The Star Machine Read online

  ALSO BY JEANINE BASINGER

  Silent Stars

  The “It’s a Wonderful Life” Book

  The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre

  Anthony Mann

  A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960

  American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking

  For Savannah, my star

  It was easy to get used to having a name that wasn’t mine and had a better sound. The Veronica was supposed to stand for what was classic in my features and the Lake was supposed to suggest the coolness you got when you looked at them. So things got put together. I went down the assembly line. Dressed by Edith Head. Faced by Wally Westmore. Singing voice dubbed by Martha Mears…. When the hair was over one eye, I became someone else…. I personally have no existence…. My real life, the only one that other people believe in, is the life of the Veronica Lake character…. Has she got any connection with me?…I’m small and suspicious and unsure, and she’s tall and poised and thoroughly experienced. The Army respects her, the Navy adores her, the Marines are nuts about her. No branch of the service recognizes me.

  —“I, Veronica Lake: Constance Ockelman, Late of Brooklyn,

  Tells How She Became Hollywood’s Cyclops Cinderella,”

  Life magazine, May 17, 1943

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE: STARS AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

  The Factory

  The Star Machine Process

  Product and Type

  Malfunctions

  PART TWO

  PROBLEMS FOR THE SYSTEM: THE HUMAN FACTOR

  Disillusionment: Tyrone Power

  Disobedience: Lana Turner and Errol Flynn

  Defection: Deanna Durbin and Jean Arthur

  Disentanglement: Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer

  Detachment: Charles Boyer and William Powell

  PART THREE: TESTING THE SYSTEM

  Bonuses: Oddities and Character Actors

  Retooling for World War II

  CONCLUSION: STARDOM WITHOUT THE MACHINE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to many people who were willing to sit around talking with me about movie stars, star personae, Hollywood and the studio system, et cetera, among them Jeffrey Lane, Richard Schickel, Leonard Maltin, Alexander Payne, Joss Whedon, Miguel Arteta, Ed Decter, David Kendall, Matthew Greenfield, Paul Weitz, Sammy Wasson, Dan Janvey, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, and many more who will wonder why their names aren’t here. I am also deeply indebted to those who helped with photo research: Jeremy Arnold (who was imaginative and intrepid and invaluable), Ron and Howard Mandelbaum at Photofest, who have been my friends and researchers on all my books. I cannot imagine doing a film book without Photofest. I especially want to thank Maxine Fleckner Ducey, who is outstanding in her knowledge of film history and her research efforts on behalf of film scholars. Maxine and the staff of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research are reliable and cooperative, and I want to recommend that anyone looking for movie photos consider their facilities. They have an amazing collection of material that is largely unseen. Many thanks also go to all the people at Alfred A. Knopf who contributed to this book: Alena Graedon, Carol Devine Carson, Iris Weinstein, Maria Massey, and Roméo Enriquez.

  Every project I undertake owes thanks to the wonderful faculty and staff at Wesleyan University’s Film Studies Department, the Center for Film Studies, and the Wesleyan Cinema Archives: Richard Slotkin, Leo Lensing, Lisa Dombrowski, Scott Higgins, Jacob Bricca, Lisa Molomont, Ethan de Seife, Marc Longenecker, Akos Oster, Sal Privatera, Leith Johnson, Joan Miller, and especially Lea Carlson, who holds us all together. No one could have better friends and colleagues.

  As always, I thank (and re-thank) my fabulous editor, Bob Gottlieb, who understands stardom in all its forms. His guidance and patience supported me. To my husband, John; my granddaughter, Kulani; my son-in-law, Rob; my sister, Rosemary; and, of course, to my daughter, Savannah, to whom this book is dedicated, I give my undying thanks for help, good ideas, encouragement, and staying the course on a project that turned out to be more challenging than I had imagined.

  “Movie star” in the old Hollywood was a concept. The person who became one juggled opposing forces: studio domination and ownership versus personal ambition and self-assertion. The resulting friction, some of which has been recorded and much of which has not, was the original idea behind this book. My deepest thanks go to those in the business who were willing to discuss the topic with me openly—the ones who were most perceptive on the subject: Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, Bonita Granville, Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra, and Elia Kazan.

  Jeanine Basinger

  MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

  INTRODUCTION

  The star-making process—like everything else during Hollywood’s studio years—was contradictory, unpredictable, and ambivalent, but none of that slowed the system down. The moviemaking business knew how to be two-faced. In fact, it might be said that the movie business understood that the best way to operate successfully was to be two-faced: Hollywood embraced the concept. The studios pinched pennies and spent recklessly. They were cautious but careless. Romantic and practical. Honest and dishonest. Male and female. Howlingly stupid and cunningly shrewd. Nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in the stories about how Hollywood transformed ordinary men and women into the gods and goddesses known as movie stars. “He’s too short and pasty pale, but my secretary couldn’t take her eyes off him” could inspire a snap decision to “Get him some elevator shoes, dye his hair, and photograph him so no one gets a chance to take their eyes off him.” Although they might later claim “We saw her on a soda fountain stool and she broke our hearts immediately with her unique beauty,” something closer to the truth might have been “Get out there and round up all the good-looking females working in that department store and fix their teeth.” Hollywood was a factory. It operated on the principle that if it dropped a lot of nubile young blondes into its star-making machine, at least one of them might come out looking like a heartbreaker. They were gamblers, and some of the biggest long-shot winners in history were the movie stars they created.

  Movie stars are fascinating, but I didn’t want to write about them. I wanted to write about the system of star making, about the “star machine” that evolved at the end of the silent era and “created” movie stars in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The great “star machine” story has been overlooked or oversimplified, but it’s a fascinating tale about a practical business plan that manufactured illusions. I wanted to describe how the machine worked.

  It would be nice to report a clear resolution to my story, à la the typical Hollywood movie happy ending. It wasn’t that simple. Any consideration of the star-making system needed to examine individual cases because the business was making movie stars out of real people. As much as Hollywood would have loved to ignore the fact that movie stars were human beings, it always ended up dealing with their personal situations, things that couldn’t be predicted or controlled: anger, breakdown, failure, bad behavior, and disappointment. (And that’s before they tried to sell the product to the fickle, even more uncontrollable and unpredictable movie audience.) Sometimes a manufactured product turned out perfectly; other times, it blew up in the shopping cart. Describing only how the machine worked couldn’t tell the entire story. Like everything else in Hollywood, the star machine had two faces. Explaining it meant both affirming its process and denying its infallibility. And to do that, I had to write about individual movie stars.

  I decided not to write about the era’s legendary figures who have already been written about in many types of books—th
e Astaires, the Crawfords and Davises, the Coopers and Gables, the Garbos, and the Cary Grants. Some of them weren’t really machine products to begin with, and in retrospect, we can see that their work has transcended their formative years when they were subjected to the ruthless manipulations of the studios. Since I had grown up going to the movies during the 1940s and ’50s, I knew how many non-legendary stars there were back then, and how important some were in their own time—some even more so than today’s “legends.” Although I would have to consider (and refer to) the greats of the past, because they are now our movie star yardsticks, I decided to feature other names, such as Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Ann Sheridan, Dennis Morgan: talents the machine actually could (and did) turn into box office draws.

  I designed the book in two sections. The first is an objective story (how the star machine, a concrete business plan, worked on a daily basis), and the second is a subjective one (considerations of the people it turned into stars). It’s a book about the star business: its failures and malfunctions, its successes, its unexpected bonuses, its astonishing ability to change course and adjust to social and cultural shifts, and its incredible longevity. The concept of “movie star” is still in operation today. Small parts of this book appeared earlier in two out-of-print books of mine, one on Lana Turner and one on the American cinema. Large parts of it were taken from interviews I did years ago with certified stars such as Joan Crawford and Betty Grable. The frankness of these people—their considerable intelligence and down-to-earth insight into what happened to them when they became stars—formed both the inspiration for and the foundation of the book.

  PART ONE

  STARS AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

  The Star Machine Product: Dorothy Lamour, circa 1939, presented for newspaper and magazine reproduction.

  It’s a crackpot business that sets out to manufacture a product it can’t even define, but that was old Hollywood. Thousands of people in the movie business made a Wizard-of-Oz living, working hidden levers to present an awe-inspiring display on theatre screens: Movie Stars! Hollywood made ’em and sold ’em daily, gamely producing a result for which its creators had no concrete explanation. Sometimes they made films that told the story of their own star-making business, and even then they couldn’t say exactly what a movie star was. They just trusted that the audience wouldn’t need an explanation because it would believe what it was seeing—star presence—could verify its own existence. “She’s got that little something extra,” muses James Mason in 1954’s A Star Is Born, quoting actress Ellen Terry for credibility. Since he’s talking about Judy Garland as he watches her sing “The Man That Got Away,” the point is made. (“She has something!” cries out Lowell Sherman when he spies waitress Constance Bennett in the earlier version of the story, What Price Hollywood?) Hollywood just told people that “he” or “she” or “it” (let’s not forget Rin Tin Tin and Trigger) had “that little something extra” and let it go at that. As a definition, it wasn’t much, but it was all anyone needed—and there’s no arguing with it.

  The truth is that nobody—either then or now—can define what a movie star is except by specific example,* but the workaday world of moviemaking never gave up trying to figure it out. As soon as the business realized that moviegoers wanted to see stars, they grappled with trying to find a useful definition for the phenomenon of movie stardom, which is really not like any other kind. Marlon Brando called all their attempts “a lot of frozen monkey vomit.” Adding up the monkey’s offerings, it’s clear that over the years, Hollywood collected a sensible list of informed observations: A star has exceptional looks. Outstanding talent. A distinctive voice that can easily be recognized and imitated. A set of mannerisms. Palpable sexual appeal. Energy that comes down off the screen. Glamour. Androgyny. Glowing health and radiance. Panache. A single tiny flaw that mars their perfection, endearing them to ordinary people. Charm. The good luck to be in the right place at the right time (also known as just plain good luck). An emblematic quality that audiences believe is who they really are. The ability to make viewers “know” what they are thinking whenever the camera comes up close. An established type (by which is meant that they could believably play the same role over and over again). A level of comfort in front of the camera. And, of course, “she has something,” the bottom line of which is “it’s something you can’t define.” There’s also the highly self-confident version of “something you can’t define” that is a variation of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

  The last one makes sense. “Seeing it” is, in fact, the only reliable definition of stardom. The problem for the business was that audience members didn’t all agree on what they saw. Some said that Greer Garson was a talented actress of ladylike grace and charm, but Pauline Kael called her “one of the most richly syllabled queenly horrors of Hollywood.” For their legions of fans (who still endure), Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were the believable epitome of musical romance, but for Noël Coward they were “an affair between a mad rocking horse and a rawhide suitcase.”* Hollywood followed majority opinion, promoting the stars for which there was the most consistent audience agreement, while they worked hard to figure out the mystery of why one person (Clark Gable) could be loved by fans and someone who looked just like him (John Carroll) could not. It was Topic A in Hollywood, and studio bosses didn’t discuss it only in isolated boardrooms. They read stars’ mail, quizzed fan clubs, and enlisted the help of movie magazines to create questionnaires about who the public liked and why. Answers from fans almost always boiled down to one thing: a popular movie star was perceived to have a tangible physical presence. “He’s so real. I almost feel I can reach out and touch him” (Gable). “She’s adorable, very warm and real” (Janet Gaynor). “When she’s on screen, you can’t look at anyone else, and you feel you’re right up there with her” (Garbo). “I think he’s just like someone I could know right here in Ohio, and if I needed anything he’d step down and get it for me” (Van Johnson). In other words, it’s what Elvis Presley’s character in Jailhouse Rock (1957) tells his co-star after he unexpectedly kisses her. She sputters about his “cheap tactics,” but he nails down the reason she’ll accept him: “That ain’t tactics, honey. That’s just the beast in me.” Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that this “beast” was best represented by Jimmy Cagney, who passed the real test of the term “star quality” because he could “displace air…be a screen filler.”

  Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, doing what stars do in High Society.

  Fans confirmed their desire for this tangible presence, telling moviemakers what they responded to in movie stars really was something that seemed physical. Great movie stars were “alive” inside the frame. It was their home, their owned space. They were utterly at ease up there (and, sadly enough, often nowhere else). When Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, two consummate stars, sing “Did Ya Evah?” in High Society (1956), they prove the point. “Did Ya Evah?” was a tough assignment. Sinatra and Crosby had to sing, dance, hit their camera marks, respect the sophisticated Cole Porter lyrics, deliver scripted dialogue, stay within their characters, pretend to be slightly drunk, keep the beat of the orchestra playback, move around a specially designed library set with limited space while following a specific choreography that had to look improvised, and never forget that they were rivals for the audience’s affection, “Frankie” and “Bing.” They had to watch out for each other in more ways than one. (Each was keenly aware of the other’s star power.)

  “Did you hear about poor Blanche? She got caught in an avalanche,” sings Sinatra, carefully enunciating Porter’s words. “Game girl,” mutters Crosby, riffing on the lyrics. “She got up and finished fourth.” Sinatra responds with his own ad lib: “I think I’ll dance!” As he wobbles by, Crosby cautions, “Well, don’t hurt yourself.” These men are what stars are, doing what stars do. They seem as if they’re making it up right in front of you. (The illusion of stardom is always the illusion of
ease.) Looking at them performing “Did Ya Evah?” is a lesson in star definition: two hardworking professionals are executing a complicated musical assignment in order to look like two amateurs who’re reeling through an accidental musical romp. Fifty years later, after they’re both dead and gone, they are still alive inside the frame—still making it appear that it’s happening right in front of you, in the moment.

  In the “golden era” of Hollywood, filmmakers knew that stardom required personalities like Crosby and Sinatra. Finding such stars was what the studios did. But how did they do it? Was there a formula? No. But there was a process. The hard part was that the process cost a great deal of money, and it was fraught with potential disasters. No matter what they did, no matter how smart they were about it, it could go wrong, because no one knew for sure what they were doing.

  A successful star trio: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, stabilized by Dorothy Lamour, in Road to Zanzibar.

  Moviemakers asked themselves many questions about stardom. Was it luck, an accident of fate? When Alice Faye got appendicitis and had to be quickly replaced in Down Argentine Way (1940), her desperate studio (20th Century–Fox) stuck a cute blonde who’d been around town for nearly a decade into her part: Betty Grable. Given a chance by an appendix, Grable succeeded and became even more famous than Faye, lasting for an unprecedented decade at the top of popularity polls. All her life, Grable said her stardom happened because “I was just lucky.” The business asked itself, “Was it only luck?” Or did it require some special role that fit perfectly to what the actor could do? When five-time Olympic gold medal swimmer Johnny Weissmuller was cast as Tarzan, the role gave him a lifetime of fame. Since he was no actor (by his own frank admission), a movie with little dialogue and a lot of swimming fit him perfectly. No Tarzan, no Johnny?