* We’ve still got him. He’s basically taken over: Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt (who has since transferred himself into the “man” category by muscling up and buzzcutting his hair), Orlando Bloom. Once the “boy star” emerged, he would not go away.
† The “teen idol” had prototypes in the 1930s, with Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy. Actors Douglass Montgomery and Phillips Holmes also pioneered as “sensitive” types in the 1930s. However, these actors really are only prototypes and were not as influential as those who emerged in World War II.
‡ Boys (and girls) next door—and all the World War II exotic types—had all been seen before, of course they had. But they took on a new and increased importance during the war. The significant issue for stardom is that Hollywood ramped up its recruitment of those types for the star machine, looking for new actors and actresses to develop.
* Johnson’s career was nearly destroyed before it began. In 1943, he was cast with Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne in A Guy Named Joe (1943), a breakthrough movie for him. Two weeks into filming, he was in an automobile accident in which he emerged with a fractured skull and severe facial and head injuries. He nearly died, and everyone assumed his scars would destroy any possible movie career. MGM considered replacing him with John Hodiak, but Tracy stood up and said if Johnson were dropped, neither he nor Dunne would continue. Dunne agreed, and since Johnson didn’t appear in the first half of the movie, the three months he needed to be patched together were enough. In the end, his forehead was deeply scarred, requiring special makeup to cover it. A metal plate was inserted in his head, effectively ensuring that he couldn’t be called into the military. Esther Williams said Johnson tapped his head and told her, “I’ve got service for twelve in here. And it’s sterling, not silver plate. Only the best for MGM.”
* Just how big a star Johnson really was to moviegoers then was confirmed by Woody Allen in 2005. Introducing his latest movie, Match Point, at a screening at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, Allen was asked what his biggest thrill as a director was. “That’s easy,” he replied. “Directing Van Johnson back in 1985 [in The Purple Rose of Cairo]! I couldn’t believe it! Here I was, me, directing Van Johnson!” Life magazine (November 5, 1945) called Johnson “the most adored male in the U.S. today.”
* Walker was brilliant in twisted form, as in his last film, My Son John (1952), an underrated movie in which he’s a communist spy. Walker’s death has never been fully understood, being explained as of “natural causes after…a dose of sodium amytal.” Walker’s psychiatrist described him as the victim of schizophrenia of an undiagnosed nature.
* Johnson had a similar showstopping number, dancing with Gene Kelly, in Brigadoon in 1954. “I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean” shows his ability to light-foot it around the screen, and he more than keeps up with Kelly. And he takes to the dance floor to cut a mean Charleston while the Firehouse Five Plus Two beat out a Dixieland number in Grounds for Marriage (1950), a piece of junk in which he plays an ear-nose-and-throat doctor whose opera-singing wife is trying to remarry him. But though Johnson made quite a few musical films, his dancing ability wasn’t used as much as it could have been. Van Johnson was supposed to be a guy with his feet on the ground.
* Johnson is playing a role originally created by James Stewart. Although they look nothing alike, they have much in common. Stewart was the prewar image of the all-American boyish charmer, but Johnson had hoisted that burden during the conflict itself. They match up to different decades, but they were a variation on the same theme: Here’s a guy who might live down the street from you—the Indiana, Pennsylvania, guy and the Providence, Rhode Island, guy.
* Johnson, like most stars at MGM, suffered through the early 1950s with mediocre material. Despite some good roles (Brigadoon), he played in a series of dismal attempts to revive screwball comedy: The Big Hangover (1950), Three Guys Named Mike (1951), and Confidentially Connie (1953), a really dumb movie that is essentially about red meat and how schoolteachers can’t afford it on their low salaries. Johnson’s durability as a star was severely tested by such material.
* Lon McCallister died on June 11, 2005.
* She’s not yet our June Allyson either. In her stance, attitude, and singing style, she’s clearly still a Betty Hutton understudy.
* June Allyson was one of the most popular stars of the 1940s and 1950s. For two decades she was a big name—in 1955, she was listed in the box office top ten—and she kept herself going through television, summer stock, and dinner theatre, finally returning to Broadway to star in Forty Carats in 1970. She did TV, toured in plays, wrote her autobiography, and was still beloved, with a large and loyal fan following, when she died on July 8, 2006.
* It’s good to remember that small talents could inspire other stardoms. If Hollywood made a movie star out of Sonja Henie, a champion ice-skater, someone would also try to make one out of Belita, who also could skate (and so could Vera Hruba Ralston). Belita became a low-budget Henie in B films for Monogram, but at least she was worthy of a low budget.
† Iturbi’s playing himself was something he shared with another famous piano player, Oscar Levant. (Levant also sometimes played a written character, as in An American in Paris [1951] or The Band Wagon [1953].) Levant, whether he was himself or a character, however, stood apart from the action and acted as an ironic commentator.
* Marion Hutton was also famous, initially more so than Betty. Today she’s mostly forgotten, and shorts or movies that feature her as a singer sometimes confuse viewers. Isn’t that Betty Hutton?, they wonder, watching Marion sing in Orchestra Wives (1942), for example. No. It’s her beautiful, look-alike older sister, Marion, who also appeared with Abbott and Costello as the romantic lead in In Society (1944).
† In fact, Hutton was one of the few big-name female movie stars to become a best-selling record artist, having eleven top-ranked hits between 1944 and 1953. One of her biggest and best is still heard often today, “It Had to Be You” from 1944, which reached number 5 on the Billboard chart.
* Hutton’s all-time hit record was “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” which Billboard clocked as number one for two weeks running and which stayed on the charts for twenty weeks.
* Leisen cruelly said that Hutton “sincerely believed that she would win the Oscar…and nobody had the heart to tell her otherwise.”
* Hutton died on March 11, 2007.
* Maureen O’Hara, the A-list doyenne of the harem picture, had previously established herself as a serious actress, but her exceptional beauty, particularly in Technicolor, doomed her to harem picture assignments. However, it was not her only métier. Yvonne De Carlo, another beauty first associated with such movies, would come along later, developed as a Maria Montez clone.
* Other reviewers, of course, didn’t understand. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said Montez played “with the hauteur of a tired nightclub showgirl in Arabian Nights.” He was wrong. Montez was never tired.
* Eyeballing one of Miranda’s “daytime” hats, in The Gang’s All Here, Charlotte Greenwood mutters, “I see I’ll have to watch my bell cords and lamp shades.”
* Natalie Wood was popular, but not a name like O’Brien and never top box office herself as a child.
† O’Brien was born Angela Maxine O’Brien in January 1937. Listed as “Maxine O’Brien,” she appeared in her first movie in December 1941: Babes on Broadway. She played a bit as a child actress who auditions for a dramatic role by crying, “Wait! Wait! Don’t send my brother to the chair. Don’t let him burn. Please, please, warden, please.” Those were her first words on-screen and the sum total of her appearance. She was ranked in the top ten box office draws in 1945 and 1946. (Shirley Temple was listed in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939, six years to O’Brien’s two, but O’Brien’s record is impressive.)
* Laughton makes the most of every moment he’s given. Playing the title ghost—the spirit of a cowardly ancestor cursed for deserting his kinsman in the moment of battle—he relishes such lin
es as, “Excuse me, I’m overdue now. I must gibber at the oriel window.”
* Folklore has always claimed that director Minnelli got O’Brien to cry hysterically for this scene by telling her that her dog had died. O’Brien, saying she’d like to set the record straight, told the truth: She and June Allyson were known at the time to be MGM’s best criers, and O’Brien felt competitive. To get her to bawl, her mother told her, “June’s getting ahead of you, and people think she’s the better actress. Maybe we should have the makeup man put on false tears.” Hearing this, O’Brien said she burst into tears every time she thought of it. (An actress is an actress, it seems, no matter how old.)
* Lamarr and George Antheil developed a frequency-hopping radio system for remote guidance of torpedoes. The system was never used in the war, but it forms the basis of most modern wireless communication.
† Grable was born in 1916.
* No other female star to this date has ever achieved her record. Doris Day earned ten years, but not consecutively. Elizabeth Taylor earned nine years, but also not consecutively. Grable is the female box office champ.
* Grable retired from movies in 1955, but later revived her career on TV, in nightclubs, and on Broadway. She became one of a string of replacements for Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!
CONCLUSION
STARDOM WITHOUT THE MACHINE
They don’t make ’em like this anymore: Ann Sheridan, “the oomph girl.”
The machine successfully supplied Hollywood with movie stars for nearly three decades. The discovery, the screen test, the makeover, the publicity, the casting to type—it all worked and it happened every day in the week.* Today, however, the movie business feels it doesn’t have to create movie stars. Hollywood has shifted its goals. Stars aren’t a primary asset that the studio needs to own, and they certainly aren’t “the gods and goddesses of the silver screen.” Manufacturing movie stars is no longer a priority—making blockbuster hits is. The “star” of a movie can be special effects, a big-name director, or controversial subject matter. William Goldman, the screenwriter who made the definitive statement about Hollywood—“Nobody knows anything”—summed up the situation: “As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless and absolutely essential.” This attitude—we’ll use ’em, but who needs ’em—is exactly opposite of the old days when the business knew they were essential, though they might have treated them as if they were worthless.
As the studio system began its slow collapse during the 1950s, it took a while for Hollywood to grasp what was happening. By the end of the 1960s, most moviemakers realized that “movie star” magic was losing credibility. “Glamour is on life support,” commented Joan Collins, “and is not expected to live.” The days of the Movie Star who would put in fifty years at the top—a Joan Crawford or a Myrna Loy or a Jimmy Stewart or a Fred Astaire—were over. One of the last legendary stars to be born inside the studio system was Clint Eastwood, who went to the famous “star school” at Universal Studios in the 1950s but survived the collapse of that system by shrewdly moving to television and then to real fame by embracing international filmmaking. He defined his continued success by saying, “You’ve got to outlast yourself.” (Eastwood, of course, is more than a movie star. He’s in a class by himself with his Oscar-winning producer-director-actor-composer quadruple-hyphenate status. No rules define Eastwood, which is why he can be called both the Last of the Oldtime Movie Stars and the First of the Modern Movie Stars.†)
This movement away from the glamour of the movie star system occurs in a gradual change that can nevertheless be seen on-screen and that was registered at the box office. A simplified way of observing the process is to look at the annual Motion Picture Exhibitor’s polls of top ten box office stars. In 1960, the names on the list, in the order of popularity, were Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Sandra Dee, Jerry Lewis, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Elvis Presley. With the exception of Presley, who became a movie star because he was a rock music phenomenon, every name on the list was developed by the studio system. The mix is typical of the golden era: three beautiful and talented women, five leading men of differing age groups and types, one comic, and a ringer, Presley.
By 1970, however, the number of great movie star personalities developed by Hollywood’s star machine begins to wane. Paul Newman, John Wayne, and Jack Lemmon are on the list—and all are “Hollywood” stars.* The other seven names reflect change: Clint Eastwood, a product of the original system who found success outside its boundaries; Steve McQueen, a television star who moved onto the big screen; Barbra Streisand (the only woman), a name developed on Broadway and through the music business; Dustin Hoffman and Walter Matthau, two Broadway actors who weren’t traditional handsome leading men; and Robert Redford, a Broadway and television actor, and the only new glamour boy in the group. The last two names on the list are surprising: Lee Marvin and Elliott Gould. Marvin is a star phenomenon. He was an authentic World War II hero who drifted into acting and made his movie debut in 1951. For years, he was strictly a character actor finding second-level success as a brutish villain. (Marvin is forever immortalized as the man who threw scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat [1953].) As the old system collapsed, and censorship lessened, films became more and more violent, ultimately elevating the status of an actor like Marvin, who could credibly play a hero for the new era: a man capable of terrible physical cruelty. During the early 1960s, Marvin hit the top by winning a Best Actor Oscar for Cat Ballou, a movie that used his type: He plays twins, his usual cinematic self—a rotten villain named Kid Shaleen—and a hilarious comedy variation of that role. Since Marvin had been fully confirmed cinematically as owning his own brutality, the send-up worked to perfection. Although Marvin had earned his chops at a non-star level in the old system, he emerged after it collapsed as something greater than the business had once thought he could be. He stands as a rebuke to the golden era, and his career causes one to wonder who else might have been more if given the chance.
Elliott Gould’s name on the list gives pause. There is no one who, if asked to name a top box office star, would blurt out the name of Elliott Gould. Yet Gould was once the coolest, most emblematic guy on the street. From 1969 to 1975, his was the persona of the decade: the stoned dude who didn’t much care what happened and accepted doom as his inevitable lot in life. In M*A*S*H (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), and Nashville (1975), four movies directed by the man who knew best how to cast him, Robert Altman, Gould was the man of the hour. Today, Gould is a character actor of great humor and personality, but he is no one’s idea of a movie star, much less a top box office draw. His presence on the 1970 list, alongside Lee Marvin, confirms the change that’s occurring from the old to the new. Marvin is on the list because the newly violent film stories needed him (as in 1967’s The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank), and Gould is on the list because he was a perfect star for a cynical hit movie, M*A*S*H. It’s the dawn of an era in which the movie is the star, and the actor rides its coattails. In old Hollywood, the success of the movie had largely depended on the star. Now the success of the star would become dependent on the movie. Marvin and Gould prove the point.
As early as 1970, those who wanted to become movie stars were facing the news that they would have to operate the star machine for themselves. Faye Dunaway, who debuted in movies in 1967, said, “A star today has to take charge of every aspect of her career. There are no studios to do it for you.” In today’s movie world, all actors are basically on their own, creating what CAA agent Rick Nicita described as a “free-for-all” atmosphere.
“Star” billing has become a floating designation according to the role being played. One day, Catherine Zeta-Jones is a “star” with the leading role in The Mask of Zorro (1998). The next, she steps down to “supporting actress” and even wins the Oscar in that category (as in Chicago [2002]). Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Kevin Bacon, Dennis Quaid—all are cer
tified movie stars who sometimes play the lead and other times take on secondary roles. Even designated “stars” who’ve won Best Actor or Actress Oscars—Daniel Day-Lewis, Geoffrey Rush, Judi Dench—have no single character type and can disappear off the screen (and out of the newspapers) for as much as a year and never be missed, an unthinkable situation for a star in the past. Today, actors and actresses float across and around stardom. They take jobs as they choose, accepting whatever billing is appropriate to the role, keeping their careers moving from film to film, country to country, big-budget flick to small independent movie, from film to television to stage—whatever and wherever. Since there’s no longer one single system producing and exhibiting movies (Hollywood!), there’s no longer one simple system creating and defining stars for the public’s endorsement. In short, there is no star machine. It’s gone with the wind.
This would be good news to many of the movie stars of the past. The Cagneys and Davises and de Havillands fought hard to break the hold of the machine. The situation the modern movie actor enjoys is the situation they dreamed about and longed to have. By their standards, the life of today’s star is much improved and certainly at first glance it looks that way. Today’s stars can form their own production companies and sign one-time-only contracts for each film they make (or forge lucrative “multipicture” deals on their own terms). They can demand high salaries and even a percentage of the gate. They have powerful agents to negotiate deals for them.* They can confidently demand whatever perks they want: first-class air travel for their families, nannies for their children, days off, specific suites in specific hotels stocked with specific kinds of bottled water, and a cook and chauffeur at their beck and call twenty-four hours a day. With the support of a clever (and powerful) agent, a movie star can shape a quality career, combine it with a sensible lifestyle, and demand the right to play Batgirl one day and Madame Curie the next. The opportunity for movie stars to “own” themselves has never been greater than it is today.
The Star Machine Page 67
