The Star Machine Read online

  To reassure the audience that what they were never going to have really wasn’t all that hot, movie stories about the star machine made the news pretty grim. If you became a movie star, you’d lose all your friends, who were far better folk than you anyway. Your family would give up on you, and the love of your life would walk out. You’d start to regret your fame, with its empty nights and full closets. Then you’d become an addict, start coughing and staggering around, and suddenly fall off your high heels and die. Talk about cautionary tales! Stardom, said Hollywood on-screen, was a real bitch. But with good clothes. So don’t be envious, little fan, just love the star of your choice with every penny you can possibly spend at the box office. And don’t forget the fan magazines, photos, autographs, paper dolls, coloring books, and endorsed merchandise.*

  When a star in development had gone through all the evaluating and fixing, building up and promoting, outside scrutiny and pressure, there was one final all-important step: the one the studio would have to leave in the hands of the public, the fickle fans it depended on.

  Let’s say the machine had done its job. The young actor or actress had passed all tests and had arrived at the star level. The studio was happy. The new star looked into the mirror and said, “I see a star.” The studio looked at the star and said, “I see money.” But the public had to look into the movie frame and say something, too: “I see a sexy man I’d like to be with” (Clark Gable); “I see an exotic, unknowable beauty” (Greta Garbo); “I see a shopgirl just like myself who works hard but in the end wins money, clothes, and mansions because she’s just like me” (Joan Crawford); “I see some red-hot tap dancing” (Eleanor Powell). The audience had to see something it wanted, needed, liked, or loved. It had to see some thing, even something it couldn’t put into words but knew was there. The star needed the right role, the right co-star, the right genre—and the fan’s endorsement.

  The final step was the one that put the name above the title and could even lead to legendary status: It was typecasting. If the star’s special type hadn’t already been locked firmly in place by the buildup, or if nature hadn’t decreed it in the first place through exotic beauty (Hedy Lamarr) or specialized talent (Eleanor Powell), it had to happen now. Every top-of-the-line movie star had to find a type that he or she could play over and over. And over. That would keep the movies rolling and the money flowing in. The star had to become “bankable,” which meant the star had to become a recognizable shelf product.

  * One variation of the story says Mayer later became afraid she couldn’t carry the show and planned to replace her with Joan Crawford. Powell herself often said that Mayer was unhappy with the fact that, as shooting progressed, her role was dominating the film. She does dominate, and Mayer would never have let that happen if he hadn’t believed in her. She has close-up after close-up, is allowed to imitate Katharine Hepburn in 1932’s Morning Glory (and sends her right up), and is even allowed to be saucy and flirtatious as she impersonates the French star La Belle Arlette.

  * It lost in all categories.

  † Marjorie Lane dubbed Eleanor Powell in her early films.

  * The MGM makeup department consisted of fifty-two people and was famous for the boast it could “make any plain-looking woman beautiful in one hour and any beautiful woman hideous in four minutes.” They worked in a suite filled with spirit gum, false hair, wigs, putty, fish skin, sponge rubber lips, paint, grease pencils, cotton fluffs, mortician’s wax, false teeth, aluminum powder, and a gelatin capable of changing an entire facial contour. They were the wizards in the land of Oz.

  * Eleanor Powell is believed by experts on her career to have actually been in a 1930 Paramount musical, Queen High, which was made at New York’s Astoria studio. She received no billing and was said only to be seen tapping on a tabletop for a few seconds. This film has no eyewitnesses, but if it exists, Broadway Melody of 1936 was her third film, her first at MGM.

  † Powell played a fresh young thing in her first few films and a more sophisticated woman in her later efforts, but she was never fussily dressed. For the most part, Eleanor Powell escaped the fashion horrors of her era and was never a victim of the Couture Killers.

  * Powell made only thirteen films, not including Queen High. In ten of these, she was the leading lady or was co-billed with another star. In Scandals she played a secondary role. In Thousands Cheer (1943) and Duchess of Idaho (1950) she performs a single specialty number, playing herself. Duchess of Idaho was her last movie.

  * Stewart was cast in a singing-dancing role with Powell in Born to Dance while MGM tried to figure out what to do with him. On his way to fame as an all-American hero, he also played a Chinese peasant, a murderer, and Jeanette MacDonald’s weakling brother.

  * An unintentional howler today, this line meant “upbeat” and “fun” in its time.

  * Ann Miller, who took Powell’s place as MGM’s greatest female tap dancer, had a different style. She was not an acrobatic, balletic dancer, but a pure tapper, a ballroom star. The two women were never rivals and had great respect for each other.

  † The Great Morgan is usually not counted or included in her filmography. Today it can be seen on Turner Classic Movies.

  * Glenn Ford and Eleanor Powell were divorced in November 1959.

  † From 1960 to 1964.

  * Many dubious “schools” to help young people learn how to become movie stars sprang up around the country calling themselves “talent scouts.” The business itself satirized this process in several movies. One of these films, 365Nights in Hollywood (1934), carries my favorite ad for such a school: “Perhaps You Have That Spark That Could Make You the Next Gable, Garbo or Barrymore…No Talent Necessary.” It’s hilarious but painfully on the money.

  * Marlon Brando’s long-lost (and believed by many to be mythical) screen test for the James Dean leading role in Rebel Without a Cause was recently found in the Warner Bros. vaults. Brando had made the test in 1947, although the film was not actually made until 1955. In fact, Brando didn’t make his screen debut until 1950 (in The Men). In 1947, Brando was just about to make his breakthrough as Stanley in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire. In the test, which runs five minutes, Brando looks incredibly young and slightly awkward, although he’s also slender, physically beautiful, and full of a strongly masculine power. A modern viewer of the test described Brando as “lightning on legs.” (Brando’s title card states his name, gives his age as twenty-three, his height as 5′10′′, his weight as 170, his hair as brown, and his experience as: stage 3 years.)

  † A poor “scene” test didn’t mean a young man or woman couldn’t be turned into a movie star. It meant they didn’t yet know how to act in front of a camera. The scene test was most important when it was being used to decide whether or not the performer—who might already even be a star or successfully employed actor—would be right for a particular role. (The wardrobe screen tests were all about clothes fitting right, looking right on the actor, and photographing correctly.)

  ‡ Most of the tests existing today are from the 1960s, after the studios’ heyday.

  * Garson always called Remember? by the title Forgive and Forget.

  * Strickling, who never told where the bodies were buried, was all-powerful at MGM. Stars were told that if they got into trouble: “Don’t call the police. Don’t call the hospital. Don’t call your lawyer. Call Howard.”

  † A top star was estimated to receive about three thousand fan letters a week. (At her peak, Betty Grable averaged twenty thousand.) Fan mail usually asked for autographed photos, most of which were signed by designated forgers. Even Bugs Bunny had a “signature stand-in.”

  * The contest is a fact. It was announced in the May 2, 1925, issue of Movie Weekly. Under Crawford’s photograph was the caption, “Name Her and Win $1,000!” And indeed, the winner was Joan Arden. However, two different people had submitted it, which meant that the magazine was going to have to pay $2,000 to use it, and they didn’t think Crawford was worth all that. T
his multiple-submission problem continued through the next names on the list: Diana Grey, Joan Grey, Ann Morgan, and Peggy Shaw. When they got to Joan Crawford, they were financially secure. MGM later made up a story about a “little crippled lady in Albany” who won the contest, which Crawford believed till her dying day. She did, however, hate the name “Crawford,” which she thought sounded like “crawfish.” Later she came to love it and felt she’d been lucky in the contest.

  † Maybe the final prize in this category goes to Max Showalter. The successful character actor and Broadway musical comedy star was born in Kansas as Max Showalter. His studio, 20th Century–Fox, changed this to Casey Adams, a more star-ish name for his 1950s career in the movies. When Casey went back to Broadway, he changed back, starring as Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly! as Max Showalter. He had substantial careers under two different names.

  * Warren G. Harris, in his biography Clark Gable, details how MGM gave Gable new dentures, restyled his hair, plucked his eyebrows, and built up his physique. Harris quotes MGM publicist Howard Strickling on Gable: “He was willing to be molded. He wanted to be a star. He wanted to be a success.” Harris adds that portrait photographer George Hurrell pointed out that Gable “looked good from any angle,” adding that “most people have a good side and bad side, best from one angle only. Gable could be photographed under any lighting conditions, any camera angle.”

  * Lake’s loose hair was an example of Hollywood visual logic: loose hair, loose morals. Audiences got the message.

  † In fact, in the 1980s Paramount Studios publicist Teet Carle claimed Lake’s “safety hairdo” (a.k.a. her “victory hairdo”) had been such an effective campaign that it had been written up as factual in the Navy Department Safety Bulletin mailed out to war plants. The story and photo became a major media event.

  ‡ The publicity departments had a tricky twofold task: keeping the newcomer’s name in the eye of the public in the right way and out of the public’s eye in the wrong way. For the latter, they bought off policemen, bribed newspapermen, and paid hush money under the table to cooks, maids, and nannies—something they did for both stars and stars-in-the-machine.

  * These “controlled” interviews disappeared by the 1960s, and stars began to be treated as oracles. Brando said, “Today once you are a star, people start asking you about politics, astronomy, archaeology, and birth control.” Author Scott Berg commented on what was lost when stars were no longer taught what to say to reporters: “Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn’t so much information about him. Today you’re on television all the time…In the old days, the audience never got tired of the star…or at least it took a lot longer.”

  * There were always, of course, movie tie-ins: paper dolls, figurines, clothing lines. My favorite movie tie-in fashion outfit is the “Saint Joan jumper,” from 1957. Jean Seberg modeled it, and ads claimed it was “made with Texet Knitting Wool.” Suitable, no doubt, for wearing to be burned at the stake.

  † Today, of course, movie stars must confine their advertising work to Japan if they are to retain any credibility.

  * I confess to adoring these ads and all the fashion advice of the movie mags of the 1940s. My favorite no-nonsense fashion adviser was Modern Screen’s Marjorie Bailey. Her tongue-in-cheek write-ups—meant to be taken very seriously—are often hilarious: “Yep, dirndls are still with us…maybe you think I’m asleep on my feet because I don’t tell you to head for one…No, pal. No.”

  * These lessons, the studios felt, were freebies that they generously doled out while even paying newcomers to take them.

  * If a newcomer had been pushed forward rapidly, like Eleanor Powell, these lessons still were part of her day. In particular, Eleanor Powell had to be taught to dance for the camera and the editing process. She had to realize her number would be cut into parts that varied shots showing her full frame with shots eliminating her dancing feet and giving her a close-up. Her choreography had to include these cutaways. She would also have to perform her numbers with the orchestra, so they could record her music at the perfect tempo; then perform her number as four cameras photographed it, with no sound except her playback recording; and later dub her taps so as to capture perfect sound. Powell was always her own stand-in, since no one else could do her elaborate routines.

  † Gable was loaned only one other time, to Columbia in 1934 for his Oscar-winning performance in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, a punishment for what Louis B. Mayer felt was Gable’s bad attitude. Gable’s 1931 release Night Nurse was from Warners but was not a loan-out. He came to MGM after he made it. It had been made earlier and held up in release. Gone with the Wind was not a loan-out because although it was David O. Selznick’s production, MGM was the distributor.

  * Shirley Temple, who appeared with Colbert in Since You Went Away, described how it worked. When Temple moved so that Colbert’s dreaded right side came into the frame (it was her left side she favored),“Suddenly [Colbert] reached out and grabbed my chin. Firmly holding my head faced away from the camera, she rotated herself to a left exposure. She would not tolerate any tricks.”

  * Garson was not a beginner. She had well earned her Oscar nominations in Mr. Chips and Blossoms in the Dust (1941), and she was a mature woman with a considerable theatrical career behind her. Crawford, on the other hand, had come up from the very bottom and had not yet proven her acting chops, despite her fame.

  * See part III: “Retooling for World War II,” which discusses the careers of Van Johnson and June Allyson.

  † The studio ruthlessly didn’t care whether Johnson or Drake made it—and all the better if they both did. The two young men had both appeared in small roles in The White Cliffs of Dover in early ’44, when they were not yet known. White Cliffs was released in May, followed by Two Girls and a Sailor in June. MGM then capitalized on both successes—the studio released four more Drake films in 1944: Maisie Goes to Reno and Mrs. Parkington in September, Marriage Is a Private Affair in October, and Meet Me in St. Louis (Drake’s signature film) in November. They had already put a second Van Johnson film out just before Two Girls: Three Men in White, a late-May release. For Johnson, the follow-up movie was a prestige film, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, released in November. Thus, both Johnson and Drake went from small roles to stardom in only one year’s time, with Two Girls and a Sailor making the difference.

  * When his MGM contract ran out in 1949, he did some TV, some theatre, drifted to England—nothing really clicked for him. He died from lung cancer in 1982 at the age of sixty-four, not having acted since 1975.

  * Even when a “Hollywood stardom” movie was a comedy, there could be a grim reality on parade underneath the jokes, as in Stand-In (1937), Once in a Lifetime (1932), and Boy Meets Girl (1938). Star Dust (1940) was a fictionalized version of how a little Texas girl became Linda Darnell—starring Linda Darnell. It was designed to be a happy-ending piece, but it nevertheless had a pall of hypocrisy, chicanery, and waste written all over it. Another example, Make Me a Star (1932), is supposed to be hilarious, but it’s practically a tragedy. The story is a variation on Merton of the Movies, a novel that became a vehicle for Harold Lloyd in the same year (Movie Crazy) and would later be remade for Red Skelton in 1947 under its original title. Make Me a Star, competing with Lloyd’s successful version in the same year, is largely forgotten, but it’s a revealing presentation of the sad efforts of the untalented to become movie stars. Its small-town hero (Stu Irwin) takes a “National Correspondence Academy” course in movie acting. (Lesson #4 is the “Western Hero Course.”) Irwin, inspired by #4, changes his name to “Whoop Rider” and goes to Hollywood to make his fortune. Surveying “Whoop,” Joan Blondell, as a studio professional, solemnly says, “He’s just another good grocery clerk gone wrong.”

  The “star is born” movie is in contrast to the optimistic musical success stories in which a leading lady breaks a leg and the youngster gets her big chance, or the freshman guy wins the big game, or invents something,
because these are not stories about the manufacturing process of stardom. Telling the tale of movie stardom is telling a voodoo story that sells dreams to the huddled masses but reassures them it’s all a load of clams.

  PRODUCT AND TYPE

  Humphrey Bogart before he opened Rick’s Café Americain, as a mad doctor in The Return of Dr. X.

  Ricardo Montalban, a handsome Mexican actor brought to Hollywood in the 1940s, grasped the situation he was in at once. “The product was not any individual movie,” he said. “It was the actor. They created a persona that they thought the public would like…it was amazing.”

  Well, it was amazing. Every successful movie star became a specific type that the audience endorsed. The type needed to be right for its times, it needed to seem natural to the star, and it needed to become so welded to the star that it seemed not to be a role at all but a secret peek into what that actor was really like. Whether they found the actor’s type in a first role (Deanna Durbin) or after years of searching (Humphrey Bogart), they had to find it. The star machine made only one product—a movie star—but the studios, smart about salesmanship, knew that the products mustn’t be identical. There would be no lasting profit in that. Movie stars had to be different, not only from the moviegoing public but also from one another. Hollywood increased the longevity, adoration, and ultimate monetary values of the stars the machine made by giving the public a variety of types to choose from—a General Motors, as it were, of movie star merchandise.