The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  * Marie Dressler was one of a long line of 1930s female oddities cast with Beery. Although Marjorie Main was specifically groomed as a latter-day Dressler to play opposite him, he also co-starred with other women who were more or less the same type: Marjorie Rambeau and Margaret Wycherly.

  * Marjorie Main played the supporting role of Ma Kettle in the 1947 box office hit The Egg and I, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Few will remember that she was actually nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for this portrayal, which originally had warmth and humanity and only later became a stereotype. She and Percy Kilbride, who played Pa Kettle, were so popular with audiences that they were given their own Ma and Pa Kettle series. They made nine Ma and Pa Kettle films, becoming a 1950s landlubbing version of Beery and Dressler (although Kilbride was a small, skinny man).

  * Rooney’s eighth marriage (to Jan Chamberlain on July 18, 1978) has endured.

  * Linden’s story is a Hollywood classic. He spent ten years, beginning in 1931, almost becoming a star. Despite a showcase role in RKO’s Are These Our Children (1931); co-starring roles in movies with James Cagney, Irene Dunne, Lionel Barrymore, and others; and publicists really working hard to sell him, Linden never could make it. When the promised role of Laurie in the 1933 version of Little Women was given to Douglass Montgomery, Linden fled California. “I ran away from Hollywood in 1933,” he said. “I was twenty-three and felt forty. There was a narrowness in thought of nearly everyone I met. Living in Hollywood was like dropping out of the air onto a strange, undiscovered planet.” Nevertheless, Linden tried a second time, returning to sign a term contract with MGM, who featured him as the young lead in Ah, Wilderness in 1936. He was paired with Cecilia Parker. Thinking Linden and Parker could become a successful young romantic team, MGM cast them together again in A Family Affair—and then gave up on him (and later, on her). Linden had talent and he had opportunities. He had good luck (replacing Luther Adler in the London stage production of Golden Boy) and he had bad luck (having his big scene as a wounded soldier in Gone with the Wind left on the cutting-room floor), but in the end he had no luck. He looked too young to play romantic leads and too old to play adolescents. He made his last Hollywood film in 1941. He became an inspector of roads for Orange County, the perfect example of a talent that never found the right role or the right type or the right moment for stardom. He died in 1991.

  * The popularity of stories about families had been established on radio with the soap opera One Man’s Family, and the Andy Hardy series inspired imitations, the most successful of which was the popular Henry Aldrich series from Paramount. Based on a 1938 Broadway hit, What a Life! (by Clifford Goldsmith), the stories about Henry had also been turned into a hit radio series in 1939. The first movie, What a Life, in 1939, starred Jackie Cooper as Henry and Betty Field as his girlfriend—and the script was by the famous team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. After Cooper repeated his role in a 1941 follow-up (Life with Henry), the role was taken over by the youthful and likable Jimmy Lydon, who appeared in nine Aldrich films within the next four years. The films are all charming, fast-paced, and favorites of most serious movie fans who appreciate the high standards the series maintained with only a limited budget.

  * Garland and Rooney also do a number together in Words and Music (1948) in which he is playing Lorenz Hart and she appears as herself.

  * In 2006, Rooney was featured in one of the top box office hits of the year, Night at the Museum. Rooney troups on.

  * This top level of “movie stars” was itself three-layered: those in development, on their way up; those who had arrived and were really what it was all about; and those who were moving downward, getting ready to become what we ruthlessly call has-beens (or turning into supporting players). Sadly, there was also a shadow level: those who were never going to make it to the top. There would be no there in their there. They would be the ghosts in the machine, to be dropped, forgotten, and never thought of again.

  † Tino Balio, in his important book Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise (1930–1939), defines studio rosters in four categories: supporting players, who he says performed the least important parts in movies and were employed for a short time only in order to perform their role and would not receive a screen credit; stock players, a wide range that for Balio includes promising beginners as well as experienced old-timers, who had six-month contracts (or longer) and could be paid from $50 to $350 per week; featured players who did principal roles and received screen and advertising credit with year-to-year contracts and a specified minimum and maximum number of pictures guaranteed; and stars, the elite class.

  * However confusing the differences between the character actor–type star and the supporting player may seem to us today, old Hollywood was not confused. The studios had a firm grip on their hiring and billing levels. Today, defining these categories may seem to be splitting hairs, but such information shows how clearly Hollywood’s business practices understood audience response to actors. They defined the appeal of any actor in financial terms, stabilized it, and hired the person to deliver what he had that made money. And they were tough about it. However, if an opportunity to violate their rules appeared that might be profitable, they moved fast to exploit it.

  * One of my favorites is Charlotte Greenwood. Greenwood appeared only in musicals to perform her patented astonishing dance in which she kicked one leg up alongside her ear, then rolled over on her heels and did the same thing with the other leg and the other ear. Working this routine into the plot had to have been a full-time job for someone.

  * B films were defined by having non-star names, low budgets, and running times under seventy minutes. These movies were officially designated “B productions” and carried as such on the factory lists. They were not, as some people erroneously think today, product to be quality evaluated critically as “B.” “B” meant low-budget, not bad film.

  † According to Leonard Maltin, the series came about because Hersholt had played the Dionne quintuplets’ doctor, Allan Dafoe, in three movies with great success. When Dafoe refused to sell further rights to his name, an independent company bought the rights to a popular radio series about Dr. Christian for Hersholt.

  * Oliver was Oscar-nominated for her role as the Widow McClennan in Drums Along the Mohawk in 1939, but lost to Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind. She would have made a perfect Mary Poppins, since she resembled the drawings in the original pre-Disney books.

  † Oliver died in 1942 after making her last film, Lydia, in which she played—what else—a sharp-witted spinster.

  * Morgan was nominated again in 1942, but as Supporting Actor for his role as the pirate in Tobacco Road. He lost to Van Heflin for Johnny Eager.

  RETOOLING FOR WORLD WAR II

  If it’s true that Hollywood simultaneously reflects our world and shapes it, then here’s what the movies can tell us about the era between 1941 and 1946: The men went to war, and the women went crazy. This explains succinctly the sudden shift that took place around 1942, when some people became movie stars for whom there is simply no explanation other than the one that was given for so many things during those years: “Hey! There’s a war on!”

  Most film historians mark the year 1939 as the peak of studio system production. It was a year that brought audiences Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, among others. The years 1940 and 1941 kept up the standard: Audiences saw Rebecca, Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley, and many other fine films. Everything in the factory was functioning at the top level of both efficiency and creativity.

  And then came World War II—a watershed event politically, culturally, socially, and artistically. It brought change, and Hollywood’s star machine had to adapt. Like the widget makers who suddenly had to manufacture airplane parts, like the small town where the women had to run the businesses when the men left to fight, like everything and everybody, Hollywoo
d had to retool.* Before the war, things were one way. During the war, another. (And although they didn’t realize it yet, after the war Hollywood and the movie business was going to be something else altogether, something entirely different that no one expected.) At first, the war appeared to be a serious setback for star making—a rupture in the process, a loss of direction, a radical change in taste. But it soon became obvious that wartime was going to be a time of star bonuses, an unexpected bonanza in short-term box office success.

  The retooling for war that skewed the star making system has no equal in film history except for the transition to sound that took place from approximately 1926 to 1931. In both cases, new types were needed suddenly, and the business had to move fast. It was during the transition to sound that the studio system star machine organized itself, partly as a response to the new need for “talking stars.” Within little more than a decade, the machine would be put to work again in a factory that now knew how to make rapid changes. After the shock of December 7, 1941, the machine got busy and manufactured a lot of new products. Some, like the plastics and frozen foods invented for GIs, would last. Others were like that dreaded necessity of wartime rationing, Spam. When the war was over, the public was glad to see the last of them. But whether durable stars or temporary stars, the machine made stars. When its country called, the star machine, like Lucky Strike Green, went to war. It retooled and found some big-time stars for the duration: young fellas and girls next door, zanies and exotics, dogs and kids, and one certified all-American box office champion.

  THE FELLAS

  The first and most pressing need for the machine was to find new male stars. Hollywood immediately set to work to develop other stars to replace the actors who had gone to war. The top priority for what the machine wanted in a man was simple: one who was available. That was going to be older men, star look-alikes, foreigners who had escaped to America, guys who were 4-F, or young and boyish-looking fellas. Some male movie stars had legitimate deferments from combat. John Wayne was thirty-five years old in 1942, and this put him at the ceiling for draftability (the cutoff was age thirty-five). He was also a married man with four underage dependents. Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire were over forty. William Powell was forty-nine, Bogart was forty-two, and Tracy was forty-one. These men did their part, but they were too old to be drafted into active service. New movies to star those who stayed behind were immediately put into the works. Handsome men with accents—and in a war story an accent was an asset—were groomed: Philip Dorn, Helmut Dantine, Paul Henreid, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Arturo de Córdova. When Gable enlisted, all the studios created Gable look-alikes: John Hodiak, Lee Bowman, John Carroll, James Craig. But the main fodder of the star machine as World War II hit the studios in the pocketbook was the last group—the young, boy-next-door types. The all-American man was about to become a 4-F kid.

  After the boys of World War II, the “leading man” would never be the same. The teen idol was born with the retooling of American manhood into a younger, thinner, more sensitive-looking guy. The effect of World War II on shaping the “new hero” as a “sensitive” male has never been fully explored.* Much credit has been given to the Actors Studio for producing a new kind of male star—the Montgomery Clifts, the James Deans, and the Marlon Brandos. Who remembers that the type was already in place, thanks to World War II having brought us Van Johnson, Marshall Thompson, Dane Clark, Lon McCallister, William Eythe, Robert Walker, Guy Madison, and others?† When the men went to war, the boys took over. The boys needed girls next door to romance, and younger sidekick actors to hang out with and younger parents to have given birth to them, and so on.‡

  VAN JOHNSON

  Van Johnson

  The secret of Van Johnson’s success was simple. He looked like a real person. And he looked like a real person at a time when audiences wanted it that way. Movie stars almost never look like real people. Even the least good-looking of them—or the ugliest (Wallace Beery)—never actually look like the rest of us ordinary folks. They stand out. Johnson stood out because he looked supra-real. He was tall and freckled, and he was both handsome and goofy looking. He had a rough-hewn quality, with a distinctive voice and a scarred mug. Life magazine defined his appeal as that of “the simple-faced boy from next door…out of the classic groove.”

  Before the war, the machine didn’t know what to do with Van Johnson. Should he play villains, loyal sidekicks, or heroes? Would he be in musicals, having been a legitimate chorus boy, or would he do comedy or drama? In late 1941, Johnson had signed a six-month contract with Warner Bros., but he just sat around after his arrival at the studio. A starstruck movie fan, at least he enjoyed being in Hollywood. As his contract was about to expire, he was suddenly cast in Murder in the Big House, a typical low-budget Warner Bros. movie. By the time shooting began, in January 1942, America had entered World War II, and Johnson’s career would drastically change. However, the movie he was making was not only undistinguished (it wasn’t supposed to be otherwise), but he was undistinguished in it. Warners inexplicably dyed his hair and eyebrows black. (“They told me blond men weren’t star material,” Johnson said later.) He played a young reporter and looked awkward. “I simply didn’t know how to act in front of a camera,” he admitted.

  Murder in the Big House is one of the many examples in which Warner Bros., with its tendency to deemphasize stars and emphasize genre and story, bungled it with a young talent. Like Lana Turner before him, Johnson didn’t fit in the universe of the Warners genre system. (And like her, he would end up at MGM.) Seeing Johnson in Murder in the Big House is unsettling: Somewhere in there is the big goofy guy with freckles, but in the meantime, who is this stiff nerd with the dark hair? Changing Johnson’s hair color to black destroyed what he had to give to the camera. It robbed him of what he was, and of what would make him famous: his boy-next-door, natural qualities.

  Almost immediately, Warners dropped Johnson’s option and didn’t renew his contract. By late 1942, he signed at MGM, which had started losing its roster of male stars to the draft. Van Johnson was standing there—all six foot two inches of him (and soon to have a draft-defying steel plate in his head*)—and MGM knew what to do. They focused on his wartime potential and the machine moved in.

  First, Johnson was shrewdly larded into small roles in several movies, testing his ability and his audience appeal. He appeared in three 1942 films: Somewhere I’ll Find You, The War Against Mrs. Hadley, and Dr. Gillespie’s New Assistant. In Somewhere I’ll Find You, he was given the true kiss of promised stardom: He was allowed to play a small role in a movie starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner, and he meets the challenge with natural ease. In Mrs. Hadley, Fay Bainter, an established character actress with serious credentials, plays a wealthy woman who isn’t interested in making sacrifices for the war effort. But her daughter, played by Jean Rogers, falls in love with a buck private (Johnson) and marries him. Johnson looks utterly charming and seems to be just the boy you’d want your daughter to bring home. Dr. Gillespie tested him opposite a real scene-stealer, Lionel Barrymore. Johnson once again held his own, impressing everyone as Dr. Randall “Red” Adams. For Johnson, 1942 was a success, and the studio liked what they saw. He was a hard worker who adored his new career and was more than willing to cooperate with studio bosses in any way they required.

  Johnson’s final trial period was 1943. First, he would appear in The Human Comedy, one of Metro’s “prestige” films, based on a number-one best seller by William Saroyan; then he would be seen in small parts in two films (Pilot No. 5 and Madame Curie); and follow up by doing a repeat of Dr. Red Adams in Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case. He would close with A Guy Named Joe. During 1943 and 1944, Van Johnson would become a hugely popular movie star, and within two years he would be ranked in the top ten box office draws (for the years 1945 and 1946). The efficient star machine had used 1942, 1943, and 1944 to bring Johnson forward to top ten box office status in a classic example of its ability to create a star. Johnson’s face would be
seen on more movie magazine covers than any other male star’s during this period, and almost every movie magazine carried news about him—a story, a photo, an interview, a full-color picture, a review of a movie, an announcement of his next movie. He received more than eight thousand fan letters per week, mostly from girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. He was Frank Sinatra without the songs. (When the fame first took him over, he was quoted as saying, “I can’t pick my nose in public anymore.” Later he changed this to “Now I can’t even pick it behind four walls.”)*

  Johnson’s 1943 movies illustrate how wartime needs developed his image. The Human Comedy is a movie that so perfectly captures the emotions of the day it almost can’t work at any other time. It’s a sentimental story about a small town, a lazy, sun-dappled, safe American world. Its citizens all know one another, and whatever news there is belongs to everyone immediately. It’s the kind of small town that only those of us who grew up in one can really believe, and Van Johnson perfectly fits in it. After all, he was from Providence, Rhode Island, and was pretty much a real-life small-town boy. As the doomed older brother of Mickey Rooney, Johnson has a sort of glow about him. He’s full of life and humor, the perfect embodiment of America’s sacrificial young soldiers. The sadness of his on-screen death elevates his wholesomeness into emblematic status. It was his next movie, however, a minor film without the co-stars, the literary pedigree, or the sentiment, that revealed something that would become essential to his long-range stardom, something that would put a final zip to his type and help him continue to be popular after the war ended.

  Pilot No. 5 showcased MGM’s star workhorse Franchot Tone carrying the can while a newcomer, Gene Kelly, was tried out in a nonmusical film. The setting is the Dutch East Indies. Military men have scavenged parts out of wrecked airplanes to assemble one workable machine to fly on a dangerous mission to bomb the Japanese. There are five pilots, one plane. Which pilot should be picked for the dangerous job? Pilot No. 5 has two leading men (Tone on his way down and Kelly on his way up), and three young players being given a moment in the sun to see if the audience bites. (There is actually a fourth. Peter Lawford, looking skinny and fairly callow, has an unbilled role as a British soldier.) The other two actors being “introduced” are Alan Baxter and Dick Simmons. Each has a larger role than Johnson and each gets to narrate his own “flashback” story. Johnson has no such tale to tell, but he’s billed over them and is the only one of the three who became a star.