The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  The movie also does a good job of doing what Durbin herself wanted, by carrying little Penny forward into World War II America. The character had always been about democracy and female triumphs, so she goes to work in the aircraft factory and learns to rivet. Unlike what happens in some other movies that had movie stars or rich girls screw up in the “Oh-dear-I-broke-a-fingernail” school of women who have to learn to work, Penny gets it right away. (Durbin’s democratic characters always would.) Furthermore, she starts singing to entertain at lunch hour and makes friends with everyone. She fits in. When she and Cotten are at a dine-and-dance joint that workers frequent, she’s the only one dressed in a long formal gown. Because it has an enormous hoopskirt, they can’t find room on the crowded dance floor. Penny just goes behind a wall and jerks her gown off, coming out in her fancy little black slip as if it were a cocktail dress. Durbin’s resourceful little girl is resourceful in a new way!

  As usual, she’s featured in several intense close-ups. Her lips are full and moist. Her voice is lower, huskier. And that nice little sparkling twinkle in her eye hints at something more than a bracing bicycle ride. But she’s still Deanna: confident, sure, and clever at solving her problems. Cotten has told her he’ll never get serious, but naturally, she gets her man. As he prepares to board his plane back to war in China, she confidently says, “I’ve got it all figured out. I’ll build ’em. You fly ’em.” It’s the usual Durbin credo. The movie ends with a series of close-ups of her, first watching his plane take off, then singing at the factory, and then superimposed over flying B-17s. She is singing “Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There.” All Deanna Durbin movies had their priorities straight.

  Durbin appeared in one other 1943 release, Frank Borzage’s sweet film His Butler’s Sister. It was a charming comedy, with Durbin looking lovely and her co-stars, Pat O’Brien and Franchot Tone, supporting her in fine style. Durbin was not satisfied, however, and kept pushing the studio to let her appear to be older, sexier, more mature. Finally, her unhappiness could not be ignored; she was too big a star and too valuable a property. At the end of 1943, Universal gave in and announced that from now on, Deanna Durbin’s movies would change direction and audiences would see her as a dramatic actress rather than a musical comedy star. Durbin had triumphed over the machine and was going to challenge the typecasting that had been hung on her since her first movie. The announcement was made by Felix Jackson, who firmly stated that Durbin’s total change of pace would begin with her playing in a film noir inexplicably named Christmas Holiday (1944). (As if that weren’t a big enough error, it co-starred her with newcomer Gene Kelly. Although Kelly had not yet fully established himself as the musical box office star he would become, he was still associated with musicals through his Broadway success Pal Joey and his successful co-starring vehicle with Judy Garland, For Me and My Gal, in 1942.*) Naturally, audiences assumed that a movie co-starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly and called Christmas Holiday would be a lighthearted musical. (People still make this mistake.) The grim little story has Kelly playing a murderer and Durbin his put-upon wife who, it is hinted, is practically a prostitute. Ah, the lapses of sanity amid the coldhearted planning of the studio system. In her role as “nightclub hostess,” Durbin is first seen dragging herself out into the footlights of a seedy dive to warble the bad news: “Spring will be a little late this year.” Audiences barely knew what to do with themselves.

  Seen today, Christmas Holiday isn’t all that strange. Gene Kelly’s character is, for most of the film, Gene Kelly’s character—a charming seducer with a hard edge, his traditional Pal Joey. He’s creating a likable heel, familiar Kelly territory. He’s overfriendly, oversolicitous, taking his Irish charm just a shade too far, so that it seems ominous, even dangerous. In fact, both Kelly and Durbin are really quite good in this film, but over the years, the idea that they were miscast has doomed Christmas Holiday. They are miscast only in terms of audience expectations, not in terms of their abilities. (Playing a cynical newspaperman, Richard Whorf assesses their relationship: “Bad boy meets good girl. Damage estimated at $10,000.” It was the general critical opinion.)

  Christmas Holiday was the only time Durbin was allowed to act a mature role with pain and depth connected to it. When Kelly commits murder, his creepy mother (played by Gale Sondergaard) blames it all on the Durbin character. Awash in guilt feelings, Deanna degrades herself by accepting “work” in a “nightclub” that is obviously selling female companionship. Her entrance is once again held back. The plot has been under way for a good ten minutes before she appears, and the setting for her entrance must have been genuinely shocking to her fans at the time. It’s a dark and stormy night—hard rain, wet streets, expressionistic lighting—outside a run-down old mansion that is an obvious brothel. There’s a madam (Gladys George), and two women are dancing together. Couples are going upstairs. “Girls” are sitting at tables, and Durbin is dressed in low-cut black satin, wearing heavy makeup. She’s tired, depressed, and down on her luck. When she sings, she has no zing, no bounce. Her radiant smile is gone. Deanna Durbin is too tired to twinkle.

  Durbin’s one chance for an acting challenge came in Christmas Holiday, with Richard Whorf and Gene Kelly, but fans didn’t like her in dark shadows, heavy lipstick, low-cut necklines, and murky melodrama.

  As the plot unfolds, Durbin is given the chance to break down and cry, to express regret, and to really suffer. If you didn’t know who Deanna Durbin was, you would accept her performance on its own terms—and she’s good. She was never afraid to show emotion as an actress. But the ghost of “Deanna Durbin” hovers over her character. If you take away the noirish shadows, narrated flashbacks, and wipe off all her makeup, you could find the usual Durbin in her “girl from Vermont” who falls in love with the wrong guy. What’s missing is the fix-it quality and the radiance. And yet there’s no finer Deanna Durbin screen moment than when she embraces Kelly and lovingly sings the Irving Berlin hit song “Always.” The problem was simple: Her studio and her fans didn’t want to see her feeling blue and looking troubled. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, it’s that no one wanted her to.

  Durbin received some favorable reviews, and she herself was said to believe that Christmas Holiday was her best movie. However, fans moved fast to write in and complain, making it clear: Give us back our Deanna. And right now. Universal moved equally fast to comply.

  The failure of Christmas Holiday drove Durbin back to musicals. She next made her first color film, Can’t Help Singing, a fluffy little “wagons west” story about yet another feisty and independent, parent-defying young woman. The film has a marvelous Jerome Kern score (with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg), and no fewer than three hit songs emerged from it: the title song, the bouncy “Californ-i-ay,” and the lyrically beautiful love song “More and More.” By 1941, most leading ladies were being presented to the public in color, and certainly musical stars were appearing almost exclusively in Technicolor movies. Yet Durbin had been a workhorse saddled to cheaper black and white to bring the maximum profits to Universal. As a sop to her return to type, Universal appeased her by placing her front and center in glorious color and lavish costumes designed by Walter Plunkett.* In color, her hair has been turned into a reddish gold that enhances her milky complexion. She’s decked out in a series of gowns in striking colors: a giant green bow on a hat, a red-and-gray plaid coat trimmed in gray fox with matching muff, and an all-lavender ensemble. Whatever she wears, she has matching gloves, hat, and flowers or ribbons for her hair. She looks good in a lighthearted and swiftly moving entertainment piece. But it’s still the old Deanna Durbin character—a twisty little piece of baggage, an adorable con artist who takes things into her own hands and gets her own way from all the grown-ups, including her parents. (Let it be said once and for all: The little girl actresses who were big, from Pickford through Temple to Durbin and on to today’s Hilary Duff, were never anything but a living hell for men. They took charge, and how!)

  One scene illustrat
es why Durbin’s frustration with Universal’s inability to accept her as a woman was valid. When she sings “More and More” to her leading man, the forgettable Robert Paige, they are alone at night in the open spaces, traveling overland to rejoin their wagon train. (Where were the censors on this one? Maybe because it was Deanna Durbin, they figured no one would believe she’d do anything inappropriate at night.) There’s an undeniably sexy quality to her performance. She leans seductively toward Paige, singing with a deeply controlled but unmistakable warmth that could be called heat. It’s not just a number in the movie, it’s really a love song. She sings it to him, with an intimacy that most romantic numbers don’t have. There was always something lush about Deanna Durbin, something soft and sensuous under her sparkle and bounce; she was a softly curved and sexy woman. She married three times before she was thirty years old, and she wanted to put this element of herself on the screen. From time to time, she succeeded far more than she may have thought she did.

  Can’t Help Singing was a hit. After its successful release in 1945, Durbin and Felix Jackson (who was considerably older than she) eloped and were married quietly in Las Vegas. (Durbin’s career had only three years left to run, and that would be just about the lifetime of her marriage.) Her next film was one of her best as an adult singing comedienne. Lady on a Train (1945) was directed by Charles David, the man who would become her next and last husband. She has clearly been “made over.” Her hair is long and blond, her makeup is mature, and her lips look sensuous. Durbin has been “styled” and has her own version of the great female star’s personally designed wardrobe. The only problem is that these clothes are really hideous. In one scene she wears a coat that had to have been made out of a pinto pony—and it’s trimmed with studded cuffs. With it she has a runaway hat with a gigantic feather jammed in it.* (Wearing this outfit, she’s chased by angry dogs. I rest my case.)

  There’s a schizophrenic quality to the costuming that reflects the ongoing fight between Durbin and her studio. In an early scene, she wears her hair in little pigtails and sloshes into a crowded movie theatre in an oversized raincoat, causing a big ruckus—ever the determined Miss Fix-It, bent on getting her way. Soon after, she appears in a glamorous black faille suit with matching hat and muff, her hair twisted into two elaborate chignons. Since we’ve just seen her in the raincoat and pigtails, the faille and the chignons make her look as if she’s our Deanna just playing dress-up in her mom’s clothes. Lady on a Train is lots of fun, but right on the screen it makes clear the conflict over Deanna Durbin and her image. On the one hand, there’s the studio’s obvious attempt to present the story as if our Deanna were still perking along, solving a murder with the same spunk and energy she put to getting work for her dad’s orchestra. On the other, audiences can see her in black, stepping out under a shadowy nightclub spotlight, singing “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?” in a drop-dead sexy manner. Even in a single scene, the conflict can show up. Deanna’s offscreen daddy out in San Francisco can’t sleep until she sings to him, so she uncorks a lyrical “Silent Night.” (It’s really still 1937, fans, and all’s right with Deanna’s world.) But the number is shot like a typical Hollywood glamour moment worthy of a Turner or a Hayworth. Durbin is radiantly lit in close-up, her long blond hair spread out over a satin pillow. As she literally coos, “Silent night, holy night,” a series of close-ups show her right side up, upside down, from overhead, from under her chin, from dead on. Suddenly it’s 1945, folks, and here’s your latest pinup babe! Universal Studios and Deanna Durbin were on a collision course.

  Durbin’s next film, Because of Him, released in 1946, would be more of the same. It reteamed her with Charles Laughton; Franchot Tone was her romantic lead. Her clothes were designed by Travis Banton, and her cameraman was the great Hal Mohr. One credit tells us that the “Musical Director of Miss Durbin” is Edgar Fairchild. Not only does she have her own personal musical director, but she is “Miss Durbin,” no less. (The producer, of course, is her husband, Felix Jackson.) She was being taken care of in the way she wanted to be taken care of, but also in the way Universal wanted.

  Because of Him shows how the audience just wanted Durbin and didn’t care about logic. Her character wants to be an actress, not a singer. She becomes a Broadway actress in a straight play, and the fact she’s a great singer plays no role in this success. Well, why not? We’re in a Deanna Durbin movie, and Deanna Durbin is a singer. Durbin is the definer of her own movie universe—no further explanations are needed. In the beginning of Because of Him, she sings for no reason, allegedly singing along to a recording she has made of herself. She is dreamy, radiant. Her close-ups invite intimacy, and the structure of her movies does the same. Viewers watch her primp, check out her appearance in a mirror, decide which pin to wear on her suit, and so on. She seems to be singing for herself alone, separate from her filmed universe, and thus singing directly to the audience. Deanna Durbin movies began to be only about her and her audience. Both star and studio no longer pretended they were to be anything more than vehicles for her singing and her popularity.

  While making Because of Him, Durbin and Jackson announced that they were expecting a baby in March 1946. This child, her first, was a daughter born in February and named Jessica.* Sadly, the marriage was already in serious trouble, and the couple would announce their separation within the year. After the birth of her daughter, Durbin would make only four more movies. The first, and the last to be produced by Felix Jackson, was a musical remake of a Margaret Sullavan hit, The Good Fairy (1935). The original script had been written by the talented Preston Sturges and directed by William Wyler. The remake was updated to make Durbin a movie usher named Louise Ginglebusher and to give her four lovely songs. The new title was I’ll Be Yours (1947), and Durbin, now a mother, played her part of the lovable orphan with great charm. It was her last good movie. The final three films of her career were Something in the Wind (a title just asking for critical jokes), which cast her as a female disk jockey who gets kidnapped; Up in Central Park, her second period piece based on a stage musical about Boss Tweed; and her very last movie, For the Love of Mary (1948), which had been shot before Up in Central Park. Mary, in which she plays a White House telephone operator, had been shelved, but was finally released in late 1948.

  Durbin was under contract to Universal until the end of 1949, but she didn’t make a single film that year (although she collected her salary). Her divorce from Jackson was finalized during this time on the grounds that he had “deserted her two years before.” Durbin said, “He left me and went to New York. He never came back and I have never seen him again.” Taking her little daughter with her (she was granted custody), she went to France, removing herself from the spotlight forever. Her only words regarding her departure were these: “Take a look at my last four films and you’ll appreciate that the stories … were mediocre—near impossible. Whenever I complained or asked for story or director approval, the studio refused. I was the highest-paid star in the poorest material.” In December 1950, she married Charles David, the man who had directed her in Lady on a Train, and in July 1951, they had a son named Peter. And that is really the last anyone can say about Deanna Durbin. Edna Mae apparently lived on and lived on happily, but Deanna Durbin was finished.

  BY THE TIME DURBIN LEFT, Universal was not all that surprised. Furthermore, they had prepared themselves for losing her. She was star trouble, and they knew it. As early as the end of the 1930s, Universal was already trying to create other little Deanna Durbins—just in case—while over at MGM, they, too, were trying to recoup their losses from not having kept her under contract. Imitation Durbins were almost a cottage industry. Not only was she a product at Universal, she was the product. Naturally, they had to have a potential replacement under contract, and they had not one, but two: first, Gloria Jean; then, Susanna Foster.

  It’s the ultimate business irony—and perhaps another of the reasons people outside of Hollywood think the place is insane—that, after having spent a
fortune to create a unique personality that they and only they owned, a studio would immediately set out to duplicate it. Once movie stars’ types were fully established, they could receive the ultimate tribute to their importance: the creation of a “look-alike” or potential replacement who could become a threat in case the star became difficult to work with.* All successful movie stars faced this “duplicator” issue. Even Shirley Temple was threatened by Fox’s other very popular child star, Jane Withers. And Paramount developed a brunette would-be Temple, Carolyn Lee, who could neither sing nor dance. Rival studios always would try to create their own version of a successful actor or actress. This was true proof of stardom. Margaret O’Brien said, “MGM had a look-alike for every star … if you were a star, they would hold it over you and threaten to use the look-alike … even though they never would.” For instance, it’s strange to read articles today about the unique qualities of Lauren Bacall. She’s lasted long enough and at a high enough level in movies, theatre, and television not to have to justify herself. She has become an original, eliminating the competition. But when audiences first saw her, they talked about Veronica Lake. Like Lake, Bacall was skinny, seductive, and had long flowing hair. Lake was the original, a sexy little girl with blond hair falling over one eye and a low, husky voice. After Lake, and then Bacall, came Lizabeth Scott, a blonde (like Lake) with a smoky voice and a sultry manner, and Nancy Guild, groomed for stardom by an ad campaign that screamed Guild “rhymes with wild!”† Bacall is a case where the duplication surpassed the original.