The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Nice Girl? was in production on December 4, 1940, when Durbin celebrated her heavily publicized birthday. The event had become a tradition. She was “surprised” by a large party on the soundstage and presented with a “new song” to sing, “I’m Nineteen Now.” Plans for her next movie, to start immediately after Nice Girl?, were announced. It would be called It Started With Eve (1941), and she would co-star with the famous Charles Laughton. The studio saw no problems on the Durbin star horizon. However, the very next day Mr. and Mrs. Durbin announced the engagement of their nineteen-year-old daughter to that nice young man who had been working on her set back in 1938, Mr. Vaughn Austin Paul. The wedding date would be her parents’ own thirty-third wedding anniversary, April 18, 1941. It was Deanna Durbin’s first really grown-up step, and she took it on her own without the studio’s advice or prior approval. Marriage! Dum-da-dum-dum. The studio, less than thrilled, nevertheless revved up the publicity department. If they couldn’t stop it, they could at least use it.

  The details of Durbin’s wedding to Vaughn Paul were fully reported in all the fanzines of the day. Deanna wed Paul at the Wilshire Methodist Church where “Jeanette MacDonald had married Gene Raymond.” There were long stories about showers, parties, and, ominously, quarrels. “They quarrel now and then,” Modern Screen says cheerfully, adding, “Who doesn’t?” The main thing is this: “There has never been such a wedding.” (At least not since Jeanette MacDonald’s, Norma Shearer’s, Jean Harlow’s, or whoever’s.) Vera West designed her gown, and Deanna and Mrs. Durbin brought back the lace for the veil from a recent trip to France. (Just when they’d had time to go to France wasn’t made clear.) Deanna wore a lengthy, floating train, carried flowers with streamers, and shook hands with nine hundred guests. Judy Garland and her new musician husband, David Rose, were there, and so was Mickey Rooney. The other two of the “three smart girls” were bridesmaids, and a big reception was held in the Florentine Room of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Atop her giant wedding cake was a birdcage with a pair of lovebirds inside. Outside, and not invited, were thousands of fans, all screaming their heads off. The couple left on their honeymoon in a blaze of flashbulbs.

  One month later, Deanna Durbin was back at work, filming It Started With Eve, which most fans think is her best movie and which became one of the year’s top ten box office draws. Directed with excellent pacing by Henry Koster, and once again produced by Joe Pasternak (in their final film together), the movie paired her with a worthy opponent in the scene-stealing department: the very wily Charles Laughton. The movie opened at Radio City Music Hall, the official exhibition endorsement of a film that everyone thought was going to make serious money. It Started With Eve presented the first really grown-up Durbin. She doesn’t “fix” things. (Laughton does.) She is out in the world, working for a living (as a hat-check girl), with no parents anywhere in sight (they are back in her hometown of “Shelbyville, Ohio”). At no time is she required to braid her hair in pigtails, put on little-girl outfits, or pretend to be anything other than a mature young lady. She has real love scenes, lovely clothes, and a chance to show herself as an excellent screwball comedienne. There’s one moment in which, fighting with her leading man, she’s asked to romp around a room in a juvenile manner, jumping over furniture and careening around tables. However, she’s wearing a sophisticated gown, hairdo, and makeup, and the “romp” has grown-up implications. The plot is clever. A rich old man, played to the rafters by Charles Laughton, lies on his deathbed. His son (Robert Cummings) races to his side, and the old man’s last wish is to meet the woman that will become his daughter-in-law. Since this fiancée is out shopping with her harridan of a mother, and since time’s a-wastin’, Cummings rushes out, spots Deanna, and hires her to impersonate his bride-to-be to give the old man peace. Instead, he gets a look at Durbin, perks up, and doesn’t die. The rest of the movie is about sorting things out, with Durbin singing, Laughton hamming, and Cummings looking confused.

  The pairing of Charles Laughton and Deanna Durbin is the Battle of the Charm Titans. Laughton was seldom cast with a co-star who could take a single moment away from him, and neither was Durbin. When these two scene stealers take to a nightclub floor to dance a wild conga, it’s a true “I can do anything better than you can” moment of star acting, each one grabbing the focus back from the other one in a duel of audience champs. The great thing is that they seem to delight in the challenge. Finally, they both seem to be saying, I’ve got a co-star who can bounce back at me. It Started With Eve has that accidental magic that can lift a minor picture up: a harmony of great stars, great script and direction, superb production values, and a supporting cast in which not one false note is sounded. Fans ate it up. Everything seemed perfect.

  And then it happened. Deanna’s marriage was the first defiant step. The second was to begin openly fighting with her studio because she felt they were keeping her a child. Durbin went home and sat down … and no studio threats could budge her. From It Started With Eve, released in October 1941, until The Amazing Mrs. Holliday, released in February 1943, no new Deanna Durbin movie appeared. Although it was announced that she was going to star in a film called Forever Young, to be directed by the celebrated Frenchman Jean Renoir (then in Hollywood), not a single Deanna Durbin movie was released in 1942.

  Deanna Durbin and Universal Pictures faced an essential movie star problem: what the studio wanted versus what the star wanted. Durbin was that thing the studios most feared and hated in their “products”—a star with a brain in her head and a commonsense background. For her, it was about being allowed to be a grown-up woman and to appear as one on-screen. That meant being allowed to perform in more serious material and be recognized as a person who could make decisions regarding her career. Studios were experienced in handling movie stars who would sulk until they came to their senses, and the executives in charge made assumptions about Durbin’s feelings based on that kind of prior experience. They were used to stars who might present problems but who would let the money, the fame, and the lack of another potential career bring them home again. It didn’t occur to them that Durbin might be different. They always knew her movies would ultimately stop being profitable, at which point they would drop her, which would be her problem, not theirs. But in 1942, Deanna Durbin was a movie star with undeniable box office clout, and a year offscreen for her was money lost, especially since the public’s acceptance of her as an adult wasn’t a sure bet. Since Universal was a studio that did not own its own theatre chains, any movie star that could draw audiences was very important to them, more so than at the powerful studios that did have their own theatres. At first, Universal decided to wait her out. They used her hiatus to pump up her fan mag publicity, a way of concealing that there were no new Durbin movies in the works. The show went on.

  Durbin saw herself as glamorous and mature, a woman who could do more than play feisty girls, but her studio wanted her to keep on pumping up her bicycle tires.

  The studio worked hard to keep her in the public eye: They issued portraits from their files to keep her face out there, and she remained front and center in all its publicity handouts. She also remained a cover girl for Photoplay, Modern Screen, and all the others, since Universal had a backlog of photos. The volume 1, number 1 issue of Star Album, published in 1942, had Deanna Durbin on the cover. She also held pride of place in the month’s stories, under the heading “America’s Sweetheart.” This article had one full-page photo and five other smaller ones. “She belongs to the public as no other star ever has,” says the write-up, claiming the public has taken her to their hearts as though she were their own daughter, sister, or girlfriend, “whatever the case may be.” She is praised for her talent, naturalness, and the fact that she has behaved like “a normal, well-bred young American girl and not like a rootin’ tootin’ movie star changing boyfriends and hair shades every other week.”

  “Deanna Durbin’s Life Story” trumpets the cover of the February 1943 issue of Modern Screen, which also has her fac
e on the cover. (She’s twenty-one years old and already has a “life story.” Not only that, it’s “Deanna Durbin’s Life Story”—book length.) Durbin is everywhere in the magazine. Pages 26 through 33 and 97 through 102 are all entitled simply, “Deanna Durbin.” There is a full-page black-and-white photo of her, and another “book-length” story of her life. Eighteen photos, including many family pictures, are printed. One of the photos is a wedding picture of Deanna and her groom. Durbin’s “book-length” story is really only her original studio-invented bio updated to include her marriage and latest films. Readers apparently never got tired of hearing the same things repeated again and again.

  Once Universal understood that Durbin was deadly serious about staying away, real negotiations began. Big promises were made, and Durbin agreed to return to work and was welcomed by everyone with great relief. In order to accommodate her complaints, it was agreed that her next film would indeed be directed by Jean Renoir, and it would be called Forever Young (a title that might have alerted Durbin to trouble ahead). It would, however, be produced by someone new, Felix Jackson, replacing Pasternak. The studio said Jackson would help create a new image for Deanna Durbin while still building on the old one that fans loved.

  Forever Young was released as The Amazing Mrs. Holliday. It was another Durbin musical, and the director was the pedestrian Bruce Manning. What happened? For many years, no one really knew, but in 1986, the intrepid film historian William K. Everson published an explanation in Films in Review. Having read Renoir’s newly published autobiography, which discussed the Durbin film and referred to Renoir’s having done “several weeks” of shooting, Everson wrote to Durbin for an explanation. In one of her rare—and perhaps her only—responses to anyone asking about her former life, Durbin wrote a thoughtful letter back. She clarified the movie’s purpose: “We all wanted to change the, by then, stereotyped image of the ‘nice’ young girl, the sugar-coated ‘Miss Fixit,’ the kind of story Jean Renoir qualified as ‘trop mini.’” Durbin explained that Bruce Manning was named producer, and the working experience was a happy one. However, as shooting progressed, the script didn’t seem to be working. Manning suggested adapting The Taming of the Shrew to present-day Texas, with Durbin’s “father” becoming a gas station owner. This idea did not work out. Durbin, who should know, made clear that Renoir shot two-thirds of the movie as it now exists.

  Felix Jackson began management of Durbin’s career with The Amazing Mrs. Holliday. Released in February 1943, the movie was weak, bolstered only by Durbin’s still-intact charm. For her return to movies, the Durbin-Universal compromise is in effect. She is presented in both a childish way (pigtails, bobby sox, and oversized raincoat) and a grown-up, glamorous way (upswept hair, jewelry, and sparkling evening gowns, although much is made of how she can’t really walk in her high heels). The plot was dubious, all about a missionary (Durbin) who rescues nine war orphans in China. For the first time in her career, there were serious rumbles from the critics. The fans, however, still loved her. (“Here’s Deanna back—and about time!” crowed the ads. “The Great Durbin Drought is over!”)

  But what was happening? It Started With Eve seemed to have launched her into a more grown-up career, playing a lovely young woman, old enough to fall in love and marry and be on her own. She had been cleverly cast in a property that maintained her original persona but updated it into letting her deal with love, romance, and the need to make her own living. Mrs. Holliday was both a step back and a step down. Durbin’s complaints about Universal grew. She began to speak openly about how she really felt. The fan magazines of 1943 began printing some of the truth about her situation.

  At first, her remarks seemed cheerfully cranky—a “Well, everyone has to let me grow up, don’t they?” kind of statement. And then they became frankly critical in a way seldom heard from movie stars. “You know how it is with parents? How they feel they still have a child when they haven’t, until the child revolts and then something’s done about it? They’d had me at the studio since I was a little girl, and I still seemed a little girl to them. You don’t consult children. You decide what’s good for them and do it. With grown-ups, you ask what they think, and if they think it’s okay, then you do it … I just wanted to be consulted, talked to. What I really wanted, I guess, was for them to realize that I’d grown up.” Then she began to do more than complain. That “well-bred American girl” who was no ordinary “rootin’ tootin’ movie star” but “happily married” sued her husband, Vaughn Paul, for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty (the usual Hollywood issue). It was December 1943, and she was twenty-two years old. She told the press that she was “normally a very happy person” but that she had been in “a constant state of depression” which had been caused by Paul’s “criticism of me and everything I did.” Vaughn Paul enlisted in the navy and was not heard from on the subject. The divorce was granted. Within no time, Hedda Hopper was hired to write a treatise on the “Inside Story of Deanna Durbin’s Divorce” in the January 1944 issue of Motion Picture. Durbin had, apparently, started doing a little rootin’ and tootin’, but Hedda stoutly does her job, recounting how Deanna had always been the ideal of American girlhood, but … as Hedda flacks it, “Deanna’s divorce is not shattering news to me. It is the most natural thing in the world … Her marriage was doomed from the start.” (Hedda Hopper as oracle.) Hedda tells us that Deanna forgot to follow the advice of her mother, just like some of you fans out there (so don’t be so quick to judge and, above all, don’t stop being her fans). She wisely casts Durbin as a “Cinderella,” who just had to keep on with “her drudgery.” “Work, work, work,” says Hedda. Poor Deanna! Hopper describes how a special dressing room was presented to Deanna in a big public ceremony, and “it had been especially constructed for her, and it was a lovely thing.” Although some people might think that indicates a life of privilege and pampering, Hopper is on the job to warn what it was really like: “Deanna went through the impressive ceremony graciously, then went back immediately into the dressing room. It might have been a prison, except that there were no bars.”

  Of course, for a young woman like Deanna Durbin it was a prison, albeit a luxurious one. She now faced one of her primary burdens as a movie star. The fans wanted her “prison” life for themselves, and if they couldn’t have it, they wanted Deanna to have it on their behalf. She was their designated thriver, and if she wasn’t happy, well, it wasn’t their fault, was it? Let her suffer. Besides, her suffering was interesting and united her even closer to them in their need for escape.

  As for her studio, they had started making deals with other big names such as W. C. Fields, Marlene Dietrich, and Edgar Bergen. Instead of relying on a couple of Deanna Durbin movies to rake in the money, they started turning away from her to hire a solid list of performers they could use to make other A films every year. They wanted to make Durbin movies, but now she was what studios called “difficult.” They dropped all pretense of her being their “little girl.” Before he left her behind, even Pasternak himself, who loved her, called her a “cold cash property.” Lest this seem heartless to her public, he reminded everyone of the facts of life about movie stardom: “We may seem inhuman,” he said regarding how Durbin was treated, “but for a price like that [what she was paid] we can’t be too gallant, either.”

  Since Deanna Durbin had always been Penelope Craig, her Penny from Three Smart Girls, Universal now had the brains to figure out a compromise that would work for them as well as for Durbin and her fans. They put her in a movie in which Penny was allowed to be grown up. Furthermore, they smartly connected her directly to the current issue of World War II defense plant efforts and the Rosie the Riveter working woman. Hers to Hold (1943) was the result. The credits warn that Deanna is not a child: “Miss Durbin’s gowns by Adrian.” And her co-star is not a boy. No Jackie Cooper or even a young Robert Stack. He’s Joseph Cotten, who was not a kid but a suave and sophisticated “older” man. He has sex appeal and doesn’t hide it.*

  T
he movie starts with Penelope Craig giving blood at the American Red Cross blood bank. She enters to a flurry of activity—“Penelope Craig! A celebrity! Everyone knows her!” Durbin is given the kind of star entrance that was popular in Hollywood at the time. The audience naturally would be looking intently at the screen, waiting for their first glimpse of the Star Really Grown Up This Time. Everyone talks about her, says her character’s name, anticipates her. When she enters, surrounded by reporters and photographers and doctors and nurses, the audience is at first not allowed to actually see her. She’s swept into a cubicle behind hospital screens where only her feet are visible. A flurry of photographers’ bulbs go off. Then her unmistakable voice is heard and her legs go up on the bed. Audiences can hear her and see her feet in black high heels, but no Deanna! This kind of tantalizing photography and cutting and story building was perfect for Durbin, whose fan legions were so strong. Furthermore, there was the “Penny is now a grown-up—what is she going to look like?” issue for viewers. There’s no real surprise. She looks like Deanna Durbin, which was the whole point of the star entrance.

  Throughout the movie, the compromise between Durbin’s desire to be a woman on-screen and Universal’s need to have her be the same old Deanna is obvious. Charles Winninger, repeating his role as Durbin’s father, nostalgically says, “Seems like only yesterday she was—that tall.” Later in the film, he says, “You grew up too fast. It’s the only way I have of keeping my little girl little” as he shows the “family” home movies. And naturally, the “home movies” are all footage from the original movie, Three Smart Girls, and other Durbin films. Fans can relive their first glimpse of Deanna, fresh-faced and sailing her boat. Several minutes of the running time of Hers to Hold is taken up with old footage. Deanna sails, pumps up her bicycle tires, hugs her father, has a pillow fight with her sisters, twirls for the camera in her first long dress, and sits proudly at her graduation. The star machine could solve its Durbin problem—resurrect the old one and resell her. (Universal knew how to sell its version of Deanna Durbin. No studio was ever smarter about any star, until it got dumb.)