A GIRL FOR THE FELLAS
June Allyson
The lovely-looking and naturally beautiful young girls who emerged as new stars during World War II could be glamorized—and some later were—but during this period they were kept wholesome and fresh-looking: Donna Reed, Jeanne Crain, Phyllis Thaxter, Teresa Wright, Laraine Day, and many more. During the early forties, they were sold as “the girls who live next door,” but the public wasn’t all that fooled. Who lived next door to someone who looked like Donna Reed? No, the real girl next door during the wartime years was someone a little less attractive, a little more mousy, a tad imperfect with her gravelly voice: June Allyson. Allyson was the World War II girl for Van Johnson’s boy. This relationship was born on-screen in Two Girls and a Sailor in 1944, and it carried both of them past the war.
Like McCallister, Allyson was presented to audiences during the war as an overnight sensation. She was young and she was perky, but she had been working for her living, scratching her way into show business, for a long time, and it had been seven years since she first appeared in a movie. She was both talented and shrewd, having invented a name and life for herself even before the studio did it for her. Her real name was Ella Geisman, and she was born in 1917, which meant she was already twenty-five years old when she made Two Girls and a Sailor, her breakthrough movie. Not old, but not an innocent young girl either. She was born in the Bronx. Her father deserted her mother when Allyson was barely six months old, taking her older brother with him, and she saw her sibling only once more. Ella and her mom were very poor. Allyson later admitted, “It’s hard to forget those days.” Their apartment had no bath, so they heated water on a coal stove and bathed in a washtub. Because her mother had to work, Ella was alone much of the time, and they often moved from neighborhood to neighborhood. While visiting her grandparents, she fell from a tree she was climbing and seriously injured her back, becoming a semi-invalid with a steel brace. Allyson’s childhood was hardly the stuff that connected her to the happy all-American icon she became for MGM.
Allyson found escape by going to the movies. She particularly loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and dreamed of becoming the new Ginger. After being given swimming therapy for her back, she started taking dancing lessons and dreaming of show business success. She changed her name to June Allyson, entered amateur dance contests (none of which she won), and “studied” Rogers by watching her films with Astaire over and over. (She later claimed to have seen one of them eighteen times.) She was intrepid in promoting herself and actually made her movie debut in 1937 in a Vitaphone short, Swing for Sale. She also made four other shorts for Educational: Pixilated, Dime a Dance, Dates and Nuts, and Sing for Sweetie. It’s always a shock for fans seeing Swing for Sale to realize that the platinum-haired young lead is actually the June Allyson they thought they first encountered in the 1940s. She’s twenty years old and she’s cute but not yet distinctive. Her voice is a bit rough but not quite the unusual raspy sound we now associate with her. She handles herself well and shows an ability to be relaxed on camera. However, platinum hair robs her of any naturalness or originality. She looks just like one hundred other girls of the 1930s—the parade of Harlowettes that were, quite literally, standing on every street corner. It was only after she stopped imitating others that Allyson became a star. As herself. Or, actually, as the “herself” the business invented: the ideal girlfriend and/or the ideal wife.
While making her early musical shorts, Allyson was also trying to make it as a dancer on Broadway. She went into a series of shows: Sing Out the News, in which she had three numbers of her own: Very Warm for May, appearing only as a chorus girl; and Higher and Higher, in which she had a small role and her own program listing. Finally, she found what she was looking for, that accident of casting or timing that changed her life. In 1940, the new Cole Porter show, Panama Hattie, starring Ethel Merman, opened, and June not only snagged a job in the chorus but also the understudy role to the second lead, Betty Hutton. Just like in the movies, Hutton came down with the measles and Allyson went on in her place, performing with great success. Producer George Abbott saw her and promised her a good part in his next show, Best Foot Forward. In it, Allyson was given three numbers of her own. When the screen rights were bought by MGM, she was hired for the movie and was on her way. When she arrived in Hollywood, she was a performer with five years of experience both on Broadway and in musical shorts.
Allyson knew what she wanted, and she was willing to work hard to get it. MGM quickly spotted her talent, her originality, and, possibly the most important thing of all, her malleability. They put her directly into the machine, “erasing” her earlier movies and giving her a small specialty number in the Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland hit Girl Crazy. The movie opens on Rooney living it up in a nightclub, and Allyson comes onstage and nails a fast and sexy number, “Treat Me Rough.” She’s bold, she’s physical, and she’s comic. Not the girl next door.* After a small part in Thousands Cheer (1943), she took a featured player role in Meet the People in 1944. (The star was Dick Powell, who would later become her husband.) In Meet the People, Allyson’s last role as anything but a star, she gets special billing at the end of the featured players—June Allyson as Annie—which singles her out. Thus, the credits make it clear she’s been marked for stardom, and her performance makes it even clearer that she’s itching to have it. In her first scene, she appears outside a train window. She has been placed directly in the center of the frame, in front of bandleader Spike Jones, just behind Bert Lahr, standing next to a featured player, the singer Virginia O’Brien. Allyson has no lines and no action except for a smile. However, she’s in the key light, smiling her head off, standing out like a beacon. When she finally gets her big number—“I Like to Recognize the Tune”—she comes onstage to join the popular band leader Vaughn Monroe and practically eats the number alive. Although others in the cast finally join her, she makes the song hers, and the editing favors her with medium close-ups. She stops the show. Later in life, Allyson said, “I couldn’t dance, and Lord knows I couldn’t sing, but I got by somehow.” The truth is that Allyson could sing and dance. Her next movie was the highly profitable Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), and, as has been discussed earlier, its success confirmed her stardom.
Allyson’s story illustrates how the star system worked to establish a unique presence. When she was a junior Jean Harlow, she didn’t click. When she was a second-level Betty Hutton, she did all right but would never have become a star. MGM’s makeover process did three key things for Allyson: It changed her hair color, it costumed her distinctively in simple “off the rack” outfits (especially designed, of course), and it deglamorized her makeup. The cumulative effect turned her into a different presence on-screen. By changing her hair to a “realistic” color, dressing her in little Peter Pan collars and full skirts, and wiping off some pancake, MGM turned her into a girl next door. World War II did the rest by creating a need for her. Giving her a softer personality—fewer madcap Huttonisms—but still retaining her feisty quality, MGM made Allyson into a tomboyish leading lady perfect for the 1940s. And by tapping into her own personal yearning for what she never had—family, a normal life with a father bringing home the bacon—they coaxed out of her a quality that was touching, something the audience could sense and feel that didn’t need to be articulated. MGM located the trembling little girl who lived inside her. Eventually, Allyson’s background of poverty and loss, of pain and illness, was promoted to her public. Everything June Allyson wanted when she was Ella Geisman transmitted itself to her adoring fans. She became a star on behalf of all the little people out there—their show business legend. She was one of them, a movie fan, a dreamer.
It’s easy to underestimate June Allyson. She plays low key, without ego. But she connected to her audiences. She didn’t look like anyone else and she didn’t sound like anyone else, but she seemed real. She was a model of wartime naturalness. Fans recognized it, made her a star, and didn’t throw her away at t
he end of the war, because what she had to give—her innermost true feeling—could fit in any era.
Like Van Johnson, she had staying power. Like Johnson, she had the musical ability that stretched her assets, but MGM seldom chose to use her this way after the war. Instead, they understood three things: her poignant qualities, which could be used in drama; her very strong fan base which, grounded in female moviegoers, wasn’t going to desert her; and her linkage in the minds of the public to Van Johnson.
To carry her out of the war years, MGM shrewdly cast Allyson with Johnson in four movies, and they became a successful team. Johnson and Allyson actually made only a total of five movies together, but they are always listed as one of Hollywood’s best romantic pairs. (They had been, in a sense, born as stars together in Two Girls and a Sailor, and the public remembered them that way: the all-American couple.) After the war, they were cast in the dramatic High Barbaree (1947), which told a navy flier’s story in flashbacks, and two romantic comedies, The Bride Goes Wild in 1948 and Too Young to Kiss in 1951. The titles say it all, but they carried Allyson (and Johnson) forward, mixing together comedy, romance, and little touches of drama. Their postwar films combined their box office appeal, ensuring success. Their final film, Remains to Be Seen (1953), was an adaptation of a Howard Lindsay–Russel Crouse play about an apartment house manager and a girl band singer who become involved in a murder.
Allyson became the perfect wife of the 1950s, especially when paired with Jimmy Stewart in Strategic Air Command
in the hit biopic The Glenn Miller Story.
The other shrewd move MGM made regarding Allyson is one that is seldom commented on: her “perfect wife” phase. June Allyson is to the 1950s what Myrna Loy was to the 1930s—the mate who reflects the values of the decade in moviegoing terms. Loy provided glamour and escape. She was the sophisticated, well-dressed companion, ready to go out on the town, hit the spots, and slug down her own round of martinis. She was a constant challenge to her husband, sassing him as needed, and always fun for him to be with. Allyson’s wife was the loyal, steadfast homebody, always loving, always supportive, always keeping the home fires burning while wearing a reasonable little outfit. Allyson was fun too, but she adapted to her husband’s wants. If he needed her to catch balls while he practiced pitching (Jimmy Stewart as a baseball player in The Stratton Story), hang around the bandstand while he played his gigs (Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story), or stand by the window watching the skies while he tested jets (Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story), well, that’s what she did. The all-American girl of the 1940s grew into the all-American wife of the 1950s, and Allyson remained a star.*
ZANIES
A good way to think about how off-base the star system became during World War II would be to remember that those years made a pop culture icon (although not a real movie star) out of pianist José Iturbi. Iturbi was middle-aged, chunky, Latin, and had a receding hairline. He was a phenomenon of the war, a time in which classical musicians were presented to mass audiences to validate American popular culture. Iturbi was a weapon of democracy. He would play classical music with a reverent, appreciative look on his face, signaling viewers that this was really good stuff. Then suddenly he’d drop the classical and get down, all boogied out, and play “The Dickie Bird Song” or “Route 66” just to prove he was really an okay guy.
Iturbi usually stood aside from the action, just playing himself, since to play himself involved little challenge. Iturbi as Iturbi was always put-upon, the beleaguered famous and talented man whom ordinary people were chasing after, trying to meet, or become involved with, as if he were Clark Gable or maybe Joe DiMaggio. Wherever he went in any movie, people recognized him. (“It’s José Iturbi!” cries the milkman.) Iturbi, seldom seeming to understand what is really happening, was a classed-up musical version of Bill Dana’s Mexican character Jose Jimenez. However, he could play the piano.* Occasionally, he would also be directly involved in solving the problems of star characters. (Anchors Aweigh, 1945, was all about the attempts by Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra to meet Iturbi so they can convince him to audition the heroine, Kathryn Grayson.) MGM (who should have known better) even cast him as the romantic leading man for Jeanette MacDonald after the war in the 1948 hit Three Daring Daughters. Iturbi still played himself, Iturbi as Iturbi as lover for MacDonald.† (Well, perhaps with his soft brown cow eyes and his perpetually bewildered expression he was kinda cute, at least as cute as Red Skelton.) Iturbi’s sudden “star” presence, however, was inexplicable. He was a zany success in a zany era.
José Iturbi, pianist, with two fellow musicians of his era, Mr. Tom (right, in tuxedo) and Mr. Jerry (left, providing commentary).
During the war, the movie business used the word zany a lot. It was supposed to mean “a harmless nuttiness” and serve as an explanation for a lot of things no one could really understand or justify. The musicals and comedies of the war years contain an astonishing amount of crazy behavior, silly, convoluted plots, and bizarro “specialty numbers” that have no connection to the story. Some of these are not only unwatchable today, but downright scary. When Red Skelton howls like a coyote, portrays an advertiser getting increasingly drunk on his product, or turns into a nasty, naughty little boy, there’s nothing benign about it. When Ben Blue twists himself up like a pretzel or Virginia O’Brien sings a number so deadpan you’d swear she was a corpse, or Martha Raye renders her trademark song, “Mr. Paganini,” as if it were a bazooka gun—well, you know you are in World War II. War brought stress and change, and the need to release tension through entertainment was enormous. Naturally, to help the war effort, Hollywood was right there at the ticket office with the right kind of star, one with a way-too-jolly madness, a hysterical kind of desperate good cheer.
BETTY HUTTON
Betty Hutton
Looking at Greta Garbo emoting on the screen, swathed in velvet and fur, leaning back on a chaise longue, her lips half parted, her heavily lidded eyes drooping downward, crushing a gigantic bouquet of white roses to her bosom, one of my students solemnly intoned, “Wow! How did she get away with this?” Which leads directly to Betty Hutton. The only possible way to view Betty Hutton today is to say, “Wow! How did she get away with this?”
There is a single answer for both Garbo and Hutton: You had to be there. It’s all about something they had underneath that audiences tapped into. Garbo’s image was exotic, sensual, and sufferingly romantic, but her subtext spoke to materialism and hidden desires. During the 1930s, when the Depression drove hungry people into movie theatres for escape or fantasy, she proved that people could look amazingly beautiful, could lead wealthy lives, could survive poverty, could have sex, could experience erotic fulfillment, and could, of course, crush white roses, no matter what they cost. Garbo was about what was really on people’s minds—a need to escape sexual repression, a need for luxury, a need to see the things that would never, no matter what, be a part of their daily lives.
Hutton was the same. She was the high-octane fear and desperation that was inside everyone during the hard days of World War II, the insanity that had to be denied, repressed, lived with, and unleashed only on the dance floor, or, secretly, at the movies when watching her literally swing on a chandelier and bellow out one of her truly nutty song numbers: “Fuddy Duddy Watchmaker” or “My Rocking Horse Ran Away.” The great philosopher-patriot of World War II, Hutton sings the key question of the changing times: “Murder he says? Is this the language of love?” She was perfect for the wartime audience.
Hutton had various nicknames: “Bounding Betty,” “the Blitzkrieg Blonde,” and “the Incendiary Blonde,” all of which fit her particular kind of movie behavior. Bob Hope called her “a vitamin pill with legs.” In her day she was also a weirdly liberated voice of the common woman—the one who was not a glamour queen but who came out of the woodwork to work in the factories and find her way to independence during the war. Hutton was a woman who would do anything to get attention. In fact, legend says that her singul
ar success was kicked off by a night in which she was so frightened about going on as the lead singer for the Vincent Lopez Orchestra that she got drunk and ran amok while performing and thus found her true calling: running amok.
In her musical numbers, Hutton is like the Andrews Sisters with only one sister. In Let’s Face It (1943), when she does “Let’s Not Talk About Love,” a witty and ironic Cole Porter consideration of a “relationship” discussion, she turns it into something that belongs on the psychiatrist’s couch. The closest comparison would be with one of Danny Kaye’s insane garbled-word renditions of the period, which may have been her model. Hutton sings part of the lyric straight in her lovely husky voice, but speeds up the rest, twisting her body as she twists the words, mugging, turning, screaming it out. Hers is the straitjacket version of Porter’s winsome little plea for restraint. (After she finishes, Bob Hope, her co-star, says, “Poor kid, you can see her heart wasn’t in it.” “Yeah,” replies a companion, “but everything else was.”)
The Star Machine Page 63
