The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  * McCracken was a member of the dancing corps for the show, and in “Many a New Day” the choreography presented a trio of young girls allegedly dreaming of the young men they might meet or marry. In the middle of the dance, a gaminlike young girl ran out to join them, but when she pushed up onto her foot—bang!—she fell down! She then became the tomboy variation of the group, totally winning over the audience. Since she was not billed separately from the dance troupe, McCracken became known as “the girl who falls down” and was later billed that way.

  * Perhaps Mary Martin’s career never took off because she always could return to the theatre, her first love.

  * His son, Alan, also was not star material for movies. He was, however, a gigantic hit on the small screen in the television hit series M*A*S*H. Oddly enough, the reassuring imperfections Robert Alda lacked—Alan Alda had them. Bad teeth, gangly body, weird hair, and a definite sense that he was going crazy inside. Alan Alda was deeply cynical for a deeply cynical age, playing Hawkeye, a wounded healer, a man forced to clean up the mess in Korea, which audiences were meant to read as Vietnam. After he became successful on TV, he had some success in big-screen movies, but not much. Currently he has found his métier playing character roles in movies, some of whom aren’t very nice guys, as in The Aviator (2004), where he is brilliant as a corrupt senator.

  * Alda did eventually find fame, playing Sky Masterson in the original Guys and Dolls on Broadway.

  * Strudwick did not become a major star, but he had a long and worthy career in stock, stage, film, and TV roles for more than fifty years. (Sources vary as to whether his birth name was John, Shepperd, or both.)

  * Russell was directed by enough great male directors to ensure her immortality: Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, Josef von Sternberg, Allan Dwan, and Nicholas Ray.

  † Nancy Davis, who married Ronald Reagan, was one of these studio girls, but she was different. She was a decent actress, although not a great beauty. This gave her the chance to be more of a character-type leading lady, as when she played the pregnant wife in The Next Voice You Hear (1950) or the interesting “best friend” to Barbara Stanwyck in East Side, West Side (1949).

  * Another such actress was Peggy Dow. Her film success was similar to Rule’s, but she has one movie that is frequently revived, Harvey (1950), starring Jimmy Stewart. Thus, she is at least around for new audiences to appreciate. She also appeared in some low-budget noir movies of the 1950s, such as Undertow (1949). Dow left the business to marry. She became the mother of five sons and has been rewarded repeatedly for her charitable works in the state of Oklahoma, also receiving an honorary degree from the University of Oklahoma.

  * However, it might be said that Trevor got the career she wanted: a respectable one full of rich performances that make the films work, as opposed to a flashy kind of movie stardom that might have died with her youth. Trevor lasted.

  * Sometimes it worked: “and introducing Mario Lanza” (That Midnight Kiss [1949]) or “introducing Goldie Hawn as Toni” in Cactus Flower (1969).

  † Vera-Ellen was developed as a star property by Samuel Goldwyn and played her first significant roles at his studio, especially opposite Danny Kaye. Goldwyn’s track record as a developer of female stars who failed or ought to have failed is fairly amazing.

  * Barbara Jo Lawrence was born February 24, 1930. She was just fourteen when Fox first signed her.

  * After Marilyn Monroe’s two “star-making” bit parts—The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950)—she made four movies in 1951 and five in 1952. By 1953, she was a major motion picture star and a household name.

  † Anytime the audience noticed someone and brought that person to their attention, however, the studios were right on it. I can testify to two personal experiences of “fan response” to a face on-screen. When I ushered for White Christmas in 1954, every night the same thing happened to the audience at the exact same moment in the film. As the star, Rosemary Clooney, sings her big number, “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me,” two young male dancers move toward her, backs to the camera. One at a time, they turn their profiles to face her, and when the one on the left turned, his looks always excited whoops and hollers from the women in the audience. Every single time. He turned out to be George Chakiris, who would win an Oscar for his supporting role in West Side Story (1961). This was a case in which the audience found him first, and the business responded. (Since Chakiris is more or less forgotten today, perhaps the women weren’t all that astute.) The second response was to the face of the very beautiful Jacqueline Bisset in Two for the Road in 1967. When she is given a close-up early in the movie, the men in the audience yelled out various comments about her. (Alas, she disappears from the plot almost immediately.) She, too, became a star for a period of time.

  * Monroe had no impact on audiences in the movie houses I ushered in, not the way I had seen Debbie Reynolds come across in her “Abba Dabba Honeymoon” number in Two Weeks with Love (1950), or Montgomery Clift in his love scenes with Joanne Dru in Red River (1948). No one went “oooh” or applauded or left the theatre talking about her. I saw and heard a lot of audiences during the years 1948 to 1958, and Monroe didn’t reach them the way she reached critics or the way she touched people after her death. Her still photograph had flesh impact in a way her moving image did not. I think of her as a phenomenon of photography more than of film. When she delivers her famous line in All About Eve, about the producer she’s being sent over to seduce and flatter—“Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?”—she herself looks exactly like one. Her movie image was strangely enlivened by her death, freshened by tragedy, made dimensional by offscreen facts.

  PART TWO

  PROBLEMS FOR THE SYSTEM:

  THE HUMAN FACTOR

  There were reasons why some stars felt disconnected from what they were required to do for their art. Maria Montez pitchforks up some lunch for the livestock … Joan Blondell milks a cow … June Allyson hangs out the wash … and Loretta Young rustles up some hot grub.

  Just remember, it’s ninety percent hard work.

  —How to Become a Movie Star, 1946

  It was one thing to have the machine malfunction. It was another to have it work perfectly and then backfire. Always ready to deal with failures, the business wasn’t ready to deal with successful movie stars who were built to bring in millions and who suddenly began to grumble about the terms of the deal they had made. But this happened, and there was no simple way to create a business plan to manage it. Malfunctions of the machine process were systemic. The daily complaints from working movie stars were human. And if there was anything the Hollywood moviemaking business resisted, it was humanity.

  The ordinary little problems of the daily workforce, the labor issues, became very expensive when the laborers were movie stars. The machine process was constructed specifically to identify cooperative performers and to teach them that they’d have to obey orders. Yet in a significant minority of cases, the arrivals forgot that and started making trouble. What happened? Why didn’t all the movie stars created by the machine live happily ever after as long as they stayed off the pills, avoided gangsters, and didn’t adopt babies who grew up to write nasty books about them? What the heck was their problem?

  In many cases, there was a disconnect between what the studio wanted and what the movie star wanted. In the beginning, both studio and performer worked harmoniously toward the same goal: stardom. Their motivations, however, may not have been exactly the same. Cary Grant said, “I think most of us become actors because we want affection, love, and applause.” The business, of course, wanted financial gain. The studios were prepared to be helpful parents to the needy little children who were going to grow up to be big, big stars, as long as they did what they were told. Everyone wanted to get there, so there weren’t many troublemakers along the way. Later on, however, things started to get wobbly for some stars, especially after they’d had a little time at the top and realized fully the situation they were
in. “The deck was stacked against us,” said Alice Faye.

  Faye wasn’t alone in her perception. Once certain stars settled in, they didn’t like the daily life. Although the business sold the public the idea that a movie star lived in a world of furs and fashions, racing cars and polo ponies, swimming pools and servants, champagne and caviar, the truth was quite different. Yes, they made a lot of money, and yes, they had lovely homes and full staffs, and yes, they did buy ponies and furs and cars—but. Popular movie stars worked like dogs on the privacy-invading treadmill they had chosen to embrace as their profession. Songwriter Harry Warren sadly observed, “[Stars] always have to become remote … they all do … from what I could see of it, there wasn’t anything easy about being a star.” Too late, some of them understood what they had signed up for. The world called them movie stars, but the devilish business they worked in called them product.*

  The situation for any movie star began with the signing of the much-coveted “exclusive” seven-year contract. This contract officially marked the arrival of a star to the top rank, and almost everyone signed it with joy. Seven years of security and top money! Seven years, of course, was also exactly the same amount of bad-luck time you’d get if you broke a mirror. “They promised me a rose garden,” Joan Crawford said about this period, “and they gave it to me … acre by acre.”

  These seven-year contracts bound the individual to the studio. They required the signer to accept any role the studio wanted him to play and to cooperate fully regarding publicity. Studios required a “star” to work a forty-week year. The other twelve weeks, for which they would not be paid, were an alleged “vacation.” The studio had the right to terminate the contract, dropping the star for any reason, or to renegotiate the contract on its own terms if the star began to lose popularity. The star couldn’t quit, nor could he or she just bop over to another studio and try to negotiate something better. Stars, in fact, couldn’t really negotiate much of anything—not better roles, more money, better work conditions. This is not to say that clever actors and actresses didn’t find ways to wheedle things, or that they didn’t fight to play Scarlett O’Hara or get more money. Some of their little negotiations were pathetic. Jeanette MacDonald insisted that anytime she went anywhere—to a wedding, a funeral, an event—her presence should be defined as “studio requested” so she’d be paid or so that she could deduct the cost of her clothing. Gable bargained for a “flight clause”—he would fly only if he approved the make of the airplane and if the airplane had more than two engines and a licensed pilot. Susan Hayward negotiated control of her hair (no cutting unless she said okay), and Gene Tierney controlled her own teeth. Most of these “rights” were won long after the individuals had become really big stars, and they represent the only things available to negotiation: small perks and coddled whims.*

  The hard legal facts of star contracts were clear. Movie stars could not do anything except work for the studio that had signed them for seven years. The studio would decide exactly how the star should be seen, advertised, cast, and promoted. Studio management not only could put stars in any movie it chose, it could also change or transform the star in any way it wished. The studio gained the legal right to dye hair, dictate plastic and dental surgery, and assign interviews, “dates” (for promotional purposes), public appearances, and endorsements. No star was supposed to marry without studio permission (although some did). “The studios controlled our lives completely,” said teen star Jimmy Lydon. “They told us who to go out with and where to go … they owned us like a piece of furniture.” The studio also reserved the right to loan the star (with no consultation or permission) to another studio if it seemed desirable. Such negotiations reflect the practical nature of the business, which traded stars back and forth according to any studio’s need, and which reveal how studios cooperated with one another when something was in the interest of both parties. The studios paid one another for these loan-outs, with none of the money going to the star. (In fact, David O. Selznick survived financially by loaning out the stars he signed and created: Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, and others.) Although the standard seven-year contract did provide for regular salary increases, and sometimes bonuses—or large jumps due to success—it completely favored the studio. And it was ironbound. If a star got uppity and refused to show up to make some harebrained movie about zombies, the studio put that person on “suspension.” “Suspension” meant that all the time the star sat home would be added to the end of the seven-year contract, effectively meaning that the star could be under contract for nine years rather than seven. Needless to say, no star was paid a salary while on suspension.

  The star system was a slave system—albeit a highly paid, glamorous slave system in which the slaves were more famous than their owners. “Yes,” said Ann Rutherford, “we were really like slaves. You were chattels of the studios. They could buy and sell you.”

  Movie stars had a six-day workweek (they worked on Saturdays back then), with the day beginning at 7:00 a.m. and stretching to the end of the day. Although they were supposed to work only until 6:00 p.m., more often than not, evening shoots were required and they remained on the lot until seven or eight, or even nine o’clock at night.* At whatever time stars left the set to go home, they still faced work: learning lines for the next day’s shoot and needing to be in bed by ten so as to look good for the cameras the next day. Actual shooting began promptly at 9:00 a.m., and the star had to be ready—hair, makeup, and costume perfectly in place, lines learned. Not for the star was the casual stroll onto the lot just minutes before film began to roll. Asked what would happen to a star who was habitually late at MGM in the 1930s, Joan Crawford looked astonished, did a double take, and said, “I can’t remember anyone ever being late.” Pressed, she grew stern. “No one was ever late,” she stated firmly. “But what if they were?” “They were not.” Stars who were unreliable soon enough were no longer stars, and up-and-comers who were late soon became down-and-outers.†

  A movie star’s day was long and exhausting, with very little free time, because there was more for a star to do than act. When stars were not in front of the camera under the hot klieg lights, they were assigned other tasks, the ones that had gotten them there but were even more necessary now. They posed for still or “portrait” photographers,‡ gave predetermined (and scripted) interviews, learned lines for future scenes and relearned lines that had been rewritten and changed since they learned them the first time, continued to take lessons in acting and diction and manners, learned songs and dance numbers and rehearsed them, did wardrobe tests and fittings for the next assignment, made screen tests with newcomers, posed for elaborate fashion layouts, and met visiting dignitaries and selected fans. Everyone in the movie business worked hard, but stars were under terrific pressure. Crawford’s second husband, Franchot Tone, himself an actor, described what it was like to maintain her “complex schedule”: “She must get her homework done, her lines learned every day. She has continuous meetings with the producer or the director or somebody else equally important each evening. She has to get up at four or four-thirty in the morning in order to get to the hairdresser and onto the set. She needs a massage at night before she can sleep for a few hours. She has to eat sparingly and exercise constantly. This goes on and on … and when Saturday night comes … other duties, other priorities arise. Conferences about the next script. Talks about dancing lessons. Discussions about yoga, tennis, and swimming lessons … she’s a star.”

  Stars just wanna have fun. This photo was taken on the set of Meet John Doe as a joke. Edward Arnold rubs Barbara Stanwyck’s feet, and Gary Cooper pretends to knit.

  One of the star’s most tedious chores was standing still for wardrobe fittings as described by Myrna Loy: “Each costume had to be tried on for endless camera tests, because no matter how good it may look in the fitting room, it’s the eye of the camera that must be satisfied. Every detail has to be perfect in advance, so as not to hold up shooting or cause a need f
or reshoots … this required me to stand patiently and quietly for hours at a time.” There was no sitting around. If there were waits between scenes so lights could be rapidly readjusted (and sending the star off the set to do another task wouldn’t be economical), stars needed to either remove their costumes in their dressing rooms or lean against ironing boards that were set up—wrinkles were not allowed. During such waits, which were described as “the boredom of hell,” individuals had to find their own amusement.* Sadly, stars found that their arrival at the top hadn’t necessarily changed their lives all for the better.

  When the cameras weren’t rolling and lights were being moved or checked for another take of the same scene, stars had to sit still while a team of men and women touched up their makeup, cemented on nails, checked their wardrobe, pulled on their hair, or looked them over for continuity flaws that the camera would notice—little flaws that hadn’t been there in the previous take, such as a curl out of place or a smudge on a sleeve. If they were fully made up and costumed, waiting for the call of “action,” they weren’t allowed to eat, read, sleep, talk on the telephone, or smoke. (They could have coffee or smoke if their makeup was going to be retouched.)

  No studio ever expected a star to complain about any of this or, God forbid, call in sick. In fact, the studios expected a great deal, and some players not only didn’t like it but couldn’t stand up to the pressure. One such was the hauntingly beautiful Gail Russell. She made her first movie—Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour—in 1943, and played her first important role in The Uninvited in 1944. Her ethereally beautiful face, surrounded by a dark cloud of thick black hair, was one of the loveliest ever to grace the movie screen. Russell was only eighteen when she started in movies, an amateur among professionals, and her inexperience overwhelmed her. She wasn’t strong enough to survive the harsh reality of filmmaking, and she was limited in talent. In 1945, she started drinking on the set to get over her stage fright. By the end of the 1940s, she was a heavy drinker and having trouble remembering her lines. In 1953, she was arrested for drunk driving and entered a sanitarium. By 1955, she was in Alcoholics Anonymous but by 1957 had fallen off the wagon and was arrested for drunk driving for the seventh time. In 1961 she was found dead in her apartment, surrounded by empty vodka bottles. She was only thirty-five years old. Her comment on stardom was simple and contained no joy: “There was always a sense of pressure, no time to think or relax. I just wanted to be alone to take stock, and it wasn’t possible. Film work was just too demanding.”