The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

The reason Betty Hutton was called “a vitamin pill with legs” (among other things) is well illustrated here.

  Hutton keeps nothing in reserve. She hops, she leaps, she mugs, and she grimaces. She throws herself on the floor, jumps up and down, and emits war whoops. She twitches and she tics, but you don’t have to worry that she’s going to fly apart on you the way you fear Judy Garland will. In fact, Hutton might stand as a cheerful version of Garland, one who’s nuts all right, but who’s not going to let it kill her. Or break our hearts. It’s as if she’s saying, “Okay, kids, it’s wartime, so let’s all buck up and shake it off!” And it wasn’t that she couldn’t be touching. When she sings a slow tune, like “Somebody Loves Me” from the movie of the same name, or “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” in The Perils of Pauline, she reveals a sad and lonely quality. But she’s the over-the-top version of the all-American Girl in World War II, so she’s not going to break down. We couldn’t use her if she did. At a time when our nation was sending its young men out to be killed, she was the bottom line of American democracy, our last line of movie star defense.

  Consider the lyrics of her personal lament, when she tells her psychiatrist in song that she’s always “Doin’ It the Hard Way” in Duffy’s Tavern (1945). Jitterbugging and juking around his couch (naturally she can’t just lie there), she sings, “Some girls can make any man dream, by flashing an innocent gleam…Me? I have to do a rip up, curl my upper lip up, light a Roman candle, and scream…I have to do it the hard way!” Betty Hutton is many people’s guilty pleasure, but some feel the need to explain her or even apologize for her. Why not just say it right out? She’s nuts, and I love her. She appeals to the anarchy in me. Yes, it was World War II and I was a child when I first found her. The world was in chaos, and people needed the relief of her insane kind of humor. Yes, yes, yes. And Betty Hutton was willing to kill herself to entertain you if it should prove necessary. In fact, she came close to doing it often, proving that her stardom was the most positively suicidal of any movie personality. Ever. I personally was grateful.

  Hutton, like so many other movie stars of the golden era, came from a hardscrabble background. She was born in 1921 in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her mother was an alcoholic, and her father deserted the family when she was only two. (He later committed suicide.) Betty (her real name was Betty Thornburg), her sister Marion (older by one year), and her mother barely managed to survive, living a life of poverty. Her mother, however, could play the piano, and her daughters could both sing. It was their way out. By the time she was sixteen, Betty (her last name changed to Hutton) was singing with Vincent Lopez, and her sister, after a brief stint with Betty as a sister act, moved on to sing with Glenn Miller.*

  In 1939, Betty Hutton appeared in four musical shorts, three for Vitaphone and one for Paramount. She was eighteen years old and a confident, brassy presence, especially in Public Jitterbug #1 in which the Hutton whirlwind is definitely up there on-screen. In one of her Vitaphones (for the Broadway Brevity series), titled One for the Book, Hutton sings, dances, and performs two numbers: “Old Man Mose Ain’t Dead” and “Mr. End Man.” She’s radiant, and like Old Man Mose, definitely ain’t dead. Every time she jitterbugs onto the screen she’s a jolt of electricity. She has stardom written all over her except for one thing—she’s apparently cuckoo. Without World War II to liberate female energy, Hutton would never have become a movie star. A famous recording artist, yes (she really can sing),† but a big-time star with her face on magazine covers? Unlikely.

  In 1940, Hutton began a successful Broadway career, first appearing in Two for the Show, which starred Eve Arden and Alfred Drake. Her second appearance was as the secondary lead in Panama Hattie, starring Ethel Merman. Hutton received excellent reviews, and the show was a smash hit, inevitably bringing her to the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. She was signed by Paramount, where she would spend the majority of her movie career. Her “debut” was in 1942’s The Fleet’s In, and her role was a plum. She played the best friend of the popular glamour girl Dorothy Lamour, surrounded by a strong cast: William Holden, Cass Daley, Eddie Bracken, and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, featuring Bob Eberle and Helen O’Connell. Hutton was assigned two showstopping numbers: “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” and “Build a Better Mousetrap.”

  Assessing Hutton’s abilities, studio bosses at first thought she might be a second lead, the lovable comic sidekick for glamour girls like Lamour. However, watching her sing, dance, play comedy, and more than hold her own, they thought perhaps she could do more. Hutton was pretty and had a good figure. Furthermore—and this was key—because she could sing ballads beautifully, she might play romance and be a viable leading lady. They next assigned her to a more or less safe leading role, to test her. She would play a telephone operator at Paramount Studios in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). The movie would have a flimsy plot about how Hutton helps her friend, an old gateman (Victor Moore) who has told his son (Eddie Bracken) that he’s a big shot at the studio. When Bracken, a sailor, gets shore leave, he brings his buddies to Paramount to show off—and Hutton and Moore run around, gathering up real movie stars to entertain the boys. It was surefire for Hutton. She had a lot to do but was safe inside the A list of Paramount studio contract players.

  After Rhythm’s success, Paramount put her in color, to test that aspect of her appeal: in Happy Go Lucky in 1943, co-starring Mary Martin, Eddie Bracken, and Dick Powell. Already realizing that Mary Martin would never be a big moneymaker for them, Paramount gave Hutton showcase footage even though she was technically playing a secondary role. She performed one of her all-time hits, “Murder He Says,” as well as “Fuddy Duddy Watchmaker,” and climbed right to the top. Hutton became huge, and for eleven years (1942 to 1953) she stayed at the top, with specially designed biographical musicals being created for her.

  It was odd that Hutton, the ultimate in unrealistic players, should be asked to play so many real-life women on screen. (She portrayed Blossom Seeley, Pearl White, Texas Guinan, and Annie Oakley.) All these creatures had to be adjusted to Hutton, of course, and were selected because something about them seemed right for her in the first place. Texas Guinan was the famous “queen of the nightclubs,” who greeted her customers with a raucous “Hello, suckers!” in the 1920s. She was supposed to have been bold, loud, and brassy—a Betty Hutton want ad if ever there was one. (“Even her funeral’s a big sell-out,” someone says in the movie.) The movie was called Incendiary Blonde (1945), a nickname developed for Hutton, not Guinan. The plot sets Guinan up as a Texan, with Hutton singing “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” strutting down the street in jeans, boots, and Stetson, turning cartwheels, and demonstrating her shooting ability. (This opening scene may be what ultimately got Hutton the most important role she ever played in a musical—that of Annie Oakley in Metro’s Annie Get Your Gun. She’s essentially playing the same part here, and proving she can do it.) The Guinan credo—“Mine’s gonna be a short life and a gay one”—works well for a Hutton property. She socks out period numbers like “Oh By Jingo” (wearing pheasant feathers on her rear end, an image Paramount used to sell the movie), and also delivers “It Had to Be You.”*

  Betty Hutton’s greatest role at Paramount, and the one she is best remembered for today, is that of the typical American small-town girl, Trudy Kockenlocker, in Preston Sturges’s amazing send-up of American small-town values, 1944’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Trudy Kockenlocker is Betty Hutton’s Hamlet. Did she do it or did she not do it, that is the question, until the answer presents itself in the form of an unwed pregnancy. That is, a possibly unwed pregnancy. Trudy can’t remember what happened. Ms. Kockenlocker—and where were the censors?—has gone out jitterbugging with a bunch of soldiers in a whirlwind of champagne, hot numbers, and a bonk on the head with a chandelier. When she turns up at dawn, all she can remember is that she thinks she got married to a guy named something like “Private Ratski-Watski.” Hutton doesn’t sing or perform a musical number in this movie. She has only her ch
aracterization between her stardom and disaster—the movie skates on thin ice, or at least it did in its day. If Hutton hit a wrong note, her character would be smarmy, unsympathetic, or at the very least, unattractively stupid. But Hutton was born to be a Kockenlocker. She moves in and takes her place as the underground World War II American girl—forget your sweet June Allyson and your noble Ginger Rogers or your low-key Phyllis Thaxter. Hutton puts on-screen the truth, showing an innocent girl in a backwater town stepping out into a world of men and opportunities that are suddenly available to snap her out of her boredom. America is undergoing a transition—it’s out of the kitchen sink for the women, over into an entirely different kind of hot water. Hutton, the perfectly schizophrenic movie heroine, was the girl to play that kind of character. In fact, if it weren’t necessary to worry about political correctness and feminist issues, not to mention all those noisy Focus on the Family prudes, Trudy Kockenlocker could stand as America’s permanent and official Miss America. At the very least, she could be Miss World War II. But, no. We need to remember the muscle-bound images of the Rosie the Riveters who valiantly shot bolts for the U.S.A.; and, of course, continue to revere the noble wives personified by Ginger Rogers in Tender Comrade. These are appropriate women for the war years, while in truth, it was the teenaged Trudies, out there jivin’ and groovin’, who were swinging in the winds of change. After the war, the Rosies went home, the wives and moms continued onward in dull grooves, but the Trudies were still with us.

  Betty Hutton in her best comedy, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, playing a small-town girl, Trudy Kockenlocker, with William Demarest as her father (left) and Eddie Bracken (right) as her hapless boyfriend.

  Today Hutton is more known for her zaniness than her dreamy and wistful quality, but Paramount hoped to capitalize on her softer side in 1948 when it cast her in the movie version of the Broadway stage play Dream Girl, written by Elmer Rice. Paramount bought the rights to the play specifically to introduce a “new” Betty Hutton to the public. She was a big moneymaker for them, but proving that the studio understood her stardom, Paramount worried that since the war was over, her brand of nuttiness might fade. The idea was that she would be presented as an “actress” rather than a crazy personality, and if it were done right, her fans would stay with her. Mitchell Leisen, the director, wanted to film in Technicolor, but Paramount wasn’t prepared to take that level of financial risk. In Dream Girl, Hutton is a hybrid—her old jumping self and a softer, dreamier self that shows sensitivity and introspection. This worked for no one. Her “Blonde Blitzkrieg” fans were disappointed, and those who wanted serious acting were also let down. The film was a flop, and it was the beginning of the end for her. Hutton genuinely loved Dream Girl and believed it was a change of pace for her. When the movie flopped, she was deeply hurt.*

  Betty Hutton, Paramount’s reliable meal ticket for nearly a decade, began to lose her place, but she had two great successes in the early 1950s: Annie Get Your Gun and Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth (plus an underrated appearance in the small musical Let’s Dance, which no one ever discusses). The role of Annie Oakley in the highly successful Irving Berlin musical was originated on Broadway by Ethel Merman, but she was considered too old and too unattractive for the movie version. (Besides, she had already failed in her chance at a movie career in the 1930s.) Hutton knew she was perfect for any part that Merman had originated, but the screen rights to Annie Get Your Gun were sold to the powerful MGM, largely because it was the studio famous for making high-quality musicals. Metro’s resident musical genius leading lady, Judy Garland, was cast in the part.

  By then Garland was experiencing severe career trouble. She began filming Annie, but her outtakes (in particular the raucous “I’m an Indian Too” number) reveal a tragic situation: Garland is terribly thin, obviously distracted and ill. Her attempts to pump herself up to do the number when the playbacks begin are heartbreaking. When she finally collapsed and had to be replaced, MGM asked Paramount for the loan of Betty Hutton, whose singing style and comic ability seemed right for the role.

  Betty Hutton took on Annie Oakley (and the ghost of Ethel Merman) in the MGM version of the famous Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun.

  Hutton had been in Hollywood eight years; it was 1950. She came over to MGM from her place as the top star at Paramount on loan to the most prestigious studio in town, and she was, briefly, also its queen. (Later, she would say that she was treated badly at MGM and felt unwelcome.) Annie Get Your Gun was the musical film of the year, and Hutton was on the cover of Time magazine and won Photoplay magazine’s Best Actress award. Her combination of sassy and rough on the one hand, soft and vulnerable on the other, made her the perfect Annie Oakley. The movie was a smash hit, and she received outstanding reviews and a great deal of respect.

  The Greatest Show on Earth was also a blockbuster, winning the Oscar for Best Film in 1952. Hutton plays a trapeze artist, surrounded by an all-star cast that included Jimmy Stewart, Dorothy Lamour, Cornel Wilde, and newcomer Charlton Heston. In 1950 she also made Let’s Dance, opposite Fred Astaire. The movie has a bad reputation because in the overall career of its male star, it’s not the same quality as the Astaire-Rogers films, or masterpieces like Band Wagon or Funny Face (1957). The idea of Astaire, with his cool elegance and tasteful charm, paired with the Blonde Blitzkrieg appalls most of his fans. But Astaire was a Nebraska boy with a sense of humor and his own ability to be silly. The two make a solid pair, and Hutton rises to Astaire, understanding that it’s a privilege to dance with him. For his part, he reaches out (some might say down) to her comedy level, and the two of them perform a hilarious spoof of westerns in a lively dance number in an underrated entertainment. The combination of two big hits and a movie with Astaire made it seem as if Hutton had survived the stigma of being nothing but a wartime “bonus” success.

  However, after quarrels over who would direct her next movie, Hutton got up and walked out on Paramount in July 1952. She turned to stage and nightclub appearances, and also did an original musical for television, Satins and Spurs, on NBC in 1954. Later, she would try her own TV show, The Betty Hutton Show, but things began to go wrong. Her personal life was a mess, with two divorces and an addiction to amphetamines. During the early 1970s she hit bottom, but was saved by a Catholic priest, Father Peter McGuire of St. Anthony’s Church in Rhode Island. In a wonderful one-on-one interview with Robert Osborne on TCM (in 2000), Hutton said about herself and her career, “I used to eat and breathe show business. I was only alive when people were applauding. I died when they closed the curtains…But…I’m not somebody from the past. The Paramount days were all terrific, all marvelous. And they’re all gone.”*

  Hutton’s career was jump-started by World War II, but it could have been kept alive longer than it was. When I saw her perform at the 92nd Street Y in the 1980s, she gave it everything she had, which was still plenty. Even people who had never heard of her leapt to their feet when she finished. David Cuthbert of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote that no one “connects with the audience the way Betty Hutton does. The lady remains a great entertainer.” Those of us who saw her in her prime couldn’t agree more. When I was a child, we all felt that her songs were giving us the safe version of some angst, some horror, that we ourselves couldn’t understand but that was running loose in our world. Hutton ran loose for us the safe way. We’ll always love her.

  ABBOTT AND COSTELLO

  Bud Abbott (in choke hold) and Lou Costello (in bowler hat).

  The craziness of Hutton wasn’t unique on the screen. There were zanies everywhere—in horror films, in strange musicals featuring musical saws and Apache dances, and yuk-yuk imitations of Hitler and Mussolini. There were hee-hawing hillbilly comediennes like Judy Canova and Cass Daley, and there were nerdy leading men like Eddie Bracken. There was always Danny Kaye. And then, of course, there were Abbott and Costello, the movie comedy team that ranks with Laurel and Hardy and Martin and Lewis for popularity, if
not art. Abbott and Costello were beloved figures during the war. Their films were consistently in the top twenty-five moneymakers (and they cost peanuts), and their names were on the top box office draw lists in eight of the years between 1941 and 1951. They were a World War II phenomenon, although they went on for years afterward and also found fame on television. Costello died in 1959, leaving Abbott an alcoholic old man with tax problems and no work. (He died in 1974.) Today they are considered immortal for their famed “Who’s on First?” exchange, an old vaudeville routine now elevated to the status of existential and linguistic purity.

  Nothing reveals an era more than its comedy, and when the world went off the tracks in World War II, audiences embraced a comedy team that was more than off the tracks. Abbott and Costello were crazy, and their movies were even crazier. Abbott does nothing. He can’t sing, he can’t dance, and he’s not young enough or good-looking enough to provide any romance. Costello can be funny, although he’s a shameless mugger, and his choking sounds or his “Woooooh!” trademark are worked to death. Nothing about them made any sense, and nothing about their film plots did either. They were American Dada, and they were what the wartime audiences needed. That says a lot.

  I never got Abbott and Costello. Even as a child I was dubious. For one thing, Abbott was really mean to Costello, knocking him around, insulting him, forcing him to do all the work and taking the credit for it himself. There was no insulating silence or charming musical score to distance his cruelty, as there was with Laurel and Hardy. Abbott was just really mean, a scary and dangerous old grown-up, and I begged my parents not to take me to Abbott and Costello movies. (Maybe Abbott would be in the lobby.) Furthermore, Costello was dumb. I wanted to love him and knew I was supposed to, but he was dumb. What if you called a plumber, and Costello showed up, as in In Society? He’d wreck the house, destroy the bathroom. What if you needed any kind of a grown-up—a doctor, a housepainter, a photographer—and Costello showed up? (Adults were never on the alert for things like this.) Abbott and Costello scared me. Were they out there? I prayed not.