Johnson is the second pilot to be introduced. He’s jaunty, cocky, the comedy relief in a grim story. The role is a nice showcase for someone who can register with a minimum of dialogue and screen time. Johnson plays a sassy hepcat, telling someone to pass the “cackle jelly” (eggs) when they eat breakfast. His character is a smart-ass, wisecracking GI. “I’m fighting because I like it,” he says, revealing the thing that would help Johnson endure: his cynicism. He could project a nasty streak. Yes, he was the gosh darn, aw gee, and shucks hero of World War II, but he was never entirely naïve and he cut a very different image from the sweet boy heroes like Lon McCallister. Prior to Pilot, Johnson had established his sweetness, his all-American sense of wholesomeness. But without Pilot to fully reveal his nasty streak, Johnson might not have become a big star or survived the 1940s. When the need for apple pie ended, Johnson was still authentic. He could play all huffy and annoyed by “normal” people while being presented as the embodiment of them. He later became an excellent audience surrogate as a carping presence. While everyone else is hopscotching around in the heather in Brigadoon (1954), he’s dying to get back to noisy Manhattan, and he steals the show from both Hepburn and Tracy in Frank Capra’s State of the Union (1948), playing a cynical news reporter who has all the smart lines.
It was 1944 that turned Van Johnson into pure gold. He played a bit part in The White Cliffs of Dover, and once again appeared as Dr. Red Adams in Three Men in White. Then he hit the top once and for all with two enormous wartime box office hits, a lighthearted one and a serious one: Two Girls and a Sailor followed by Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.
Johnson had one major competitor for the top spot as young heartthrob during the war years: Robert Walker. (He and Johnson appear together in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.) Walker was a fine actor and an original presence. His ability to command the frame and take attention from other actors was deadly. He easily steals Bataan (1943), in which he plays an innocent former movie usher who has entered the navy as a musician. Surrounded by Robert Taylor (a Metro leading star), Lloyd Nolan, Thomas Mitchell, and George Murphy (all movie veterans), and colorful youngsters (Desi Arnaz), Walker wipes the floor with them. His World War II appearances include his role as a sensitive young man born in a military family for whom the army is a frightening chore (Since You Went Away), his marvelous role as the innocent army private who woos Judy Garland into marriage in The Clock (1945), and his big box office hit as the comic infantry schnook in See Here, Private Hargrove (1944). Walker chafed at being typed as the boy next door. During the war, when his career was starting, he essentially accepted the casting, but after the war, he began to fight with MGM. Walker’s career compared to Johnson’s illustrates one of the keys to lasting stardom: the ability to survive fame. Johnson was willing to embrace stardom and the system that defined him, while Walker fought it, railed against it. Johnson took his blows and kept on going. Walker was beaten down. Compounding his dissatisfaction was his tragic relationship with his wife, Jennifer Jones, who left him for David O. Selznick. Walker’s behavior became increasingly neurotic and self-destructive, although his talent never wavered. When Alfred Hitchcock understood his weird and unsettled qualities, he cast him in his greatest role, that of Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train (1952). Robert Walker’s career was short—he died just short of his thirty-third birthday in 1951—and he has never received his due, but Strangers gave him immortality. Furthermore, his influence cannot be denied.* His shadow falls over James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and others.
Van Johnson’s life as the big box office heartthrob, pinup-boy draw of the 1940s was the biggest type of stardom there is—it’s just a briefer version of it. By the end of the 1940s, as his hottest bobby-sox adulation died down, he was starting to see a diminishing of his popularity. However, being at MGM meant he wouldn’t instantly be useless after the war, because he could sing, he could dance, and MGM was the studio of great musicals. They would use him in many musicals as the romantic lead, although they didn’t gave him many chances to strut his dancing. They already had dancers—Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire—and who needs other dancers with those two under contract? Johnson was sold as an ordinary, real-life guy—presumably someone who would not suddenly start tapping his way down the street. Given a chance, however, Johnson could hoof it for real. I’ll always remember the response of the audience when I first saw Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). Red-haired Lucille Bremer, an Arthur Freed protégée, is dancing around a bandstand. The bandleader has his back to the viewer. Suddenly, Bremer turns him around and pulls him into the spotlight. It’s a sheepishly grinning Van Johnson! The audience at first gasped—it’s a cameo for him—and then burst into wild applause. Johnson and Bremer perform a spirited rendition of “I Won’t Dance,” and Johnson demonstrates his ability to sing, really dance, and still perform the role of a bashful, all-American guy. Johnson’s cute grin, his loosey-goosey high stepping, added to the usual unexpectedness of seeing a really big man turn out to be light on his feet, sent the audience into ecstasy. They cheered their heads off when the number was over.*
Van Johnson found fame and a perfect co-star in MGM’s hugely successful World War II musical, Two Girls and a Sailor, with June Allyson.
Unlike some of the new guys who came to Hollywood because of the war, Van Johnson had career longevity because he was not limited:
he could sing and dance, as in Words And Music, with Lucille Bremer, and
he could do dramatic roles as a typical griping American GI (Battleground, with the dying Ricardo Montalban).
Johnson’s World War II “star” contemporaries (and many of the “leading men” of the war, such as Lee Bowman and John Harvey) began to disappear off the screen and out of the fan mags as the “real men” (Gable, Taylor, Power, Stewart, et al.) came home. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wasn’t sure what might happen with Johnson, but by 1949 it was clear his career would not die. Two key films from that year illustrate why: In the Good Old Summertime, a musical, and Battleground, a World War II combat film.
In the Good Old Summertime is a musical remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s popular 1940 comedy The Shop Around the Corner. Johnson is cast in support of Judy Garland. He had always been agreeable and cooperative, and supporting Garland was fine with him, especially since he was the leading man. “Support” is the proper word for what he does. He has ample screen time, but all his charm, all his talent, are directed to providing a suitable foil for Garland. He seems calm beside her jitters. He’s “being there” for her in his down-to-earth manner, and by seeming to appreciate her, he tempers her insecurity and allows her to blossom as the great performer she is.
When the two stars “meet cute” by bumping into each other on the post office steps, Johnson, playing clumsy with superb physical skills, destroys Garland’s hairdo, her hat, her umbrella, and finally tears the entire back off her dress. His carefully executed physical mistakes, played with calm and apology, work as a low-note accompaniment to her hysterical but amusing responses. Johnson’s dance ability is also at work. The two of them execute their physical comedy as if they’re presenting a musical number in words and action rather than song and dance.*
This proof that Johnson was going to “be there” to support MGM’s musical leading ladies kept his value up at the studio. They had not only Garland for him but also Esther Williams, a big woman who needed a big guy like him to be her romantic opposite.
Johnson’s longevity was guaranteed by his other big success of the year, the big box office hit Battleground. After avoiding combat movies as much as they could between 1946 and 1949, Hollywood suddenly started to retell the story for an audience now willing to listen, and learned that the World War II war film as a genre was never going away. Johnson was cast as a smart-talking, smooth-operating scrounger who gripes his way through the Battle of Bastogne. His ability to be a charming cynic ensured that his postwar military characters never seemed too patriotic or dated. “Typical” though he was, and associated with the most positive of
American values during the war, it was nevertheless Johnson’s slight touch of cynicism—his Pilot No. 5 self—that carried him perfectly into the postwar years. Battleground cemented his image as a typical World War II combatant, and over the years, he would be cast in war movie after war movie. (“I know they’re going to put me in a uniform,” he said later. “I usually ask, ‘How brave do I have to be?’”)*
Van Johnson is the gold standard of the boys of World War II. All the other “boys” who emerged have to be measured by him, since he’s the only one who continued, still working on TV in the 1990s when he was in his seventies. Johnson is not a minor player in Hollywood’s history. He’s a major player for a minor period of time, and a minor player for a major period of time. And it was the cleverness of the star machine that made it so, adapting as it did to the retooling of the system brought on by World War II. Johnson’s career lasted until 1993 in stage, film, and television. He turned out to be the biggest “American boy” developed by the war years and the only one who really lasted.
THE REASONS VAN JOHNSON became a star and remained one past the end of the war can easily be understood by comparing him to Sonny Tufts. Like Johnson, Tufts was a World War II phenomenon—a 4-F guy who was big, good-looking, and available then. Also like Johnson, Tufts seemed real and down-to-earth, the embodiment of his name “Sonny.”
Tufts was a rich boy who stumbled into movies. It’s unlikely that without the war he could have become a star. But a movie star he was, although even then his name was a bit of a joke. (Years later, he became a trivia coup. If you knew who Sonny Tufts was, you established your bona fides.) For a brief time, he was heavily touted in fan magazines and co-starred opposite Paramount’s biggest names: Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Betty Hutton, and Joan Caulfield. Tufts caught the public’s attention in the extremely successful war film So Proudly We Hail (1943), a strong movie about nurses on Bataan who were serving under extreme combat conditions. He plays a marine who meets up with Goddard on shipboard when the nursing troops are being taken to Manila. Their romance is saucy, sexy, and lots of fun. It was to seduce Sonny Tufts that Goddard’s character dons the war’s most famous black nightgown to wear as a “formal” for the ship’s dance. (Later, she beans him with a rock to get him off the island and to safety by taking him along when she and the other nurses are being evacuated.)
Tufts got tons of fan mail after So Proudly We Hail and was quickly put into the star machine by Paramount Pictures, who had him under contract. Paramount cashed in on the Goddard-Tufts chemistry by re-pairing them in the 1944 movie I Love a Soldier. This obscure minor film tapped directly into what was on people’s minds during the war, and it was a success. Goddard plays a girl who every night chooses a soldier, sailor, or marine to be her date, someone who is about to ship out for combat. After a happy evening, she accompanies her choice to his departure train. She has her picture taken with each guy in a photo machine, always says she’ll be there when he gets back, always gives him a fairly chaste kiss, and when the guy tells her she took his mind off of where he was going, she always says, “Well, that was the idea.” There is nothing smarmy or sexual about any of this. It’s about loneliness, fear of death, and a pretty girl’s sense of what she can contribute to the war effort.
Goddard finally meets a soldier she can’t give the easy kiss-off—Sonny Tufts. (She can’t give him “the GI ‘so long’” as the movie puts it.) Tufts is a really big guy, naturally blond, and has a big, goofy kind of grin, not unlike Van Johnson’s. His voice is low and pleasant, and he can easily stand around looking awkward, because he was awkward. During the war, this passed for naturalism and almost for talent. Although Tufts was never taken seriously, he’s not that bad. The movie business knew how to cover his flaws. “You big yap,” Goddard says to him, at just about the time the audience is thinking something similar. He’s constantly referred to as a “big lug,” a “big ape,” and other lines designed to say outright that Tufts is no Olivier. He’s really like the guys who were going overseas—passionate, a bit shy and lost, and wearing his heart on his sleeve. His awkwardness works for the time and for the character he’s playing. Because the studio system knew its business, Sonny Tufts could briefly be a star. He wasn’t supposed to be polished, skilled, or smooth. He was supposed to be a big yap. That he could do. When the war ended, so did his career.
LON MCCALLISTER
On April 17, 2005, a small-town newspaper carried a celebrity birthday column announcing that Lon McCallister was eighty-three years old. Lon McCallister is eighty-three?* No! Lon McCallister is eighteen and can never be anything else. He is eternally youthful and innocent, the perfect embodiment of the inexperienced boy who’s sent to fight in World War II, the one who’s never been away from home before. That is his image, and it’s etched in the minds of all who saw him back then.
Lon McCallister was the epitome of “typical American boy” but he knew his Shakespeare in a scene with Katharine Cornell for Stage Door Canteen. Cornell played Juliet over the apples and sandwiches, and McCallister made a credible Romeo.
Lon McCallister was what Hollywood calls an “overnight sensation.” It served Hollywood’s needs to let the wartime public believe that he wasn’t a professional actor, suggesting that he had something authentic to share with moviegoers: himself. His popularity, which was large, was embedded in the idea that he wasn’t pretending to be an innocent boy—he was one. However, as is typical, the behind-the-scenes truth is different. McCallister was Los Angeles–born (in 1923). His grandfather was a night watchman at Universal, and his grandmother a hardworking bit player. He prepared for a movie career by taking lessons in everything: singing, dancing, horseback riding, and acting. He started playing bit parts in 1936 and for nearly six years appeared in what he says was “over one hundred pictures.” He also did radio and was befriended by the powerful director George Cukor. He had enrolled in Chapman College in 1941, but heard about auditions for the role of California in Stage Door Canteen, and, by his own admission, simply played himself and got the part. “I always enjoyed being myself on-screen,” he once said. “I never once felt that I was a good actor. There was a technique and a professionalism that I learned, but I never had a God-given talent for performing.”
Not many people remember Lon McCallister today, but those who do tend to believe that he became a movie star because he was 4-F. Actually, McCallister was drafted into the Signal Corps in December 1943, and reported for duty in February 1944. His studio, 20th Century–Fox, requested that he be transferred to the USAAF’s Santa Monica base so he could appear in the movie version of the wartime patriotic show Winged Victory (1944). Following the film, he went on tour with the national company and completed his military service by serving in the Air Transport Command in Alaska, mustering out in 1945.
McCallister was a true wartime phenomenon. His entire star career contains only twelve films. His first big success was in Stage Door Canteen (1943), in which he is introduced to the public by having him walk through a chow line in which the woman behind the counter, dishing up his mess, is none other than Katharine Cornell. They exchange a little repartee in which he tells her how much he loved her Romeo and Juliet. The two of them then speak the lines from the balcony scene to each other—Cornell, the elegant, polished older woman, and McCallister the naïve young soldier who has just discovered the power of Shakespeare.
This exchange contains real danger for both Cornell and McCallister. She runs the risk of looking old and tired, not to mention the risk of having to play with an untrained kid. He runs an even bigger risk of looking like a fool trying to act alongside one of the greatest actresses of the American stage. But against all odds, it works. McCallister plays Romeo with radiant innocence, excited by the presence of Ms. Cornell, by his own knowledge of the lines, and by the excitement that life—now that he has left home—is opening up to him. The poignant realization that his excitement may lead to death deeply touched audiences at the time. They took McCallister in and want
ed more. They froze him in place as the nation’s mascot, our official representative of the teenage soldier in wartime.
McCallister became a teen heartthrob, and his 1944 film Home in Indiana was a big hit. It paired him with two beautiful newcomers that Fox had under contract and wanted to showcase, June Haver (the studio’s new threat to Betty Grable) and Jeanne Crain. In a well-written story about horses, racing, and teenage love, McCallister was perfectly cast, and his popularity hit a peak. (The movie was remade in 1957 as April Love, a musical version with Pat Boone.) McCallister was charming but a minor talent. When the war ended, there wasn’t much to be done with him: He had served his purpose. No one needed him anymore—not Fox, not anyone else in Hollywood, and not the public.
Luckily, McCallister didn’t seem to mind. The hoopla of stardom had never suited him. He made his last film, Combat Squad, at Columbia in 1953, and then voluntarily walked away from his career. He was twenty-nine years old. (Had he been a bigger star, he could have qualified as a male Deanna Durbin.) In 1982, McCallister told an interviewer, “Twenty years ago my ideas of the rules of the game were extremely limited. From the very beginning of my career, providing I was lucky and saw my name above the title and made a lot of money, it was my ambition to quit at the age of thirty. Well, I did quit when I was twenty-nine.” He quit, but he was never really forgotten by the audiences of his era. Still being interviewed, and still being listed in celebrity birthday columns until his death, McCallister reassured everyone about his choice: “I prefer the anonymity of the has-been…and the quiet life of a beachcomber.”
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