Irene Dunne and Cary Grant make new rules about how to play a married couple in the screwball comedy The Awful Truth.
Irene Dunne was a masterful comedienne, possibly the very best of her era. She could sail through the frequently messy screwball universe like a duck through water—a well-dressed duck, even a well-behaved duck—until the moment came when she had to go crazy to set things straight. When she dresses up in cheap clothes and pretends to be her ex-husband’s sister in The Awful Truth, she steals the movie. (Not so easy to do when your co-star is Cary Grant, but he’s obviously letting her do it and loving it.) Suddenly missing her purse, she snaps out a command to Grant’s ritzy (and prissy) future in-laws: “Don’t nobody leave this room.” In Theodora Goes Wild (1936), her first starring comedy, she’s a proper small-town girl who quietly writes sexy best-selling novels. She stays proper and well behaved until Melvyn Douglas makes it his job to “liberate” her from her oppressive family but ditches her when she gets serious. She follows him to the city to turn the tables on him and wreck his life. Leaving her little hats and Peter Pan collars behind in Lynnville (population 4,426), she turns up in furs and feathers, plunging necklines, sparkling jackets—and a little crystal butterfly in her hair. Soon Douglas is in her arms and under her control.
Dunne could unite her comic, musical, and tragic skills into one role, as we see in a minor (but excellent) movie, Unfinished Business, directed by Gregory La Cava in 1941. It is half-comedy, half-tragedy, and throws in a musical number. Dunne plays a small-town girl from Messina, Ohio (this time population 4,750). As she watches her baby sister get married, she contemplates her own sad life: getting older, no prospects, living with an oppressive family. She decides to listen to “those train whistles” that have been luring her to leave town all her life. She tells her family, all of whom have plans for her, that she would like “to live first … I want to walk on the fringe.” (Her local beau, played by stodgy Dick Foran, intones, “You’ll fall off.”) And fall off she does. On the very train that takes her to New York City, she meets a bounder (Preston Foster) who picks her up on his cruise through the cars looking for something to relieve his boredom.
No punches are pulled in this film. It’s made clear that Irene Dunne has been seduced. The next morning, Foster is met by his business entourage, and Dunne waits timidly off to the side. He plans to leave without speaking to her but gets trapped. He tells her he’ll “call her,” and when she shyly, sweetly says, “I love you,” to him, it’s pathetic. She has come to the city hoping to become a famous opera singer, but quickly finds out two things: She is untrained and cannot compete, and Foster is never going to call. She clips pictures of him out of the newspaper society pages, even though a female friend tells her, “He’s a wolf! Notorious! You could draw a number out of a hat and get a nicer fella than he is.”
Needing to make a living, Dunne becomes a singing telephone operator in a nightclub and then in comes the wolf’s brother (Robert Montgomery). He’s a drunk whose main job is fighting off the breach-of-promise suits his behavior generates. Foster’s marriage announcement appears in the paper, and on Foster’s wedding night, Dunne and Montgomery get together, becoming very drunk and slightly married without Montgomery knowing about the train tryst between his bride and his brother.
It all ends swell, of course, with some hilarious lines and solid comedy, but marked by pathos, too. It is Irene Dunne’s ability that makes it work. Her heartbreak and her naïve mistake in trusting Foster are tragically real, but her ability to deliver hilarious and sophisticated dialogue with great comedy timing keeps the movie out of the doldrums. (And she can sing!) When Irene Dunne tries to explain to Montgomery about what happened to her, she says, “There are lots of women like me … in the lives of all women there’s some unfinished business.” She is credible, sympathetic, hilarious, and a realistic “fallen woman.” In the end, she doesn’t die. She doesn’t lose her rich husband. She doesn’t have to go back to Ohio. She sins and she wins. It took Irene Dunne to get away with that. (Irene Dunne is Doris Day before Doris Day was Doris Day.)
This ability to be both sinful and funny also showed itself in Together Again (1944). Dunne and Charles Boyer, two actors not afraid to play grown-ups, are brought together by one of those fortuitous Hollywood comedy-plot events—lightning strikes a statue of small-town mayor Dunne’s late husband, knocking its head off. (Her father-in-law, Charles Coburn, takes this as a good omen.) Her husband and his entire family have been so important to the town’s history that everyone thinks a new, even bigger statue should be made, and they send Mayor Dunne to the big city to employ sculptor Boyer. (“She’ll slip,” her main enemy intones. “Women always do.”)
Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the 1940s as a mismatched couple in Together Again, which was billed as “a gay comedy.” He’s a freewheeling artist and she’s a straitlaced small-town mayor. The inevitable occurs.
Together Again illustrates how vehicles were built for stars like Dunne and Boyer. By this time in their careers, they are harmonious in age, grace, and style. They have successfully co-starred before. The audience expects them to get together—they’ve seen them do it before. They believe it will work—it did before. For this plot, the subtle shading will be Dunne’s having to be coaxed out of a prudish sense of duty, and Boyer’s having to be hooked into marriage. If an actor associated with caddish behavior, say a French version of George Sanders, or an actress who didn’t have a ladylike demeanor, say a Joan Blondell, had played these roles, the plot wouldn’t have worked. Or if the characters were too young or too old, this little vehicle, made for peanuts and easily sold to fans of the stars, wouldn’t have brought its money back the easy way it did.
Without the star machine process, Dunne had still located her type. She not only gracefully sidestepped the machine, she also avoided the aging process. When the decade turned over from the 1930s to the 1940s, most of her contemporaries faced casting problems. Since she was in charge of her own career choices, she opened up the decade by playing a mother with two children in a solid comedy co-starring Cary Grant, My Favorite Wife. In her next movie, the superb Penny Serenade (1941), she was again paired with Grant and “aged” from youth to adoptive motherhood in a story about a normal woman’s family life. Both these films cast her in ways that avoided the age issue, although her next two, Unfinished Business and the fairly horrible Lady in a Jam (1942), put her in the “young” romantic lead. Business was too good to matter, but Lady was a throwback to her old screwball days, casting her as a wacky heiress in the madcap tradition. Except for Never a Dull Moment in 1950 (where she’s a songwriter who falls for a cowboy), Lady was the last time Dunne allowed herself to be cast younger than she was.* After that, she did not put a foot wrong, playing such roles as a mature novelist and screenwriter in Over 21 (1945); mothers in Life with Father (1947), I Remember Mama (1948), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and It Grows on Trees (1952); and Queen Victoria in The Mudlark (1950), nobody’s idea of a sex goddess. Dunne never let herself appear on-screen as a pathetic old lady—she was ever radiant and attractive—but she tempered the parts she accepted to fit her age. As a result, she never made a fool of herself and didn’t out of desperation add one of those “why did she do it?” roles to her filmography. Although she left the movies by choice, her career did not end abruptly. Like Loretta Young, she appeared often on television (even on Young’s own series), and she went on turning down film roles, among them The Swan in 1956 and Gigi in 1958.
Irene Dunne in four of her greatest roles in the 1940s … (above) as Mama in I Remember Mama … (below) as the very patient, but cleverly manipulative wife to William Powell in Life with Father …
… as the brave ferry command pilot who loses her love (Spencer Tracy) to the perils of war in A Guy Named Joe … and as the real-life schoolteacher whose story is told in Anna and the King of Siam (with Rex Harrison, below).
No rumors of difficult behavior, offscreen affairs, or “steel butterfly” habits e
ver came Dunne’s way. She maintained an impeccable reputation all her life. When her husband died at age seventy-nine in 1965, they had shared thirty-seven happy years. After she retired voluntarily from films, Irene Dunne appeared often on radio and television, and also made records and appeared on the covers of sheet music, but one thing that sets her apart is her remarkable list of awards and honors. Starting when she was just a girl, she began winning scholarships and gold medals for her singing. Her Oscar nominations are well known, of course, but few realize that her recording of “Lovely to Look At” from Roberta ranked number 20 on the popular sales chart the year it came out. The showbiz awards always were there, but many of her other accolades are from real life: countless honorary degrees, medals, awards. Her last great honor was for her entire life and career: the Kennedy Center Honors in December 1985. Dunne served her country in the United Nations, was active in politics, performed many religious duties, and supported numerous charities.
Citizen Irene Dunne, an alternate delegate of the United States to the United Nations.
Like all the dignified female stars of her era, she was repeatedly knocked by Pauline Kael, who couldn’t stand her, saying Dunne “does something funny with her teeth that makes us want to slap her.”* But this is a minority—you might even say perverse—opinion, and Dunne’s reputation grows as new generations see her in The Awful Truth and Show Boat. In the January–February 1980 issue of Film Comment, James McCourt wrote a superb analysis of Dunne’s on-screen persona and charm that is the definitive word on the subject: “Irene Dunne seems more than, less than, or other than a movie star.” She summed up her career in a way that bore out everything her life had been about. “I took my work seriously,” she said. “Everything I did had a purpose. It wasn’t just a superficial acting job for the moment. It was tremendously important to me … but … I knew all along that acting was not everything there was.” In other words, she never thought of herself as a product, and didn’t let anyone else do so either. She became a star and ignored the whole system.†
NORMA SHEARER
Norma Shearer
Like Loretta Young, Norma Shearer, once unequivocally the First Lady of MGM, began in silent films (in uncredited roles around 1920) and found her first big success opposite Lon Chaney (in 1924’s He Who Gets Slapped). She, too, easily made the transition to sound, her first “talkie” being The Trial of Mary Dugan in 1929. Shearer was eleven years older than Young, however, having been born in 1902, and this extra decade as a grown-up actress allowed her to have achieved considerable success in silent movies. She was already a star when sound arrived, and thus, even more than Young, had no need to be shaped up and defined by the sound studio star machine process.
Both Shearer and Young were hardworking, ambitious, and highly focused women backed up by their families. Shearer always looked after the careers of her siblings. Her brother, Douglas, became the head of MGM’s sound department, lasting in that role for decades and making a name for himself with his recording innovations. Her sister, Athole, married William Hawks, the brother of director Howard.
Young and Shearer both maintained the glamour and impeccable fashion of the movie star offscreen as well as on, and both fought hard for the roles they wanted. They differ in two key ways: Whereas Young persevered at her career after the age of forty, Shearer chose to retire, and whereas Young’s career has been devalued over time, Shearer’s reputation has been totally destroyed. Her particular specialties as an actress have become obsolete. She’s a movie dinosaur. Shearer perfected the sophisticated lady with a soigné wardrobe—the deeply, sentimentally romantic heroine—and the modern woman (of the 1930s) who was struggling to cope with problems of sex, adultery, and divorce in a world shifting its sexual mores. (She also had another type: any role that could have the word prestigious attached to it.) Since none of Shearer’s types are of much interest or any use to general audiences today, no one focuses on how good she was at presenting all of them. The common notion about Shearer is that she’s dated, and that if her films were revived, they’d be hooted off the screen. As a result, no one revives them, except for The Women, in which she’s bolstered by the very modern qualities of Paulette Goddard and the eternally satisfying bitchiness of Joan Crawford as Crystal. It’s not Shearer’s fault that cultural attitudes shifted under her feet, and at the very least her “women” should be of some historical, if not entertainment, value. The remarkable thing about her is that when her films are seen, it’s astonishing how she turned all her characters into independent creatures. Her ability to do so was a reflection of her own private life, because another thing no one focuses on is how independent Norma Shearer was. She was good at disguising it, although she never made a secret of her naked ambition. Shearer’s reputation has been given the coup de grâce by a simple biographical fact: In September 1927, she married legendary MGM producer Irving Thalberg, and it is now commonplace to assume unfairly that he made her career for her.
There is no question but that Shearer found a mentor in Thalberg. Her story is an example of the star machine skewed out of its normal trajectory by the influence of a major mogul. Once Shearer came under Thalberg’s personal wing she was taken out of the machine and “handmade.” There are, in fact, other examples of this in Hollywood’s history—David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones, and, God help us, Herbert Yates and Vera Hruba Ralston. (And there’s a British version—Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle.) However, Shearer deserves more credit than she gets for shaping her own career. She was already on her way when she first met Thalberg. An overview indicates something more than just a “star marries for Oscar role” tale of ambition, which isn’t to say that she didn’t know what she was doing, or that she didn’t get her Oscar role. Offscreen, Norma Shearer was known to be shrewd, driven, and ambitious.* When the sickly Irving Thalberg—with his dragon of a mama—began to take a serious interest in her, everyone assumed that Shearer was pursuing him only for career reasons. She liked to tell an “amusing little anecdote” about how when she first saw Thalberg, she thought the impossibly young-looking producer was an “office boy.” It was a calculated story—“You see, I didn’t know he was Thalberg, so how could I have been chasing him for the wrong reasons?” Whatever her true motivations, Shearer married Thalberg in a Hollywood ceremony (“just a little wedding”) that could eclipse any of today’s celebrity extravaganzas. She had yards and yards of organdy, an orchid bouquet, a rose-bedecked trellis designed by Cedric Gibbons, and Bessie Love, Marion Davies, and Louis B. Mayer’s two daughters as bridesmaids. (Louis B. himself was best man.) No one quite knew what to make of the Shearer-Thalberg union. (Both mothers wore black to the wedding.) In a town of ambitious cynics, almost everyone assumed the worst about Shearer’s motives, but they also feared Thalberg and Mayer, and kept their mouths shut. Only Joan Crawford had the nerve to say what people thought. “She doesn’t love him, you know,” she told Adela Rogers St. John, the town crier of the era. “She’s made a sacrifice for what she can get out of him, knowing he’s going to die on her.” (Crystal couldn’t have said it better.)
Mr. and Mrs. Irving Thalberg entraining for their European vacation, with Shearer wearing the required corsage and Thalberg the carefully folded pocket handkerchief
… The elegant Hollywood hostess, Norma Shearer Thalberg
… and the Thalbergs, Hollywood’s official “first couple,” taking some sun but remembering to show off their outfits.
Thalberg’s mother, the formidable Henrietta, hadn’t been pleased when her son fell in love with the high-steppin’ silent movie star, glamorous Constance Talmadge. By contrast, Shearer seemed downright tame, and Henrietta was happy enough to welcome her into Thalberg’s life. In her excellent autobiography, Irene Mayer Selznick (daughter of Louis B. Mayer) wrote that Shearer gave the performance of her life in front of Henrietta, playing a “potentially low-key, highly manageable candidate for wife,” remaining calmly “non-possessive” but also “determined.” After Shearer finally becam
e Mrs. Thalberg, she moved into the home her husband had been sharing with his mother and allowed Henrietta to rule the roost. Selznick writes: “Guests were invited by Henrietta, and she was the hostess who was thanked. The servants were hers, as were the menus.” Later, after she escaped Henrietta, Shearer told Selznick she became pregnant because “it was the only way I could get out of there.” (Henrietta Thalberg could have been the original mother-in-law joke.)
Whatever she felt or whatever made her decide in favor of her marriage, Norma Shearer played her roles offscreen as well as she did on. She was a faithful wife to Thalberg, a loving mother to their two children, and more important, she was able to hoodwink his frightful mother into accepting her. Shearer had the brains always to defer to the whims of Henrietta Thalberg. For this alone, she earned the help her husband gave her. If her marriage was nothing more than a career bargain, as some thought, Shearer honored the deal she made.
The Star Machine Page 47
