The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  After One Hundred Men and a Girl—a huge success to equal Three Smart Girls—Deanna Durbin had made two big hits in little over one year. Joe Pasternak, her producer, knew she was a phenomenon. “She is one of those personalities,” he said, “that the world will insist on regarding as its private property.” In other words, she wasn’t just a cute kid. She was going to be a real movie star, and in the Hollywood of the 1930s, that meant money. Her fan mail was pouring in and was closely read daily by the studio publicity department.* The requests for Deanna autographs—for which someone else signed her name on a photo†—were counted, as were the number of letters about each movie. The sale of Durbin photos and autographs (which were at first offered free and then for twenty-five cents as her popularity soared) was monitored, along with the number of endorsements requested, the numbers of fan magazine covers and articles that appeared, and the sales figures for each of her Deanna Durbin name products: paper dolls, coloring books, and porcelain dolls. Her fan clubs were especially monitored because the Durbin clubs were among the best organized and most loyal of any that were formed. (Fan clubs played an important role in helping studios expand star popularity and define its sources.)

  Durbin started out in movies already conveniently and successfully typecast. She herself later showed how well she understood her own appeal: “Just as a Hollywood pinup represents sex to dissatisfied erotics, so I represented the ideal daughter millions of fathers and mothers wished they had.” Her first three films bear this out. In Three Smart Girls, she reunites her divorced father and mother. She charms and cajoles, lies and manipulates, and succeeds. She sings three songs. In One Hundred Men and a Girl, she wants her father’s out-of-work orchestra to play with Leopold Stokowski. She charms and cajoles, lies and manipulates, and succeeds. She sings four songs. In Mad About Music (1938), she would want her “pretend” father to marry her actress mother. She would charm and cajole, lie and manipulate, and succeed. She would sing five songs. All that changed was the number of songs she sang.

  This pattern would be followed in all of Deanna Durbin’s movies. Even when she aged, and fixing things up for parents no longer seemed viable, she would fix up things for other people (foreign correspondents, war orphans, dying old millionaires, et cetera) or even herself (launching her career, trapping her man, et cetera). Along the way, devoted, grateful, and admiring people would help her, always realizing her true worth no matter what kind of shenanigans she might be pulling. In her last film—in which she sang five songs—her “fix-it” team included a bunch of senators, a Supreme Court justice, and even the president of the United States. To fans, it seemed logical that such people would want to help Deanna Durbin.

  The main thing, of course, was always finding the excuse—and the right moment—for her singing. Durbin’s voice was crystal clear and lyrically beautiful. She knew how to put over a song effortlessly, be it operatic or popular, and when she sang—radiating genuine pleasure—everything would suddenly turn her way in the plot. People who were getting ready to throw her out kept her. Grumps who hated her suddenly loved her. Handsome and rich men who had ignored her fell in love with her. The vocalizing of Deanna Durbin was the most effective deus ex machina the movies ever had.

  Universal shrewdly understood that no one really cared why she sang, they just wanted her to do it. Her musical interludes were thus usually quite simple. She mounted a stage and sang. Occasionally, her numbers were integrated into the plot, as when she bicycles along in Mad About Music singing “I Love to Whistle,” or drives her little carriage, her horses prancing along in rhythm, while she sings the title song in Can’t Help Singing (1944), but more often than not, she just got up and sang.*

  Durbin’s studio also understood that when she sang, people didn’t want to be distracted. No singing to animated animals, please, and no dancing troupes gyrating behind her. (Durbin seldom danced. Her musicals usually presented her and her alone as the musical presence, except at the very end of her career, when she was paired with Donald O’Connor in Something in the Wind [1947], and with Dick Haymes in Up in Central Park [1948].) Her music was the deepest source of her intimacy with her audience. The happiness with which she sang, the charm of her voice, and the warmth with which she interpreted lyrics took her out of the frame and put her in touch with viewers. Her numbers were solos that she seemed to sing to each individual. She had the ability to connect, to create some secret pocket of existence that individuals in the audience thought only they occupied. (Most stars do this through a slight form of irony, or mockery—a third dimension of reality that puts viewer and star in their own space together. Durbin was one of the few to do it honestly.)

  After her first three movies, it was decided that all her films would be produced by the same man who had done the first ones, Joe Pasternak, whose filmmaking motto is said to have been “Never make an audience think.”* (All in all, they would do ten successful movies together.) Having found a hit maker in Durbin, the studio protected its interests and exploited her popularity, making as many good movies with her as quickly as it could. Naturally, it had to keep one eye on the clock—she was a teenage star who was not going to be a teenager much longer. By assigning the clever Joe Pasternak to handle all her movies, it was doing the best it possibly could for her—and for itself.

  Pasternak had a popular touch and instinctively understood Durbin’s appeal. He cast her in light, comedic films that capitalized on her glorious voice and her abundant natural charm.† Pasternak’s understanding of the Durbin mystique helped make her a star and keep her a star.* However, he was always generous, giving her all the credit. “No one makes a star, of course,” he said. “Not the producer, not the director, not the writer … Deanna’s genius had to be unfolded, but it was hers alone, always was, and no one ‘discovered’ her or can take credit for her.”

  Durbin posed in her own home with her real-life parents for their Christmas card.

  Deanna Durbin was quickly put into two new films to be made and released in 1938: the aforementioned Mad About Music, co-starring her with Gail Patrick and Herbert Marshall, and That Certain Age, with Jackie Cooper. From 1938 on, Universal put her on a regular schedule of two films a year until 1942, when she was offscreen for the calendar year. Everywhere she went in public she drew huge crowds. She could no longer comfortably attend public school, so an on-set tutor was assigned to her. Radio Guide magazine listed her as one of the best network stars of 1937 (she had continued singing on the radio), and her contract was rewritten. Her newly wealthy family moved from a cheap bungalow on Eighty-fifth Street to a beautiful $50,000 mansion in the exclusive Los Feliz neighborhood. They acquired a grand piano, a swimming pool, two cars, and a staff. During production on Mad About Music, Durbin celebrated her sixteenth birthday, and the studio provided her with all the things movie stars always get on their birthdays: a big cake with her name on it and the chance to be photographed extensively cutting the cake while giving out interviews for the press. Durbin, according to newspapers and magazines, said officially: “I love being a movie star, and I love to sing. I’m very grateful to everyone who helped make it happen.” This was the appropriate statement for fans and friends and employers: I’m happy. I’m humble. I’m grateful, and incidentally, I’m going to be obedient. It was what her studio wanted to hear.

  Mad About Music was an unqualified hit, her third in a row. She was officially a star. Joe Pasternak had once again shaped Durbin’s vehicle to reflect his particular combination of music, humor, and sentiment. It’s a story designed to tug at the heartstrings. Deanna’s been packed off to a boarding school in Switzerland by her glamorous mother (Gail Patrick), where she sings, feels lonely, and pumps up her bicycle tires. All ends well, with Durbin lying, maneuvering, and faking her way through the plot. The main thing was, of course, the music of the title. Durbin enjoyed making this film, finding friends in many who worked on the picture behind the scenes, among them a young assistant named Vaughn Paul.

  As That Certain Age
began shooting in early ’38, Pasternak and Universal were acutely aware that in December Durbin would turn seventeen. And worse, she would then turn eighteen, nineteen, and onward toward a possible oblivion. Not being stupid, they realized that their only chance of preserving their box office bonanza was to get her public to accept the inevitable. For That Certain Age, they flirted with her oncoming maturity by creating a plot that allowed them to have it both ways. The advertising trailers openly announced that Durbin would have a boyfriend of her own age (played by the popular Jackie Cooper) as well as an “older man” crush (the debonair Melvyn Douglas). She would, of course, still be the familiar, fresh young Deanna, and she’d sing. However, the movie accidentally gave fans more than the studio meant to show of what was ahead for little Deanna. It contained a scene in which her character fights with her parents over a dress they want her to wear at a big party. The dress is white, covered in ruffles and ribbons. Durbin refuses to wear it, complaining bitterly that it’s too young for her, “a child’s dress.” (And actually, it is.) She defies her parents by secretly stealing one of her mom’s formal gowns. The dress is long and black and strapless. She puts it on, piles her long hair up on top of her head, and floats downstairs in high heels. All of a sudden, Deanna Durbin looks not only really grown-up but also frighteningly sexy. What were the moviemakers thinking? Were they blind? Quickly enough, Durbin’s “parents” take charge and stuff her back into the white ruffles, but not before everyone gets a look-see at something a little bit discomforting. The plot tells viewers that Deanna Durbin looks silly dressed up way beyond her years, and that once she’s returned to her white dress, she looks both appropriate and lovely. The truth is that the white dress is hideous, and Durbin looks luscious in the black. The scene backfires. All of a sudden, everyone can see that Durbin is going to grow up. And soon. She is going to wear black, slink downstairs, put her hair up, and go after—dare one say it?—some kind of sex life? Oh, no! But the cat is out of the bag. Universal didn’t like it and neither did Durbin’s fans, who wrote in and said they loved That Certain Age, loved Deanna, loved everything—but not the black dress or the “romance,” however fake, with the older man.

  Universal dodged a bullet, but they also saw the handwriting on the wall. They had jumped the gun on Deanna and learned that fans preferred not to be rushed. The studio immediately made a definite step-by-step plan for her growing-up process, figuring that if they handled the subject carefully, audiences would continue to love her. They put her and her image under their very tightest corporate control. And they were lucky: She aged gracefully, barely changing physically, and her primary appeal always lay in her vocal talent, which only got stronger. Furthermore, there was no problem of fans having to lose their darling little star tot. Durbin didn’t come to the screen as a small child. She was never a Shirley Temple. Even though Temple managed to look cute for more than ten years, her studio was always under pressure to keep her a child, because that was what the audience had first bought into. No one wanted her to grow up at all. She was more or less dropped offscreen during what is commonly called “the awkward age.” (“The awkward age” is where Durbin began, but she was never awkward.) Everything Fox did to present Temple from her first big hit, Stand Up and Cheer in 1934, to what is really the end of her time as a child star, in 1940, was to dress her in the same way, keep her story lines about orphans, lost children, rich daddies, and helpful old codgers. In other words, stunt her growth and hang on for dear life to the box office bonanza that was Shirley Temple. Durbin’s career could be handled differently. She didn’t have to be frozen in a fixed narrative age. “See how she grows” could become one of her main selling points, so all the Universal machine marketing was geared to Durbin’s aging process, but carefully and gradually.

  Since Durbin had entered films so successfully in Three Smart Girls, Pasternak and Universal now felt that implementing the new Durbin “growing-up” plan could begin with a sequel. They could restore her to fans—start her back where she began and let her slowly move forward to a very young adulthood. The sequel to Three Smart Girls would be called—what else?—Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939). It was exactly what fans wanted, and once again, Universal had a hit Deanna Durbin movie.

  While Durbin was making Three Smart Girls Grow Up, she learned that she would be awarded an honorary Oscar at the 1938 Academy Awards ceremony on February 23, 1939. (Her Smart Girls sequel would go into general release toward the end of March of that year.) She would share the “juvenile” Oscar award with Mickey Rooney, and officially it would be defined as being “for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement.”* Rooney didn’t show up for the ceremony, but Durbin did, giving a self-confident and appropriate speech that made a good impression on everyone. “Three and a half years ago,” she said, “when I came into this business, I had one desire. That was to be as good as I could be. Tonight you have made me very, very happy. My aspirations had not reached such a peak. I am extremely grateful.”

  Durbin was seventeen years old. (Rooney, born September 23, 1920, was eighteen.) Legally, she was no longer a child star. On the set of her first film, Three Smart Girls, her age qualified her as a child performer and the restrictions that applied had to be taken into consideration. Although she was allowed to be on the set all day, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the law required her to spend three of her hours in school sessions. Universal archival records indicate that her day included thirty minutes for lunch, two hours and ten minutes for makeup and wardrobe, and a thirty-minute respite at day’s end to prepare for leaving the studio (removing makeup, et cetera). Adding in her legally required school hours meant that she could be filmed only two hours and twenty minutes per day. On those terms, no one at her studio was interested in having her remain a child—it wasn’t profitable. Everyone, however, was interested in her receiving an Oscar for being one, and having the fans perceive her as one for as long as it was profitable.

  The power of Durbin’s stardom is well illustrated by the article in the November 1939 issue of Fortune entitled simply “Deanna Durbin.” Under her name, a small headline stated, “One child who clicked among thousands who didn’t, Universal’s No. 1 drawing card will have earned $1,600,000 before she is twenty-one. How?” The article points out that “a really successful child is not a success but a gold mine—for the studio as well as for the parents … Such a career is still one of the great American fairy stories … Most conspicuously, right now, it is happening to a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Deanna Durbin.” Durbin was actually seventeen and just about to turn eighteen on December 4, but facts were never an issue when it came to movie stars, even in Fortune magazine. Fortune says that her five movies to date had all grossed more than twice their production costs, and that her movies alone represented more than 17 percent of Universal’s entire gross. “It had long been a common Hollywood assumption (not quite accurate, as will appear) that Deanna has been keeping that underprivileged studio from bankruptcy single-handed,” reports Fortune, adding, “In any case, for a maid so lately nubile, she has a tremendous commercial significance.” (This article says MGM let Durbin go by accident, her performance in Every Sunday having been deemed wonderful. There is no mention of any choice between Garland or Durbin, or any mention of Garland at all.)*

  With Deanna turning eighteen on December 4, 1939, studio bosses felt it was time for a real “romance” on film for Deanna Durbin. Universal created a Cinderella story entitled First Love, thereby announcing to one and all to get ready for a more grown-up Deanna. All the movie ads blatantly promoted “Deanna’s first kiss,” and a great publicity hoo-hah was created out of the selection of the actor chosen to bestow it, the young and handsome Robert Stack, who would go on to a lifelong career in both film and television. Stack was Durbin’s on-screen Prince Charming, and their sweet “first kiss” was appropriately chaste by anyone’s standards. De
anna sang seven numbers, the production values were first rate, and her modest step toward maturity charmed everyone. Once again, Durbin’s movie was a hit, and Universal breathed a sigh of relief. Their marketing strategy was working. If they handled the issue carefully, Deanna Durbin would be allowed to become a grown-up (within limits) on-screen. What they didn’t realize was that “within limits” was going to irritate Edna Mae Durbin, and she was going to make her displeasure known. For the moment, however, everything was fine, and three weeks after her eighteenth birthday, Deanna Durbin began work on a movie to be called It’s a Date (1940), co-starring Walter Pidgeon and Kay Francis, which was so successful that it outperformed her previous two big hits at the box office. Durbin’s contract was renegotiated for a hefty $300,000 per film, and she graduated from high school. It was 1940, and she was nineteen years old.

  During her run of remarkable successes from 1936 to 1940, a four-year period in which she appeared in seven box office hits, Deanna Durbin was constantly in the fan magazines and newspapers. She opened 1940 with her first costume picture, the rarely seen Spring Parade, one of those lighthearted Hungarian things. She finds romance (Bob Cummings), meets Emperor Franz Josef (Henry Stephenson), dances the czardas, clowns with Mischa Auer, sings six songs, and deals with a reluctant goat. She then went into her next movie, provocatively called Nice Girl?, a title designed to spice things up a bit. Nice Girl?, which was to be her first release of 1941, was planned as a transition movie, in which her character would be determined to shed the label of “nice girl.” (She ends up in a strange man’s pajamas, arriving home in the wee hours of the morning.) It would all be very innocent, of course, but it was provocative and once again showed how Universal cleverly shaped Durbin’s movies to be about her growing up. Since Durbin made movie after movie, she was never off the screen long enough to change all that much physically for her viewers. Audiences really were watching her grow up in a step-by-step process that was so continuous that it was never alienating.