The Star Machine Read online

  Each of these departments had detailed hiring needs. Director George Cukor said, “I think people don’t understand how a place like MGM needed to be fed, sustained, and organized every day.” All sorts of specialized jobs had to be filled: wig makers, barbers, hairdressers, manicurists, plasterers and builders, musicians, conductors, scorers and copyists, cashiers, cooks, waiters, nutritionists, architects, draftsmen, painters, furniture makers, seamstresses, fitters, stand-ins, script girls, continuity specialists, timers, focus pullers, camera loaders, researchers, as well as the top creative echelons of executives, producers, directors, editors, writers, cinematographers, and actors. These people were employees under contract, drawing regular salaries and reporting to work every morning. Not only was there enough work to keep them all busy every day, but sometimes even more personnel were needed to meet unexpected assignments. What if the studio suddenly needed two hundred Chinese peasants to be on set by 9:00 a.m. the next day? It could happen. The casting office would normally be working only with the roster of actors actually under studio contract, and there wouldn’t be two hundred Chinese anything, much less two hundred extras working for a one-day paycheck. The casting office needed to know not only who they had, but also who every other studio had and who they could get on short notice from the Central Casting Bureau in case they needed two hundred extras who could actually look like Chinese peasants. All these people would then have to be hired, signed in, given passes, costumed, made up, directed where to go, organized on set, fed, checked out, and paid. The system would go into high gear, and at 9:00 a.m., when the factory got ready to roll, two hundred Chinese peasants—or reasonable facsimiles thereof—would be standing on the set. The same would hold true if the studio needed a dog star that could untie knots with its teeth, an authentic Lakota-speaking Native American, or two fat men in bathing suits and a polar bear to chase them across an ice floe.*

  It took a lot of people to turn out the four hundred to five hundred movies that Hollywood produced each year during its glamour days. And some of those people were movie stars. Like everyone else in these factories, the stars were employees. They were well-paid employees, and they were glamorous employees, but they were employees. They, too, had to report to work on time. In his important book The Hollywood Story, Joel W. Finler provides a look at how big-name movie stars under contract at MGM were assigned in a typical work week during the summer of 1941. Nelson Eddy and Risë Stevens were rerecording their songs for The Chocolate Soldier on Stage One. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were in rehearsals for Woman of the Year on Stage Three. Lana Turner and Robert Taylor were filming the first scene for Johnny Eager on Stage Four. Walter Pidgeon and Rosalind Russell were on Stage Ten working on a movie entitled Miss Achilles’ Heel (this movie would later have its title changed to Design for Scandal). William Powell and Myrna Loy were making Shadow of a Thin Man on Stage Sixteen, and Johnny Weissmuller was doing an action-adventure sequence for Tarzan’s Secret Treasure on Stage Twelve. Poor Greta Garbo was really laboring away. She was being shot doing her famous “Chicka-Choca Rhumba” for Two-Faced Woman on Stage Eighteen, under the direction of the no-doubt-dubious George Cukor, and under the lens of the probably bemused cinematographer John Alton. Hedy Lamarr, Charles Coburn, and Robert Young were filming H. M. Pulham, Esq. on Stage Twenty-two, and the complicated airplane takeoff scene for Unholy Partners (using Edward G. Robinson in the action) was happening on Stage Thirty. In Rehearsal Hall A, Norma Shearer was taking dancing lessons to prepare for her upcoming film We Were Dancing, and in Rehearsal Hall B, Eleanor Powell was learning her first tap routine for I’ll Take Manila (later retitled Ship Ahoy). Out on Lot Number Two, exteriors were being filmed for Steel Cavalry (later renamed The Bugle Sounds) at the small train station set, with stars Wallace Beery and Marjorie Main. Thus, a week at Metro had twenty of the era’s biggest stars at work on nine stages, in two rehearsal halls, and one back lot, the factory system laboring on twelve feature films in a single week.

  Clearly, a major part needed on the assembly line of Hollywood’s successful manufacturing system was a “movie star.” Stars shaded everything around them inside the movie frame, defined the story’s meaning, lured viewers into the theatre, sold products off the screen, and had films designed especially for them that could be made rapidly and cheaply. In fact, the entire studio system depended on movie stars and was built on top of them.* Stars were the most precious commodity in the economic system. This was a simple enough concept, but it had one big problem: these stars, these key objects, couldn’t just be ordered from a supplier in Peoria or hired in like Chinese peasant extras. Yes, studios could scavenge around in theatre, ballet, opera, and sports looking for existing stars, but the camera is an ornery observer. Theatre stars often did not photograph well. Ballet stars and sports stars couldn’t always act, and opera stars could be fat and temperamental. Since the system needed movie stars every day (and lots of them), it did the sensible thing: it manufactured its own. The studios dedicated themselves to creating stars, and they made all kinds of them. There were big-name stars and little-name stars, A-list stars and B-list stars, male stars, female stars, dog stars, child stars, character actor stars, western stars for low-budget westerns, horror film stars for horror films, and, always waiting in the wings to step in when the established stars got too uppity were youngsters under consideration to become the next big stars.† That’s why they call old Hollywood “the star system.”‡

  That system knew how to create movie stars, and it understood star market value, rating it by established business practices that concretely defined “stardom.” Nobody was ever really a movie star inside Hollywood until his or her name went above the title of the movie. The studio—and only the studio—could dub someone “Sir Star” or “Lady Star.” If you were a “hopeful” star in the grooming process, it happened only for economic reasons: you’d had a hit movie and received fabulous reviews; the public had consistently been paying hard cash to see you and were writing in to say they wanted more; you had a unique talent or special quality and everyone decided to take a chance with you. However, even a beginner who was suddenly, magically “starred” in a first movie—Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls (1936) or Errol Flynn (in what was alleged to be his first film, Captain Blood, 1935)—had their names under the title. When the business later fully recognized them as real movie stars, their names went up top.

  Billing always depicted career trajectory and status; it was an insider’s guidebook to where an actor stood. The Jungle Princess in 1936 was Dorothy Lamour’s first “sarong” movie, and she was billed under the title with her two co-stars, Ray Milland and Lynne Overman. The film’s success spawned Her Jungle Love in 1938, with the same team. This time the billing read “Dorothy Lamour and Ray Milland in Her Jungle Love with Lynne Overman.” In 1942, Lamour was assigned a lackluster movie called Beyond the Blue Horizon, which contained several veiled references to her two earlier “sarong” movies. Her billing was “Dorothy Lamour in Beyond the Blue Horizon with Richard Denning [her leading man].” By the early 1940s, Lamour had become a star. Her established popularity as a “jungle princess” was being used to boost an unknown (Denning) the studio hoped to build into a star.

  Not many made it to the hallowed “star” billing. There were approximately two thousand performers floating around Hollywood by the end of the 1930s, but experts say only about five hundred of these were actually even under contract to one of the seven major studios. A studio like MGM—the biggest—could carry between fifty to one hundred names on its regular payroll, out of which no more than thirty might actually be considered “movie stars.” (This is a very small number considering the high numbers of movies being released each year.*)

  This meant a movie star was of primary importance and monetary value to his or her home studio. Thus, the moviemaking factory focused on the creation of movie stars—its lifeblood—and that is why a major element of the old Hollywood was “the star machine.”

  The
star machine process was not suddenly invented—it evolved. Movies were born, and in turn gave birth to movie stars. The system institutionalized a natural set of circumstances that began in the silent era, when moviegoers discovered they especially liked certain performers—and the movie business discovered the moviegoers’ discovery.

  At first, actors were nameless, and audiences were satisfied with the new experience of watching moving pictures. By 1910, however, audiences were responding to specific stars. Though moguls such as Adolph Zukor, who founded his Famous Players in 1912, brought theatre actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt into the movies, audiences wanted movie stars. And they found the ones they wanted, like Mary Pickford. First, she was simply “the little girl with the curls” until they demanded to know her and she became “Mary Pickford, Movie Star” and ultimately “America’s Sweetheart.” To Pickford has been awarded the title “first movie star,” and the period she represents—approximately 1913 to 1919—parallels the birth of the star system, the industry’s definition of star types, and the business’s understanding that it was the movie star who would sell its products. During these years, the business learned that audiences responded to actors on film as if they were the characters they were playing, and that what moviegoers saw was a strange amalgam of the real person, the character he played, and the interaction between the two. Stardom was a two-way street, reflecting performance as well as physical and emotional reality. Studios studied this phenomenon and sought ways to facilitate it through casting, writing, and acting.

  By 1927, when sound emerged and drove moviemaking indoors into what is called “the factory system,” the filmmaking business fully realized that movie stars were commodities, and as such, could be manufactured. At the very least, a process—a star machine—could be developed to find potential stars, polish, shape, sell, and sustain them. Why leave the creation of stars to chance? If an audience could find Mary Pickford and turn her into a star, why couldn’t moviemakers shorten the discovery process, increase the numbers of stars they had to sell, and shape the audience’s thinking by clever casting and salesmanship? It was a logical conclusion that good businessmen would inevitably reach.

  By 1930, the star machine was in operation, and its final evolution coincided perfectly with the transition to sound, which required a new type of star: one who could talk and for whom sound would shade type, reduce the ethereal distance of stardom, and increase the naturalism. Movie factories took charge of the star-making process, speeded it up, and ultimately reduced the phenomenon to its essence: even dogs and kids could be stars, if handled correctly. This formalizing of the star phenomenon marks a breaking point between silent stars and those formed by the machine system of the sound era. Great stars from the early years of silent film hadn’t been formed by this machine. They were hired by the business for their talent, or their beauty, or their skills (roping, riding), and cast accordingly. When the public responded to them with enthusiasm, they were elevated to the top and became the gods and goddesses of the silent screen. The greatest of those who continued to star after the transition to sound are not machine-made products: Garbo, Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Janet Gaynor, Norma Shearer. Garbo, Gaynor, and Shearer remained on top as stars of the sound era. Some silent film performers on the brink of stardom moved forward and into the machine process (Joan Crawford, Loretta Young), and some entirely new personalities were located and groomed by the new system in its early, formalized stages (Clark Gable, James Cagney, Bette Davis). From 1930 onward, regardless of experience, actors and actresses understood that being employed in the movies meant being subjected to the star-making machine to some degree for some period. No star escaped it.

  The star machine was the daily routine inside a studio. Knowing how much their business depended on movie stars, and knowing how much young actors and actresses (or waitresses and gas jockeys) wanted to become movie stars, the studios created a plan to locate suitable candidates, hire them, fix ’em up, and put ’em on the market. The studios never had any illusions. They knew they were shooting for the moon and at the mercy of a fickle public, temperamental actors, shifting times, and countless other unpredictable factors. This never slowed them down. They manufactured the product they needed and manipulated their system shamelessly from case to case. They used it, abused it, treated it as religion, or kicked it down the stairs—whatever worked best, fastest, and to the highest degree of profit. For one star, they would follow the rules to the letter. For another they might throw everything to the wind. They rode the whirlwind, but in the most efficient way possible. “Organization is responsible for the success of motion pictures exactly as a machine is responsible for the successful running of a ship,” said Louis B. Mayer.

  Hollywood knew how to oil its machine and steer its star ship.

  * MGM said that, given one day’s notice, its wardrobe department could outfit one thousand extras in one hour. This efficiency didn’t just apply to actors. Need a vintage car? The research department would let you know exactly how it should look and help locate one for purchase or loan. If not, the foundry and the prop shop would build you one. Anything and everything could and would be obtained—cost-efficient, no excuses, no delays.

  * Genres—the types of stories movies sold—were important, but movies were primarily sold through big-name movie stars.

  † The word starlet was seldom used by professionals inside the studio. It is largely a latter-day construct, meant to be pejorative, although it was sometimes used by the press in the old days. It is not a meaningful term for this book.

  ‡ The star machine described here existed primarily after sound was established, and the powerful “in-house” movie studios formed—the era known as “the golden era of the studio system,” roughly 1930 to 1960. This system of manufacturing movie stars collapsed when the studios collapsed. During the early 1950s and until approximately 1960, the factories slowly disintegrated, pressured by legal decisions that forced them to divest themselves of their theatre chains and practices of block booking; by competition from foreign films; by labor problems and political problems such as HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee); by the emergence of television; and by their either losing their stars, who defected to control their own careers, or by themselves dropping them because of economic pressures. See the bibliography for suggested readings on this topic and on the history of movie stardom from its silent days forward to the studio system era.

  * At the end of the 1940s, MGM called its acting payroll together on a soundstage for the annual studio photograph. Only fifty-eight actors and actresses sat for the picture. These were Metro’s “elite.” The photo includes not only the people we think of as stars, but also important character actors and supporting players. The photo shows stars like Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Spencer Tracy, supporting players like Betty Garrett, and character actors like Jules Munshin and Edmund Gwenn. (We also see Lassie. Yes, folks. A star. With his own star dog dish.) These fifty-eight performers were what the top-ranked studio felt it could afford to keep under contract, available for the fifty-two movies they’d make that year.

  THE STAR MACHINE PROCESS

  Eleanor Powell, after MGM had made her over.

  Why Can’t I Be a Movie Star?

  It is difficult to see how a substantial segment of the American population can avoid hoping, however feebly, to be among the blessed whom the magic hand of Hollywood plucks from obscurity. Let us take an imaginary Fanny Jones in any town in the United States. Her talents may be dismal, her features ordinary, her intelligence uninspired. Yet how plausible it is for her to muse, “It might happen to me.” And why not? Is Fanny Jones freckled? She knows how easily make-up experts hide the freckles of Joan Crawford or Myrna Loy. Is Fanny Jones astigmatic? She knows that Norma Shearer has a squint. Does Fanny Jones lisp? She has read all about how words beginning with “r” are cut out of Kay Francis’ scripts. Is Fanny Jones short? They can photograph her on a box. Is she f
at? They’ll put her on a diet. Is she thin? They’ll fatten her up. Can Fanny Jones act? Well! Can Hedy Lamarr? They’ll teach her. What fatal blemishes can the Fanny Joneses (or the John Joneses) actually admit that will bar them from the new Valhalla? They know that wizards will coach them, dress them, raise their eyebrows, straighten their teeth, lift their bust lines, lower their coiffures. Brilliant directors, writers and producers will dedicate themselves solely to the exploitation of their hidden talents.

  The point is that these things do happen.

  —Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers

  It all began with finding the raw material.

  In Springfield, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1912, a baby girl named Eleanor Torrey Powell was born. No rockets were launched. Her mom was a housewife, and her dad worked in a hardware store. Scandalmongers later said that little Eleanor’s dad had contracted a “social disease” during his wife’s pregnancy, and the baby was born prematurely, without fingernails, toenails, or eyebrows. Whether that’s true or not hardly matters. What is true is that Dad bunked off when Eleanor was barely two years old. She was told Daddy had “gone to heaven,” so it was quite a shock later when he turned up in 1935 with his new wife on his arm during Eleanor’s tour in a show called At Home Abroad. (Her mother had lied to her to protect her from “the scandal of divorce.”)