The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  After a potential star was signed to a step contract, the star machine went into high gear. Jargon inside the factory referred to this as “the buildup.” If a performer came to Hollywood already a name, as Eleanor Powell had, he or she didn’t always need this buildup. However, the typical actor or actress being groomed for stardom underwent this detailed business process, which was identical for everyone. Two things would happen next. First, the employees began to be used (and that was the operative word) in bit parts, walk-ons, and small roles that gave them a minimum of dialogue. If they did well, they were given larger speaking roles and one or two key featured roles. If the public noticed them, reviews singled them out, and/or the studio saw potential, they were renewed again. Then the system really went to work.

  During this period of bit casting, the newcomer would be turned over to the studio publicity department. Hollywood studio publicity departments, key to the star-building process, were huge. At the top was a publicity director, who assigned stories and personally handled anything messy that turned up. (Some were famous inside the business, most notably Howard Strickling at MGM, Russell Birdwell at Selznick International Pictures, and Harry Brand, who worked for Darryl Zanuck.* Their large staffs—MGM’s department had more than forty people—included unit reporters, publicists, the still-photography department, the advertising department, the famous portrait photographers like George Hurrell, fan magazine liaisons, and the fan mail office.† There was an office to create the previews of coming attractions, generate magazine articles, news items, and merchandising tie-ins; people to solicit product testimonials and endorsements; and specialists to do fashion layouts, to arrange personal appearances and radio assignments, and to design all the movie ads and posters. Strickling said, “We did everything for them. There were no agents, personal press agents, business managers, or answering services in those days. All these services were furnished by the MGM publicity department.” The business was also adept at using the other media—magazines, newspapers, and radio—to promote its product, and it worked with fashion specialists and other franchises to find ways to use its stars and promote up-and-coming hopefuls. There were also publicity flacks outside the studios, as well as regular newsmen and -women, columnists, and fan magazine personnel. All of these people had to cooperate and agree to endorse new stars and the created fantasy about them. To achieve this much-needed press cooperation, it was essential for the actors or actresses to fully accept and carry out what the studio told them to do.

  With the help of the studio head, and subject to his approval, the director of publicity would be instructed to invent who the star was. This was an imaginative, somewhat whimsical, often hilarious, and definitely ripe-for-satire process. These things usually happened:

  The actor’s name would be changed.

  A fake biography would be created, working as much from a basis of truth as could be logically salable.

  Photographs of all types would be taken: fashion shots, close-ups, glamour poses, cheesecake, “human interest” (posing with dogs and children), and seasonal shots (cheesecake shots for Christmas, Halloween, and other holidays), all of which would be widely circulated to newspapers and magazines.

  “Plants”—small stories to appear in movie magazines and newspapers that mentioned the new star name and kept it before the public as often as possible—would be sent out and “dates” would be arranged with a slightly bigger-name star of the opposite sex (which benefited the stardom of both). “Plants” were a form of imprinting: Keep the name in front of movie fans and they’ll eventually follow it to the box office.

  Introductions would be made to every publicist in town, every magazine writer in town, and every newspaperman or photographer to “show off” the new girl/guy in interviews.

  Lessons in everything would begin, the most important of which was learning how to act for the camera.

  The first step was the all-important name change. There could be no believable glamour in an Irmagard Gluck or Percy Flutterman. (Having your name changed, often without your consent or participation, must have had some effect on these people. But most were willing.) If, by some lucky chance, your name was deemed “bankable,” you could keep it. Eleanor Powell had a musical flow, and she had already established her name on Broadway. Van Johnson was perfect—simple, honest, and easy to spell; it suited, and its owner fit the promotional campaign being built for him as an all-American boy next door. Errol Flynn was excellent. Errol was unusual but easy to pronounce, and it carried a touch of class, a bit of old-fashioned British gentlemanliness, which Flynn brought back to reality with its jaunty Irish origins, grounding the actor in “good guy” roles rather than prissy ones. Sometimes one half of a name could be okay: Elizabeth Grable was fine, but her nickname, Betty, worked best to reflect her zingy, down-to-earth image and her lighthearted musical roles. Ethnic players were allowed ethnic names—Katina Paxinou, Akim Tamiroff, Leo Carrillo, Mischa Auer, Leonid Kinskey, Lupe Velez—and minority actors who were comedians could have joke names to identify their trade: “Stepin Fetchit” for an African American and “Parkyakarkus” for a Greek.

  Most potential stars, however, had to undergo the name change. This was imperative if your physical image and your name were at odds. For instance, strongman “Duke” Wayne’s name was the unacceptable Marion Michael Morrison. The tall and exotic beauty Cyd Charisse had the comedy handle of Tula Finklea. Cary Grant was Archibald Leach—no elegant man of your dreams there—and Robert Taylor, a pretty man always striving to seem more masculine, carried the original name of Spangler Arlington Brugh—a name that would not work on a marquee, or with his image. Names often needed to be shortened—Harlean Carpenter became Jean Harlow—or made more elegant—Ruby Stevens became Barbara Stanwyck. The British Jimmy Stewart had to become Stewart Granger for obvious reasons. Joan Crawford’s Lucille Le Sueur, which no one knew how to pronounce, sounded too much like “sewer” when they tried it. As she was growing up, Crawford had been nicknamed Billie, and when her mother remarried, she had become Billie Cassin, a good name for a flapper but perhaps not for someone who wanted (and got) five decades of stardom. (Crawford’s close friends, like William Haines, always called her Billie.) It was famously publicized that her star name, Joan Crawford, was the second-place winner in a movie weekly’s “name the star” (and win $1,000) contest, after the first winner, Joan Arden, turned out to be the name of someone already in show business. Second place! How would you like to live your life not only without your own name, the one your mom and dad chose for you, but also with a second-place contest winner from a ten-cent fan magazine? Even more humiliating to the woman herself was the fact that she didn’t know how to pronounce the new name. Being a Texan, she called herself “Jo-An” for weeks before someone corrected her.*

  Two curious examples of name change involve Gig Young and Anne Shirley. Both began their careers with “movie star” name changes: Young was originally Byron Barr and Shirley was Dawn O’Day. Both were so billed. But in 1942, Byron Barr played the character of “Gig Young” in The Gay Sisters and in 1934 Dawn O’Day played Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. Both stars changed their actual working names, which were already false, to another level of falsehood—permanently becoming named for characters they had played.†

  After the name change, the “star biography” was created. The best part of the studio bio was that it could eliminate anything boring or unsavory about a star’s past. It could also exaggerate small things, turning an actor who’d won a meaningless medal at a local swimming meet into a “celebrated swimming champion.” Fathers who were plumbers became engineers or architects, and two years in reform school could be recast as “continuing his education.” The creation of a star bio was essential, because it defined the story that was going to be fed to the public: where he or she came from, and who the family was.

  The “bio” was a blatant advertising tool, designed, like all advertising, to shape the buyer’s attitude and convince him that he needed
the product. And the bio had to be clever—attention getting. If there were something a little bit exotic that could be used, such as the fact that Olivia de Havilland and her sister Joan Fontaine were born in Japan, it was emphasized. In fact, the de Havilland sisters were perfect studio bio material. Not only were they sisters, which was interesting (not much to them, apparently, as they were lifelong rivals), but they also had an illustrious relative, the airplane designer Sir George de Havilland. This gave them class. Athletes like Johnny Weissmuller and Sonja Henie, who had been Olympic champions, were easy to write up, and Tyrone Power’s father having been a famous actor gave the son a touch of movie royalty. Jimmy Stewart’s all-American personality fit well with his upbringing in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart had gone to Princeton, which might have knocked him out of the “I’m just a small-town guy like you” category, except that it was sold as “and this small-town guy like you actually showed those Princeton snobs a thing or two.” Ingrid Bergman, a foreigner, was Americanized. She liked to “eat huge sandwiches…and play jazz records.” She was photographed on a Minnesota farm, cheerfully churning butter with fellow Swedish Americans.

  To enhance the “creative” process (as it were), the newcomer was asked to fill out an elaborate form that asked such questions as “What does your father do for a living?” and “What are your hobbies?” and “Where did you go to school?” There were also queries about favorite colors, pets, phobias, or exciting vacations, but it was a questionnaire designed to provide the publicity people with something tangible to use. Clark Gable’s questionnaire helped the MGM publicity department understand how Gable wanted to see himself. They used his answers to weave together the truth (Gable had worked a great many odd jobs when he was young) with his secret wishes (he had been around men who hunted and fished when he was a kid, and he wanted to be like them). Publicists wrote about him as a “rough-and-ready guy” who had worked with his hands and done all kinds of labor (true), and they photographed him in sportsman’s clothes, posed against fireplaces, surrounded by guns, smoking a pipe, and looking calm but ready to wrestle a polecat should it become necessary in Beverly Hills (false). Adrian, MGM’s resident clothing designer, created an offscreen Gable wardrobe: turtlenecks, open-necked shirts, simple sweaters, and riding breeches worn with boots. MGM also hired experts to teach him how to shoot, fly-fish, and ride. Gable loved his new image and adapted to it gracefully. Ironically, he eventually became a “rugged outdoorsman” who loved to hunt and fish. A bio success—life imitating art.*

  While studios tried to ground the bio in reality as much as possible, they also treated the questionnaire like a trampoline. They jumped on it to achieve an unlikely soaring upward toward some pretty elaborate lies. Mickey Rooney saw the studio put out a release claiming his favorite author was Eugene O’Neill, but “that implied I read books…I didn’t read books.” Even “quality” magazines published false stories as if they were gospel. Life said Ann Sheridan “smokes thirty cigarettes daily, likes aquaplaning, wears an opal ring, has read Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and fears policemen.” Alice Faye said, “I’d read stories about Alice Faye in the papers—stories the studio publicity department had planted—and I would wonder who that girl was. It didn’t sound like anyone I knew.” Biographer Stefan Kanfer says Lucille Ball’s original bio (invented for her by RKO in the late 1930s) claimed she was “a woman of multiple talents, an odd mixture of Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Aphrodite.” Among other things, it said: “She once took an open cockpit plane up in weather 20 degrees below freezing to effect the rescue of a schoolboy; she plays a fast game of polo, has a hobby of woodcarving, owns a profitable florist shop, and is one of Hollywood’s best-dressed actresses.” Kanfer points out that Ball “did not know how to fly, was not a horsewoman, had no financial interest in any flower shop and dressed well but not as well as a hundred more successful actresses with their own couturiers.” All studio bios were flexible: They were updated as publicity brought fact into the process. Since fans would soon enough know whom the star had married—and divorced—bios had to be shaped and reshaped. But no matter what, they always contained the title of the star’s current project in release and the current project in the works.

  The studio bio was all a game, a storytelling game, a shrewd tool that helped suggest to fans how to see the star. Only what seemed right was used; the rest was thrown out. Her publicity bio never suggested that Rita Hayworth was not a professional dancer as a kid—nor, in fact, that she was not a Latina. Her real name, Margarita Cansino, was front and center in her bio, because that ethnic association with the fiery and the exotic was part of her persona. Bios hid defects, but could also use poverty and hardship to gain sympathy and connect stars directly to their fans. Just as Eleanor Powell had been presented as a former ugly duckling, no secret was ever made of Crawford’s hardscrabble life, nor of June Allyson’s crippling childhood accident. Crawford’s background fit because she played shopgirls who rose out of poverty to wealth. Allyson’s star appeal was that of a “likable little waif” without ethereal beauty. Her recovery from an accident was useful. (However, if a star were to be shaped into a ladylike figure, a former job as a hash-house waitress would be swept aside.)

  Many on-screen jokes have been made over these star bios. In It’s a Great Feeling (1949), a fake bio is created for a would-be star: “Eighteen duels fought over her…born in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower…” Then one of the inventors says brusquely, “So much for the facts…the rest you can make up.” The definitive example is a musical montage at the beginning of Singin’ in the Rain (1952). While Gene Kelly, as silent film star Don Lockwood, tells his swooning fans his “bio,” movie audiences see the truth. Pressed by a gushing interviewer to tell “the story of your success,” Kelly describes how he and pal Donald O’Connor would “perform for Mum and Dad’s society friends” (they are shown dancing for pennies in a beer parlor), how he was “taken to the theatre: Shaw, Molière, the finest classics” (they are sneaking into a cinema showing a horror picture), how he attended “an exclusive dramatic academy” (slapstick in vaudeville), and played “the finest symphonic halls” (cheap theatres in Arizona and Wyoming). Throughout all this, smiles Kelly, his motto was “dignity, always dignity.”

  No one became a star without posing for silly holiday promotions. In looking through old studio publicity shots, it’s one thing to see Marilyn Monroe sitting on an exploding firecracker or Esther Williams on a diving board in a bathing suit, but quite another to come across Loretta Young dressed up as an Easter Bunny, her ears all a-flop, her eyes all a-twitter as she proffers a gigantic Easter egg, or Susan Hayward, who later became an Oscar-winning actress, “riding” a phallic Fourth of July rocket in shorts and high heels, a leering grin on her face. Even Greta Garbo had to pose with a lion (the MGM logo). Men were not exempt either. Stills exist of a bare-chested John Wayne, of Victor Mature scrubbing himself in a claw-footed bathtub, and of no less than Ronald Reagan coyly posed at poolside in tight black bathing trunks adorned with a snappy white patent leather belt. (Lookin’ good, Mr. President!) Every potential star, male or female, was brought into the publicity department and asked to pose for a set of photos that included shots at the beach; holiday promotion shots with witch hats, pumpkins, Santa suits and Christmas trees, and firecrackers; “healthy” shots in shorts and jodhpurs, fashion photos in suits, dresses, and hats; and various suggestively glamorous poses in tuxedos and low-cut evening gowns.

  The publicity departments released these photos to newspapers and magazines on a steady basis. They were attractive fillers of space, and media editors were happy to use them because the public loved cheesecake and the photos were free. Taking pictures of would-be stars—and established stars—was a huge part of the movie business. The largest outlet for all this photography was, of course, the many movie magazines of this era.

  Stars posed for endless “holiday” promotion shots. A young Betty Grable make
s a perky Valentine’s Day Cupid, Janet Gaynor decorates the tree for Christmas, and Dorothy Lamour is a pilgrim for Thanksgiving. Lamour’s photo was sent out with a suitable caption: “Just as the Puritan maids of old gazed seaward toward the shores whence they came, wondering what the next ship from England would bring, so does lovely Dorothy Lamour stand at the restless shore.”

  Publicists knew how to capitalize on current events for all sorts of magazines. For instance, during World War II, blond Veronica Lake enjoyed a brief but potent stardom as a sex symbol. (“I wasn’t a sex symbol,” she later said. “I was a sex zombie.”) Lake was famous for her long and silky hair, which fell provocatively forward, swinging loosely over one eye, a style that was dubbed “the peekaboo bang.”* She peekabooed out from behind it so effectively that her acting limitations were overlooked. When women went to work in defense plants, they were asked to secure their hair in nets or caps to comply with machine safety rules. Lake’s studio moved quickly to use defense plant regulations to her advantage, planting ads in all magazines, claiming “the peekaboo bang popularized by Veronica Lake, Paramount’s beautiful star, soon to be seen in 1943’s So Proudly We Hail!” was causing factory accidents, or at least causing women some beauty salon trauma. To stretch the publicity even further, Lake posed for photos, displaying a new style: her hair swept back off her face and rolled up sensibly over her ears. The studio released an accompanying story that positioned Lake as central to the defense effort: By changing her hair, she proved she was a good citizen and reminded everyone that she was the woman all American women wanted to look like. The “Veronica Lake problem” for women working in defense plants was perfect “found” publicity, and the business made maximum use of it.†