The Star Machine Read online

  In conducting their searches, the studios were usually highly astute and far more sensible than anyone might think. They wanted young people who were beautiful and talented, of course, but also pliant, flexible, and, above all, obedient. With the amount of money it would take to promote, publicize, and turn out a movie star, studios didn’t want any nasty surprises down the road. “Nasty surprises” were not what people today might think. Crazy mothers and fathers who had disappeared? No problem. Shady reputations, unusual sexual practices, even alcoholism? Relatives in prison? The studios could—and did—handle all those. They knew how to shut up and cover up. Nobody cared about bad behavior as long as it didn’t make the newspapers. What they did care about was money. “Nasty surprises” meant that initial investments weren’t going to pay off. Maybe the star was going to be lazy, sickly, neurotic, or, worst of all, disobedient and ungrateful. Anything that threatened the financial investment needed to be rooted out before it could become a nasty surprise.

  Once a hopeful was located, he or she was going to undergo a rigorous process of preparation and evaluation. As in the case of Eleanor Powell, the studios weren’t seeking perfection; they didn’t need to. For inside the studio system was the star-making machine, with its sharply honed “evaluation,” “development,” and “instruction” that would create perfection—or at least something that could be made to look like it—on film.

  The first steps in the star machine process usually involved two key events: a screen test and a thorough physical analysis. Unless, like Powell, the performer had prior footage, the test was imperative, because it showed studio bosses how potential stars would photograph before anything was done to “fix them up.” There are many amusing (and probably apocryphal) stories about the reactions the business had to some of these tests. They are mostly based on rumors that can never be verified, but they are fun. We’ve all heard about Fred Astaire’s, after which an executive was supposed to have commented, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” (Well, Astaire was, I suppose, balding.) Of Bette Davis, it was said she had “less sex appeal than Slim Summerville.” Tyrone Power’s eyebrows made him look like “an ape,” and Alan Ladd was deemed “too short to stack up.” (He was, but it turned out not to matter when they found him an equally small co-star, Veronica Lake.) Clark Gable (“ears too big”) was allegedly costumed for his test in a Native American chief’s war bonnet (or a Polynesian sarong with a gardenia behind his ear, depending on who’s telling the tale). Most first-test legends assert that “Nobody saw the magic but the secretary” or “Nobody saw it but the studio head’s wife” or “Nobody saw it but the butler.” It was hard to see, and it sometimes took more than the screen test to figure it out. But the machine process started with the screen test simply because people don’t always look on film the way they look in real life. Some people really respond to the presence of a camera and suddenly look twice as beautiful in front of it. Short people can look tall. Skinny people can look curvaceous. On the other hand, a stunningly beautiful creature could photograph badly, looking flat-faced and deadly cold. Studio bosses wanted to get a sense of who the person was going to be on film.

  Screen tests are a largely unexplored area of movie history. Many have disappeared, because test film stock was reused.* Although some exist, they are seldom seen, and only the ones made by individuals who became big stars have been made public. Screen tests were of three types: scenes, in which an actor was tested for a specific role, usually performing opposite another actor being tested or an unknown; wardrobe, in which an actor already cast in a part modeled the clothes designed for the role; and the all-important “personality” test, in which the newcomer was photographed while off-screen “testers” asked questions designed to relax the performer and reveal the natural personality. These last tests were especially important to newcomers who were often untrained actors and whose “scenes” could be disasters.† A “personality test” gave studios a better sense of what someone might become on film. Potential stars were asked to “walk around,” “light a cigarette,” or “stand up and sit down.” The camera could move in for close-ups to catch the performer off-guard, elicit a natural smile, or reveal any facial tics or mannerisms.

  Unless the objective was “to find the right person to play Scarlett O’Hara,” the most important screen test was always the personality test. The original personality test exists for a young and radiant Ingrid Bergman. She is a magical presence on film, lighting up the screen. If it were always as easy to see “star” as it must have been with her, the business would have been simple, and if more screen tests were as heart-stopping as hers, more would have been saved.‡

  After the screen testing, the newcomer would be looked over at closer range by the costuming, makeup, and hairstyling departments. If the results of the screen test were “not bad, maybe…can you do something with the hairline?” the departments were assigned to work on a specific problem. If the consensus had been “this person is dynamite, let’s get him/her looking as good as possible,” studio teams began at once to make the naturally beautiful look even better. If the diagnosis was “great except for the moles,” there was work to be done.

  In any event, the studio next took the new discovery forward into a “looking over” period that probably had no parallel outside a tenth-century Arab slave-trading market. It was “fix-’em-up” time. As had been done with Eleanor Powell, young “properties” were brought into a studio room where they were carefully measured for height, bust size, shoe size, shoulder width, and so on. They were weighed and warned what weight they would have to reach and/or maintain to look good on camera. Under intense lights and under the scrutiny of magnifying glasses, they sat in chairs as several men in white coats examined them, openly discussing any problems. (A presentation of this process appears in both the 1937 and 1954 versions of A Star Is Born.) Joan Crawford always talked privately about how she never really knew how she had escaped this initial review, managing to get her freckles past the experts. (She escaped the violet-ray treatments forced on Powell. At home, Crawford wore no makeup and allowed her red spots to show. Sometimes—after she became a star—she was dramatically photographed to reveal them, but most people never realized she was freckled.)

  Based on results of the “look over,” the studio devised a plan. Most of the “work” was done with cosmetics, proper lighting, clever photography, and strategic fashions. Height could be enhanced with platform shoes, proper camera angles, and a pygmy co-star, or shoulders broadened with pads and waists cinched in with girdles. However, Hollywood was also the original nip/tuck factory, a pioneer in cosmetic surgery and dental work. Was there a handsome guy (Clark Gable) whose ears stuck out? They could be taped back, or even surgically corrected. Were there ethereal beauties who smiled and showed teeth that weren’t straight? (Besides Powell, Joan Crawford, Alice Faye, Greer Garson, and Lucille Ball all needed dental work.) A studio dentist was on salary and waiting with the braces and the caps. And for noses that were too big, too long, too ethnic, too “anything”—from bumps in the middle to strange tips at the end—those were a piece of cake. At the end of her evaluation, the beautiful Maureen O’Hara was inexplicably told to have her nose bobbed. “They said it was too big, which it is,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but I like it anyway.” She kept it and became a star.

  A simulation of the star make-over … “which eyebrow looks best?” Janet Gaynor playing Esther Blodgett on her way to becoming Vicki Lester in the 1937 A Star Is Born.

  Hollywood had started using cosmetic surgery as early as the 1920s. For obvious reasons, not a lot of information about who got what done was left lying around, and few volunteered to tell what they had done and when. Silent stars such as Valentino, Bebe Daniels, and Carmel Myers were said to have had surgery—Valentino on his ears, the females on their noses. Hollywood could and did fix, and face-lifts for aging stars became increasingly popular as techniques were perfected. On the whole, however, most of the beau
tiful people brought out to Hollywood didn’t need much done to them that couldn’t be accomplished through less drastic means. They were beautiful people, but many small things were done to change their looks or to make them more photogenic. It is well known, for example, because she always told everyone, that Lana Turner’s eyebrows were shaved off by the makeup department when she appeared as an Asian in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938)—and they never grew back. Turner’s eyebrows, from 1937 onward, were a product of the drawing pencil. Margaret Sullavan underwent a major makeover in order to photograph properly for the camera. She was lovely to look at, with a true radiance and major talent, but she didn’t photograph well. Her face was deemed “asymmetrical” and her eyebrows had to be shaved so that makeup could raise the line of her right eyebrow. Her mouth slanted downward, so her lips had their corners raised by careful application of lipstick. Makeup was also used to decrease the distance between her mouth and nose.

  Rita Hayworth has always been known to have had her hair dyed and her hairline raised through electrolysis to make her look less Latin. Bob Schiffer, a famous Hollywood makeup man who worked with Hayworth during most of her career, never said Hayworth was anything less than a glorious beauty, but he gave interviews about how minor adjustments needed to be made for her to look as luscious as she did. “One eye was a little smaller than the other,” said Schiffer about Hayworth, “so I used to take a false eyelash and place it at an angle, then glue her own eyelash to it, just to even her eyes out.”

  The making of a movie star … from Margarita Cansino, 20th Century–Fox player … to Rita Hayworth, potential superstar: new name, new hairline, new shape, new hair color, new makeup, and new stance: up and on her toes.

  Greer Garson was put through the wringer by the makeup department when she was brought over from England in December 1937. She had just turned thirty-three, an age that made the experts nervous. Her adventures in the star machine are well documented and described in A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson, by Michael Troyan. He quotes Garson as having told a fan magazine that “Studio experts teach you to streamline yourself…(my eyebrows, for example, resembled fishhooks when I came here and are now sleekly arched half moons).” In other words, Garson’s eyebrows had been reshaped and MGM planted a piece about it in a magazine in the same way they had presented Eleanor Powell’s makeover from ugly duckling to glamorous dancer.

  Because of an unhappy experience with a screen test in England before she came to America, Garson was reluctant to enter movies. (Troyan quotes her as having complained, “They just can’t photograph me. My face is all wrong for the screen.”) Yet after MGM worked on her, America’s first sight of Garson was in the 1939 hit movie Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in which she played the rather small role of Mr. Chips’s lovely wife who tragically dies in childbirth. Garson’s face is first seen in the film in close-up as a mountaintop fog lifts around her, and she is breathtaking. MGM had “fixed her up” but good. Her worries, however, were not ungrounded. Caught unprepared by her enormous success in her first role, MGM rushed Garson into a terrible film, Remember? (1939), with Robert Taylor.* The makeup department evidently forgot to “remember” what it had learned about Garson, and her fears were fully realized. Her face looks flat and broad, and her fabulous cheekbones—so fully on display for the rest of her career—are not lit to give her face the planes it needs. Her makeup is wrong and her hairstyle unbecoming, its flattop quality making her forehead look too low, which it wasn’t. Although she wears clothes that are chic, they don’t give her any personal style. They are standard “MGM clothes”—and others knew how to wear them better. (Garson was never a clotheshorse.) Remember? shows what could go wrong for a beautiful woman in front of a film camera. If Remember? had been Garson’s first movie, we might never have heard from her again.

  Hollywood worked hard to invent and develop new tools for makeup, and it was never stingy with the results. Hollywood’s makeup tips appeared in movie magazines, newspapers, and general-readership magazines. Women who wanted to look like movie stars were told to paint their eyesockets with Vaseline, which would make them look “aglow” and “very sweet.” Discolored teeth could be painted with enamel. Eyebrows could be shaved and reshaped. The Max Factor Corporation sold their Hollywood products to the general public. “Glamour for you, too!” screamed an ad for Max Factor PanCake makeup. Max Factor proudly listed their accomplishments in a trade ad in the Hollywood Reporter of May 10, 1934: the invention of a makeup to give natural tone to the skin (1920), a perspiration-proof body makeup (1923), “underwater” makeup (1926), Panchromatic makeup (for use in color photography, 1928), sunburn makeup (1929), and the one they were currently promoting in 1934, “Satin Smooth,” which was supposed to be full of “delicate tones that photograph beautifully.”

  Makeovers were sometimes not about cosmetics. If a fabulous dancer who couldn’t sing a note was brought into the system, the dubbing department had five suitable voices waiting—they picked the one that sounded the closest to the dancer’s speaking voice. This had been done for Eleanor Powell. If an actor was a stutterer or a Hungarian whose English was incomprehensible, the diction department went to work. Everything and anything could be fixed, even awkward personal problems. Did a hot comic have a wife without talent who also wanted to be in the movies? Not a problem for a powerful studio: She could be stuck into minor roles to shut her up. Studios bought off current employers, former wives and husbands, jealous relatives, untalented siblings, anybody they had to. They paid for anything that could be considered a reasonable expense. Ready and willing to tackle anything, the machine could polish, shellac, trim, tuck, reshape, repress, and get rid of unwanted past baggage.

  The first early assessments from the star machine covered everything about a hopeful, and they were detailed and ruthless. Those who conducted them saw these assessments as helpful to the potential stars, rather than cruel. After all, wasn’t it going to make them rich and famous? The difference between our latter-day perception of stardom (“Ah, the mystery of it all!”) or our romantic ideas of persona (“He was born to play a gentleman”) and this hard-nosed routine evaluation process is startling, even terrifying. In the Wesleyan Cinema Archives exists Clint Eastwood’s “report card” from his early days as a contract player at Universal. Eastwood is ruthlessly assessed in the categories of attendance, acting (“voice work must improve…projection not good”), diction (“seems completely green to the whole business”), dancing, singing, horseback riding (“in beginner’s class”), and gym. The general comment, after Eastwood had been taking these classes for one month, was “An extremely likable boy who has gained admiration from his associates by his good nature and eagerness to learn.” This document is dated June 1, 1954. Also in the archive is another one dated October 25, 1955: the payroll termination notice for Clint Eastwood, the last day of his contract, as instructed by an interoffice communication dated September 22, 1955, which tersely reads, “Please be advised that we will not exercise our option on Clint Eastwood.” He might be “an extremely likable boy,” but they saw no dollar signs in him.

  Even actors who had already made a mark were subjected to intense scrutiny. In the same archive exists David O. Selznick’s specific wishes regarding the handling of Ingrid Bergman’s screen test for the role of Maria in Paramount’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Even though Bergman had reached a high level of success in Swedish films and had triumphed in America as star of Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), Adam Had Four Sons, Rage in Heaven, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1941, and was preparing to appear in Casablanca (1943), she was treated by Selznick as a possibly flawed product who needed careful handling to be “sold” to Paramount. Dated July 28, 1942, and entitled “Instructions from Mr. Selznick Re Miss Ingrid Bergman’s Paramount Test (for For Whom the Bell Tolls),” the document has fifteen detailed items. For instance, “The most important thing is the pants that she [Bergman] will wear, as Mr. DeSylva has some strange idea about her being too heavy in th
e hips; therefore see that the pants are properly tailored and not large enough for Marie Dressler.” The instructions include further details on makeup, Bergman’s eyebrows, lipstick, eyelashes, and hair. (“Miss Bergman” got the part and an Oscar nomination for it, with no mention of her hips being wrong for the job.)

  Once a performer had survived the assessment period, he or she was labeled “a potential useful property” and offered a short-term studio contract at a salary that was good for the times but not overwhelming by Hollywood standards. These were called “step” or “option” contracts, with “step” being the optimistic side (“step by step” you’ll go forward) and “option” the pessimistic (we have an “option” to drop you if we don’t like the way you’re going). There were reassessment periods every six months, so if youngsters weren’t working hard, showed no real ability, or didn’t seem to fit the studio’s roster, they could be dropped. No discussion. If the contractee was doing well, however, the contract would be renewed for another six months, usually with a small increase in salary.