How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  "It's my favorite book," Elizabeth added.

  Not wanting to give false encouragement, Brown—the director of Garbo and Norma Shearer—beat a hasty retreat down the alley, but his pursuers were not the kind to be shaken off easily. They pursued him all across the lot, "prattling on," hounding him past Stage Five, where production numbers for MGM's musicals were shot. Gene Kelly and Kathryn Grayson were there that day, tapping their way across the stage for Thousands Cheer. Judy Garland might have been there that day as well, shooting the final scenes of Presenting Lily Mars, the pinnacle of her teenage glamour period.

  But nothing could distract mother and daughter from their chase. Shouting a breathless litany of reasons why Elizabeth would be perfect for the film, they stalked Brown past Stage Fifteen, the largest soundstage in the world, where MGM prop men were busy assembling a full-scale aircraft carrier for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. By the time Brown had reached Overland Avenue, the tenacious pair was still scurrying behind him, harrying him onto Lot Two, a surreal landscape of fantasy and illusion. The brownstone facades of New York overlapped with nineteenth-century London. Across the way was Tarzan's jungle and Esther Williams's shiny modern swimming pool. Mother and daughter pursued the director past mirage after mirage: the ruins of the Chinese temple from The Good Earth, the Main Line mansion of The Philadelphia Story, Andy Hardy's house. Opposite the train station last used in Waterloo Bridge stretched a replica of a New York pier, complete with a life-size ocean liner. Actually, one eighth of an ocean liner. That was all the camera needed. It was a landscape of bits and pieces.

  No doubt Elizabeth paused to marvel, or at least tried to. "I was terrifically impressed," she'd recall after her first tour of the studio. "The lot was so huge—at that time they were doing maybe thirty films at once and it was teeming with life—people dressed up in Greek clothes, people dressed up as cowboys, people dressed up as apes, and real live movie stars. Of course, everybody, even the extras, looked like movie stars to me."

  In 1943 MGM was a veritable city unto itself. "When I think of MGM," said actress Elinor Donahue, "I think of light and color and flowers and bigness. Everything was just big." Indeed, more than thirty soundstages on five different lots covered 176 acres. A private police force with nearly fifty officers kept the peace. There was a clinic, a dentist's office, a foundry, a commissary that fed employees at any time of the day. "It was a complete city," said actress Janet Leigh. "You could live there."

  The commissary was surprisingly egalitarian, with extras rubbing elbows with stars, and everyone sipping Mr. Mayer's mother's chicken soup made with matzo balls. "The commissary seemed huge to me," Donahue said. "Years later, when I went back to MGM, it didn't seem quite so big, but for a young girl it was enormous. Lunches were called usually around the same time, so you'd have the whole lot in there. You'd look out and see Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy strolling in from their sets, still in costume. The place was filled with every star. I remember Xavier Cugat coming in carrying his miniature Chihuahua in his pocket."

  The various players sat according to type. "I'm not sure if it was structured that way or if they just naturally gravitated together," Donahue said, "but the younger players sat together, and the western players. The comics were always together, horsing around, always very loud and cutting up. It seemed every day Red Skelton would stand up on top of the table and deliver some routine. Everyone would be laughing."

  George Cukor observed, "I think people don't understand how a place like MGM needed to be fed, sustained, and organized every day." It wasn't just actors, directors, writers, cameramen, and editors who populated the lot, but also hairdressers, manicurists, tailors, musicians, architects, film loaders, electricians, prop men, script girls, sound technicians, bricklayers, painters, cooks, and dozens more. The wardrobe department went on for blocks. Studio press releases boasted that with just one day's notice MGM could costume one thousand extras. That's not even counting the regular background players, "the $75-a-week people with standard contracts," Donahue said, "who came to work every day and were told where to report, what film they'd be in that day. Crowds of people were always moving back and forth across the lot."

  And by 1943 MGM lived up to its claim of being the most star-studded of all the studios. More than sixty top names—from Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn to top character players like Edmund Gwenn and animal stars like Lassie—headed the Metro roster during the war years.

  Now her mother was telling Elizabeth that she'd be a movie star herself. It all depended on Clarence Brown—and producer Mervyn LeRoy and, of course, Mr. Mayer—signing her for National Velvet. Brown, to his great relief, finally managed to shake off his pursuers that day, but the passion they'd displayed stayed with him. "What impressed me most," he said, "was [Elizabeth's] conviction that the picture ... would provide a vehicle for her eventual stardom." Of course, it was her industrious mother whispering in her ear every morning who convinced the eleven-year-old that National Velvet— and stardom—were her fate.

  In these years it was hard to discern where Sara ended and Elizabeth began. One movie-magazine writer immediately recognized the "spiritual affinity" between mother and daughter upon meeting them. They thought the same things; they used the same words to express them. And in the spring of 1943, even as war raged throughout Europe and the Pacific, one goal and one goal only existed for both of them—and it wasn't world peace.

  Hustling Elizabeth back across the lot to the studio schoolhouse, Sara remained fired up about National Velvet. She knew the importance of breakout parts and how rarely they came along. She'd had a taste of fame herself once, playing the ingénue in Channing Pollock's play The Fool, which made her a sensation for a brief moment. After the London premiere in September 1924, Pollock remembered Sara being mobbed by fans, "clamoring for bits of her frock and locks of her hair."

  A heady experience for the daughter of a laundryman from Arkansas City, Kansas. Sara was born "Sarah" Warmbrodt in August 1895. Her mother's family were Ohioans; her father's father had emigrated from Switzerland. Growing up in a neighborhood of railroad clerks, blacksmiths, and masons had made Sara quite the aesthete: She recited poetry at church socials with such eloquence that the locals declared her destined for the stage. In that booming industrial town with its busy intersection of rail lines that led to bigger cities like Wichita, Tulsa, and St. Louis, Sara's mother, who played the piano and the violin, encouraged her daughter to dream. After seeing Aline McDermott, the leading lady of a touring stock company, perform at Ark City's opera house, Sara went backstage and confessed her hopes of being an actress. McDermott did her best to dissuade her. "She was afraid ... that I didn't know the world," Sara said. "So I thought the best way to know the world was to go out and be in it."

  From then on, like Dorothy, she kept her eyes peeled for a way out of Kansas. Her own personal tornado came in the form of an itinerant moving-picture cameraman, who came through town looking for a leading lady. The local newspaper hosted a contest. Sara got a call in the middle of the night telling her that she'd won. "I was so excited," she said. "I dragged my poor dad out of bed and made him go downtown with me." In the little amateur thriller, the teenaged Sara played the damsel in distress "without any makeup." Her experience served her well. When a stock company from the Orpheum circuit came to town a short while later, Sara won a part—and not even a sprained ankle could keep her from it. Her brother teased her that she'd sprained it "romping down to the theater so fast to get a job." No matter the pain, she hobbled through her part for the week of the show's run. "I just felt as if my whole future depended on my sticking it out."

  Her passion was so single-minded that she never had time for a serious beau. Channing Pollock thought Sara rather "plain," a "wallflower" even, delicate and petite. To Sara's way of thinking, the theater offered far more than any beau could: illusion, applause, and the opportunity to get out of Kansas on her own terms.

  At an age when most girls were getting married and starting fam
ilies, Sara, twenty-one, packed her bags for New York. Breaking away from the dusty back roads of Ark City and the steam of her father's laundry was an extraordinary sort of rebellion for 1917, when women didn't even have the right to vote. Few women of Sara's means ever thought of such independence. Certainly no one in her family had blazed a trail for her; as Sara boarded a train for New York, her brother remained safely behind in Kansas to run a small photography shop.

  The first thing Sara did in the big city was change her name. Warmbrodt would never do; Sothern was the elegant substitute she had picked out. After Sara played a few bit parts on Broadway, the actors' strike in 1919 sent her into stock. A run with a Winnipeg company was followed in the fall of 1920 by a contract with the Thomas Wilkes troupe at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles. Sara played everything from ingénues to vamps.

  In sunny California, Sara finally landed a beau at the age of twenty-six—unlikely as he was. Even back then Franklin Pang-born was known for his fluttery performances—the same kind he'd later bring to the Hollywood screen. Perhaps embarrassed by what was obviously a press agent's ploy to pair her off with such an obviously gay man, Sara told a reporter that she and "Pang" were just "pals" who went to the beach together on their days off. And Pang made sure she got home safely after every performance, for which Sara was "very grateful." An affinity for gay male friends was one more trait Sara would pass on to her daughter.

  It's been assumed that Sara was merely a minor player during her stage career, her own frustration flowering into her ambition for her daughter's success. Yet between 1920 and 1922, Sara enjoyed quite a lively local fan base. Gossip columns noted the stir that she caused when she wore a "hectic" (read: sexy) bathing suit at Corona del Mar beach. While she might not have been known beyond the outskirts of the City of Angels, her name was mentioned in the same local columns as Lillian Gish's and Gloria Swanson's, and almost as frequently.

  Then came The Fool. Playwright Channing Pollock, then riding high, intended to take the show to Broadway after its premiere at the Majestic. The Fool had "national dramatic importance," according to one critic—a real coup for the Majestic. Sara was thrilled to accept one of the play's most important roles, a lame girl cured by her own faith. Sara instinctively got what the part could do for her. If she scored in Los Angeles, there would be Broadway.

  Pollock's choice was no mistake. When The Fool opened on July 13, 1922, in front of what the Los Angeles Times called a "brilliant first-night audience," Sara gave one of the evening's standout performances. Reviews for the show itself were mixed, but all of them singled her out. She was genuine, even moving, in a part that could easily have been sappy or cloying. The esteemed Russian actress Alla Nazimova told Pollock that he should keep Sara when he headed to New York. But it wasn't until mid-August that Sara got the word. By the time columnist Grace Kingsley reported the "shock" that local fans felt about losing "their fair Sara," she was packed and ready to go.

  Beginning a practice that would reverberate throughout the lives of both mother and daughter, a bit of autobiography was layered onto Sara's public persona to capture the interest of the press. Sara had been such a hit in The Fool, Kingsley averred, because, as a real-life convert to Christian Science, her faith had cured her when she was "very ill" a few seasons earlier. "So she puts a real devotion into the role," Kingsley said. Clearly Sara's miraculous real-life "cure," true or not, was a publicity bonanza that Pollock could use to his advantage as the show headed to the Great White Way.

  The Fool opened at the Times Square Theatre on October 23, 1922. Notices for the show ranged from outright pans to inclusion in critic Burns Mantle's ten finest productions of the year, but Sara was heaped with praise once again. Theatre magazine thought everyone "creditable but not startling," with the exception of "a little girl named Sara Sothern" who was "outstandingly fine."

  The "little girl" was, of course, twenty-seven years old, but her diminutive size and delicate manner suggested a teenager. For a few heady months Sara lived her fantasy, hobnobbing with Clifton Webb and Elsie Janis and being caricatured in the theater pages of the New York Times, always a sign of an "arrival." The Fool ran for eight months and 272 performances before moving on to London, where for another five months it drew rapturous audiences to the Criterion Theatre. "A complete triumph," the Times declared of Sara's performance. One night after the show, Mary, the future Princess Royal and daughter of King George V, came backstage to bestow upon the little lame girl a diamond brooch "the size of a belt buckle." The brooch would remain among Sara's treasured possessions all her life, raising the question of whether an addiction to diamonds is genetic.

  Two decades later Sara may well have thought back to that exciting time in London. It was her pinnacle. Her return to the United States in March 1925 was followed by a series of Broadway flops. Sara never managed the transition from ingénue to leading lady. And so there she was, seventeen years later, sitting in the waiting room outside the Little Red Schoolhouse with the mothers of Juanita Quigley and Butch Jenkins, listening to the click-click-click of their knitting needles. And she vowed yet again that she would make Elizabeth a star.

  ***

  Across town, Hedda Hopper strode into her office seven floors above Hollywood Boulevard wearing one of her trademark picture hats, a silk daisy seemingly sprouting from the top of her head. "Hello, slaves," she called out cheerily to her assistants, passing through her austere reception area—likened by one reporter to the anteroom of a dentist's office—and into her "sanctum sanctorum," the headquarters from which she coordinated her various machinations and manipulations of the film capital.

  Pausing in her typing, Hopper's secretary handed over several telephone messages as her boss passed her desk. At least one was from Sara Taylor. For weeks Hedda had been bombarded with Sara's pleas to help Elizabeth get National Velvet. The columnist had promised to do what she could—but the badgering was getting on Hedda's nerves. Glancing down at the shorthand hieroglyphics that only she and her secretary could read, Hedda considered inserting something into her next day's column—but then decided against it. Maybe another day.

  Sara would be disappointed. "A few words from Hedda," Time magazine would observe, "can make or break a director or an actor, cool or clinch a deal. Hedda's chit-chat can materially affect the outcome of schemes involving millions of dollars."

  From the windows of her office Hopper had an unobstructed view southwest over the plain of orange and palm trees toward the place where many of the studios were located. If she squinted and imagined hard enough, she could even make out Culver City, home of MGM, where Hedda herself had toiled for many years as a well-dressed supporting player. Stardom had once been a dream of Hedda's. But it was here, behind her plain desk adorned only with a big black typewriter and a leather-framed photo of the late actress Marie Dressler, that Hedda found her true calling.

  She was fifty-eight years old, an age when most other women in Hollywood had retired or faded into walk-on parts. But Hopper was neither retiring nor fading. In 1936, just when she thought her career as an actress was over, she had landed a gossip show on a Hollywood radio station, sponsored by Max-O-Oil shampoo. So popular did Hedda's "dispatches from Hollywood" become that the Esquire syndicate ordered up a daily newspaper column that was intended to rival Hearst's Louella Parsons, who'd been telling tales on Hollywood since before the talkies. The trouble was that Hedda, at least on paper, was too nice: no juice, no scandal. People who knew her well, like her manager, Dema Harshbarger, failed to recognize the ironic, sarcastic, private Hopper in her sanitized writerly persona. Harshbarger, a no-nonsense, heavyset lesbian who dressed in men's suits, told Hedda plainly that if she kept on being nice, she'd starve to death. "Wake up," Harshbarger advised. "Be yourself."

  It worked. Hedda's newly aggressive style sold. Suddenly she was a personality, a household name. In 1940 she left Esquire for the Des Moines Register & Tribune syndicate, and in the following year scored her biggest coup: contracts with the New
York Daily News and Chicago Tribune. "On that day," observed Time, "Lolly Parsons arched her back but moved over on the fence."

  Now Hedda commanded nearly 23 million readers. Hollywood honchos courted her, flattered her, showered her with gifts—and took her name in vain behind her back. All for a few words in her column. On any given day Hopper's office would be filled with the fragrance of lilies from Joan Crawford or lilacs from Rita Hay-worth, the cards attached usually saying something like "Just because." Staying on Hedda's good side was essential—because her venom was lethal. She'd gone after Orson Welles when Citizen Kane had offended her and was now leading the charge against Charlie Chaplin over the paternity case brought by starlet Joan Barry. Readers lapped up Hopper's vitriol. "Bitchery," she once said, when asked to explain her success. "Sheer bitchery."

  Hedda was the kind of woman called "handsome" in her day—tall (5'8") when most women in the business were petite. As she got older, her features sharpened, her lips pursed noticeably. Born a Quaker, she had a schizophrenic attitude about sex. She loved hearing about the stars' sexual transgressions, and her closest friends were all gay or lesbian. But her friend Robert Shaw thought Hedda herself chaste, at least since her son's conception in 1914. After divorcing the actor DeWolf Hopper, she became Hollywood's gossipy maiden aunt—"a Quaker," said Dema Harshbarger, "from the neck down."

  Sitting at her desk, kicking off her heels, and putting on more comfortable shoes, Hedda went to work. With long, slender fingers she began dialing, picking and choosing calls to return or ignore. The Chaplin case consumed most of her passion these days; Sara Taylor was just not a priority. Besides, Hedda had already done quite a bit for Sara's child. Back in 1939, when Elizabeth was just seven, Hedda had suggested that David O. Selznick cast her as Vivien Leigh's daughter in Gone With the Wind. It still rankled Hedda how disingenuous Sara could be about that whole experience, insisting that she'd never had any thought of putting her daughter in pictures. Sara claimed that it was only after "people on the street" had told her how much Elizabeth resembled Leigh that she had even given it a thought. Hedda scoffed at such baloney. At that point in time, no one had any idea what Vivien Leigh looked like! Of course the entire enterprise had been Sara's, right from the moment she'd showed up at Hedda's office with her daughter in tow, obsessed with the idea of getting her into the film.