With her love of films, it is hardly surprising that Kenny was more than receptive to suggestions that her life story might have wider cinematic possibilities. From the time she had arrived in America she had crafted her life’s story: a courageous nurse healing children and battling resistant doctors. Versions of this story were retold on radio shows and in magazines, beginning with the 1941 Reader’s Digest article. Public response hinted at its cinematic potential, and Kenny, who was finishing her first autobiography, was certainly open to the idea.
HOLLYWOOD CALLS
Kenny’s direct connection with Hollywood began when Mary Eunice McCarthy, a B-movie screenwriter, read “Sister Kenny vs. Infantile Paralysis” in Reader’s Digest. McCarthy had worked on comedies such as Slightly Married (1932), Woman Unafraid (1934), and Theodora Goes Wild (1936). She had also been one of the script writers for the controversial medical horror film Life Returns (1935). With an eye for a good story, McCarthy took the train from Los Angeles to Minneapolis in early 1942 and sought out Kenny. The 2 women delighted in their shared Irish Catholic background. But it was the possibility that Kenny’s story could rival those of other Hollywood scientist-heroes seen in films such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) that most excited both of them. “One can say, without fear of contradiction,” McCarthy declared in the screen proposal she sent to studio executives a few months later, “that the persecution [Kenny] endured makes the lives of Pasteur and Dr. E[h]rlich sound like Sunday School picnics.”23
Although McCarthy depicted Kenny as a reluctant subject who forced McCarthy to “pry the dramatic story of her life out of her,” Kenny was neither reluctant nor naïve.24 By August 1942 Kenny, worried that “a motion picture could be made without my consent,” was careful to make sure that the material in her almost completed autobiography would be protected for “I will hold the copyright.”25 Some years later Martha Ostenso discovered that even before she began working with Kenny as coauthor on the autobiography, Kenny had sold the film rights for her manuscript for $50,000.26 It was clear that Kenny intended to be in charge of the making of her story. She confidently told a friend in Brisbane that “the film story of my life is now in process of preparation,” and assured an Australian reporter that Hollywood would film her story.27 But she eventually found that although she retained the rights to the film’s technical aspects she was unable to control the movie’s scripts or its presentation of herself and her life.
McCarthy quickly claimed Kenny as an intimate friend, calling her “my beloved Elizabeth,” and telling her about her love life.28 McCarthy understood how Hollywood worked and recognized her own limited power: to make a movie she had to gain the interest of a studio and a star.29 Her film proposal interested United Artists and then RKO, and she was able to present both the proposal and Kenny herself to Rosalind Russell, a movie star who had raised money for the League of Crippled Children.30
The star of comedies such as His Girl Friday (1940), Russell was becoming tired of being typecast as a comic career woman and saw the role of Sister Kenny as a way to boost her career.31 She had received an Academy Award nomination for the comedy My Sister Eileen (1942), but felt she needed a leading dramatic role to win an Oscar.32
Russell expressed interest in McCarthy’s project and welcomed Kenny to Hollywood. Like McCarthy and Kenny, Russell was a Catholic with a sardonic sense of humor; she had once dubbed her local Beverly Hills church “Our Lady of the Cadillacs.” She supposedly hounded RKO’s new head of production Charles Koerner, who would say “Oh, please, Rosalind, not that story about the nurse,” but he finally agreed to “take a chance if you star” and if she would do 2 other films for RKO.33 Russell recalled the difficulties of attracting a producer, a director, and cast members who “all shrugged me aside.” As she remembered it, Kenny “solved this last problem for me. I had her at my home to meet the director and reluctant cast members, and from then on it was smooth sailing.”34
When Russell first met Kenny she was struck by her dowdy appearance. She looked, Russell thought, “like a[n] M4 tank” with a black dress, a big hat, and a suitcase with a leather strap around it that didn’t match. Russell bought her some fashionable clothes and took her to cocktail parties and other Hollywood events.35 Russell was also worried about Kenny’s naivety. (In the early days, Russell noted, Kenny “would talk to anyone.”)36 Russell feared that an association between a movie star and a nurse might threaten Kenny’s professional reputation. And indeed there were occasions when she noticed that physicians showed little respect for Kenny. At one California hospital, Russell recalled, after Kenny was shown a patient she turned to the doctor saying, “that’s not nice, that’s not nice.” The child did not have polio but another form of paralysis, and the hospital staff had been trying to trick her. Caught out, the physician in charge “turned red.”37
Kenny enthusiastically embraced the culture of Hollywood. She and Mary Kenny, who accompanied her on her frequent visits, were fascinated by the stars, the gossip, the fashion; they were, in Mary’s words, “two film-struck Aussies.”38 In July 1942, after conferring with screenwriters and conducting clinics in Los Angeles, Kenny flew to Minneapolis wearing white orchids, a gift from Russell.39 She became a celebrity guest, ready to speak to groups, visit local hospitals, and be introduced to admiring potential donors. During one visit to Los Angeles Kenny and Mary were photographed with Cary Grant who, a friend kidded Kenny, seemed to be “more interested in Mary than you.”40 By December 1942, at the dedication of her new Institute, Kenny was already boasting to NFIP officials about a Hollywood film of her life as she accepted flowers from McCarthy and Russell and a “very beautiful garland of red roses” from RKO Studios.41
Kenny made much of Russell’s character, praising her as “not only a fine person, but a fine actress.” In a slightly joking way she pointed to Russell’s Catholicism in comparison to the typical immorality of Hollywood stars, telling reporters that she approved of Russell “because she hasn’t been divorced, for one thing.”42 Russell, in turn, was impressed with Kenny’s work, and her faith in Kenny’s healing powers truly solidified when Kenny identified a “spastic” leg muscle in Russell’s 10-month-old son Lance. Kenny admitted the boy to the Institute under a false name, and he recovered after 2 months.43 When the film was finally shot, Russell sought to protect Kenny from the less attractive mechanics of movie production. She insisted that the makeup and prosthetics that she used to make her look like Kenny—including “things on my legs to make them fatter”—had to be removed when Kenny came to visit the set.44
But Kenny’s frequent appearance at Hollywood events also had a down side. Her growing celebrity status threatened to contradict her efforts to gain respect as a medical innovator. A true scientific discoverer was supposed to be suspicious of Hollywood’s glamorous, scandal-ridden culture. She began to remind journalists of the distance between herself and others who sought personal fame and wealth. Hers was a life, she claimed, of courage and sacrifice, befitting a great humanitarian. In a confusing characterization, a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner praised “her lack of pretentiousness” as “beguiling,” but also noted that when Kenny was asked to pose for a close-up “she tilted her nose in the air at an angle all her own and told the astonished camera-man, ‘This is my Hollywood profile; I always save it for best!’ ”45
A scientific hero was also unworldly in matters of money. Kenny frequently told reporters she received no salary and devoted her life to patient care; and her autobiography, as one commentator noted, offered a “highly romantic and dramatic picture of a lowly life of sacrifice.”46 In McCarthy’s sentimentalized screen proposal, Kenny had never received “a single cent for all the magnificent work she was doing. Moreover, she had beggared herself through the years by donating her own money for the care of countless children.”47 While reporters commented on the large payment Kenny had received from RKO for the rights to her autobiography, they usually added that it had been all don
ated to her Institute, or, in one account, put in trust for her 17 nephews who were all in the Australian air force.48 But the argument that Kenny did not care for wealth or its trappings was contradicted by her frequent sojourns at the Waldorf-Astoria and other fancy hotels. Such benefits, of course, could be explained away as expressions of gratitude from the friends and families of her patients.49 Those who knew Kenny well, though, remained skeptical about her claims of sacrifice. When her former Brisbane secretary saw her dressed in a stylish black dress with pearls and white diamonds, talking about how she had “never charged a fee,” she was contemptuous. “That lying old bugger,” the secretary commented to one of Kenny’s Brisbane allies, “did you see all those pearls and all those diamonds?”50
MAKING THE MOVIE
Kenny had hoped that with the proper guidance, the Hollywood film would simultaneously entertain and educate the public about the Kenny method. “This picture will have the rare combination of wit and pathos,” Kenny wrote McCarthy, “and also a message of healing which has not yet been combined in anything in the film world that I know of.”51 Her contract specified that she would supervise all the technical parts of the movie and she believed that its portrayal of her method would be accurate enough to guide parents of paralyzed children “in case of emergency.”52 But to her disappointment the movie took on a life of its own. Like her autobiography, it dramatized her life’s story from her earliest days in Australia to her arrival in the United States, but it also fit carefully into what studio executives felt would make a commercial product and skirted the politically sensitive chapters about her efforts to convert American doctors. The final script presented a romanticized depiction of Kenny’s life and work, and a message of hope at a time when Americans lived under the specter of epidemic polio.
The movie Sister Kenny took 4 years to make. Like all Hollywood films, it did not spring full-grown from the head of a single screenwriter, producer, or studio executive. Its construction was a process of negotiation. RKO did not consider this property especially valuable: crippled children and a middle-aged nurse did not sound like the stuff of a Hollywood hit. Although polio was not a socially unacceptable disease like syphilis, putting the disabled on screen could make a film seem too close to an RKO horror film or a medical teaching film.53 RKO executives complained to McCarthy that there were “entirely too many scenes … dealing with the Kenny method,” and other advisors told her that “it would be nothing but a dull and rather clinical portrayal of hospitals, etc.”54
Portraying a nurse-clinician as a scientific discoverer was awkward. It was not easy to translate the firmly masculinized image of Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison into a woman’s life. The story of discovery was almost always popularized as a man’s achievement. MGM’s successful drama Madame Curie (1943) was a rare exception and showed that as long as the discovery could be combined with a love story, scientific research could be claimed on occasion as a woman’s sphere. But Kenny’s story went even further. Kenny was surrounded not by laboratory equipment, but by patients and technicians in long veils. She didn’t even look like a scientist; she looked like a nurse.
Russell’s interest in the project also seemed to wane as the development of the script limped on, and her time was taken up by other movie commitments. In early 1944 she also took a lengthy break to recuperate after the birth of her son.55 Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, a powerful force in Hollywood, chided her for neglecting a project that “may save thousands of little children from being crippled for life.”56 The “collapse” of the movie became part of a wider public sense of conspiracy: that somehow the NFIP and the AMA were scheming to defeat Kenny in Hollywood as well.57 Kenny expressed her frustration privately, telling McCarthy that “every father’s and mother’s heart in America shall be saddened when they know that some frivolous picture has superseded the one with a great message.”58 But she had underestimated the power of Hollywood rumor and was horrified when some of her remarks appeared in the California press. Fearing that they might cause both RKO and Russell to back away from the project, she sent a telegram to Hopper defending Russell, arguing that Hopper had been “very much misinformed with regard to Rosalind Russell’s attitude toward the picture.” Russell, Kenny wrote, “has promoted my work ten times more than [any] other individual in America,” and the text of her telegram was repeated in print.59
The project also had trouble attracting a good director. Dudley Nichols, a respected screenwriter who was interested in directing, was RKO’s final choice. Nichols had worked with John Ford on The Informer (RKO 1935)—for which he had won an Academy Award—and Stagecoach (United Artists 1939). He had also written popular comedies like Bringing up Baby (RKO 1938) and was working with Bing Crosby on The Bells of St Mary’s (RKO 1945). Nichols’ involvement in the movie was another conversion story: a skeptical Hollywood professional committed only after visiting the Institute and seeing Kenny at work. French director Jean Renoir recalled that he traveled to Minneapolis with Nichols and watched a meeting of Kenny and many doctors as “questions were rained on her, and she answered them with great spirit.” She ended her demonstration by showing photographs of the limbs of a boy projected on a screen and asking her audience if it would be possible for him to be cured. After everyone had replied that it was impossible, the door opened and a hefty young man appeared, saying he had been the sick boy and was now a truck driver.60 In a less publicized, more pragmatic bargain, Nichols agreed to direct and produce Sister Kenny if Russell would star in his next big project, a screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra.”61 Nichols was credited in the film as producer, director, and as one of its screenwriters.62 Although he later praised her distinctive clinical insights as the sign of an “isolated genius,” Nichols disliked seeing Kenny on his set and paid little attention to her suggestions about the script.63
DESIGNING THE SCRIPT
As Nichols took over, he discarded McCarthy’s original scripts, and RKO brought in Milton L. Gunzburg, a more experienced screenwriter.64 He and McCarthy began to try to design a story of a woman in white whose life, while focused on healing crippled children, also included love and romance.
McCarthy’s original proposal had framed the story as “a stirring saga of a fighter who battled against odds … [with] complete unselfishness.” Gunzburg disagreed, telling her, “Baby, this is a love story! Rich, full and warm!”65 Kenny’s autobiography had spent only a few pages on the story of Dan, a local farmer, but McCarthy’s and Gunzburg’s scripts made a romance between Kenny and a local rancher (named Dan, then Larry, and then Kevin) more central. “Personally, I think there is too much Dan Cunningham and, I may also say, rapturous kissing which is not Elizabeth Kenny,” Kenny complained after reading one draft.66
But the love interest stayed, and Kenny’s attitude to the film’s emphasis on a love story vacillated between a proper disdain and a willingness to be seen as a woman with a passionate, romantic past. She told a friend in Brisbane that Hollywood studios were not interested in making a movie without “a love affair.”67 On one of her rare visits to the RKO set, they were filming the scene where the rancher surprises her character in the pantry and then a plate drops from behind the pantry door. Kenny, supposedly shocked, said “I wasn’t that kind of a girl.”68 When an Australian friend asked her about that scene with the remark “Gee, Sister, that must have been a beaut clinch,” Kenny replied that she was “very annoyed with the film people for putting it in.”69 On the other hand, during the final shooting in November 1945, Kenny sent the director a copy of a cable she had received from the lawyers of a man who had just died, with a message for her: “Here in the silent hills you loved so well I wait for thee.”70 Russell was convinced that Kenny had had a secret romantic life. McCarthy, on the other hand, told a reporter after Kenny’s death that Kenny had said to her, “Oh, I never wanted to bother with any man.”71 Kenny’s resistance to the portrayal of the love story may have also reflected her abhorrence of rumors that Mary Kenny
was her illegitimate daughter. During the filming of Sister Kenny she asked Charles Chuter to send copies of Mary’s birth certificate and adoption papers to counter this rumor.72
McCarthy’s and Gunzburg’s depiction of Kenny drew on both the feisty independent professional woman typical of 1930s Hollywood films that had made Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell famous, and presaged the harsher stories of women in later films such as Mildred Pierce (1945). Although both knew Mary Kenny as Kenny’s ward and one of her most accomplished technicians, neither McCarthy nor Gunzburg considered adding her character to the script. The writers tempered Kenny’s fierce devotion to her cause with a sympathetic femininity. In McCarthy’s original proposal Kenny, forced by a medical emergency to break a date with her fiancé, rides her horse “still wearing her evening gown with its beautiful long white satin train.”73 In typical Hollywood fashion Kenny’s character is forced to choose between professional success and personal happiness. Throughout the film her fiancé returns, eager to marry her, only to be put off as Kenny copes with one epidemic after another. Finally, although he protests “I’m not going to let you throw yourself away on this work any longer,” she chooses helping the world’s children over having her own.
The scriptwriters were aware that the story’s drama needed to be balanced with moments of humor, a point John Pohl also made in 1944 after reading a version of the script.74 Gunzburg had considered depicting Kenny as an Australian naïf, urging McCarthy to consider that “the mere thought of Kenny in Manhattan offers comedy situations … hamburgers, automats.”75 Pohl suggested dramatizing Kenny’s initial work at the Minneapolis General Hospital “showing you trying to demonstrate patients upon the stairway landing between two elevators … with the elevator unloading laundry, food carts, etc. and nurses and interns coming and going up and down stairs through your demonstration.” Pohl also proposed adding an episode whereby Kenny loses the special hat she has bought to meet the Queen of England out of a train window in Australia, and then finds it later on the head of an Aboriginal woman.76 In a later version of the script, Queensland doctors mistakenly test Kevin for evidence of polio while he protests “Miss Kenny knows there’s nothing wrong with me.”77 None of these episodes was used in the film, but there is a gentle comedy around a busy doctor mistaking Kevin for a patient he has no time to examine.
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