The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Powell’s character in I Love You Again is clearly a con artist, a cheat, and a liar, a guy who’s willing to take advantage of a beautiful woman who thinks he’s her husband. (And, since he actually is her husband, censorship couldn’t restrain him.) Warned by his sidekick (Frank McHugh) that he’s getting entirely too involved with Loy, Powell smugly states his philosophy regarding women: “Just because a man takes off his shoes and socks to go wading doesn’t mean he’s planning to swim the Atlantic.” In another actor’s voice, without Powell’s wry charm, a line like that could be offensive, but as Myrna Loy said, “[Powell] had great style and class and breeding.” There were actors in movies who had clothes and mustaches and coattails and witty lines, but they weren’t William Powell. As Loy went on to say, “There’s just nobody like him, and there’s never been anybody quite like him.” Perhaps the most perceptive remarks about him came from Loy, a woman of intelligence. She pointed out something no one else ever quite pinned down. “He has, mixed through it, that wild humor which comes from his Irishness.” There is a sense of wildness under Powell’s surface. It takes the form of a humorous barb brilliantly aimed, or a quirky remark that makes fun of the action, or a crazy little dance he sometimes does, or the questioning tilt of his head. Powell is holding himself together the way a gentleman should, on behalf of society. But society needs to watch out. He’s on the alert.

  One of Powell’s most famous roles of the 1930s was in one of his duller films, the elephantine The Great Ziegfeld, in 1936. He manages to make Ziggy somewhat fascinating by playing him as just a different kind of detective, one who is out searching wittily and cleverly for talent instead of murderers. (He was so closely associated with the role that he was asked to repeat it in Ziegfeld Follies in 1946.) Because he is usually thought of as being paired with Myrna Loy,* it’s often forgotten how easily he adjusted to play opposite other great female movie stars. With Joan Crawford, he was a tad tougher, and with Jean Arthur a tad funnier. He managed to be “right” for Luise Rainer, Hedy Lamarr, Kay Francis, Rosalind Russell, Jean Harlow, Irene Dunne, and Lauren Bacall.

  A signature role for William Powell as Flo Ziegfeld in The Great Ziegfeld, shown here with Esther Muir (to his left), and to his right, Fanny Brice, playing herself.

  Powell received an Oscar nomination for his role as Clarence Day in Life with Father, also starring Irene Dunne (as his wife) and the lovely young Elizabeth Taylor as a visitor who captures everyone’s attention.

  Powell seemed to sidestep the problem of aging. For one thing, he hadn’t been all that young when his stardom began, so he didn’t seem to change. He was also lucky in finding good roles that suited his age. In 1947, when he was fifty-five, he played in the satiric The Senator Was Indiscreet as a politician with a tell-all diary, and in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), he played the appropriate role of a middle-aged man going through a crisis about getting older. He was a straying husband in Take One False Step (1947) and willingly accepted the role of the father in The Girl Who Had Everything (1953). His daughter was the young and luscious Elizabeth Taylor. In Girl, Powell undertook a role originally played by Lionel Barrymore when the movie was first made as A Free Soul (with Norma Shearer as the daughter).* Powell, billed third after Taylor and Fernando Lamas, looks fantastic: trim, flat-stomached, loose-limbed.

  William Powell retired at the top of his game, with one of his final features giving him a chance to have offscreen fun with such co-stars as James Cagney, Ward Bond, Jack Lemmon, and (at bottom of photo) Henry Fonda. Powell is shirtless, whipping up some chow for the gang of Mr. Roberts.

  The best role of his later years—and said to be his favorite movie—was his 1947 Oscar-nominated lead as Clarence Day in Life with Father, opposite Irene Dunne. His performance is delightful, a kind of summing-up of all the Powell attributes. He’s funny, charming, acerbic, bombastic, impossible, lovable, romantic, and kind—all in one. It was his last hurrah in the Oscar pool and, sadly, he lost out to Ronald Colman for his fine performance in A Double Life (1947). Both men were worthy, and both had waited a lifetime for the award. Some have found it strange that Powell had begun to play fathers, forgetting, perhaps, that Nick Charles was a father. Yes, Charles was the kind of father who took his son out for a walk on a pretext so he could visit his bookie, but, still, he was a father. In some ways, the irascible Clarence Day à la William Powell was Nick Charles in period costume and color, with no mystery to solve and a lot more kids to raise.

  Powell’s final two films were both highly successful projects: How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Mister Roberts (1955). In both he was as graceful as he had always been, and his presence elevated the material. Following Mister Roberts, Powell retired from the screen. He had survived a bout with colon cancer in the late 1930s, and having found happiness with his third wife, the former actress Diana “Mousey” Lewis, he was happy to lead a life of leisure in Palm Springs. He was never tempted to return to the business he had succeeded in for nearly thirty-five years.

  Powell’s success is remarkable in that he was a studio actor yet managed to almost totally evade the star machine’s publicity mill. For a time during the 1930s, however, Powell was written about and pictured in fan magazines because of his romances with Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. By the end of that decade, he was almost never covered. He didn’t need it and didn’t want it. He was past the age of glamour boy, and not the type that was in vogue. One of the last flurries of publicity involving him occurred in 1947, when he promised Universal he would help promote The Senator Was Indiscreet. He gave several rare interviews, and in December of that year, Photoplay ran an article in which staff member Cameron Shipp talked to the three men who were most responsible for the film: Powell (actor), Nunnally Johnson (producer), and George S. Kaufman (director). The article was set up as a pseudo conversation, allegedly taking place in Chasen’s. Shipp says he was taking the three men out to lunch to obtain a “funny story” for publication, and that, given how clever these three were, it was like “being sent to Siberia to get a handful of snow.” Interestingly, the resulting “funny” interview, written as if it were a movie script, shows that Shipp, Kaufman, and Johnson can’t shut up, but Powell says nothing. He wasn’t a self-promoter and never had been, nor was he a rampaging ego. At first frustrated, Shipp, a clever promoter, finally figures out that this can be his point about the elusive star. In the final article, Shipp presents Powell as suave, bored by it all, yet unfailingly gentlemanly and polite—in short, he presents the on-screen Powell as the offscreen Powell, solid proof of movie stardom. While the others are yakking, Shipp says he spies Powell spying Boris Karloff eating his lunch, and provides the perfect description of Powell doing a double take as he sees that Boris Karloff looks just like—Boris Karloff! The scene is right out of a William Powell movie. Three men who think they’re funny are talking their heads off at the center of the frame, but they’re upstaged by the silent William Powell. He does it just by looking casually over his shoulder … and then looking a second time.

  In many ways, William Powell was the perfect movie star. Unlike Boyer, he had no accent to be explained, and unlike Flynn, he had no offscreen peccadilloes to sweep under the carpet. He could do anything you asked him to do—and would. He was focused, reliable, and easy to work with. He could be dragged upstream by a fish or dance a seductive tango—it was all effortless to him. He was available as needed, the ideal studio system movie star. Yet there was nothing ordinary or pedestrian about him. He represents the best of what Hollywood could put forth, a happy wedding between the basic quality of the product and the system that assembled the parts. He was both the exception that proved the rule and the rule itself.

  William Powell, a gentleman to the end.

  * Although Boyer never won an Academy Award, he was given a special honorary Oscar in 1942 for his “progressive cultural achievement in establishing the French Research Foundation in Los Angeles.” Boyer had returned to France in 1939 when the war in Europe broke out in ord
er to enlist in the French army and had been assigned to the 37th Artillery as a private second-class. He was mustered out within eleven weeks and returned to the United States, which was believed to be good for French and American relations. He was a firm de Gaullist, and participated in creating propaganda to promote the Free French. He received four Oscar nominations: Besides Conquest, in 1937, there were Algiers (1938), Gaslight (1944), and Fanny (1961).

  * The Trial of Mary Dugan had starred Norma Shearer. Boyer’s leading lady was his friend and countrywoman Françoise Rosay.

  * Boyer played in only two more films before returning to France. They were both 1932 releases—a small part as a lecherous chauffeur in Jean Harlow’s Red-Headed Woman and the role of a doctor in Claudette Colbert’s The Man from Yesterday.

  † Although Boyer would always return to Europe for special roles, such as the highly successful Mayerling in 1936, the exquisite Madame de … in 1953, and more, Charles Boyer really became Hollywood’s quintessential American Frenchman.

  * Mayerling was a huge hit, due largely to Boyer. This period—1936 to 1937—brought forth a great many movie stories about royals having to abdicate, run away, kill themselves, or suffer nobly and abandon their true loves, all inspired by the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Mayerling was the best of these.

  * When Lamarr became a top star at MGM, they, too, had trouble knowing what to do with her. First they stuck her in Ziegfeld Girl, where she stood around in orchids while Lana Turner got all the dramatic scenes and Judy Garland got all the musical numbers. Metro tried to cast her as part of the John Steinbeck world in Tortilla Flat (1942), but Lamarr floated among the pastoral types as if she were in costume for a masquerade ball. Later, they gave her a real pip—the role of Tondelayo, sultry native girl, in the silly White Cargo (1942). To Metro’s credit, however, she did have one of her few really good parts there as a driven career woman in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941).

  * Hollywood was good at finding popular star pairs: MacDonald and Eddy, Turner and Gable, Powell and Loy, Van Johnson and June Allyson, Astaire and Rogers, among others.

  † Love Affair was remade as An Affair to Remember in 1957, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and also directed by Leo McCarey, and as Love Affair in 1994, with Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, and Katharine Hepburn in the Maria Ouspenskaya role.

  * The “unselfish noble male” Boyer plays was not unique in the Hollywood of this era. For example, Now, Voyager, also with Bette Davis, presents another example beautifully played by Paul Henreid—like Boyer, a suave foreigner.

  * Chevalier described Boyer as “the French Valentino” and himself as “the fanciful Casanova.” When Boyer was told this, he replied, “I have always considered myself a character actor, not a handsome lover type.”

  * Gabin returned to France to fight in the war.

  * Powell, who was born in 1892, was first married to actress Eileen Wilson in 1915. She gave birth to his only child, William David Powell, in 1925. They were divorced in early 1931, and he married Lombard on June 26, 1931, divorcing her on August 18, 1933. Powell planned to marry Jean Harlow, whom he had become engaged to in 1936, but her untimely death that year of uremic poisoning (she was twenty-six) prevented their marriage. His final marriage, to actress Diana Lewis, lasted until his death in 1984 at age ninety-one.

  * At Warners, in such movies as 1932’s Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage, other Nick Charles–ish qualities were fully on display. In Jewel Robbery, Powell’s a suave thief with an ingenious method of distracting store guards: He gives them marijuana cigarettes to smoke. In One Way Passage, a serious movie in which he’s a condemned prisoner being taken to the United States on an ocean liner, he meets Kay Francis (also his leading lady in Jewel Robbery), who is dying from the Movie Disease. Their romance is lighthearted, as each conceals the truth from the other, but ultimately heartbreaking. All of what we know to be William Powell’s personal characteristics as a movie star are fully in evidence in both movies.

  * Powell’s last MGM feature was to be a remake of A Free Soul, entitled The Girl Who Had Everything (1953). The film completed his contract, and when he left the studio he was in his sixties. He had been on the MGM payroll a full twenty years, entitling him to a pension. He would make only two more movies, How to Marry a Millionaire for Fox, in later 1953, and Mister Roberts for Warners, in 1955.

  * In one of these scenes, Powell escorts Loy to the Cotton Club on election night. Rodgers and Hart composed a song for this scene. Its lyrics say, “Lord—what is the matter with me?” The tune is that of the very familiar “Blue Moon.” Hart later set different lyrics to Rodgers’s tune. Today, it’s startling to hear this old chestnut with different words. Hart liked the first set better because the words were blackly cynical and despairing, all about getting beaten up by your lover but going back to him.

  * Powell received his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor for this movie. He was also nominated another two times, for My Man Godfrey in 1936 and Life with Father in 1947. It also made a real star out of Myrna Loy, who by 1937 was on the list of ten top box office draws; an honor she would repeat in 1938, the year she was voted “queen” to Gable’s “king.”

  * On television, Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk played Nick and Nora Charles in 1959.

  * Another perfect example of William Powell’s ability to get the most from a line appears in Another Thin Man. He’s seated by himself in a rowdy nightclub. “Are you alone?” he is asked. “The good are often alone,” he replies.

  * He and Loy made thirteen films together, six Thin Man movies as well as Evelyn Prentice (1934); The Great Ziegfeld, Libeled Lady, Double Wedding (1937); I Love You Again, Love Crazy (1941); and Manhattan Melodrama. Loy also appeared with Powell in a fourteenth film as a gag. In The Senator Was Indiscreet, the absurd politician finally returns home at film’s end, to be greeted by his little wifey: Loy, in a surprise cameo.

  * The bad-man love interest, first played by Clark Gable, has been seriously discounted in overt sexuality by the casting of Fernando Lamas, who is sexy and attractive but who has been deliberately toned down. He’s bad, but given little chance to show what he would really do with a woman in his arms. Since his hair has been prematurely grayed for the role, he looks like a contemporary of Powell’s.

  PART THREE

  TESTING THE SYSTEM

  BONUSES:

  ODDITIES AND CHARACTER ACTORS

  Despite how much it seemed to have been designed by Rube Goldberg, the star machine was not intended to be kindly, whimsical, or open to individual interpretation. It was operated by businessmen applying business rules: Making money was its only yardstick. The one thing that is most often forgotten about Hollywood—because of its glamour and its entertainment value—is that it was a well-run business system. Obviously the star machine worked: It made movie stars. But it also could prove itself in other ways. It could make use of its own odds and ends, accepting unexpected bonuses of stardom that came out of nowhere, and it could react swiftly to a crisis it didn’t bring on itself. The movie factory could write, cast, design, direct, produce, and release a “vehicle” to accommodate any test it had to face… and it could do so rapidly.

  The star machine demonstrated this strength during the 1930s and 1940s two ways. First, it capitalized on any strong public interest in actors who did not fit the conventional “star mold,” turning them into big or temporary stars. Second, it turned the crisis of losing many male stars during World War II into an opportunity to introduce new faces and new types.

  Given the unpredictability of public response and the shifting trends of culture, anyone who becomes a major movie star is an oddity. You have to be different to make it, or you have to be so terribly ordinary that by default you’re different. However, there are genuinely inexplicable examples of stardom—oddities. Such actors and actresses were bonuses for the system. They just emerged and were there, because the fans liked them and the business was smart enough to capitalize on them. When opportu
nity knocked, Hollywood knew how to open the door. Star “bonuses” were more than welcome. They came in two basic packages: unglamorous types, which the public unexpectedly embraced, and character actors who could step up and carry the lead in a cheap movie.

  I’m not talking about nonglamorous superstars. Everyone knows that movie stars are not always beautiful or even sexy but have something else to offer. It’s not hard to understand why a short man with the face of an angry bulldog—Edward G. Robinson—becomes a star, and not just a star for a day or two, but for decades. Robinson is charismatic, and he is a superb actor in both comedy and drama. The same thing applies to James Cagney. On-screen he makes you believe anything—any woman would love him, any man should fear him, any crazy thing could happen to him. Robinson and Cagney are clearly leading men.

  No, I’m talking about the stars whom no one could have predicted, who would never have been selected for the star machine buildup. To find an explanation, one must first accept the unreality of the medium that creates all sorts of appealing “star” oddities: for example, Porky Pig. Is Porky Pig a star? Of course. The pig romped to fame wearing a V-neck sweater and stuttering in a little cartoon called “I Haven’t Got a Hat.” He was second-billed to Oliver Owl, but the owl never caught on. The pig still holds pride of place in Warner Bros. cartoons today. He’s the one who waves good-bye and tells us the bad news: “Th-th-that’s all, folks!” There’s no doubt but that Porky Pig is a star, but why should the public embrace a stuttering, insecure, overweight little guy? It’s easy to see why Bugs Bunny (with his androgyny and snappish sass) or Daffy Duck (who appeals to the lunatic in all of us) or Tom and Jerry (the Abbott and Costello of animation) or even Pepé Le Pew (so très charmant) could become stars—but why the pig? Well, that’s showbiz, folks.*