The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Love Finds Andy Hardy earned nearly three times what the earlier films had, and the Hardy series became a major focus for MGM. Louis B. Mayer himself kept a tight rein on the series, admonishing writers to figure out what Judge Hardy’s salary might be in real life, and telling designers to decorate the house and choose the clothing the characters wore to reflect things they could really have afforded. (Judge Hardy was supposed to be making about $3,500 per year.) Mayer’s rules were: the children could speak their minds but never be disrespectful or interrupt their parents; the Hardys would never go into debt; and the judge and his wife would never argue in front of the children.

  After the first two or three movies, this formula was set in stone. Each movie picked up where the previous one left off, providing audiences with a smooth sense of ongoing family life. Each always reminded everyone of the setting: “Carvel, Ohio, Population 25,000.” (Even when the Hardys went out west for a vacation, or to New York or Washington, the movies opened up in their Carvel home.) As the series progressed, the ability to smoothly move viewers into the story, set up or reestablish the characters was astonishing. Judge Hardy and Son, a 1939 entry, opens up on the judge in his chambers, followed swiftly by the move to Andy outside the family home, patching an inner tube on his jalopy’s tires. (This action is as arcane to today’s teenagers as anything to be found in Shakespeare.) A few minutes of running time is used to remind everyone that Andy is “typical”—he works on his car, worries about not having any money, respects his parents, and thinks about girls. A few more minutes are used to remind everyone that the Hardys are “typical” and also “proper”—Andy is asked to put on a jacket and tie for family dinner, and the judge’s voice at the table is the voice of authority. Then the little plot—an elderly couple are threatened with eviction—and the big plot—Mrs. Hardy will become seriously ill—can get under way. It was efficient, smart factory filmmaking sustained by the presence of a singularly popular movie star: Mickey Rooney. Because he looked like a real kid—short, kinda ordinary, a little bit cute, and a little bit homely—he was perfect. He was superconfident inside the frame, and his clothes, his car, his manners, and his successes and failures were all grounded in something easy and natural. On the screen, he was a sixteen-year-old boy looking to find out who he was and learn the ways of the world, relying on his old dad to guide him. Offscreen, Rooney was nineteen, but he might as well have been fifty. He had his own bookie. The “Gee whiz, Dad” life of Andy Hardy was something Rooney had never been within a cigar’s length of.

  Rooney’s career might have lived and died with Andy Hardy, except that between 1938 and 1944, his years of maximum popularity, MGM had him doing a great deal more. A lesser talent would have just been Andy Hardy, and grateful. But Rooney also played in a series of other famous movies. In 1938, he appeared opposite Spencer Tracy (as Father Flanagan) in the top box office hit Boys Town. Rooney plays as if he’s a junior James Cagney, without Cagney’s sly little touch of humor to make him likable. Rooney’s a little shit—mean, selfish, seemingly unredeemable. His performance presents the horror of a real juvenile delinquent, a bullying youngster whose sociopathic nature shows audiences just what the country is up against when kids go wild. His ultimate redemption is downright silly. No one could have gotten a hold on that kid Rooney first puts up on the screen.

  Rooney also played young Tom Edison in a film of the same name (1940) and Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939). He was utterly heartbreaking as the young boy in The Human Comedy (1943) who works for Western Union delivering the telegrams that tell families their loved ones have been killed in the war. His solid portrayal of the former jockey who teaches young Elizabeth Taylor to ride in National Velvet (1944) is the performance that makes the story work. Rooney’s experience grounds Taylor’s amateur status and keeps us from noticing that it’s her beauty, not her acting, that we’re appreciating. Rooney is fondly remembered for these movies, but the roles that stand out alongside his Hardy films are his musicals opposite Judy Garland. Without Garland, a part of Rooney’s legend wouldn’t exist, and the same can be said for hers.

  Garland and Rooney appeared together in three Hardy films (Love Finds Andy Hardy, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, and Life Begins for Andy Hardy). She’s a recurring character named Betsy Booth. But it was their co-starring “let’s all put on a show” musicals that gave them their real popularity as a movie team. There were four of them: Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Girl Crazy (1943).*

  In their musicals, Rooney and Garland blend their hysteria, synchronize their insane energy, and bond forever as child stars on the edge: the edge of maturity, the edge of success and/or failure, and just plain the edge. Coming as they do from messy backgrounds and lives as performing tots, they seem to be in a performance space all their own, one that no one but them is good enough to get into, yet one we can all respond to and appreciate. In Girl Crazy (1943), they do a number allegedly set on a dusty southwestern road in which they try to restart a broken-down jalopy. They have to get out, try to fix the car, move the car forward, jump in and out of it, and finally, Rooney has to run alongside, singing to Garland “Can You Use Me?” It’s a patter song in which he begs her to like him, and she tells him he’s a jerk (an American love song). Like the best of movie star singers, both know how to really act a lyric without losing the musical beat and pitch. Everything they do is a work of art. They’re peerless.

  In the mid-1960s, Rooney beaches up on Garland’s soon-to-be-defunct television show. She’s thin as a rail, shaky. He’s overweight and slightly sleazy. He’s become a has-been whose career has gone up and down more times than any yo-yo, while she’s notorious for her addictions and unreliability. People tune in just to see if she can get through an hour without collapsing. There they are: Garland and Rooney, America’s former teen idols. Each is looking into the eyes of the one other person who can fully understand what they’ve been through and what it’s really like to be who they are. They’ve tapped and sung their way to hell and back. It’s a moment of showbiz immortality. (Garland will be dead at the age of forty-seven, but Rooney will have a complete career rebirth.)

  In March 1944, Rooney joined the army and did what many actors managed to avoid: He served his country. Originally classified as 4-F, he asked for a reclassification and entered the 6817th Special Services Battalion, serving in Europe as a private. Rooney is an authentic World War II veteran. When he returned to Hollywood, MGM, his home studio, was a changed place, and by 1949 he was forced to become a freelancer. The pickings were slim for an aging all-American boy, but Rooney hadn’t been born in a trunk for nothing. He kept on trucking. He always could act, so he became a reliable character actor in movies and found acclaim in television. Just as 1962 was winding down, he showed his depth as an actor in the film version of Requiem for a Heavy- weight, with Anthony Quinn and Jackie Gleason. By ’62, Rooney has a weathered and battered face. There’s nothing of Andy Hardy left. The bouncing, overconfident teenager is gone. He plays a low-key, reactive character whose wordless looks say more than all of the rest of the dialogue. He’s a guy who understands failure, who knows what it’s like to have been on top and have to keep going after the good times have ended. Rooney had lived it, and he knew how to play it. He used what he had—and climbed back into the saddle again, something he would begin doing over and over in the coming years—up one year, down the next, but never giving up. He wrote his autobiography, taught acting classes, pursued various business ventures, and took roles whenever and wherever he could find them. He gave up star billing; if it was available, he took it, and if not, he accepted less. In his autobiography, Life Is Too Short, he cheerfully recounted some of his bizarre attempts to make a living during his down periods: he took a “flyer in oil”; started a company called Lovely Lady Cosmetics; invented a perfume called Taming of the Shrew; put spray-on hair inside an aerosol can to be sold to bald men; started a pharmaceutical company called Eli
m-N-Ache; and invented a round hot dog with a hole in the middle so you could put it on a hamburger bun (the Weenie Whirl). For the latter, he created special toppings so he could sell the Erich von Weenie (with sauerkraut), the Pancho Weenie (with chili), or the Surfboard Weenie (with raisins and pineapple). At least he never lost his sense of humor—or his optimism. And no matter what he did offscreen or on, the public never deserted him. (Perhaps he built up so many reserves of goodwill from Andy Hardy—and from trucking alongside Judy Garland—that nothing could ever spoil him for audiences.)

  Andy Hardy’s gone! Mickey Rooney’s a long way from Carvel, Ohio, in movies like Machine Gun Kelly

  The Bold and the Brave, with Wendell Corey.

  The final irony of Rooney’s career came in October 1979, when he returned to Broadway in a musical (with another movie veteran, Ann Miller) that no one thought had a chance. Called Sugar Babies, it was a pastiche of old burlesque routines, cornball humor, and leggy girls parading around in gauze and garter belts. Against all odds, it became a big hit, and Rooney was back on top. In a one-year period, he was nominated for a Tony for Sugar Babies, a supporting actor Oscar for his role in The Black Stallion, and an Emmy for the TV movie Bill, in which he plays a mentally retarded man. In 1982, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences again awarded him with an honorary Oscar, this time “in recognition of his sixty years of versatility in a variety of memorable film performances.”

  There is no other career like Rooney’s. Child star to character actor with stops along the way at American icon, leading man, and award-winning actor, he’s a true oddity—a combination of Shirley Temple, Laurence Olivier, and Gene Kelly rolled into one. He should never have survived child stardom, should never have survived Andy Hardy, should never have survived being typed as a “boy” in musicals, should probably never have survived World War II, should never have survived his career slumps and his eight marriages and his personal peccadilloes—just plain should never have survived, period. He was an oddity in every era, in every role yet managed to keep going and keep himself alive in the business he was born into. It’s called talent. In the end, the public knows it, wants it, and Rooney always had it.*

  Mickey Rooney

  CHARACTER ACTORS

  Moviegoers in the golden age loved second-level character players. They loved them so much, in fact, that the filmmaking business often capitalized on that popularity by creating low-budget movies to star a particular character in a feature. This did not mean that the character stopped being a character and moved onto the star roster. It only meant the business saw a chance to make an extra buck, a bonus buck as it were, off the public’s affection, by bestowing on the character a pseudo stardom or a temporary fame, since it was the character and not the actor the public wanted.

  The bonus phenomenon of the star turn by a character actor is a subtle distinction that created a short-term profit out of starring someone who wasn’t a star, which is not the same thing as creating a star out of an “oddity.” Oddities worked up the ladder toward stardom, as when Wallace Beery developed himself into a leading actor, as when Clifton Webb played two or three roles that elevated him, as when Mickey Rooney grew up to stardom. A character actor was a specialized entity that arrived at the level of character and was expected to stay there, making a solid living.

  To understand the role of the character actor, it’s important to understand that all studios had a specific, clearly defined pay scale for their employees, including actors. Performers in movies were subjected to employment levels just as the employees inside any factory would be.

  Movie studios kept under contract only the roster of actors they regularly needed. There were three categories: stars,* character actors, and supporting players. Everybody else—bit part players, extras, or “specialties” (certain dance acts, comedians, skilled cowboy horsemen, whatever)—were usually hired on as needed. “Extras” were exactly that—extra people needed briefly for large crowd scenes, street scenes, mobs, et cetera, or for one brief role. They were hired for the day or a few days from Central Casting, and they were listed by categories: dress men, juveniles, bellhops, bald men, police, collegiates, butlers, beards, riders, freaks, tall men, short men, homely women, dowagers, Hawaiians, sickly children. For instance, there was a category called “hags,” broken down into: hags with warts, hags with big noses, youngish hags, older hags, hags with twisted mouths, hags with puffy eyes, hags with twisted mouths and puffy eyes. There were snake charmers who worked without live snakes and snake charmers who worked with live snakes (Have Snake, Will Travel). In 1935, there were seventeen thousand extras listed by defined type and capability, but only about seven thousand of them worked regularly.

  Some film historians break the levels of hiring inside a studio down into even smaller categories: stars, featured players, character actors, supporting players, B-level actors, short-term contract “stars,” freelancers, stars of short subjects, and so on.† To explain how stars were manufactured, however, the minute details of differentiating employment levels can be simplified to star, character, and support.

  Men, women, kids, dogs, or any other animals could “arrive” in any category. For instance, whereas Greta Garbo, Shirley Temple, and Lassie were stars, Gladys Cooper, Butch Jenkins, and Velvet the Horse were supporting players, and Edward Everett Horton, George “Foghorn” Wilson, and Cheetah the Chimp were “character actors.” Each category played its role for the studio factory.

  There was a reason why studios kept particular characters and support players on payroll. Although the stars were the most important economically and were given the most attention, character actors and supporting players were needed to surround them. If you had a Garbo under contract, you needed a Gustav von Seyffertitz—exotic to exotic, foreign to foreign. If you had Errol Flynn, you’d want Alan Hale and Frank McHugh, Irish cutup to Irish cutup. And all movies needed variety in casting, what Billy Wilder referred to as “a bit of vegetable.” To consider the star-making phenomenon and to “read” the definition of any star, you needed to see who their studio surrounded them with.

  In old Hollywood, character actor and supporting player differed in that a character actor was famous for only one characterization, whereas a supporting player took on many different kinds of roles, and a character actor often appeared in the movie just to do a “star turn” in a role that had only one big scene. In contrast, a supporting player usually portrayed a character who was present for the total filmed story, or at least was important to its overall plot.*

  Character actors were sometimes known as the studio’s “stock company.” These are the people who make viewers ask, Who’s that guy? If my husband suddenly says to me, “Who’s that guy?”, all I have to do is ask him, “Movie guy or real guy?” If he says “movie guy,” I know the answer immediately. It’s S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, because that’s the movie guy whose name my husband can never remember. For one of my colleagues, the answer is always William Demarest. Sakall and Demarest are classic examples of Hollywood’s best character actors. Sakall perfected the role of the “Sheeeeeesh”-meister, an exasperated but kindly Hungarian type who slapped his fat cheeks in amazement at key plot moments (“Sheeeeeeeesh!”) and who fractured the English language while breaking eggs in one of his many movie restaurants. Demarest was always cranky. He kicked his own daughter in the butt in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), warning her, “Someday someone is going to murder you. There’ll be nothing left but a hair ribbon and a bone…the mystery of Morgan’s Creek.”*

  Character actors were valuable because they filled out a movie, backed up weak stars, and endeared themselves to audiences who looked forward to their particular shtick. In their own way, they were stars. Character actors played a character—and one character only. They defined and refined a type they were then identified with, and audiences accepted them as that person. In other words, like top movie stars, they had a special type they had carved out for themselves that the audience wanted them
to be. Franklin Pangborn would show up as a tutti-frutti hairdresser and disappear. Mary Wickes would arrive as a visiting nurse, huff around in her sensible white shoes, insulting her patient, and then go away. Edward Everett Horton would forget where he was going or where he had been and then go somewhere else. Such character actors were recognized by name, had their own fan clubs, were advertised in the trailers and posters for a film, and were written about in fan magazines (just not in the front pages).

  Character actors were fixed story units. Their character did not develop, change, or provide surprises. Their performances were never stretched into something new. “Departure” was not in the character actor’s catalogue; delivering the familiar, the expected, was. (Billie Burke, a character actress famous for her high-society dithering around a well-appointed dinner table, wasn’t suddenly going to “depart” this comedy role and be cast as Mrs. Danvers.)

  Sometimes two different character actors perfected the same basic shtick. For instance, Chill Wills and Slim Pickens both were “rubes”—astonished, befuddled, and twangy. They are not the same person, but they might as well be. What’s even more confusing about them is that Slim isn’t particularly skinny and Chill is certainly not cool. In popularity, Slim has the edge on Chill today because it is Slim (not Chill) who rides the big bomb downward at the end of Dr. Strangelove (1964), wearing a cowboy hat and whooping like a banshee. In their day, Chill probably had the edge on Slim because he (Chill, not Slim) played in A-level films (always as a rube, of course) alongside big stars like Norma Shearer, Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, and Judy Garland. (Neither Slim nor Chill should ever be confused with the yokel Andy Devine, of course.)

  Today, the designations of “character” and “support” are nonexistent or totally flexible. Stars are not locked into one or the other. We toss the terms around and violate the categories as needed. You can read in a magazine or newspaper that actor “Brad Pitt is really a character actor.” This doesn’t mean that the writer seriously thinks Pitt is Chill Wills. It means he is being compared favorably to serious and humanistic actors like Steve Buscemi and John Turturro. It means we’re supposed to take Pitt more seriously than we do. (By old industry standards, of course, Buscemi and Turturro would be supporting players, because they are not usually leading men, and they play varied kinds of roles.)