The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  One of Loretta Young’s most enduring roles is in a movie seen every Christmas, The Bishop’s Wife, with David Niven (center) as her bishop, and Cary Grant (left) as the kind of angel every woman wants to have turn up for the holidays.

  Throughout the movie, even when she beats up on Marilyn Maxwell in the final scene, Young is all manners and careful diction. No matter what happens, she remains dignified. Even when she’s given a speech full of double entendres, she plays it with embarrassment and a sense that this just isn’t proper. And beautiful as she is, she now looks as if she has a reputation to maintain, not just in her film role but in her offscreen persona, too. Soon she would indeed be playing the grand lady as she swirled through her television doors and into the living rooms of America.

  Finally, Young went into what would be her final film, 1953’s It Happens Every Thursday, about a couple who buy a small-town newspaper and struggle to make it click. Never confused about script quality, Young said, “It was a big nothing.” She saw the handwriting on the movie screen. Wasting no time, she immediately began her amazingly successful television career.

  It was television that made a lady out of Loretta Young. She not only played nuns and ladies but also overtly presented herself as herself, twirling through the French doors to greet her audiences.† “I am a lady,” those entrances said, “but in my little performances I am going to pretend to be otherwise for you in order to make you happy.” She also spoke little homilies in hushed tones for each week’s show.‡ She was that dreaded female self-aggrandizer: the hostess with the mostest, a decorous grande dame in a grand house with the outfits to prove it. Off-camera publicity emphasized the idea of Loretta Young, Lady Star. It seldom mentioned that she was working her butt off behind the scenes to produce, act in, and promote the show.

  Loretta Young never gave up. She had real show business guts. She fought, kept going, worked hard, and slowly piled up her longevity without anyone’s really noticing it. She quietly became a complete professional, and she had a strong family life backed up by solid religious belief. She was well grounded outside the insanity of movie stardom.

  Loretta Young

  As she aged, she never lost her beauty.* As a young woman, she was all eyes, prominent cheekbones, and smiling teeth. As an older woman, she was exactly the same. She never thickened, either in her face or her body, and looking at her is never anything but a treat. Her last official photo shoot was for Vanity Fair magazine in 1999.† She was eighty-six years old, and she stared directly, calmly, into the camera in a close-up that is as close as you can get. (She had learned long before that she had nothing to fear from any camera.) She had remained a star because she was willing to work very hard. No matter what happened, she stayed in the game. “If there is any difference between me and another woman my age,” she said in the 1970s, “it’s just that I’ve worked harder and longer and with more concentration.” About her life, she said, “The way I see it, God has been very, very good to me.” No one can argue with that. To her credit, she lived her personal life—a fair mess in many ways—with privacy and dignity. Hers was a true longevity—always at the top, always lovely, always knowing what she wanted and how to get it. She found a way to escape the restrictions of the star system by making herself the owner of the machine’s product—herself. And there can be no doubt but that she understood what she was doing. Considering the confused lives of so many of her contemporaries, perhaps the most revealing statement she ever made was this: “I know now when I’m Loretta and when I’m Gretchen.”

  In the end, Loretta Young outsmarted the star machine.

  YOUNG’S CAREER CAN BE interestingly compared to two other top-ranked actresses of her generation: Irene Dunne and Norma Shearer. Although neither Young nor Dunne was ever ranked in the top ten box office draws from the dubious Motion Picture Exhibitor’s Poll, they were unquestionably front-ranked movie stars. Shearer was on the top ten list from 1931 to 1934, an impressive record at a time when her female competition was strong.* All three women had vehicles built especially for them, and all were given serious recognition as actresses. Both Young and Shearer won Oscars, and Irene Dunne, the most versatile of them all, had five nominations. (It’s an Oscar crime that she never won.†)

  These women were peers in the studio system of the 1930s, and they faced similar problems: how to handle the typecasting, how to win the roles they wanted, how to stay on top as they aged, how to survive as the business that had nourished them began to collapse, and whether to embrace the idea of longevity and fight for it, or just fold their tents and steal away. Each made a different decision. Young, the consummate careerist, hung on and triumphed. Shearer chose to retire and disappear. Dunne, like Shearer, chose to retire, but she didn’t disappear. She continued her public life as a private citizen in political affairs, serving at the United Nations and becoming widely respected for her charitable works.

  Norma Shearer is probably the most overlooked and forgotten of the three today, and Irene Dunne the best known. (Given her absolutely delightful personality on film, it’s a crime that she’s not better known.) This is due largely to Dunne’s famous and often-revived screwball comedy opposite Cary Grant, The Awful Truth (1937), and her appearances in two adapted stage plays, I Remember Mama (1948) and Life with Father (1947). She also has a role in the Astaire-Rogers musical Roberta (1935), and made two movies that all in-the-know fans and scholars love: the 1936 version of Show Boat and the beautiful 1939 Love Affair.

  IRENE DUNNE

  Irene Dunne

  Irene Dunne, born in 1898,* was fifteen years older than Loretta Young. (The two women were friends, sharing a deep Catholic faith.) Dunne’s original career goal had been to sing with the Metropolitan Opera. She had a well-trained voice, but it was lighter than required for grand opera, so she began appearing in musicals, making her Broadway debut in 1922 in The Clinging Vine. She played only a bit part but also understudied the leading lady. After seven years of solid employment, she was cast in the leading role of Magnolia in the 1929 road company of Show Boat. During her tour she was spotted by a talent scout from RKO who made an offer that brought her to Hollywood. Her first movie was Leathernecking, which was released in 1930, when she was thirty-two years old. Since she was a mature woman when she began her film career, and a reasonably established theatre person, she was able to avoid the early stages of the star machine process. Dunne debuted as a leading lady in her very first film—and was still a leading lady in her last, It Grows on Trees, in 1952, after twenty-two years of stardom.

  Irene Dunne was an anomaly: a movie star only because she starred in movies. Not only did she not need the machine to become a success, she didn’t need it to remain one. She turned her back on the entire process of hype, publicity, fake bios, and cheesecake photos. As a result, the process didn’t have much choice but to leave her alone and accept her as she was. In the beginning, of course, when she first came on the scene, Hollywood created its usual series of silly press releases: “Irene Dunne likes to eat hard-boiled eggs dipped in vinegar … She’s depressed by handsome men … She doesn’t drink and smokes only in mixed company … She won first prize in a dahlia show [doing what isn’t mentioned].” After these first abortive attempts to generate excitement about her went nowhere, the system tried another tactic. The October 1932 issue of New Movie carried an article sensibly entitled “The Girl Nobody Knows.” (Dunne had been in the movies for three years by that time, and no pattern to publicize her had successfully emerged.) In the end, “The Girl Nobody Knows” can’t make its own point. It tries to work from true facts (Dunne’s from Louisville and was on the Broadway stage), but can’t stop itself from whipping up the false pizzazz associated with promoting a movie star: “She has a terrible temper and controls herself by reading a book.” In a final desperate attempt to do something—anything—with Irene Dunne, the article says she’s a great golfer, a member of the “hole-in-one” club who “often” has to replace her golf clubs because “she breaks them if
she shoots a poor round.”

  The star machine’s last attempt to make colorful copy out of Irene Dunne was personal. Publicists tried to create hot copy out of her marital situation. (She married Dr. Frank Griffin, a dentist, in 1928. Twelve years her senior, he would be her one and only husband.) When Dunne had first wed, she kept it to herself (“Irene’s Secret Marriage”). Later, when she came to Hollywood, her husband stayed behind to continue his dental practice. (“Parted but Happily Married.”) When they chose to remain living on separate coasts, the fan mags smelled something good to work with (“What’s the True Story About Dunne?”), but they were soon foiled when the couple changed their minds and Dr. Griffin closed his practice and moved west. If there was anything Hollywood couldn’t understand, it was a happy marriage. The business found the Griffins to be mysterious—even suspicious—and they sniffed around so much that Dr. Griffin finally issued a formal statement, silencing the publicity machine for the rest of their lives: “I’m behind her all the time in everything she does. She cooperates with me as well and we both work together.” It was a plain statement that might describe any happy marriage, but it left the natives stunned.

  By the mid-1930s, Dunne felt the need to short-circuit attempts to publicize her falsely. She avoided talking about herself whenever possible, and as James Robert Parish described it, became “charmingly vague” if forced to answer reporters’ questions. She’d give a perfect Irene Dunne performance, dithering a bit, pretending not to understand, clicking her tongue against her teeth, and heading toward the door as rapidly as possible. Ultimately she undertook a stance: She would undercut the publicists if they weren’t honest. While in New York for the premiere of the 1936 Show Boat, a reporter who’d read the movie press kit asked her to elaborate on the story of how she’d entertained on a show boat as a child and how her lawyer father had disapproved of her entry into movies, having hoped she’d become a barrister herself. Dunne spoke right up, saying she remembered seeing show boats on the river when she was a kid in Ohio, but that she’d never even been on one, much less performed there. And as for her father, well, in the first place he wasn’t a lawyer, and in the second place, both her parents had encouraged her to become an opera singer. And were there any more questions?

  Perhaps the business’s final surrender to Irene Dunne about creating fake publicity appeared later that same year in Photoplay. The author, Sara Hamilton, called her story “This Is Really Irene Dunne.” For once, a movie magazine admits the truth. Hamilton tells her readers that she can personally “guarantee no juicy bits of intimate gossip, for I know of none. Unless perhaps she lies awake nights heartsick about the kitchen sink in her new home: she’s afraid it’s too near the door. Would you all call that juicy? No? No, I thought not.” Hollywood had officially given up on Irene Dunne in the publicity flack department.*

  Irene Dunne was too popular a star to be left out of the magazines entirely, of course. What happened was that the magazines settled down into promoting Dunne in a way that was both suitable for her and acceptable to her. Her “publicity” in the fan mags was done in four basic ways that were appropriately professional:

  In the Women’s sections. Dunne posed for fashion layouts, usually costumes from her own films, as in a 1936 Modern Screen, which presents her in Hattie Carnegie’s designs for Magnificent Obsession (1935) or a 1938 Screenland, in which she models her hats from Joy of Living (1938). Dunne also “authored” an advice column for women and gave out the usual “star recipes,” which are always horrifying. (Dunne’s included a ham casserole and a coconut chiffon cake.)

  In advertisements for her films and “plants” about them. Dunne was not uncooperative about her career—quite the opposite—she just didn’t want nonsense written about her. Ads for her movies, as well as product endorsements, stills, and snapshots, were thought by her to be part of the job. She didn’t object to little “plants” about her work: “Irene Dunne got dunked for her swimming pool scene in My Favorite Wife [1940]” or “Roberta, with Irene Dunne, is filming now and is progressing nicely—soon to be in your neighborhood theatre,” et cetera. Dunne also did the usual posing for product ads, such as Elizabeth Arden makeup (“Note Irene Dunne and her Beauty Within While Wearing Elizabeth Arden”).

  Irene Dunne Griffin and her husband were popular in Hollywood, and they were often seen together at premieres and parties. Dunne considered such outings to be part of her professional responsibilities, and she allowed herself and her husband to be photographed together in full dress for the magazines. She always looks radiant and beautifully gowned. He always looks content to be at her side or slightly in the background.

  Since Irene Dunne was a star, it was necessary to keep her name and face “out there.” Her public wanted it that way. There were Irene Dunne stories in the magazines, just very few of them, considering the level of her success. The stories that do appear are revealing. Their titles say clearly how Irene Dunne was perceived: “Dignified,” “My Husband Is My Best Friend,” “How I Stay Normal in Hollywood,” “Irene Dunne Has Charm and Beauty,” “Found: One Happy Actress,” and, inevitably, “Lady Irene.”

  It is to Irene Dunne’s credit that she alone could be called a “lady” behind the scenes in Hollywood without it being an insult. “Lady” was the insider’s code word for “bitch” or “boring” or “takes herself too seriously.” When Hollywood applied it to Irene Dunne, the word meant what it was supposed to mean: She was a lady. It was her triumph over a system that she bent to her own standards of behavior.*

  On film, Dunne was a versatile triple threat in musicals, comedies, and tragedies. She was a good singer, her comedic timing was perfect, and her ability to lighten dramas that might have sagged under their own weight is remarkable. Weepies starring Dunne lift and float, making us feel the real tragedies they embody. In the same way, stupid comedies that should have been laying an egg would start to bounce when she turned up. She didn’t have to “grow up” to play serious roles, and she never got stuck in lavishly produced literary projects. She didn’t “progress” from one kind of film to another—she just maintained quality in whatever she was assigned. This was the type of career that it was almost impossible to have in Hollywood’s studio system, especially for a woman. The business understood that she needed no help, just good casting. Furthermore, Dunne had her husband at her side to advise her, and he and her brother were sharp businessmen. In the mid-1930s they had helped guide her to the acceptance of a “multi-allegiance” system, inaugurated by Claudette Colbert (and adopted by Carole Lombard), in which an actress signed an agreement to do three pictures a year, one each with three studios (Columbia, Paramount, and RKO, in her case). Like Young, Dunne also daringly went freelance in 1940. Thus, both women were in the same place by 1940. Each had become independent—and each had found a way to define herself without a machine-like typecasting process. Young had made herself into her type, and Dunne made versatility hers.

  Dunne had something else that required no machine manipulations. Like Shearer and Young, she was a glamorously turned-out woman in any movie in which having a wardrobe suited her character. However, as the July 1942 issue of Modern Screen pointed out, she wasn’t just about glamour. Dunne has “an edge,” the magazine says, because unlike “the rest of the girls, she refuses to go gaga over glamour. She’s just a simple gal with a gorgeousness rated at $500,000 per picture.” Also unlike Shearer and Young, Dunne did not have a pre-code period in which she played gangster’s molls or obvious prostitutes. She might sacrifice all for the love of a married man, becoming his mistress and sitting around painting plates while waiting for his visits, as in Back Street (1932). Or she might be abandoned by a feckless husband who commits suicide, or she might, after losing her son to his wealthy parents, have to open a bordello to make a living (The Secret of Madame Blanche, 1933). Or, as in Ann Vickers (1933), she might misjudge the character of the young man who sweeps her off her feet at a country club dance and end up an unwed mother. But Dunne’s ea
rly years in desperate women’s film plots were never smarmy. She was more often presented as a symbol of womanly decency. In her 1935 musical Sweet Adeline, in which she beautifully sings “Don’t Ever Leave Me” (the Helen Morgan hit), she is dressed in yards of white organza, ruffled and tied with satin bows, to play up her “innocence.” Dunne, however, stood aside from priggishness and was never a symbol of virginity. She portrayed decent women making their way as the fates would allow.

  Dunne entered films as a leading lady, as seen in two of her early efforts: Cimarron, with Richard Dix (above); The Great Lover, with Adolphe Menjou.

  Helen Morgan as Julie, Hattie McDaniel as Queenie, and Irene Dunne as Magnolia in one of the greatest musicals ever made, the 1936 version of Show Boat.

  Irene Dunne is mostly appreciated by modern audiences because of her skill in comedy. She’s the female Cary Grant. She’s always a bit bemused by the movie world around her, and although she shows how her characters feel, she also seems to be holding something valuable back. We can see she has an opinion—she communicates that directly as if, like us, she’s just an observer of the movie event. (Grant did the same. They were masters at establishing rapport with audiences first and their co-stars second, yet no actors ever reacted better to others or played to their casts better. Grant and Dunne are magical but never fey.) This “to the side of things” quality allowed Irene Dunne to really kick up her heels in the 1930s filmed screwball world. Watching her get even with an unfaithful husband (Grant) by putting him through her comedy wringer in The Awful Truth (1937) is pure joy. And watching Grant give it back to her—all under the umbrella of what we accept as true love between them—shows why her performance was nominated for the Oscar, one of the few times a woman in a lighthearted comedy has ever been chosen.* Dunne said, “The best way to be funny is to be cold-blooded and purely mental about it. It demands more timing, pace, shading, and subtlety of emphasis. It is difficult to learn, but once it is acquired can be easily slowed down and becomes an excellent foundation for dramatic acting.”