Dane Clark was a look-alike John Garfield.‡ Patric Knowles was a look-alike Errol Flynn. James Craig, a Clark Gable, and Cheryl Walker, a Lana Turner. Interestingly, if Warners had wanted a look-alike Joan Blondell, they had one ready made in her own sister, Gloria. Unfortunately for her career, Gloria was too much of a look-alike. In a small role as Errol Flynn’s secretary in Four’s a Crowd, it’s distracting. When she enters the room, she disrupts the flow of the story. Is this Joan Blondell? In the meantime, the interaction between Flynn and Rosalind Russell gets lost. Warner Bros. understood the problem. Gloria Blondell couldn’t be a star.
Durbin’s situation in facing the competition from look-alikes was not unique. It was just especially delineated and highly developed. The business made more imitation Durbins than anyone else. The first “Deanna,” Gloria Jean Schoonover, was about five years younger than Durbin. (Durbin was born in 1921 and Schoonover in 1927.) She was said to have been onstage in local theatres when she was only three years old, and she had a radio program in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1932. By 1937, she was studying opera in New York and was brought to the attention of Joe Pasternak, who was only then beginning to shape Durbin’s career. In an interview in Films in Review in 1973, Gloria Jean (which became her film name) proclaimed Deanna Durbin her idol, and said, “I was publicized as Deanna’s protegée, and, of course, there was an age difference. Although we were both at the same studio I can’t say I really knew her, which was very disappointing to me.”
Gloria Jean signed a seven-year contract with Universal and, like Durbin, made her first picture as a star, receiving billing over everyone and surrounded by an excellent cast: Beulah Bondi, Billy Gilbert, Robert Cummings, C. Aubrey Smith. The movie, released in 1939, was called The Under-Pup, and it was in every way a Deanna Durbin vehicle. But had Durbin not been a star, Gloria Jean would never have existed. She wasn’t good enough, although she could sing and was sweet-looking (actually, she looks amazingly like Deanna Durbin). Today, none of Gloria Jean’s sixteen Universal films is well known, with the notable exception of Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), which is revived because of W. C. Fields. The proof of Gloria Jean’s purpose is clear from the start. In her very first moment in the bizarro comedy (penned by Fields under the name of Otis Criblecoblis), she is, apropos of nothing, photographed pumping up her bicycle tire, a definite joke on Deanna Durbin. It’s hard to build a career of your own as a cartoon version of a bona fide movie star. In 1946, at the age of nineteen, Gloria Jean faced the end of her seven-year contract. By 1961, she was a hostess at a Tahitian restaurant in Encino.
Gloria Jean was never able to establish herself because she was an imitation Deanna Durbin. She had no territory of her own to claim, so when Durbin left films, what was the point of having a referential rival?
Someone who fared a little bit better, for at least a moment of fame, was Universal’s other “Durbin,” whose fans are still loyal today, Susanna Foster. Suzanne DeLee Flanders Larson was a Chicago-born girl who loved Jeanette MacDonald, claiming to have seen her in Naughty Marietta (1935) sixty-eight times before she stopped counting. She had a lovely voice and a passion to sing, and like Durbin and Gloria Jean before her, found the chance to warble on radio while still a kid. When a midwestern critic sent a recording of her to MGM, she was signed to a contract without the studio actually having set eyes on her. She was, by her own description, a pretty bizarre sight when Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s assistant, came to the train to fetch her. “I was 5′9″ tall, weight 69 pounds, wore a tailored suit, a little derby hat, a blouse from the dime store, high heels, and carried a Pomeranian Spitz dog.” She was also, as of that day in February 1937, exactly twelve years old, having been born in December 1924. She met her idol, Miss MacDonald, and all the other MGM stars, and was given a screen test in which she played a scene from Anne of Green Gables (1934). Promptly, she was offered the leading role in the movie version of Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. (The film wasn’t made until 1944, at which time it made a star of a beautiful little girl who couldn’t sing and didn’t need to—Elizabeth Taylor.) Susanna said no. Her family, who apparently let the kid run things, backed her up. Why did she say no? Because she wasn’t scheduled to sing in the movie. Probably shocked out of their minds, the heads of MGM dropped her in February 1938. (Having had plenty of experience with young men and women and their families, they undoubtedly smelled the trouble that, in fact, Susanna Foster would later represent.)
Foster persevered and, because of her singing talent, was signed by Paramount for The Great Victor Herbert (1939). The stars were Allan Jones and Mary Martin, who were both kind to her, and her big number, “Kiss Me Again,” was a triumph. Publicized as the girl who could “hit B-flat above high C,” Foster made two more films at Paramount, There’s Magic in Music (1941) and Glamour Boy (1941), but she also developed a reputation for being difficult, impatient, and dangerously outspoken. Since stars needed to be grateful, manageable, and obedient, and she was none of the above, she sat around the studio for nearly a year doing nothing. Barely seventeen years old and with only three films in the can, she demanded to be released from her contract in 1942 and applied to work at Lockheed Aircraft. Instead, she signed with Universal, who had their own problems. When Durbin rejected the leading lady role in their planned remake of Phantom of the Opera (1943), Susanna Foster was given the part.
Phantom of the Opera was shot in three-strip Technicolor and cost $1.5 million, a huge sum in those days. Foster played the female lead, with Claude Rains as the Phantom and Nelson Eddy as her romantic co-star. It was an enormous hit and had excellent production values in all departments, ultimately winning Oscars for color cinematography and set design. Susanna Foster was at the top of the heap. After making a Phantom rip-off, The Climax, in 1944, and doing some radio, she made three more movies and then, startling everyone, went on hiatus in 1945. “I want to do what I want to do,” she said. “And that has nothing to do with show business.” Nothing really happened for her ever again. In 1948, she rejected Universal-International’s offers to star first in One Touch of Venus, then The Countess of Monte Cristo (1948). “I sold my mink coat,” she said, “and came back East with $1,500 to my name … I was terribly disillusioned with the movie business.”
Foster didn’t follow orders, and thus didn’t fit any studio’s idea of potential “product.” “There’s always been talk that the studio signed me as a rival to Deanna,” she said in an interview in February 1983 in Films in Review, “but I don’t think Universal was thinking that far ahead when they signed me for Phantom.” Rumors hinted that Deanna herself killed Foster’s progress, using her influence with studio heads. “If she did, it’s news to me,” said Foster.
The only really successful “Deanna Durbin” model was Jane Powell, who began her career at Universal about the time that Deanna’s fame was winding down. Like her predecessors, she found early success on radio and made her movie debut in her tender years, at the age of fourteen, in Song of the Open Road (1944), in which she played a teenaged girl named Jane Powell. She was then given the name professionally without her consent, being informed on the telephone that she had been renamed. (She was born Suzanne Burce.) Unlike Foster, she acquiesced about such things. (“People have asked if being named over the phone was traumatic, but I’d never thought about it. I guess it could be, if you let it.”)
In fact, that kind of positive attitude seems to have kept Powell afloat. She was a hard worker, a genuine talent, and she had the good fortune to leave Universal to sign with MGM, who now had Joe Pasternak under contract. In Powell, MGM finally found its own Deanna Durbin—Baryshnikov to Durbin’s Nureyev. Like Durbin, Powell was showcased in her movies, which were vehicles designed specifically for her. Pasternak produced the first five of Powell’s MGM pictures, and later four more. The New York Times nailed down her pedigree: “Miss Powell doesn’t have as yet the easy charm Deanna Durbin exhibited, but given a little more time under the expert tutelage of Mr. Pasternak t
here is no reason why she, too, shouldn’t become the movies’ singing sweetheart.” No reason at all. In fact, Powell remade the Deanna Durbin feature It’s a Date as Nancy Goes to Rio in 1950, and the Times said, “MGM is trying to route [Jane Powell] in the footsteps of the young Deanna Durbin.” As the studio system collapsed and her style of musicals lost favor with the public, Powell sensibly remarked, “I didn’t quit movies. They quit me.” Jane Powell was too good to be nothing more than a Durbin rip-off, and her career lasted longer than anyone else’s in the singing-girl-who-grows-up category. She’s still beautiful and youthful today, a true star who made her own mark in the movies. She kept working—did lecture tours, television, exercise tapes for the arthritic, summer stock, Broadway, and wrote a book. In Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, a book written by her husband, former child star Dickie Moore, Powell made a definitive movie star statement: “I did what I was told. I spent my life trying not to disappoint anybody.”
• • •
NO MATTER HOW MANY imitators Hollywood might develop, there was only one Deanna Durbin, and there will never be another one. People today don’t realize how fresh she was, how unique. When they hear about her, they assume she was some sort of “goody-goody” and inevitably want to avoid her. Described that way, she sounds awful. But she wasn’t.
Deanna Durbin’s movies are about innocence and sweetness. They’re from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.
The concept of a Deanna Durbin—a lovely teenage role model who makes a big success—seems dated. And yet the beat goes on. Today her type is bigger than ever, as merchants have clearly identified the female teenage market as a gigantic one. “Deannas” don’t sell the same brand of innocence, but they sell. And sell. Now they live on TV. The venue is different, and they dress like little tarts, but they’re still kids working the teenage market. The most successful and mainstream representatives are the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, who starred for years on the sitcom Full House. They now license their image to video games and market their “lifestyle brand,” which sells clothing, shoes, perfume, and other such items through Wal-Mart. Other new Durbins have a home on the Disney Channel: Raven (That’s So Raven), Hilary Duff (Lizzie McGuire), and the animated heroines Kim Possible (voice-acted by Christy Carlson Romano) and Penny Proud (voice-acted by Kyla Pratt). These neo-Durbins of Disney are an interesting lot. They’re diverse—black, white, live-action, animated, clairvoyant, klutzy, even superpowered—but they’re uni- form, all of them being positive, energetic girls who live the middle-class American teenager’s life. Hilary Duff’s Lizzie McGuire is probably the best known of the bunch, but the Disney Channel has promoted Raven heavily. She made a film for the channel, The Cheetah Girls, about three high school friends who form a singing group. A single from the movie played frequently on the channel, in which the girls sing about the legends of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, but in this song, there’s a twist: The three girls aren’t buying into the fantasy! “I don’t want to be like Cinderella,” the three girls sing. “I can slay my own dragons, I can dream my own dreams. I’m my own knight in shining armor. I’m my own superhero.” It’s not all that hard to picture Deanna Durbin singing these words.
Deanna Durbin’s screen character was simple and direct, with a lemony zest and a sly self-humor. Like Mary Pickford before her, she has been totally misrepresented. In her movies, she stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. She’s female power unleashed, seldom naïve, and almost always a manipulator—a role born in her first movie, Three Smart Girls. Except for Christmas Holiday, her films kept to the image she had successfully defined as a child: spirited, determined, and conniving. All her characters tended to have similar “problems” to solve. She undertakes countless pretenses to further her own wishes—pretending someone is her dad who isn’t, pretending to be someone’s fiancée when she isn’t, pretending to be a new maid when she isn’t, pretending to be someone’s widow when she isn’t, et cetera. But whatever she does, it’s light and easy. And when things start to drag, she sings. Her movies usually ended with her singing, all plotlines abandoned and all side characters left out of the frame. (Who were they, anyway?) Audiences liked it that way, and female teenagers adored her. She was their role model. And they remained loyal to her long after her career was over.
The woman who was once Deanna Durbin, out for a stroll in her anonymous French world.
Why did audiences embrace Durbin? She’s that American icon—the problem solver, the little underdog winner, the individual whose determination changes things to the way she wants them to be. Sometimes she’s poor, but then she gets successful or richer. Sometimes she’s rich, but she’s always down-to-earth, acting as if her bedroom weren’t bigger than Madison Square Garden and as if every teenager wore floor-length white ermine. For females, she was that special movie example—a member of their sex whom the entire world revolved around, the center of the filmed universe.
Deanna Durbin might not have been a great actress, but she wasn’t a bad one either, and she was a great personality. There was an honest quality about her, and audiences felt it. Whatever motivated her to leave the business—the desire to be real and have a life that made sense—was the truth that audiences felt in her on-screen presence. Durbin connected right to audiences. She seemed to be one of them. The amazing thing about her was that it turned out to be true. She came down off the screen and proved it by rejoining them. Her defection wasn’t a ploy and was never rescinded.
Why did Deanna Durbin retire? Watching her obvious joy in her singing, in her music, and even her delight in the roles she plays, one can only wonder how it is for her now. All reports are that she is happy in her life, and that she never regretted walking away from Hollywood. (Judy Garland said she had once run into Durbin in Paris, and that she was obviously happy. Garland, on the other hand, had confessed her own woes to her former colleague. Laughing, Garland said Durbin told her, “Why don’t you get out of that business, you dumbbell?”) But what a talent Durbin had. What a voice! Does she hum a few bars while she bakes, out there in her French farmhouse? Does she ever think about the past? Does she say “I could have been a contender if they had let me play Hedda Gabler”? Deanna Durbin, that most open and radiant of movie stars, remains more enigmatic than Garbo. She retired and led a normal life, the one thing that seems to have eluded almost every other movie star. She’s the winner, and still champ.
JEAN ARTHUR
Jean Arthur
Jean Arthur became a movie star twice. It didn’t make her happy either time. She first reached the top during the silent era, mostly in low-budget westerns, but was nevertheless a genuine leading lady. After leaving Hollywood “for good” in 1931, she returned and became a star a second time. Film history has chosen to ignore Arthur’s silent film career and embrace the idea that she fought the system all her life, forging an independent stardom throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, refusing to cooperate with the system along the way. The truth is that Jean Arthur was always a studio contract player, and proof of her cooperation with the star machine—however unfulfilling it was for her or how unwilling she was to do it—exists in countless published interviews, magazine covers, fashion portraits, radio show appearances, and posed stills. (My favorite is a shot for the 1941 movie The Devil and Miss Jones. There she is, all smiles, bare back, and shoulders, looking sexy in a one-piece bathing suit.)
It was a weird fate that moved the shy and insecure Jean Arthur into the most demanding of publicity arenas: movie stardom. It seems inexplicable, but although Arthur was shy and insecure, she was also ambitious and driven. She was able to resolve her schizoid dilemma—the need for privacy versus the desire to act—when she located a place of safety that allowed her to deal with b
oth: the performance privacy of a movie set. By her own admission, she was happy while filming. “I hardly know how to explain it myself,” she said, “but when I am on the set, I am an entirely different person. I’m not afraid of anybody or anything. I’m absolutely self-possessed and at ease … And yet, if I were to meet any one of the very same people at a cocktail party half an hour later I would be tongue-tied.” Loving her work, Arthur succeeded at it. However she suffered, she learned to cooperate with the star machine. She hated it, but she did it. She balanced her worlds. And so it was that the story of Jean Arthur, movie star, became the story of a woman who quit, came back, quit again, came back again, and along the way constantly threatened to quit for good.* In the end, she stayed the course, never fully disappearing until she became too old to be a romantic leading lady. When Jean Arthur finally did leave the screen permanently, it was nearly thirty years after she had made her first appearance on it.
After her success was established, Jean Arthur made a mantra out of her complaints, constantly griping about having to give interviews and pose for stills, bemoaning her fate as a movie star. How could the star machine possibly promote someone like that? Ironically, promoting Jean Arthur was a piece of cake. The machine just sold her misery. Columbia Pictures created a ruthlessly clever campaign in which they made no attempt to hide Arthur’s unhappiness, giving full press coverage to everything negative she had to say. Their approach was “Let her gripe. We can use it.” They simply asked fans to sympathize with the poor unhappy dear. As a sidebar, they reminded everyone that it was the generous studio itself that had changed her status from a minor actress with an inferiority complex to a glamorous—and wealthy—motion picture star. (“See photos. We know how to turn reluctance and lack of cooperation into something fine.”) Not only fine, in Arthur’s case, but spunky, charming, and, of course, downright American. They had spun gold out of straw. What’s more, they could do the same thing for anyone (thus giving rise to hope in kitchens and shops all over America).
The Star Machine Page 40
