The Star Machine Page 4

  As a single mother with a daughter to raise, Mrs. Powell had a hard time of it and did whatever it took to earn a respectable living. She boxed bullets at a Smith & Wesson gun factory, worked in a bank, cleaned houses and hotels, and waited tables. Worried about finding friends and social circles for her shy, overly tall, and gawky little girl, Mrs. Powell decided when Eleanor was six years old to enroll her in a local dance school. The fee—one dollar per hour—would prove to be well spent.

  Eleanor liked the school. She studied ballet and acrobatic dancing, gaining a focus for her loneliness and shyness and some much-needed self-confidence. She was twelve years old when she was hired by impresario Gus Edwards to dance in his summer show at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. Twice a week, for a salary of seven dollars per night, Eleanor Powell, wearing burnt-orange velvet pajamas sewn by her grandmother, did an acrobatic ballet routine to the music of “The Japanese Sandman.” (It had been her dance school recital number.) Audiences loved her, and she loved them. She was invited back the following summer, and by the end of the year began dancing in a nightclub called the Silver Slipper. She was just a kid, barely using makeup onstage, but by the age of fourteen she was earning $75 a week and was the official breadwinner of her family. Her mother was by her side all the way, and they both already understood that dancing was going to be their ticket to a better life. And Eleanor Powell had not yet started to tap.

  Urged by all who saw her dance to go to New York, Powell left school (with her mother’s approval) and headed for the city. Once there, she moved from venue to venue. She danced at Ben Bernie’s Supper Club, in vaudeville, and at private parties. She also went to every Broadway audition listed and was often asked about the current dance craze: Could she tap? Privately, the Powells felt tapping was unworthy of Eleanor’s background in ballet and feared something so seemingly faddish was a waste of time and money. They did it anyway. Eleanor Powell signed up at the Jack Donahue Dance School for ten tap dancing lessons ($35), and these would be her only formal tap training. The Donahue technique included fastening sandbags around Powell’s waist to keep her feet as close to the ground as possible, thus forcing her to tap loud and hard. She was tall and strong, and she came at it with a vengeance, learning quickly. No less an authority than Fred Astaire would later say of her, “She put ’em down like a man. No ricky-ticky sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dance in a class by herself.”

  Just two months after her seventeenth birthday, on January 9, 1929, Powell, using a tap number for her audition, landed her first real Broadway show, Follow Thru, in which she performed a specialty number in the second act. When Follow Thru closed the following year, she continued making a solid living dancing for hire in different venues, until she went back to Broadway in Fine and Dandy, in September 1930. After that show closed, she did what was by now a safe routine for her: She went back to the clubs and parties until she could find a new show. During 1930–1932, she was steadily employed, and the Dance Masters of America voted her “the World’s Greatest Feminine Tap Dancer.” She next signed for George White’s Music Hall Varieties. By November 1932, when she was twenty years old, she was a true professional with a solid reputation as a hard worker, a top-notch tapper, and a girl who kept her mother close by her side.

  George White liked Eleanor Powell’s talent and style. He had been producing a series of Broadway musicals known as George White’s Scandals since 1919, and he had signed with Fox Studios in Hollywood to make two movie versions of these shows: George White’s Scandals of 1934 and George White’s Scandals of 1935. White signed Eleanor Powell for the latter, and she agreed to appear with the understanding—at least in her mind—that this was like all of her working life: a single gig. She expected to return to Broadway when it was over, and in fact, that was what she wanted to do. Her security, she felt, lay in her solidly established patterns of continuous work from supper club to nightclub to vaudeville to party to Broadway show, et cetera.

  A weak movie with an old-fashioned plot, George White’s Scandals of 1935 starred Alice Faye and James Dunn. Various vaudeville turns by such popular performers as Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin are intercut into the plot, and one of the turns features young Eleanor Powell. Although she is given a few lines to say after her dance, and she’s invited onto the dance floor by Dunn, who is later seen “romancing” her as they clink champagne glasses on a nightclub date, that’s all there is to it. It’s the dance that counts. Powell’s feature solo number repeats her George White’s Music Hall Varieties specialty, a fabulous tap routine for which she wore spangled tights, a backless white shirt, and black bow tie. Except for a cutaway or two, the camera stays with Powell as she spins, she turns, she kicks, and she knocks out an eye-popping back-stepping moon walk, rapidly tapping with all the ease and confidence in the world.

  Before Powell could pack and return east, MGM noticed her. Fox Studios and 20th Century had just merged into 20th Century–Fox, and the new studio undertook a reduction of its combined talent, circulating sample footage of signed players for other studios to consider for purchase. That’s how MGM’s staff, including Louis B. Mayer, saw Powell’s number in the excerpts from George White’s Scandals.

  Already known for its musicals, MGM was on the lookout for song and dance talent, and Eleanor Powell certainly had the latter. The studio was in the planning stages for a movie to shoot in 1935, Broadway Melody of 1936 (“so new it’s a year ahead!”). It was going to showcase several young musical talents—singer Frances Langford, dance team Buddy and Vilma Ebsen, the lovely June Knight, and in a role that would secure his stardom, handsome Robert Taylor, who actually uncorks an acceptable baritone to sing “I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling.” There are several different accounts of how Powell got cast in the leading female role. (This is usually the case with movie stars, about whom all false information is, in some fundamental way, true.) It isn’t clear who brought her to Mayer’s attention (perhaps Arthur Freed, perhaps Sid Silvers) or what the exact plan for her was. Powell biographer Margie Shultz believes that Mayer at first intended for Powell to do only one specialty number. According to Shultz, Powell, who was eager to return to New York and unhappy with the Hollywood atmosphere and her experience in Scandals, told Mayer no unless he paid her $1,000 per week (a very high salary for a newcomer) and created a role for her in the story. Mayer then offered Powell a secondary role (that later went to Una Merkel). Powell countered by raising her salary demand to $1,250 per week, and to her surprise, Mayer—perhaps following the paradoxical “if she doesn’t want me, then I want her” rule of show business—said yes. The money was too good to refuse, and Powell signed her first contract with MGM. It was a short-term contract for three weeks, but at the $1,250 salary she had demanded. When Powell reported for work, Mayer told her he wanted to test her for the lead. Again, there are various versions of the political shenanigans involved, but however it happened, Eleanor Powell stepped into the leading role,* and the final billing for the movie indicated that MGM had complete faith in her. First came the film’s title—Broadway Melody of 1936—then, on a level together, “Jack Benny” to the left and “Eleanor Powell” to the right, and, centered underneath them, “Robert Taylor.” Powell was thus billed under the title alongside Benny and over Taylor.

  Eleanor Powell’s first dance in Broadway Melody of 1936 presented her in a solo that turned into a trio with co-stars Vilma and Buddy Ebsen.

  The proposed shooting schedule of three weeks stretched to three months, as MGM decided to give Broadway Melody of 1936 top-notch treatment. They smelled a hit, and they weren’t wrong. The finished film would garner three Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Story, and Best Dance Direction.* It was named one of Film Daily’s Best Films of the Year, and became one of the top-grossing movies of the 1935–1936 season—and this was a movie that features a vaudeville performer named Robert Wildhack, whose specialty was performing various examples of human snoring (e.g., “acute resuscita
tion, or the self-awakening variety”).

  Eleanor Powell had moved herself onto the lot of the top-ranked musical-making studio in Hollywood when a talented tap dancer was considered an asset. The workings of the Hollywood star machine entered Powell’s life, and she was never the same again.

  What happened to Eleanor Powell at MGM was what happened to all the young hopeful actors and actresses who came there, whether they could dance or not. The MGM experts coolly assessed her. She was very tall by the star standards of the day, a full five foot six. She was a bit gawky and certainly no actress. Powell had looked okay in Scandals, but just okay. She had no inherent glamour. She was not a beautiful girl, and she was never going to be, but she was pretty, really pretty. She could be cast only in musicals, and she couldn’t sing. On the other hand, MGM bosses knew they could make her over, give her all the pizzazz she needed, and they could dub her vocals.† She would never be any real financial risk for two reasons: They had signed her for only one film, and she could dance.

  Furthermore, she was already an experienced professional and could be counted on to comply with the demands of the business. She had poise and self-confidence. And when she danced she lit up like a Christmas tree and sizzled, flashing a natural megawatt smile. Knowing they would get their money out of her, MGM moved Powell forward, took a hard look at her, and decided to put her into their star machine.

  Powell wore her brown hair short, in a Dutch bob with bangs. The straight and casual style looked stringy and severe on film, and it flopped around when she danced. A special shampoo was prescribed to give it more body. She was ordered to grow it longer, to shoulder length, and hair extensions stood in when necessary. She was given a permanent wave to create wispy little curls around her face, which softened it. Her hair was lightened by a rinse (not a dye) and highlighted to give it shine under the lights. Her part was changed from the side to the middle, giving her face balance, diminishing her strong jaw, and emphasizing her lovely cheekbones. Powell was heavily freckled, so the studio had her undergo a series of violet-ray treatments that caused skin peeling. Her freckles disappeared, and a dermatologist gave her a daily skin-care treatment that was designed to reduce the size of her pores, since the close-up camera showed everything. Her eyebrows were plucked and given a flattering shape, and a special design for her lip makeup corrected an overly thin lower lip.* Her nails were grown long, shaped, and painted. Her teeth weren’t straight, and they looked yellowed on-screen. Since one of her best assets was her natural grin, Powell’s teeth were immediately whitened. Three pure white porcelain caps covered the crooked ones.

  Despite her years of dancing, she was taken to “posture class” and taught how to stand up straight and square her shoulders—the “MGM female” stance. Her real problem, thought studio bosses, was her legs, which looked knotty, bunched up at the calf and the thigh. She had highly developed short leg muscles—and her overly large knees were already a Broadway joke. Walter Winchell described things as being “as homely as Eleanor Powell’s knees.” She needed a tough daily regimen to exercise both her long and short muscles to give her legs a smooth look.

  Her figure was not voluptuous, but since she was a dancer, no one expected her to be zaftig. She was, however, put on a diet to help her gain the exact twelve pounds (not ten, not fourteen) the studio felt she needed to look attractive in front of the camera. In the meantime, she was padded for a better figure. The wardrobe department made personal foundation garments for her that would mold her hips, flatten her already flat stomach, and uplift her too-small bosom. The famous dress designer Adrian, who created glamour for the women of MGM (Garbo, Crawford, et al.), designed clothes that corrected what the star machine operators had defined as “figure faults.” Adrian put Powell in big squared-off collars and dresses with tucks all around her shoulders. When she wore a low neckline, he strategically placed flowers on her bosom to offset the flatness the eye would wander toward. In the area of dance, however, Powell asserted herself. She insisted that when she was doing a number on film that was supposed to be a rehearsal, she should be dressed in honest rehearsal clothes: loose slacks, shorts, flexible tops. Adrian responded, creating a series of casual outfits that fit her beautifully, that were obviously comfortable, and that she was comfortable wearing. Powell’s rehearsal ensembles did much for her image: They gave her a natural quality, a down-to-earth simplicity that her fans loved. Powell’s one other stipulation was that her mom would make her dance outfits, and indeed, for the first years of her career, her mother sewed by hand all of Powell’s dance costumes (a homey touch the publicity department made much of).

  Later, after her success in Broadway Melody of 1936, Powell took diction lessons to remove the final traces of her Boston accent, and she studied acting and tried to improve her singing under studio guidance. In the meantime, the studio figured out what to do with Eleanor Powell, an untrained actress, in her first role. She would play an untrained actress, an amateur looking to get started! Furthermore, she could play an untrained actress who pretends part of the time to be a French music hall star with a phony accent. In other words, MGM covered. The business was canny, and they knew the audience. So what if Powell seemed to them raw, untrained, amateurish? That was who she was going to be for them. With one shrewd move, the studio both forestalled any audience criticism of her playing and closely identified her with them. She’s just an ordinary person “like all of you”—except, of course, when she danced.

  Fortified by her co-stars, top name Jack Benny in the lead and old pros Una Merkel and Sid Silvers around her, Eleanor Powell made her MGM debut* with the best musicians, costumers, camera people, and makeup artists, and then left town to fulfill her Broadway commitment to appear in another revue, At Home Abroad, with Beatrice Lillie and Ethel Waters (directed by Vincente Minnelli). Powell (and her mother) expected to pick up where they had left off, going from revue to revue, show to show, nightclub to nightclub, and now maybe movie to movie. On March 30, 1935, George White’s Scandals of 1935 opened in movie houses, and despite the shortcomings of her looks and costumes, Powell received excellent reviews. On September 20, Broadway Melody of 1936 officially opened, and her reviews were sensational: “First, last, and always there is Eleanor Powell…That girl is literally a screen sensation who makes history with this picture. She has no peer in dancing” (Hollywood Reporter). “A rangy and likable girl with the most eloquent feet in show business…plays with an engaging candor and straightforward charm” (New York Times). “The hoofing…combined with an appealing new personality cinches her cinematic future” (Variety). Hollywood magazine summed up the general idea: “Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to see a new star born. This little lady has the looks, the figure, and the dancing feet…Ten out of ten must agree she is a wow.”

  Eleanor Powell’s famous lean-back-and-kick-high stance.

  What did the audiences and critics see in Broadway Melody of 1936? Eleanor Powell first enters the frame dressed in a plain, somewhat masculine two-piece suit, topped off by a Garboesque brimmed hat. Under the suit jacket is a little white blouse with a small bow—and little bows would become a Powell trademark. She’s utterly at ease and projects a bright, sparkly personality. She looks fresh. Within minutes, she is up on a rooming-house rooftop performing a tap dance. She does a straightforward solo number to the song “Sing Before Breakfast.” Powell would later become famous for her elaborate dance spectacles, but the audience first fell in love with her as she tapped out a charming routine that showed what a great dancer she was. All the MGM magic was at work in understanding Powell’s low-key introduction to audiences. Her newly “glorified” self looks terrific. Her costume is a pencil-slim dark dress set off by a white belt, with big white bows on its short sleeves and an enormous, stiff white collar around her neck. As she begins to tap, the dress is revealed to have ingeniously concealed pleats that allow her to move around freely and easily. She looks like a real small-town girl,† one with a naïve charm, an innocent and good-natured
personality, but whose tap dancing generates a heat that speaks to the audience of fire and passion underneath. (Powell’s sex appeal was always in her feet.) Powell later does an elaborate ballet routine with the Albertina Rasch dancers to “You Are My Lucky Star,” as well as a tap number to a reprise of the same song. The finale brings out everyone in the cast to beat “Broadway Rhythm” to death, each doing his or her own turn, with the icing on the cake being Powell finishing everything off with a take-charge display of rat-a-tat footwork. Wearing a sparkling top-hat-and-tails ensemble, she twirls rapidly around an Art Deco piano, feet flying, showing off a series of pretzel-like acrobatic backbends and turns, and never forgetting to keep flashing her radiant smile toward the camera. Audiences adored her, and critics went gaga.

  MGM bosses wasted no time. During the run of At Home Abroad, Eleanor Powell was offered—and signed—a coveted seven-year contract with the Rolls-Royce studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She and her mother were never gypsies again. From 1935 to 1945, Eleanor Powell was a star property in Hollywood.

  By the end of 1935, MGM had its publicity machine up and running on Powell. All the fan magazines were creating Eleanor Powell stories. Though she had been a success in her first Metro effort, the star machine was going to create an image for her. One of the first and most dramatic was in the December issue of Photoplay, an article entitled “The Glorifying of Eleanor Powell (How in Twelve Months She’s Been Transformed from an Ugly Duckling into a Vivid, Radiant Film Beauty).” It’s a piece of clever but cruel salesmanship that illustrates the horror of the star-making process. Having made over Powell successfully, MGM was prepared to capitalize on its own genius. The article openly tells Powell’s new fans that it was MGM who designed the product they were buying. Without denigrating her talent, and by shrewdly finding a way to include her in her own makeover process, the article (shaped by MGM’s publicity flacks) hints in a subtle and unmistakable subtext that any fan/reader could become an Eleanor Powell. The dream of stardom that Hollywood sold was always a dream of promise and possibility…and if anyone doubted it, there were “before” and “after” portraits of Powell for proof. There to be seen is a freckled girl with crooked teeth and bangs (before) and, right alongside, a smooth-faced beauty in lamé, the new star product (after).