The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Fan magazines and press clippings validate how Columbia Pictures (Arthur’s home studio during her greatest days in the 1930s) promoted her from 1934 onward as someone quite possibly off her rocker but adorable and worthy of fan support: “Jean Arthur Needs Your Help,” “The Strange Case of Jean Arthur,” “The Private World of Jean Arthur,” “Hollywood’s Problem Child,” and “Is Jean Arthur Really Unhappy?” These alternated with pleas for understanding: “Leave the Lady Be!” and “Give Her a Break!”* Arthur, needless to say, was required to pose for all the photos that accompanied those stories.

  The people who worked with Arthur found her to be reliable and professional.† She took her career seriously, and when her nervousness interfered with her work, it was always because she was trying to do a better job, give a better performance. Her co-workers sympathized, and the worst they had to say of her was she was a little “eccentric” or “odd.” The best word the studio could find to say about her was the vague “independent.” Whenever the Hollywood film business called someone “independent,” it meant “publicity trouble.” Errol Flynn was “independent” and so was W. C. Fields. Carole Landis, a beautiful blond starlet who ended up committing suicide, was “independent.” Unlike Flynn, Fields, and Landis, Jean Arthur was not seen constantly in nightclubs, nor was she an alcoholic or a playgirl. Early on in her career, however, there had been a bizarre biographical event that labeled her as a possible candidate for “independence.” She got married for twenty-four hours.

  His name was Julian Ancker, and she wed him in the latter part of 1928. When the marriage was annulled after a single day, there was a great deal of negative press coverage. Her parent studio at the time, Paramount, came up with various explanations. The first one released to the public was that after her marriage, Jean Arthur discovered she had a clause in her contract that forbade her to wed, and she chose career over love. Arthur herself publicly denied this, making the statement that she would marry any man she loved and wouldn’t mind losing her career over it. She added, “I made a mistake and I realized it. I thought it best to correct it.” (One fan article tried to turn the marriage into a women’s film weepie, claiming that Ancker had died tragically on their wedding day.) When Arthur left Hollywood in 1931, her marital “incident” was forgotten, and when she returned to a larger fame in the mid-1930s, her official Columbia Pictures studio bio eradicated it. Much later, near the end of her life, Arthur offered her only explanation. “Julian looked a bit like Abraham Lincoln and that’s probably why I fell in love with him … shortly after our marriage was annulled, Julian died. He was out fishing and he had a sunstroke.” (If spoken aloud in a bemused tone of voice, this could be a Jean Arthur line in a screwball comedy.)

  Although Jean Arthur hated publicity, she nevertheless had to submit to it just like everyone else. In four shots from the late 1920s and early 1930s, she posed as a bunny for an Easter promotion … reminded magazine readers which perfume was suitable for a formal occasion … golfed (in appropriate duds) … and posed for the ubiquitous “here is my dog” shot.

  Despite being “independent,” Arthur went forward and the machine had no trouble selling her. She might well be difficult, independent, reclusive—but soon she’d be all that at a theatre near you, playing a delightful, spunky, vivacious leading lady, a good gal pal that you’ll all realize does shoot her mouth off, but oddball that she is, you’re just gonna love her. And identify with her. The machine turned out to be right. The public did identify with her and love her, and rightly so. Jean Arthur might have been a handful, but up on the screen she was divine.

  Arthur is fascinating because of her bizarre relationship to the star machine, but also because she represents how a movie star can be defined and shaped by the work of great film directors. The machine knew how to allow specific directorial talents to help build its stars. Auteurs could beget auteurs. This was particularly true for Arthur. Few female stars consistently worked with as many top-ranked directors. As a result, her films stand the test of time as well as those of any other actress from her era. She starred in films for Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, John Ford, Frank Capra, and even lesser lights with distinctive touches such as Mitchell Leisen, John Cromwell, William Seiter, Wesley Ruggles, and Sam Wood. She had what few actresses ever got—a series of enormously talented men to add dimension to her talent, to provide her with memorable moments in significant roles, to give her everything she needed to enhance her inborn talent. John Ford helped the young Arthur find out who she could be on film. DeMille found her tomboy spirit as Calamity Jane in The Plainsman (1936), opposite Gary Cooper. Hawks found her one-of-the-boys charm with Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Borzage brilliantly illuminated the depth of her loving spirit in History Is Made at Night (1937), while Stevens found her honest, girl-next-door qualities in The Talk of the Town (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943). Billy Wilder knew how to use her when she was older, making her a prim congresswoman from Iowa with fire buried inside her soul in A Foreign Affair (1948).

  But it was Frank Capra who released Arthur’s passion, and her ability to play a virginal sensuousness became one of her trademarks.* No one ever conveyed the female yearning for sex any better than she did, nor any more sweetly without seeming prudish. No one was ever better at holding herself in on-screen while a handsome man made love to her, and no one was ever better at showing that, if she did decide to let go, the world was going to have to stand back. Consumed with love, Arthur is luminous. Her delicious voice quirks up a notch when a man kisses her. She leans forward, pulls back, and never seems cold, only decent. Capra used this quality in all his films, but George Stevens took it to the highest level in The More the Merrier. While Arthur and Joel McCrea sit outside on her apartment steps and utter banalities, he kisses her over and over again while she tries to maintain her equilibrium. She embodies the plight of the 1940s female. She wants him. She can’t have him. But if she could only get him! Arthur is the quintessential well-brought-up American young woman with deep and honest desires. She’s the queen of conveying the true feeling of delicious sexual frustration.

  There is no star story quite like Jean Arthur’s. Born Gladys Georgianna Greene in 1905,† she changed her name to Jean Arthur in 1923, the year she began her film career. Growing up, Arthur had professed interest in becoming many different things—a tightrope walker (highly prophetic, in its way), a teacher of romance languages, and ultimately a photographer’s model. She had been successful at the latter, and a lovely shot of her taken by the famous Howard Chandler Christy caught the eye of the inevitable movie talent scout. All her life, Arthur had been a movie fan (Mary Pickford was her favorite), and she couldn’t resist the offer from a Fox talent scout to come to Hollywood for a screen test. She was young and lovely, and her test, despite no previous acting experience, went well. She was offered the starring role in a movie to be called The Temple of Venus (1923). A few days after shooting began, she was fired. Later, she pointed to this experience as “where and why I developed the most beautiful inferiority complex you’ve ever seen.” She was replaced by Mary Philbin.

  Fox decided not to give up on her, though, and cast her in a smaller role more suitable to her lack of experience, a supporting part in John Ford’s Cameo Kirby (1923), which would star John Gilbert.‡ She played the best friend of the heroine (Gertrude Olmstead), but she was in good company in a quality production based on a Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson play. The rest of her first year in movies was spent mostly in two-reelers. As a result, she decided to freelance, the beginning of her expression of dissatisfaction with the system. Since she found only two projects on her own (a one-reeler for Universal and a feature called The Powerful Eye), Arthur made a choice she would repeat throughout her working life. She opted for security and went to work under contract for Weiss Bros/Action Films, where she became a star in low-budget westerns. Between 1923 and 1928—a span of only six years—Arthur appeared in more
than forty movies. Most of these are totally unknown today, and have names like Biff Bang Buddy, Fast and Fearless, Roaring Rider, Riding Rivals, and The Cowboy Cop. She was always billed second to the male cowboy, but she was never less than the leading lady. During this period, she occasionally also played small parts, such as her appearance in the other excellent movie she made in silent films, Buster Keaton’s 1925 Seven Chances. Arthur portrays a receptionist, and she has one excellent scene in which it might be said that she enacts what we’d later recognize as a “Jean Arthur” moment. Keaton, desperate to marry in order to claim his inheritance, proposes to her as she sits reading a book. She doesn’t even look up at him. She just holds up her arm and waves her wedding ring in his face.

  In early 1928, Arthur was invited to the prestigious Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios to take a screen test for a role opposite their popular leading man William “Billy” Haines. She didn’t get the part, but she did get her own copy of the test. She took it to Paramount Pictures and sold herself by pointing out that she was an experienced actress with solid credentials and MGM was trying to sign her. Paramount wasted no time, giving her a three-year contract, which would last until 1931. At Paramount, Jean Arthur went into a transition between her silent and sound careers, which coincided with the transition of the entire studio system from silent to sound movies. She was safely under contract to a major studio and ready to move up the ladder.

  Instead, she began to drift. Having already established herself as a working movie star, she wasn’t a candidate for the studio’s buildup or promotional push. Like others who had already arrived in silents, she was simply moved over into the “star” roster when talkies took over. If she had been relatively new to the top, like Loretta Young, or if she had been a big-name silent star, like Garbo, Norma Shearer or Janet Gaynor, she would have been groomed or regroomed or at least treated with more care. It wasn’t that Paramount had no work for her, or that her films were duds, or even that she went unnoticed in them. It was just that she never seemed to get off the plateau of “star in the movies” rather than bona fide talking “motion picture star.”

  Looking back today, it seems hard to understand why Paramount didn’t do more with Arthur then. One of her most distinctive characteristics was her unusual speaking voice, a quirky asset many have tried to describe. She sounds as if she’s about to scream but is swallowing her yelps, pulling them back into a plummy tone enhanced by an unusual cadence and rhythm. Sound might have given her career the kind of boost it gave others with unusual voices, like Charles Boyer and William Powell. Her first three films with sound were synch-sound.* Her first real sound and dialogue movie didn’t happen until 1929. It was the Philo Vance detective story The Canary Murder Case, starring William Powell. Arthur is somewhat stilted in her delivery and was said to have been deeply disappointed over her role and her performance. Nevertheless, immediately following Canary’s release, she was elected as one of the annual WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1929. This was a publicity ploy in which executives from the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) chose a group of female newcomers each year as “promising stars.” (WAMPAS also chose for that year Loretta Young, Helen Twelvetrees, and Anita Page. Lest they seem like geniuses, it might also be noted that other names on their list were Mona Rico, Ethlyne Clair, and Caryl Lincoln. WAMPAS baby stars were selected only from 1922 to 1934.) After Stairs of Sand (1929), a silent based on a Zane Grey novel, and The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), in which she’s Fu’s adopted daughter, Arthur was put into the next Philo Vance mystery, The Greene Murder Case (1929) and, although billed fourth, played a significant role as an icky sweet and innocent girl who, naturally, turns out to be the murderess. Her next movie, The Saturday Night Kid (1929), is one often searched for “the beginning of Jean Arthur as Jean Arthur.” She is also often “found” in others of her early Paramount sound films: in small moments in her Philo Vance films with William Powell, or in Street of Chance (1930) with Powell and Kay Francis, or in The Silver Horde (1930, for RKO) opposite Joel McCrea. It has even been said that the obscure Young Eagles (1930) offers the first real “Jean Arthur” character. Since she plays a German spy who isn’t really German but an American girl pretending to be a German spy, one can only wonder. (One film that no one thinks had the “real Jean Arthur” is RKO’s 1930 Danger Lights, in which she is a drab and routinely written female love interest.)

  However, the film most often cited is The Saturday Night Kid, which starred the delightful Clara Bow. Arthur plays Bow’s sister, a strange idea, and someone apparently mixed up the assignments. Bow plays a self-sacrificing, reliable department store worker and Arthur plays a wild and irresponsible type who steals Bow’s boyfriend without caring about him and who also gambles and loses money, placing the blame on poor Clara. The one thing to be learned from The Saturday Night Kid is that Jean Arthur on film is no villain. It wasn’t that she couldn’t play it, but she doesn’t generate selfishness or evil, nor does she have a vixenish personality, particularly not while inhabiting the same frame as Clara Bow.

  In 1931, by the standards of the machine, Arthur wasn’t locating a type, or no type was being located for her. Offscreen she lived with her mother (and a bunch of pets, according to the movie magazines). She openly acknowledged she had made no close friends in Hollywood. (Speaking about this period later, in Screenland magazine in 1939, in one of her many “I am miserable” interviews, Jean Arthur said that she was “frustrated at every turn … no one was particularly interested in me and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly … no time off for pleasures, or for friendships … yet … I was still floundering.”)

  Motion Picture magazine of May 1930 nailed the problem: “The success story of Jean Arthur is always being written. But it always turns out to be a little premature. Every so often she seems to have beaten the game, and things that she does are hailed with enthusiasm and excitement. But afterwards nothing ever seems to happen.” Arthur would go forward one square and back two. Different things had been tried: serious roles, funny roles; good girls, bad girls. Her hair had been lightened, and an attempt to spruce up her image with clothes and makeup had been undertaken, but she hadn’t really broken through. It wasn’t clear who she was. Finally, in 1931, Paramount Pictures decided to drop three females from their roster, terminating their three-year contracts. One of the women was Jean Arthur. (The other two were Fay Wray and Mary Brian.)

  In the spring of 1931, Jean Arthur left Hollywood, believing her movie career was finished. After her later rise to fame, this departure was often cited as proof of her “bravery” in flouting the studio system, but she herself eschewed any attempts to compliment her in this regard. She described her move as motivated by practical needs, not bravery. “I had been in Hollywood long enough to know which way the wind was blowing. If I couldn’t get stronger parts with the studio where I’d been, why expect the others to have faith in me? I knew I had potentialities, but no one else sensed it. So I just quit altogether … I wasn’t demonstrating any noble ability.”

  Arthur went to New York and, in January 1932, began what she hoped would become a successful stage career in Lysistrata.* She played the role of Kalonika for a touring company that later opened on Broadway. (She also took the significant step of marrying Frank Ross Jr. in June 1932. She had met Ross on the set of Young Eagles.†)

  By the end of 1933, Jean Arthur had appeared in eight theatrical productions, not one of which had lasted any significant amount of time. The Curtain Rises was her longest Broadway run, at sixty-one performances. After it closed, she returned to California, allegedly to visit her parents (who now lived in Beverly Hills).* The studios saw her second arrival as an indication that she had given up on theatre, “had come to her senses,” and was ready to work in movies again. Offers began to come in. She later said she accepted the one from Col- umbia Pictures, a “Poverty Row” studio, for o
ne simple reason and one reason only: They agreed to allow her to make films for them between her Broadway engagements. In February 1934, Jean Arthur signed a five-year contract with Columbia. By May of that same year, her first film from her new studio was in neighborhood theatres. It was called Whirlpool.

  Whirlpool co-starred Arthur with Jack Holt. It was a small movie, even for a cheapie studio like Columbia, but she breezed through it, no doubt envisioning a glorious future in which, financially secure from her Columbia contract, she would glamorously train between Hollywood and Broadway, enjoying a prestigious theatrical stardom paid for by movies. Perhaps feeling no obligation to be great (her contract was signed) and with no worries about her future, Arthur was more relaxed in Whirlpool than she had ever been before. The movie creature that today is known to be “Jean Arthur” peeked out at the audience. She quickly shot two other small films, The Defense Rests (1934), again with Jack Holt, and The Most Precious Thing in Life (1934), with Richard Cromwell and Anita Louise. Despite her success in Whirlpool, it’s obvious no one yet knows how to cast her. In The Most Precious Thing in Life she’s an unwed mother who lives to a drab old age just so she can sacrifice herself for her son, who, of course, doesn’t know she’s his mom. However, movie audiences around the country were being treated to a “new Jean Arthur movie” in May, and again in August and then again in November of 1934. She was becoming established.