The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Many star oddities have made the top ten list of box office draws. On it are Rin Tin Tin, a dog; cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers (whom no one really thinks of as movie stars); and the ice-skating phenomenon Sonja Henie (three years on top). The business always understood that stardom was about connecting to the viewer. There were lots of unpredictable successes. Mae West was an oddity whose ploy was to make fun of the concept of “female sex symbol.” She was an oddity in drag, as it were, pretending to be what she wasn’t: a young and desirable leading lady. She sent up the concept, and thus conquered it. Oddballs were a necessary “other” to the excessive beauty and glamour of the system. They made room for audiences who wanted reassurance about their own lack of glamour and glory. Oddities provided variety, offered the possibility of unusual story lines, and reflected the unpredictable nature of stardom. For instance, why should Clifton Webb have become a star in movies?

  CLIFTON WEBB

  Clifton Webb

  Clifton Webb was not young. He wasn’t sexy. He didn’t appear to be strong and virile. And by the narrow-minded terms of his own day, he appeared not only prissy but effeminate and clearly projected qualities everyone assumes are fanbane: intelligence, education, and erudition. Yet he not only became a major star of the late 1940s and 1950s, but also a top box office draw. The brilliance of the studio star machine was that, when it stumbled across the fact that Webb was likable, it didn’t waste a minute to begin creating vehicles for him. Webb, who had actually made silent movies, was “born” to sound motion picture audiences with his Oscar-nominated performance as Waldo Lydecker in Laura in 1944.* The part was tailor made—acerbic, elegant, sophisticated—and shaped Webb’s screen persona for the rest of his career. (Lydecker, of course, was actually a possessive, obsessed, murdering liar, but audiences embraced his smart-assed superior attitude and razor-sharp wit.) In his second film, The Dark Corner, Webb played another villain, a Lydecker clone. Webb’s popularity as the type inspired Fox to include him in their biggest prestige film of 1946, The Razor’s Edge, casting him again as an acid-tongued social arbiter.

  Having observed Webb’s success as Waldo Lydecker, his studio decided to let him be Lydecker—forever. It was a sensible idea, but Webb would never have become the box office draw he became had Fox not eventually stumbled onto the key for the Webb formula: Eliminate the villainry, keep the acerbic comedy. His career might have been only as a supporting actor, or might have died out altogether, had he not made Sitting Pretty, the film that changed everything for him. In 1948, Webb was cast as the scene-stealing Lynn Belvedere in Sitting Pretty, co-starred with Maureen O’Hara and Robert Young. The movie was a slim little piece about a male babysitter in a neighborhood of suburban gossips. It was as if Waldo Lydecker had reformed himself, left his job as a New York columnist and radio personality, and entered the sitcom world of the 1950s. Belvedere, like Lydecker, is a writer. He walks like Waldo and talks like Waldo, and like Waldo, loathes sentiment, children, and American homespun values. This time, however, he doesn’t kill any of his co-stars. He just wishes he could.*

  Sitting Pretty took the edge off Webb’s Lydecker persona. While not making him lovably sentimental like an old Lionel Barrymore character, it made him totally acceptable. The secret was that Webb was allowed to tell little brats to shut up, to dump cereal on the head of a baby that was flinging the stuff around the room, to provide comeuppance to a nosy neighbor—in short, to do all the things that audiences longed to do in their own lives. They took Clifton Webb into their hearts as a surrogate smart-ass, the person they would be if only they were, well, more like Clifton Webb. The unlikelihood of average Americans wanting to be Clifton Webb was not lost on 20th Century–Fox, but they knew what to do when they had a bonus winner. In the next few years, Webb starred in movie after movie, becoming a solid headliner and a genuine movie star.†

  Webb understood what had happened to him, and he happily embraced his rehabilitated Lydecker-ness in his private life. He attended every party he could, almost always with his celebrated mother, Maybelle, on his arm, and he became famous as a fashion plate. He was credited with introducing Hollywood to the white mess jacket and sackcloth slacks, and he was named to the list of ten best-dressed men in the world. He was also emminently quotable, uncorking offscreen the same kind of acid wit and smug (but comic) self-satisfaction he displayed in movies. He told reporters he couldn’t play murderers anymore because he would be committing professional suicide if he did. “I’m now America’s sweetheart,” he announced. As to his having left the theatre to become a movie character, he was very clear-minded: “I love Hollywood,” he said, “and the chance to make more and more money. I love money. Furthermore, I need money and I will do positively anything to get it.” He was a perfect American hero of the materialistic 1950s. Webb knew how to connect.

  Clifton Webb became a star by being an anti-star. He stuck it to the public and their way of life, and they loved him for it. He portrayed an unlovable human being in a period when there were far too many lovable old stars around on-screen. Webb rejected audience love, making the fans come to him on his own terms. As a result, he seemed new and refreshing.

  The fifteen years of Webb’s stardom can be rationally explained by its taking place during the postwar transition to antiheroism. But how does an ugly old mug like Wallace Beery get to be a movie star? And a hammy old ugly mug at that. It’s understandable why comics who are neither handsome nor well built can become stars—Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye. They’re comedians who star, not movie stars who are funny. Comedy comes first with them, and their ability to be funny is the source of their stardom. (Women comediennes are either glamorous, like Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball, or reduced to sidekick roles, like Eve Arden and Martha Raye, or leads in B movies, like Judy Canova.)

  WALLACE BEERY

  Wallace Beery

  Wallace Beery was once thought of as a great actor, being nominated twice for the Oscar and winning once.* Yes, that Wallace Beery, the corny old devil who beached up playing Jane Powell’s father in the 1948 A Date with Judy, in which he takes rumba lessons from Carmen Miranda. Furthermore, his is no minor stardom. Wallace Beery was a top ten box office draw from 1931 to 1935—five solid years. Not only that, he made a comeback to the top list in 1940, for an overall total of six years on top. All Beery’s movies made money. Audiences loved him. His career represents the perfect triumph of the star machine’s ability to capitalize on someone unusual. Beery, a professional actor, kept going the way a professional actor keeps going. When he aged, he took on character work, and made his characters the leading men. He was an unstoppable kind of movie star who hogged every frame he ever entered.

  Beery was a palooka. A gravelly-voiced, mug-pussed, eyeball-rolling ham. He’s all jerky motions, beefy presence, and loud guffaws. He wears a perpetual “aw, shucks” grin, and that would be one thing, but he manages to make us as an audience aware that his “aw, shucks” is really “look out, suckers.” Beery is ever the con artist. He’s not to be found playing a judge or a royal personage or a beloved old schoolteacher. Beery is decidedly low class and a crock, and that’s his glory. Movie stars couldn’t all be grand. Someone had to be a schlub, and Beery commanded the field. While he was on-screen, he could call the space his own. Even the young and super-handsome Clark Gable looked a bit uninteresting when he had to put up or shut up against Beery in Hell Divers in 1932.

  Wallace Beery came to movies already an experienced pro.* He was born in 1885 (sometimes listed as 1881, 1886, or 1889) and began his career in the theatre in 1903 and never stopped working as an actor until his death at age sixty-four in 1949. His official movie debut was in 1913 at the Essanay Studios in Chicago. In a 1935 interview, he claimed that his “first screen appearance was as a raw-boned Swedish housemaid in a one-reel comedy.” This was Beery’s version of his career, but research indicates that his first movie was His Athletic Wife, a one-reel comedy, and it was followed by a series of comedies cal
led the George Ade fables. His first Sweedie was in 1914. (This housemaid character, Sweedie, was such a hit that Essanay produced a series.) Louella Parsons wrote the stories, and Beery, who ran the production unit, co-directed and played the lead. A new comedy was turned out every two weeks.

  In his early years, Beery alternated between comedy turns and roles as villains. He was slender then, fairly good looking, and certainly impressive. He was six feet one inch tall and a solid (no flab) 200 pounds.† In the 1920s world of teensy movie players, he was much in demand for his stature, and he played memorable villains in Mary Pickford’s The Little American in 1917, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and Blanche Sweet’s starring vehicle The Unpardonable Sin in 1919. His biggest silent hit came in 1920 when he played Magua, the Native American villain in The Last of the Mohicans. He also played the important role of Richard the Lionheart in Allan Dwan’s directorial version of Robin Hood in 1922, which starred Douglas Fairbanks. Other famous Beery silent films were The Covered Wagon (1923), The Lost World (1925), and Old Ironsides (1926).

  In 1929, Beery was employed by Paramount, and he had been in movies sixteen years when his contract was due to expire. With sound movies coming in, Paramount didn’t renew seven of its silent stars: Florence Vidor, Bebe Daniels, Richard Dix, Adolphe Menjou, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri…and Beery. He was off the screen for a year, and it seemed likely that, given his age and the emphasis on good looks in Hollywood, his film career was ended. Suddenly, however, he was hired by MGM to play a showcase role that had originally been intended for Lon Chaney, who had just died of cancer. Emergency gave Beery his chance, and after his Oscar nomination for this role (in The Big House), his sound career was ensured.

  Beery was next cast as Pat Garrett in the 1929 Billy the Kid, with Johnny Mack Brown, and then as P. T. Barnum (a role ready-made for him) in 1930’s A Lady’s Morals (the first try to turn opera star Grace Moore into an audience favorite). Moore didn’t go over very well as Jenny Lind, but Beery was a hit as Barnum. After that, he got lucky once again, when he was put into a movie with Marie Dressler, another aging wreck with great talent. The film was called Min and Bill (1930), and Dressler won the Best Actress award for her performance. The movie was also a smash hit at the box office, and MGM—happy at finding a bonus on their roster—defined Beery as an unquestionable star. He proved them right when he appeared in The Champ in 1931—an old-fashioned story about a drunken ex–prize fighter who has the total devotion of his little son (Jackie Cooper). The movie was nominated for Best Picture of 1931/32, but lost to Grand Hotel, and Beery, also nominated as Best Actor, almost lost. When the votes were counted, he had only one vote fewer than Fredric March, and the Academy called that too close to declare anything but a tie. Beery and March shared the Oscar.*

  After The Champ, Beery took his place as a major player in the studio system of 1930s Hollywood, one of the biggest stars in Metro’s heaven. He appeared in nearly a full decade of quality material and in showcase roles written and designed especially for him. It’s surprising how many of Beery’s films of the 1930s are frequently revived today. He’s the villainous Preysing in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer all-star Grand Hotel in 1932 (“I hate the lousy part,” he said, “but I’m playing it”); the husband of Marie Dressler in another huge box office hit, Tugboat Annie (1933); and Jean Harlow’s coarse husband in Dinner at Eight (1933), another Metro all-star hit. He played the lead in Viva Villa! (1934), the colorful role of Long John Silver in 1934’s Treasure Island (hopping around spryly on a bogus peg leg), repeated as Barnum in The Mighty Barnum (1934), and made a dominant figure out of Uncle Sid in the 1935 filmed version of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! In all these films, he received billing above the title, because no matter what, Wallace Beery starred. He would have it no other way, and heaven help the co-star who got in his key light. (Robert Young, one of his fellow cast victims, stated succinctly that Beery was “a shitty person.”*)

  However, when Beery was folded into a star ensemble piece like Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, his professionalism revealed itself. In Grand Hotel, for instance, where he is the movie’s only villain, he plays it straight, with no winking at the audience about what a lovable old rogue he is. His performance is in consort with the rest of the cast, and perfectly true to his role in the hotel’s “passing parade.” Although his part as Harlow’s crude husband in Dinner at Eight is essentially a comedy one, he keeps it in check, once again in tune with the rest of the stars. In an A-list movie with an A-list crowd, Beery knew how to tamp it down and play his note in the orchestra correctly.

  Looking over Beery’s work at Metro in the 1930s reveals one of Hollywood’s clearest stories about how an oddity can become a star bonus and a studio can facilitate the process. He had the good luck to be at Metro, and Metro had the good luck to have signed him. Metro was a studio at which the concept of “star power” was fully understood, and the power of Wallace Beery shows up immediately even in a film that, while well directed and written, was never intended to be an award-winning masterpiece. Hell Divers (1932) is such a film, one made purely for entertainment. Beery is billed over Clark Gable, and is, in fact, being used to boost Gable’s career. In other words, the studio wanted Gable to be discovered by audiences, and they know moviegoers would certainly find him in a Wallace Beery film.

  Hell Divers, directed by George Hill, is a story about men, machines, and the noble tradition of the military, all done in a brawling atmosphere of camaraderie and double entendre. Beery plays a happy-go-lucky guy who bangs a piano and sings, “Oh, the monkeys have no tails in sam-bo-ango” with a real macho gusto that is utterly beguiling. Not yet out of control, he seems natural, improvisational. There’s a rough, honest quality to his mugging—he uses the acting technique he mastered in silent film and just adds noise. Beery plays an ordinary mutt who will be brave and matter-of-fact in the face of death, sacrificing himself for others. He gets to play a great male weepie scene in which he has to say good-bye to a beloved skipper who is leaving the service because he’s lost an arm in a plane crash. “I wish I could give you one of mine,” says Beery, after he’s awkwardly, mistakenly offered to shake the skipper’s nonexistent right hand. Both men enact the behavior of an era in which men who felt deep emotions weren’t supposed to cry. Beery is totally in tune with his own zeitgeist in this scene, and when his longtime woman friend, played by Marjorie Rambeau (who runs a shady bar but has a heart of gold), describes him, she says, “No woman’s a wife to a sailor. All she can be is a port of call,” she’s defining the Beery star popularity. Women in the audience liked him because he was temporary fun, and men liked him because he was their free alter ego.

  With his success in The Champ (1931), Beery was cast in more movies with a kid. He and Cooper were re-paired in films like O’Shaughnessy’s Boy (1935). His role continues his tradition of a lovable, no-better-than-he-should-be kinda guy. This time he’s a circus lion tamer whose wife skips out, taking his son. This is hackneyed material, but within it, Beery carves out moments that can break any parent’s heart. When he’s finally reunited with his older little guy, played by Cooper as a starchy military school martinet, Beery’s joy seems to fill him up, lighting his eyes, his smile, and his entire face. So eager, so happy, he fails to pick up on the signals that the head of the military school is clearly observing—the kid hates him. Wearing an awkward suit, hair slicked back, huge grin in place, Beery approaches his son all tenderness and love, full of plans and memories—it’s a killer to watch. He has an expressive face and a voice he can modulate and use as an instrument. His schmaltz seems to be completely authentic as he eagerly tries to please his boy. Seeing that his son carefully lines up his boots in proper military fashion each night, Beery grabs his and does the same. He tries so hard, with such innocence and simplicity! Beery always knew what he was doing.

  By the time he appears in MGM’s version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic pirate story, Treasure Island (1934), Beery is practically working on cruise control. He
doesn’t act, he performs. Perfectly cast as Long John Silver, he knows what the audience wants from him and how to give it to them. There is something brutish in him, in both his appearance and his demeanor, so playing a villain requires him to do little. Working from that base, he boldly gives the audience the “wink-wink-I’m-really-okay” performance of the decade. He’s both comic and threatening, and pulls the sentimentality back from the brink just in the nick. Paired yet again with Jackie Cooper (wearing what appears to be a wig cast off by Jean Harlow), he steals every scene. Not for him W. C. Fields’s famous warning “Do not act with children or dogs.” Beery (and for that matter, Fields) knew how to upstage a kid. While Cooper Goody-Two-shoes around saying, “’Pon my soul!”, Beery stumps about on his peg leg, arghing and shivering his timbers, managing to eat the scenery, burp, and carry right on. In Wallace Beery, like it or not, you confront a man who knows better than you do what you’ll put up with.

  After his first years as a star, Beery began to play a cartoon version of himself. He not only played the same character, he gave the same performance. His movies and his type became a franchise. Like today’s movie names, à la Star Wars IV: The Phantom Menace, Beery’s movies might have been called Wallace Beery IV: Twenty Mule Team or Wallace Beery X: Bad Bascomb. Accepting the wretched excess that came to define his work, MGM ground out programmers to rip off his popularity, and as far as wretched excess was concerned, Beery more than rose to the occasion. As his belly flopped over his belt and his jowls hit his shoulders, his movie roles followed suit. It was hard to decide which enlarged more, his waistline or his nose, and yet Beery remained a certifiable star. At least he deserves credit for his ability to hang on at the very top, and to successfully mug his way through the worst of material, never losing the majority of the audience’s affection because no matter what critics had to say, the moviegoing public loved the guy.