The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  McCracken, undoubtedly a big talent, was a Broadway pro, and it shows. She knocks out her music and her lines with that hard edge that’s reaching for the little old lady in the balcony. However, she has no up-close appeal, an absolute must for movie stardom. And she’s faux-fresh. Reynolds was fresh, a naïve kid from Burbank with no professional experience. When Reynolds came on the screen, she had an innocence that would still be with her when she made show business history a couple of years later in Singin’ in the Rain. But more important, when the camera came up close, she could play to it, be intimate with her audience. Reynolds had the three-dimensional spirit. McCracken played horizontally across the frame to an audience that wasn’t there. Reynolds played right to the camera, the only audience she’d ever known.

  Success on Broadway never ensured a movie career. The movie frame and the proscenium arch are two distinctly different acting spaces. Although some people can fill both with ease, adapting as needed, the majority cannot. Two of Broadway’s biggest names, Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, could never get their film careers going despite a logical assumption that they should be big at the box office. Martin had talent and looks, although she wasn’t truly beautiful, and Merman had talent. Martin wasn’t big enough to fill the screen and Merman was too big. (Had she not been such a star name, she might have become a secondary lead, a musical Eve Arden.) Both Merman and Martin were given solid chances in the movies, with Merman having the greater success of the two. She found one of her most simpatico roles when she reprised one of her greatest stage hits, Call Me Madam (1953), re-creating her pseudo–Perle Mesta character and belting out “The Hostess with the Mostest on the Ball.” Perhaps audiences didn’t need Merman on film, since movie sound systems could deliver her kind of famous belting reach from any performer. Without the thrill of Merman’s voice raising hackles in a live performance, she was reduced to less than she was. At least she was reduced to nothing special other than that famous Broadway person, Ethel Merman, playing in a movie. Merman was great, but film was not her medium.

  If all we knew about Mary Martin were her lackluster screen appearances, no one would ever understand why she became a great star.* She looks like a lesser Jean Arthur, without Arthur’s unique speaking voice and delicious warmth. Martin was given the best of it in setting up her potential movie career. Her movie debut at Paramount was in The Great Victor Herbert (1939), with Allan Jones. The movie in which it was thought she would break through was the filmed version of the popular stage hit Kiss the Boys Goodbye in 1941. Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be a rather messy version of the Broadway show, in which Martin plays an unknown actress trying aggressively to win the national search for an actress who is “half Vivien Leigh, half Deanna Durbin, half Shirley Temple.” Looking at Martin in Kiss today, a viewer can see that she’s cute, she’s peppy, and she certainly can sing, but she’s not as photogenic as she needs to be. Paramount spent 1940, 1941, and 1942 trying to turn her into what everyone logically thought she could be: a popular movie musical comedy star. She was cast with Bing Crosby (Rhythm on the River), Jack Benny and Fred Allen (Love Thy Neighbor), and Dick Powell, Eddie Bracken, and an emerging Betty Hutton in Happy Go Lucky (early 1943 release). Nothing really worked. The public didn’t buy.

  It wasn’t just singers who experienced these mysterious movie malfunctions, of course. Warner Bros. wanted a Cary Grant, so they signed Robert Alda,* a Cary Grant look-alike. Warner Bros. worked hard to develop Alda as a star, even though some of their plans for him were dubious. (In The Man I Love [1946], he co-stars with Ida Lupino, but when the big crisis arrives, it’s Lupino who steps up and socks the villain, not Alda.) In some ways, Alda is more conventionally handsome than Grant, more polished, more honestly debonair. Grant’s elegance always contained that touch of the other—an authentic sense of a guy who hadn’t always been so debonair but had learned how to be, which is why audiences loved him. Alda was a Broadway success and an excellent actor, but he lacked the strange nooks and crannies of ambivalent meaning that made Grant a star. (James Wolcott described Grant as being “cubism in a business suit.”) Alda was too perfect. No slightly querulous voice, no weird hairline, no touch of Cockney in his accent, and no sense that underneath the calm exterior, things were boiling. Grant was smooth, but his pants might fall down. Oh, he’d cope, and still look good, but he had an “anything might happen” excitement that Alda could never convey.

  Interestingly, Alda and Grant both starred for Warners in biopics about musical geniuses. In 1945, Alda appeared as George Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue, and in 1946, Grant played Cole Porter in Night and Day—two look-alike actors playing fake versions of the lives of two men whose “action”—composing music—takes place in their heads. Rhapsody chooses to tell the full Gershwin story, starting in his childhood on Manhattan’s colorful Lower East Side and moving forward through his struggle for fame. (Warners was recycling material they had used in other movies such as City for Conquest [1940] and Blues in the Night [1941].) On the other hand, they chose to begin Porter’s story when he’s an already grown-up Yalie. Since Porter was homosexual, Warners felt his story had to be treated delicately, and they treated it so delicately that nothing happens. The sinking of the Lusitania throws Porter temporarily off course, and he’s vaguely wounded in World War I (a figment of the screenwriters’ imaginations). His “war wound” recovery is très glamorous, taking place in an attractive French hospital that has a grand piano so he can compose “Night and Day” in his spare healing time while Alexis Smith sits nobly by, tending him while planning to micromanage his career. (Later, a tree falls on him, crippling him. Then he gets up and walks at Yale.)

  Night and Day is a true stink bomb of a movie, despite good musical numbers, but Grant inhabits it confidently, as if he’s playing at a very high level in a worthwhile property—but in case he isn’t, it’s not going to implicate him. Alda, in comparison, has the better, more fully developed story, and he gets down into it, wallowing in the plot—unlike Night and Day, there actually is a plot—but he can’t make it work. Grant stands to the side and says, “I’m Cary Grant,” and audiences know that’s true. Alda says, “I’m George Gershwin,” and everyone knows it’s not. Robert Alda was a good-looking man with talent, tripped up by being a look-alike to Cary Grant, a comparison that just wouldn’t fly.*

  There were many leading-man malfunctions. The harsh truth is that, in those days, you could get away with mere talent in the theatre, but in movies you had to be somebody. A young man named Gordon Oliver was featured dramatically in the 1937 Boris Karloff movie West of Shanghai. Oliver played the romantic lead, and he was a real look-alike for Jimmy Stewart. He was thought to be a surefire bet for stardom, but he’s about as forgotten as it gets today. Donald Woods was handsome, tall and slim, and a competent actor, with excellent diction. But there was nothing about him that was special, and the audience was cold to him. (In Sweet Adeline [1935], Ned Sparks yells at Woods, “You stand there like a cigar store Indian!” It was a suitable epitaph for his film career.)

  Shepperd Strudwick was a supporting actor with solid credentials. He was on the borderline between being really handsome and just okay, but he was tall (always an asset in the land of Alan Ladd), and he had a good voice to go with his training. When 20th Century–Fox was losing its leading men to the war in 1942, they decided to change his “effeminate” name and try to make a star out of him. (You can just hear the assessment discussion. “What self-respecting red-blooded American guy is going to be named Shepperd?”) When “John Shepperd” played the title character in the weak biopic The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (1942), he made no mark. At a crucial moment in the plot, he has what should have been his star-making scene. He reads aloud from “The Raven,” trying to sell his manuscript to a reluctant editor who has gathered a group of printers together to listen. (Pause a moment to consider if today reading a poem aloud could be the dramatic high point of a film. Perhaps if the poet were running ahead of a rolling fireball…) In this
crucial scene for his character, which is also a trial scene for his acting ability, Strudwick—both John and Shepperd—failed.*

  And so did Everett Marshall, the lead singer in I Live for Love (1935), and John Shelton, Alan Marshall, and the very beautiful young child star Robert Sinclair, who looked like Katharine Hepburn when she was playing a man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935). Sinclair hit the top, sharing co-billing with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937). He was sort of a new Freddie Bartholomew, very British and classy, and well able to handle his plum role amid the elite. Whatever happened to him? What he was hired to become became Roddy McDowall. Who knows why? These actors were all Edsels in the star machine.

  Another famous “he failed to become a star” was the sensuously handsome Jack Beutel, handpicked by Howard Hughes to play Billy the Kid in the Hughes-produced The Outlaw (1943). Beutel had a sort of Clint Eastwood–ish look, although he lacked Eastwood’s height, his presence, his sense of self-irony, and his clearly masculine quality. The Outlaw was designed to be hot, hot, hot, and Beutel was supposed to capture the public (both male and female) and become the first really big new male star of the 1940s.

  Hughes had always been smart about star appeal—he was the man who first fully understood Jean Harlow’s charisma. He chose Beutel because the young actor had a brooding sensitivity, a sexy mouth, and an almost feminine quality. Hughes had instinctively picked up on the male androgyny that was going to be popular in the postwar era, which brought forth a new type of leading man: the Montgomery Clifts, the James Deans, the Farley Grangers. He was on the ball in his choice, but there were two flaws in his vision: the slow process of getting The Outlaw to the general public, who by the time they saw the movie were already tired of it, and his initial misunderstanding of who really was the hot, hot, hot element of the picture. Beutel’s co-star, chosen for the size of her bosom, had been thought by Hughes to be someone who would help put Beutel over. She was very young and totally inexperienced, but that was an asset—she couldn’t very well upstage the equally inexperienced Beutel. The girl’s name was Jane Russell, and she turned out to have much more than a big bosom. She shoved Beutel off the screen, and not just by bending over.* Russell emerged as a press favorite with her direct gaze, skeptical attitude, and her real sexuality. She was a tall, rangy woman. If all the tail-finned design forms of the 1950s were molded into their human essence, the result would be Jane Russell. She became a perfect on-screen companion for big men like Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, but also both Bob Hope and Roy Rogers—and even Marilyn Monroe. No matter what you put up against her, Jane Russell could hold her own. She was down-to-earth and had a sense of humor about the world and herself, and even turned out to be able to sing. By the time The Outlaw was in theatres, it was Jane Russell everyone wanted to see. She was presented on the lobby poster, leaning back on a haystack, chewing on a piece of hay, with the words “Mean, Moody, Magnificent” next to her image. And they didn’t mean Jack Beutel.

  The one who was supposed to become a star (Jack Beutel) didn’t, but the one who wasn’t, did (Jane Russell), from The Outlaw.

  Not everyone had Jane Russell’s luck. There were so many, many pretty girls who came to Hollywood. Looking at old movie magazines and studio rosters of young hopefuls, you sense that America was made up of nothing but pretty girls. Each decade a long list of these females attained a certain level of achievement before dropping away or fading from sight. The fact they weren’t loaded with talent didn’t mean they couldn’t learn to act, or that there wasn’t someone else who couldn’t act who did make it. In the 1930s, there were Franciska Gaal, Beverly Roberts, Florence Rice, Jean Muir, Patricia Dane, Ellen Drew, Lynne Carver, Gail Patrick, and June Knight. In the 1940s, a time of transition in which many newcomers were under development, there were Dorothy Patrick, Nancy Coleman, Faye Emerson (who upped her level by marrying Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son Elliott in 1944), Barbara Bates, Beatrice Pearson, Julie Bishop, Adele Jergens, Frances Gifford, Wanda Hendrix, Allene Roberts, Marguerite Chapman, Marie McDonald, Marilyn Maxwell (originally called Marvel Maxwell), and so many others.†

  By the 1950s, as television brought new stars forward, the old-fashioned promotion methods began to seem hokey. The machine kept on chugging, working hard to promote such women as Elaine Stewart, a gorgeous Ava Gardner–ish beauty; Jody Lawrence, who was Kim Novak’s cousin; and the exotic Bella Darvi, a “protegée” of Darryl and Virginia Zanuck. (“Darvi” was an amalgam of DARryl and VIrginia.) But the glamour and magic of the system seemed to have less appeal. This brought on a type of internal malfunction that was new—a malaise or disillusionment with the idea of stardom in advance of its having happened, which affected those undergoing the process.

  For instance, a young woman “under development” in the 1950s was Janice Rule. She was a potential star who started out thinking she wanted to do it—and found out she didn’t really want to after all. Rule was unusual looking, talented, and brought more to the table than the “Miss Oatmeal of 1955” type of background. She was an Ohio girl who studied ballet and started dancing in Chicago nightclubs in her teens. She attracted enough attention to be offered an excellent film debut playing with luminaries Joan Crawford and Robert Young in the film version of the successful play Goodbye, My Fancy, in 1951. The publicity machine went into full force on Rule, who seemed to embody all the naturalness and wholesomeness that era was looking for in female movie stars. Though she appeared on the cover of Life magazine on January 8, 1951, and was labeled as a “rising young actress,” she never quite secured the leading role. However, Rule also began acting on Broadway, and landed the role of Madge in the original Broadway cast of William Inge’s Picnic, playing opposite Paul Newman in his Broadway debut. During the 1950s, she alternated film and stage roles, still never finding the singular kind of movie stardom she seemed a natural for. During the 1960s, Rule became interested in psychoanalysis, and after serious study, received her PhD in 1983 from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. Although she did continue to act occasionally after that, she became a practicing analyst in New York and Los Angeles. Today she is barely remembered as a movie actress. (Rule died in October 2003, at age seventy-two.)*

  Rule illustrates a seldom-mentioned aspect of show business: For many, it’s not all that exciting. Once having achieved a certain level, they turn away to other things that mean more to them. To be a movie star required real focus and sacrifice. Not everyone wanted it that much once they saw what it really was. This is a malfunction of choice, which is very different from failure.

  It was hard to become a star, and sometimes, even with extra help, it didn’t work. There were young women whose looks were good, not extraordinary, who got plum parts because of connections: Joy Ann Page, who played a significant role in Casablanca as the young bride who asks Bogart’s advice, as well as a strong supporting role in the 1944 Kismet, as Ronald Colman’s daughter; Joan Evans, who starred opposite Farley Granger in Roseanna McCoy (1949); and K. T. Stevens, whose main asset was her initials. Page was Jack Warner’s stepdaughter, Evans was the daughter of two famous movie magazine writers, Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert; and Stevens was the daughter of director Sam Wood. Page, Evans, and Stevens were backed up by power, but they did not have what it took. Perhaps it was personal choice that took them out of the business, or perhaps it was lack of audience response to their qualities, but even with the help of the star machine, they malfunctioned.

  Sometimes a potential star gave up before arrival at the very top yet kept on working. Claire Trevor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Key Largo [1948]), but she never quite broke into the ranks of actual stardom. Despite many opportunities to break through—the female lead in Stagecoach (1939), an Oscar-nominated part in Dead End (1937), and a flashy villainess in Murder, My Sweet (1944)—Trevor ended up “in support.”* She herself defined the reason: “My heart was seldom in my work. I was bewitched by the legitimate stage and considered Hollywood a bad joke.
” She also often said she did not have the drive it took for a female to survive in the studio system. (It’s no secret that the great female stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford placed their careers above everything.) Trevor defined what stardom required: “To make a real career in Hollywood, you have to become a personality, have to cultivate publicity departments, and become known as ‘the Ear’ or even ‘the Toe.’” Trevor, who had a long and relatively successful career, is not as much a malfunction as she is a non-function. She never cooperated fully with the machine’s process.

  Sometimes the machine authored its own undoing. Eager to push a newcomer, the business would occasionally tell the public “a star is born” right on screen in the credits. These powerful “and introducing…” title cards for newcomers were usually the kiss of death. Maybe the audience just couldn’t take the hint, but a bravura “and introducing” send-off usually turned out to be an epitaph. “And introducing Douglas Dick” in The Searching Wind (1946) illustrates the point. A classic example is Roberta Haynes, who was cast opposite Gary Cooper in 1953. The movie was to launch a big career for her, as she was given a showcase role opposite a genuine legend. But Haynes was “introduced” into limbo. Today she’s a guaranteed winner in any trivia contest that asks, “Who was Gary Cooper’s co-star in Return to Paradise?” (Try it. Mail me half your winnings.) The kiss of death was still on this billing as late as 1962, when it was given to Mariette Hartley in Ride the High Country. Hartley found fame playing James Garner’s wife in Polaroid commercials on TV, but she never did become a movie star.*