inexplicable example of failed stardom is the blond singer-dancer Barbara Lawrence. She had won a children’s beauty contest and become a professional model at the age of five. In 1944, Lawrence was on a modeling assignment when she learned that 20th Century–Fox had a casting call for showgirls, so she tried out. Fox put her under contract and used her in the chorus line of Betty Grable’s Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe (1945). Barbara Jo Lawrence (her real name) was tall, slender, radiantly beautiful, and a natural blonde with long, thick hair. She looked like a real winner, and Fox was delighted, preparing to groom her for major stardom. And then they found out she was barely fifteen years old.* Appalled that they had been parading an underage girl around in feathers and evening gowns, they quickly shoved her into their studio school and tried to forget about her, deciding to use the next two years on her grooming process, hoping she’d sooner or later be a replacement for Grable.

  The beautiful and talented Barbara Lawrence, a definitive example of “why didn’t she make it?”, a malfunction no one can explain. BELOW: Barbara Lawrence at the peak of her career, surrounded by Linda Darnell, Kurt Kreuger, Rudy Vallee (with binoculars) in Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours.

  In 1946, when Lawrence was sixteen, Fox suddenly had a casting problem that caused them to remember her. June Haver, the other lovely young blonde they were grooming to replace Betty Grable, was tied up filming Three Little Girls in Blue when Fox was ready to start filming a movie called Margie. They had hoped to use Haver, but she was unavailable. Barbara Lawrence (the Jo had been dropped) had been a stand-in for Haver in wardrobe tests for Margie. When Darryl Zanuck saw the tests, he gave her Haver’s role. (Haver was already a star anyway, and the role was more supporting than starring.) So Barbara Lawrence stepped into Margie in a showcase part, the small-town siren who was the gorgeous rival to plain-Jane Margie (Jeanne Crain). Lawrence plays the girl who has everything Margie has ever wanted for herself: looks, clothes, boyfriends, self-confidence, and the nerve to rouge her knees and to neck with a guy on her own front porch. Lawrence, who is excellent, has one terrific musical number, “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You,” and plenty of key moments to call her own. She even ice-skates! Both reviewers and audiences noticed her, and she seemed to be on her way, next playing Tyrone Power’s wealthy love in the lavish costume film Captain from Castile (1947). By her fifth movie, Lawrence was well recognized and was cast as Dan Dailey’s sister in Give My Regards to Broadway (1948), sharing a musical number with him. Fox then tried a generic “departure” for her, testing her flexibility by taking her out of musicals and into the film noir role of a cheap blond gangster’s moll in The Street with No Name (1948). The same year, she hit gold by being cast in Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours.

  Lawrence was at the peak of her beauty—and her billing. Four names appeared on the credits above Unfaithfully Yours: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, in that order. Lawrence (whose name in the film is Barbara) swans around eating chocolates, wearing a maribou-trimmed dressing gown set off by a diamond necklace with matching earrings. She’s first glimpsed dressed in high 1940s glamour: leopard-skin skirt and a scarf, an all-black hat, gloves and coat, standing, waiting at an airport, dragging on a cigarette, and looking as bored as any beautiful woman can look. Her delivery of her cheerfully contemptuous lines is the perfect Sturgean counterpoint to a musically written script about a musician. Lawrence plays the disenchanted wife of Rudy Vallee, who, as always, is a wealthy uptight fool who has somehow managed to bag a beautiful piece of arm candy. Since he’s rich, that might not seem so odd, but Vallee’s candy is sharp-witted and sharp-tongued. When Lawrence watches Harrison kiss Darnell with great passion, she indicates Vallee’s glasses and drawls, “Put ’em back on your nose and learn something.” Throughout the movie she nonchalantly treats her husband as if he’s her great burden in life. (“Come on, stupid,” she says to him.) When he intones pompously, “Give me the simple viewpoint,” she responds, “You’ve got it, boy, you don’t have to yearn for it.”

  Lawrence’s role is actually very small, but every time she’s on the screen she makes a great moment out of it. She’s Eve Arden and Lana Turner in one package. Yet she would never again appear in a film of such quality, with billing equal to stars of such caliber. Never again would she display quite this level of glamorous sheen, with her wet lips, blond hair, and eyelashes that work like street sweepers.

  Lawrence was only eighteen years old when Unfaithfully Yours was released in 1948. The studio was famous for grooming young blondes for musicals, and she had proved she could sing and dance as well as do comedy and drama. She was ready to be moved up to major stardom. Instead, in 1949, she stepped down in a series of sister roles, lose-the-guy roles, friend-of-the-daughter roles. She was Linda Darnell’s sister in A Letter to Three Wives, a college coed friend of Loretta Young’s daughter in Mother Is a Freshman, the girl who loses the hero to Valentina Cortese in Thieves’ Highway, Diana Lynn’s sister in Peggy (July 1950). Lawrence was always billed fourth or even fifth. She hit you’ll-never-be-a-star bottom when she had to play herself, “Barbara Lawrence,” in the 1953 Bette Davis movie The Star. Lawrence, as Barbara Lawrence, is presented as the hot new property the studio chooses to replace the aging Davis character, Margaret Eliot. (Davis, in a sense, is also playing herself. And Joan Crawford. Rumors said that the screenwriters, Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson, who had been close friends of Crawford’s, based the role on her.) The story line concerns how a studio is grooming “Lawrence” and preparing her to play the lead in a big film about a sexy young girl, which Eliot always felt was the perfect role for her. Everywhere Davis goes, people are talking about Lawrence, whose photo is seen around the studio, on the walls, in offices, and outside on posters. She herself, however, is seen only briefly, when she arrives at a Hollywood party wearing a low-cut gown, a white fox fur, and diamonds on her ears, at her neck, on her wrists, and in her hair.

  No actress should ever play a movie star in a movie unless it’s the l
eading role (Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful [1952], Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard [1950]) or a hilarious cameo (Ernest Borgnine, pushing his grocery cart, attacked by would-be filmmakers in Mistress [1991]). In The Star, Lawrence proves she’s not a star—and will never be a star—because she’s perfect playing someone who is not yet a star. Sadly, she was locking herself into failure. From 1953 onward, her roles were mostly in B pictures, and when they were A-level (as in Greer Garson’s Her Twelve Men [1954], or the film version of Oklahoma! in 1955), her roles were insignificant. After The Star, she made only nine more films, officially ending her movie career in 1958. Although she appeared in theatre and successful television shows such as Perry Mason and Riverboat, she never became a star.

  Barbara Lawrence had it all. The looks, the talent, the versatility, and the opportunity. What happened? Well, for one thing, she was very tall, with a slightly string-beanish quality. But more important, her height meant that even in flat shoes she was the same size as Dan Dailey. This was a problem—not one that couldn’t be fixed, but a problem nonetheless. Second, Lawrence had a quality that Hollywood found hard to deal with, in that her voice was low and quirky, more suitable for throwing comedy lines over her shoulder than cooing at a man. In fact, she’s very reminiscent of another tall, inherently comic, yet beautiful and potentially glamorous young woman: Lucille Ball. Hollywood never really knew what to do with her either. Ball was another strange mixture of something very glamorous and sexy and something oddly offbeat and comic. This was a hard female type to put into a leading-lady niche, and Lawrence suffered accordingly. And there was another issue: Betty Grable didn’t drop out as Fox’s leading musical blonde until 1955, and June Haver had already succeeded as her official replacement. Haver’s own replacement, Sheree North, was being developed at the same time, but, most important of all, a dark horse, an unexpected blond champion, arrived out of left field and claimed Fox’s publicity machine as her own. Her name was Marilyn Monroe. She, too, could sing, dance, do both comedy and drama—and was even more lovely, talented, and charismatic than Lawrence. Barbara Jo Lawrence was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wasn’t Marilyn Monroe, and no one else was either.

  Marilyn Monroe skyrocketed to spectacular fame, effectively eradicating Lawrence. She was one of the last—if not actually the last—truly big female star to be “built up” by the star machine the old-fashioned way. During the years 1951 to 1953, she began to appear in bit parts, and then moved on to big-budget movies, magazine covers, newsreels, the works. Allegedly, Monroe came out of nowhere, but that “nowhere” was the usual time of development and growth, in her case a four-year apprenticeship in bit parts and walk-ons.* For those who might wonder why no one saw malfunctions coming in advance, Monroe’s case is a perfect study. Her legend suggests that audiences spotted her right off the bat and insisted the studio “make that girl a star!” The myth of “the audience speaks” has occasionally been true, as in the cases of Tyrone Power or Gary Cooper,† but it’s usually the result of some careful planning. For instance, in Monroe’s case, she appeared in four movies in 1950: A Ticket to Tomahawk, Right Cross, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle. In Tomahawk, she’s one of the girls in the chorus line behind Dan Dailey, and in Right Cross she’s sitting in the background of a fancy restaurant/bar, playing a girl Dick Powell has just decided to stand up. He walks over and brushes her off—no magic. These two roles—one with no dialogue—do not make you go, “Wow! I see a star back there” (and they didn’t in 1950 either). What happens today is viewers say, “Wow! I see Marilyn Monroe back there,” which is not the same thing.

  It was her two small speaking roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve that caused everyone to notice her. In these two outstanding movies, directed, written, photographed, and designed by top movie personnel, Monroe was showcased. Her hair, her costumes, her poses, her co-stars, and, above all, her dialogue were first-rate. In The Asphalt Jungle, director John Huston lets the camera linger over her voluptuous body as she leans back on a chaise longue and seductively, poutingly, delivers her purring and well-written lines. In All About Eve, she enters the frame in strapless gown, fur, and jewels, and on the arm of no less than George Sanders. Again her lines, written by director Joseph Mankiewicz, are witty and memorable. In two quality films, she gets noticed—and is on her way to becoming an “overnight sensation.” What Monroe’s two memorable 1950 films show us is well explained by David Thomson: “These situations, as well as the attitude toward her of other actors, reflected the knowledge at the Fox Studios that she was picked out for higher things.” (Thomson adds, “Gossip would not have been slow to provide the means by which she negotiated the executive office.”) Fox, experienced at grooming successful sexy blond stars, chose to pull Monroe out of the ranks and give her everything they had in the buildup, even though some of her directors really didn’t see her as all that unusual. (Fritz Lang, who directed her in 1952’s Clash by Night, said, “She was a peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty and—I wouldn’t say ‘star allure’—but she knew exactly her impact on men.”*)

  The stories of Barbara Lawrence and Marilyn Monroe illustrate the vagaries of stardom malfunction. Lawrence was on her way, but Monroe got in her way. Monroe was unique, but she, too, could have gotten lost in the system as her four 1950 movies illustrate. The star machine did its work for both women, but Monroe could bring something to her moments that Lawrence, as talented as she was, could not. The audience knew the difference, and once the machine polished up Monroe and set her up as proper bait, the audience bit—and Monroe and the studio system took it from there.

  Monroe’s success was spectacular, although she was not really “an overnight success.” But the speed with which she arrived is hardly the point. The business never cared whether it was “overnight” or “more than five years,” as long as sooner or later she went over with the public. In fact, one of the things the business feared was moving too quickly, lest an investment not pay off. The reasons malfunctions were tolerated is that they were considered a legitimate risk.

  Ironically, Hollywood the business was totally dependent on audience response and yet mistrusted it. They usually preferred to test it—and test it again—before they fully invested in the popularity of any newcomer. It’s also surprising how smoothly malfunctions could be swallowed into the system and how little money was wasted dumping them. Potential stars who didn’t work out were moved down into the supporting category. They were made into “stars” for the B-picture unit. They were dropped. They went into real estate or returned to Podunk Village. One truly successful star who thrived at the box office could easily pay for fifteen or twenty failures. The studios absorbed their mistakes and rolled on. When the machine failed with a product, the businesspeople involved cleverly shifted focus and absolved themselves of all blame. Onward and upward. The business was utterly realistic and prepared to regroup. If someone didn’t work out, there were plenty of others in the wings.

  In hindsight, we can look at the legendary movie stars of old Hollywood and feel that we understand why they made it. But as with Marilyn Monroe, we are looking at end product—groomed, showcased, shaped, and supported. If some of the malfunctions had been assigned better roles, or better advisers, or had come along in a different decade, or not been compared unfavorably to already established stars, or hadn’t run away from it, bungled it, or even died, what might have happened? It’s impossible to know.

  * When we review all these movies today, taking them out of their own times, we can see that Crawford is actually excellent as Sadie Thompson, Sinatra is charming as the cowardly son of a notorious bandit, and Ishtar has become a cult-favorite comedy. Crawford, Sinatra, Beatty, and Hoffman are all stars entitled to their failures.

  * When the films of some formerly successful movie stars are revived today, these stars do translate well for the modern audience that suddenly “discovers” them. They aren’t cases of malfunction; they’re cases of “temporarily forgotte
n.” Clara Bow is still hot, still sexy. Janet Gaynor is still adorable (and can act as well). Will Rogers still has folksy charm, even if it does make him a bit of a dinosaur. And Rin Tin Tin can still bark and upstage any two-legged rival.

  † Montgomery is famous today for one film which is often revived—his directorial and starring turn in Lady in the Lake (1946), a famous experiment in camera subjectivity. This means that the one movie a modern audience likes Montgomery in is one in which technically he doesn’t appear!

  * No wonder she was fired from For Whom the Bell Tolls after filming began, replaced by Ingrid Bergman.

  * My favorite “Watch Bing Crosby Cope with Any Co-star” moment has to be the duet he sang with David Bowie on his posthumously aired 42nd Annual Christmas Special of 1977. Once again, Crosby rises to the occasion, friendly and unflappable, not in the least alarmed by Bowie’s terrifying thinness or razor-sharp incisors. He sets a relaxed but classy tone, to which Bowie is forced to adapt, and the two achieve a moment of genuine warmth singing “The Little Drummer Boy” together.

  * Some people in the business claim that Paramount wanted to sign her because their top musical comedy star, Betty Hutton, had just walked out on her contract and they were looking for a replacement.

  * The number was performed with Ferrer, who had by then become her husband. In the film, he plays the leading role of Sigmund Romberg, who wrote the song.

  Today, Madonna would be a similar example. A huge singing star, she has never been able to achieve movie stardom despite excellent opportunities, such as the title role in Evita (1996).