by Lorna Luft
An inebriated Norman Maine slinks into the ceremony, and staggering to the dais, congratulates his wife on winning “that valuable little piece of bric-a-brac.” Digging in further, he suggests that he would like an award for the worst performance of the year, or, better still, three for his last three pictures. Unaware that Esther has approached from behind to help him down the steps, he gestures broadly, accidentally backhanding her in the face. Gasps are audible; instant remorse and humiliation descend upon him as he slumps to the table and slurs, “Can somebody give me a drink?” Once home, Esther’s gold statuette lies askew on the floor. As her Grandmother Blodgett had foretold, for every dream of hers that comes true, Esther indeed pays the price in heartbreak.
Vicki Lester (Janet Gaynor) wins an Academy Award in A Star Is Born (1937). Gaynor used her own Best Actress Academy Award statuette, which she won at the first Academy Awards ceremony held in 1929, for this scene.
Fresh from the sanitarium, Maine returns to an old haunt, Santa Anita Park, the thoroughbred racetrack where former studio nemesis Matt Libby perches beside him at the bar. Maine sips his ginger ale as Libby begins to taunt the washed-up idol, “You can live off your wife now. She’ll buy you drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.” Maine loses his cool and takes a wild swing, but Libby connects with a forceful blow to the face. The crowd recognizes the former star. Norman peels himself up off the carpet, onto his barstool—once again humiliated, shaken, alone—and orders up a bottle of scotch. He disappears for four days, until he is apprehended for drunk and disorderly conduct, crashing an automobile into a tree, resisting arrest, and injuring one of the arresting police officers. At night court with Oliver, Esther pleads for Maine’s release and swears to be personally responsible for her husband. Photographers and reporters circle outside the jail to catch the two together for front-page news coverage. It was a raw, ripped-from-the-headlines scenario few motion pictures had ever dared to depict.
At the Maines’ beach house, Esther confides to Oliver her plans to leave Hollywood and take Norman far away to live a private life, to start over. Norman is in the next room, ostensibly asleep, but he hears every word (“… there’ll be no more Vicki Lester”) before Oliver takes his leave. It’s near twilight. Norman, clad in a bathrobe and leather sandals, promises Esther he will reform and announces his fresh start will begin with a restorative swim, “I’m going wading out in our front yard.” He embraces her, stops at the door, and repeats a request he made at the end of their first meeting, “Mind if I take just one more look?” He has made his decision: his wife’s stardom is more important than his own life.
Back in Hollywood, one newspaper headline reads, “NORMAN MAINE’S BODY FOUND OFF MALIBU; EX-STAR PERISHES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT!” The funeral is mobbed, the fans and press relentless. Esther, veiled, shrieks in grieving fear as a fan tears away the veil, the last vestige of her privacy. She collapses, weeping, as two stellar Hollywood careers are stomped out in the frenzy. This and the following sequence, are Gaynor’s moments to display her acting ability, to go deep, and mostly she succeeds. It is earlier in the movie that she falters. She fails to conjure the level of charisma that Vicki Lester supposedly radiates; she errs too far on the side of the everyday, the common, with scarcely a spark of superstar electricity. In the film, she symbolizes the star from humble beginnings, the average girl who becomes the personification of screen magic. But the full realization of that magic wouldn’t occur until the face, heart, and voice of Judy Garland forever defined the role.
As Esther is packing up the beach house to leave Hollywood behind and return home, Grandmother Blodgett shows up and immediately takes charge of the situation. She has come to challenge Esther’s determination to give up with some determination of her own. With stern wisdom and support, Lettie reminds her granddaughter, “If you get what you want, you have to give your heart in exchange.” Esther relents and will attend an event described as “A Tribute to Vicki Lester” at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that evening. With her grandmother, Danny, and Oliver in tow, Esther hesitantly greets the crowd, getting by without incident until she, in her final encounter with Norman, looks down to find herself standing over Maine’s theater forecourt footprints; the relationship has now come full circle. Esther steels herself, and for the radio audience, gently but forthrightly announces, “Hello, everybody.… This is Mrs. Norman Maine.” Tears roll down her cheeks, the music swells, and the film ends.
Even in 1932, let alone 1937, this basic high/low tale was not exactly considered an inventive idea. However, the film relates a touching story that the public embraced as the basic movie-star legend, part comedy and part tragedy—a romantic portrait of behind-the-scenes Hollywood not quite as it is, but how many would like it to be.
Even in 1932, let alone 1937, this basic high/low tale was not exactly considered an inventive idea. However, the film relates a touching story that the public embraced as the basic movie-star legend, part comedy and part tragedy—a romantic portrait of behind-the-scenes Hollywood not quite as it is, but how many would like it to be. The Selznick International Pictures production, released by United Artists and once again boasting a music score by Max Steiner, was freshly appreciated in the mid-1930s, and proved to be a critical and commercial success.
At the tenth Academy Awards, held in 1938, Hollywood rewarded itself, in a sense. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Writing, Original Story; Best Directing; Best Picture; Best Actress; Best Actor; as well as an oddity from the early years, Best Assistant Director. The film won for Best Writing, Original Story, betting again on the durability and flexibility of the classic show-business tale. (The film also received a Special Award, given to cinematographer W. Howard Greene, for his superb Technicolor cinematography.) Although the genesis of the film remains a source of confusion and dispute, it’s suggestive that when William A. Wellman and Robert Carson won for their story, Wellman publicly stated the award belonged to Selznick. At the awards ceremony, Wellman offered the statuette to Selznick and said, “Here, you deserve this. You wrote more than I did.”7 Selznick certainly believed he deserved it and the award remains with the Selznick family to this day.8 For Wellman, it was simply enough to make a film that would rank as one of his top five favorites of the over eighty films he made in his distinguished career.9
The 1937 A Star Is Born had a production cost of $1.1 million and grossed $2 million in its initial release. It was rereleased to theaters in 1945 by film distributor Film Classics and enjoyed extensive telecasts in the early 1950s—an important point as the film hadn’t been out of the memory of movie audiences when Judy Garland embarked upon her version. The quintessential Hollywood drama had been formed, a dark fairy tale of hopes, dreams, heartbreak, and glamour, seasoned with some ugly truths about failed careers, alcoholism, and suicide. In late 1952, this aging melodrama gained some attention, then some traction, when Hollywood buzzed with the notion of updating the story with songs and starring Judy Garland. Suddenly, everything old was new again.
Fredric March and Janet Gaynor in a scene from A Star Is Born (1937).
One-sheet poster from A Star Is Born (1954).
Chapter Two
A STAR IS BORN
(1954):
THE FILM THAT GOT AWAY
TO SEE A STAR IS BORN AT THE INAUGURAL TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES CLASSIC Film Festival on April 22, 2010, was one of the great nights of my life. This was the network’s first event of this kind, and they chose Mama and A Star Is Born to be the opening night gala presentation at the Chinese Theatre. My twenty-seven-year-old son, Jesse, was excited, and my twenty-one-year-old daughter, Vanessa, was emotional as the lights dimmed. I was thrilled to share with them the world premiere of the new digital version of my mother’s musical masterpiece. Thanks to digital technology, the ravages of time were removed from the film. It was quite an event for us all. Besides The Wizard of Oz, my children had only watched a handful of their grandmother’s films. They had
heard me speak many times of A Star Is Born and my belief that it was Mama’s greatest film. On that night, they were finally able to judge for themselves. The capacity crowd, which included my brother Joe, applauded at the end of scenes and cheered their approval at the conclusion of each musical number. At one point, I looked over to Jesse and Vanessa and said, “You understand now?” They nodded. Now they could fully see and appreciate Judy Garland’s power. At the end of the film, sobs could be heard throughout the theater. Despite the fact I had seen the film many times, even I had tears running down my cheeks. Vanessa reacted as I did when I first saw the film—she cried as she witnessed her grandmother’s electrifying performance. “I can’t believe she did all that,” she kept repeating. Alec Baldwin was among the many celebrities in attendance that evening. After the film ended, he made a point of telling me, “Your mother’s performance is one of the greatest on film.”
For many years, A Star Is Born was an upsetting experience for me. The film’s story, and its underlying message about fame, hit too close to home. The enthusiastic reaction of my children spurred me to open up the photographs and memories about the film I have carefully kept and privately collected for decades. Now I could watch and discuss the film with a more optimistic outlook. Mama’s movie had not only been showcased with glorious results, but in a way, the accolades the film was receiving decades later helped to soothe the pain it had caused me in the past.
This scene still, from the second attempt at filming “The Man That Got Away,” has become an iconic image of my mother.
Vicki Lester improvises with two palm leaves as she acts out the “Someone at Last” musical number. Photo by Bob Willoughby.
THE YEAR WAS 1970. THE PLACE WAS NEW YORK CITY. I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS old and living on my own for the first time when I saw my mother’s A Star Is Born. It was a late-night television broadcast, and I eagerly stayed awake to tune in. Splintered with commercials and all chopped up, the story didn’t really make a great deal of sense to me. I saw Mama leaning against a piano in a dark blue dress, exuding glamour and melancholy as she belted out a torch song. I saw her camouflaged in a strawberry-blonde wig and caked with makeup on a studio lot. I saw her onstage channeling her younger self, with long hair and ribbons in a flashback scene.
Then suddenly, she was in a beach house, clowning through “Someone at Last,” a song I had never heard. But there, in the living-room set, was all the furniture I had grown up with: the white leather chairs, the Tang dynasty camel, the hand-painted Chinese screens, the Maurice de Vlaminck painting, and the two tall lamps styled as blackamoor art—African men wearing turbans and holding swords. The turbans were lampshades and are racially insensitive today, but the romanticism of antebellum slavery was actually popular at one time! These were the pieces that followed us into every family home, and every house or apartment where my father lived. You see, after the film wrapped, my father, Sid Luft, who produced A Star Is Born, told me that he purchased all the furniture from the set at salvage cost (ten cents on the dollar) and had it moved into our two-story, five-bedroom, five-bath English Tudor home at 144 South Mapleton Drive in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills. (Jack L. Warner wrote in his autobiography that my father “borrowed” the pieces from the Warner Bros. studios for a party and never returned them. This isn’t true. In fact, my father sued Warner over such false claims in his book and settled out of court.) Now the film held a special emotional significance for me. Here was not only my mother, but echoes of my father, and household decor I had grown up with. I grew up on the set of A Star Is Born, literally.
The “Someone at Last” production number from A Star Is Born (1954).
I knew my father much longer than I did my mother. I was still sixteen—the age when my mother played Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939)—when she died. (My brother, Joe, was fourteen and my elder sister, Liza, was twenty-three and already had a career of her own.) It was incredibly painful for me to watch A Star Is Born for the first time. Up until then, I had only seen Mama on-screen as a girl, either in The Wizard of Oz or one of her many screen teamings with Mickey Rooney. That girl was a stranger. The person I knew as my mother was right there on television in A Star Is Born. I have the same feeling when I watch Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), A Child Is Waiting (1963), or I Could Go on Singing (1963). This was Mama. After that first experience, I would watch A Star Is Born once in a while, here and there, without fully understanding the high regard some people expressed for it. It felt scattered, choppy, not the great piece of work I later—much later—came to appreciate. I eventually came to regard it as “the film that got away.”
The production’s journey starts back in 1951. Sometime before my mother and father became the Lufts, they were enjoying a Sunday drive through Connecticut during her record-breaking nineteen-week engagement at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. In a reflective mood, she recalled viewing, years before, the Janet Gaynor–Fredric March version of A Star Is Born (1937) and feeling a remarkable connection to the story of a fated relationship between a talented newcomer on the rise and a matinee idol drinking his way to the bottom, all set within the hurly-burly of Hollywood. She saw that film, at its basic level, as the story of a young woman blossoming under the guidance and nurturing love of an older man. On a subconscious plane, this must have resonated with Mama because it mirrored the dynamic of her own unresolved relationship with her beloved father. She had proposed a remake, in which she would star, to MGM, but they dismissed her suggestion. They thought her longtime fans would never accept her as the wife of an alcoholic.
A photographer’s proof sheet records my first visit to the set of A Star Is Born. Photos by Bob Willoughby.
Mama had actually played the character of Esther Blodgett in a one-hour broadcast adaptation for the CBS Radio Network anthology series Lux Radio Theatre, which aired on December 28, 1942. She acted (but sang no songs) opposite Walter Pidgeon as Norman Maine. When Mama mentioned her dream project, Dad heard opportunity knocking. Some of the screen rights had become available. The original owners, David O. Selznick and John Hay “Jock” Whitney, auctioned off various properties when they dissolved their partnership and Edward L. Alperson now possessed some of these rights when he purchased negatives and prints to A Star Is Born and was looking to profit from them. Alperson was a film producer as well as president of Film Classics, a company that reissued older films. My father began negotiations both to secure rights to the original material from Alperson and to arrange a production agreement from Jack Warner of Warner Bros. studios. (Selznick retained some foreign rights to the 1937 A Star Is Born and a dispute began between Warner Bros. and Selznick that wasn’t settled until 1955, when Selznick traded his remaining rights to the film plus a $25,000 payment to Warner Bros. in exchange for their remake rights to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.) Warner was impressed by Mama’s recent high-profile “comeback” with sold-out appearances at London’s Palladium and the Palace in New York City. She resurrected two-a-day vaudeville (a matinee and evening performance daily) on Broadway and won a special Tony Award in 1952 for her work. However, Warner saw firsthand her artistry at her explosive concerts at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. The mogul was confidant of the viability of the deal. He was a gambler, like my father. Both men sensed that the stakes were high and the time was right to take a chance.
This was the early 1950s, the era of the Eisenhower administration. The Red Scare was on everyone’s mind, and Hollywood was hit hard by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. The motion picture industry was in a state of flux. Fewer people were attending movies, choosing instead to stay home and watch such popular programming as The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971), The Jack Benny Program (1950–1965), and I Love Lucy (1951–1957) on television. Cinerama, 3-D, and CinemaScope were gimmicks the movies employed to get people off their sofas and back into movie theaters. The Robe (1953) was the first film using the new CinemaScope process. It was no cla
ssic, but the size of the screen caused hordes of curious people to line up to see the spectacle. Change was in the air. The major movie studios had recently been forced to divest their theater circuits as a result of a landmark antitrust lawsuit. Though the divestment made a studio like Warner Bros. flush with cash to invest, it marked the beginning of the end of the old Hollywood studio system—the “dream factory” that produced a stable of contracted stars like my mother. Despite all these setbacks, Hollywood was still churning out products we now consider classics. The year A Star Is Born was released, it was competing against such heavy hitters as Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) starring Marlon Brando, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), an unforgettable vehicle for James Stewart and Grace Kelly.
This was the early 1950s, the era of the Eisenhower administration. The Red Scare was on everyone’s mind, and Hollywood was hit hard by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Warner Bros. entered into a multipicture contract with my parents’ production company, named Transcona Enterprises, in August 1952. A Star Is Born would be the first picture out of the gate; rather than a straightforward musical, it would revolve around several musical numbers, all sung by Judy Garland. It was hyped as her big movie comeback, even though she was just thirty years old. Mama’s fifteen years at MGM have taken on a tinge of mythology over the years. In 1935, when she was only thirteen, Louis B. Mayer signed her to a long-term contract, though not quite certain what to do with her. He loaned out her services to Twentieth Century Fox for Pigskin Parade (1936), figuring on trying her out at no expense to his own studio. Mayer soon decided that having signed both Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin was a mistake; they had one young girl singer too many on the lot. Mama made the cut, while Durbin was picked up by Universal Pictures and became a swift success in Henry Koster’s Three Smart Girls (1936). Mayer was determined to prove to himself and to the industry that he had made the right choice in keeping Judy. Fortuitously, one of Mama’s great champions at the studio was Ida Koverman, Mayer’s executive secretary, who was determined to have the young singer’s career be a regular topic of discussion by the MGM front office.