Christmas in July: Preston Sturges's masterpiece

Christmas in July (1940), scene featuring Dick Powell and Ellen Drew.

The decade of the 1940s in the last Century witnessed the larger concentration of talent in the history of American cinema. The best generation of American directors plus the first wave of emigrated Europeans, all of whom started in the silent movies and moved easily to the talkies, were then in their prime and releasing movies regularly: Ford, Capra, Wyler, Hawks, Hitchcock, Preminger, Wilder, Lubitsch, Walsh, Lang, McCarey, Cukor, Curtiz, Kazan, Huston, Stevens, Siodmak, etc. This list is far from exhaustive, but in the middle of those luminaries and oceanic talent, a name is mandatory to add. Preston Sturges came to be one of the most popular, admired and successful moviemakers of the decade. James Agee, one of the best cinema critics of the forties and never prone to exaggeration, called Preston Sturges in 1944 the “most gifted American working in Hollywood”. And the fact that Sturges invented the Flashback technique in The Power and The Glory (1933) proves further the case of his extraordinary talent. Hollywood called and by 1933 Sturges was a full-time screenplayer. Permanently upset with the changes and alterations the directors made to what he wrote, he decided to get behind the camera. 

Preston Sturges directed eight pictures between 1940 and 1944, releasing only in 1941 two flawless comedies and timeless classics many times copied yet never equaled: “The Lady Eve” and “Sullivan's Travels”. Moreover, bookending the eight films there are two pieces (“Christmas in July” and “Hail, the Conqueror Hero”) that are exemplary comedies and a manual of movie construction, plot progression and, overall, humanity. Sadly, after 1944 all that changed. His matrimonies and divorces (Sturges had four wives) dented his finances as well as his health via a drinking problem. Looking for total independence from the studio system, Sturges devised a project with the notorious and very rich (and very odd) Howard Hughes, both partnering in California Pictures Productions.

It was a doomed partnership that for many reasons didn't last – who thought that a sophisticated, brilliant and outspoken artist could get along, let alone make business, with one of the more reclusive and misanthropist men of Hollywood? Sturges never recovered and, after his venture with Hughes was dissolved, no major studio had him back nor wanted to finance his movies. Sturges was able to direct (and completely control) only one more film, the magnificent “Unfaithfully Yours”. Yet it tanked at the box office (due to the Carole Landis/Rex Harrison scandal) and that was the end of his career.

As Sturges later recalled, "When Mr. Hughes made suggestions with which I disagreed, I rejected them. When I rejected the last one, he remembered he had an option to take control of the company and he took over. So I left."  His last years were very, very sad and at some people point Sturges was seen begging for a drink in bars and hotel restaurants, sometimes promising as payment an old Hollywood story. Sturges tried to write his autobiography – to which he wanted to give the title of “The Events Leading to my Death”, but he didn't have the time to complete it. He died alone and broke, suffering a heart attack in the Algonquin Hotel four years after he'd finished his last movie The French, They Are a Funny Race. He  was sixty years old. 

"Crooked, but never common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (2023) is a recent and worthy attempt at dissecting Surtges'movies. The author is a renowned cinema critic, Stuart Klawans. One by one, from "The great McGinty" to "Unfaithfully yours" the analysis is deep and detailed. There are many new angles that even fans of Sturges will learn here for the first time. After a very general intro to each movie the author deals with said movie, but mostly with the screenplay. There's less on camera movements, acting or the actors' performances. In any case, minor flaws and all, this is a very good - and funny - book that deals right with someone right at the core of the best decade that cinema has known: a writer and director whose influence is way larger than his fame.

Richard Barrios remarks in A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (2009): "As much as Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell was a new-style male ingenue for musicals, as it can be seen by contrasting his performance of “Young and Healthy” (serenading Toby Wing) with that of Clarence Nordstrom in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” Nordstrom is overripe, phlegmatic, consciously cute—the Charles King type. Powell is aggressively young and healthy, leering visually at Toby Wing and audibly with his brash tenor—and somehow retains the innocence to warrant Ruby Keeler’s adoration. And Dubin and Warren’s songs did not clash with the dramatic action as in earlier backstagers. The arching outbursts of “Young and Healthy” and the ricky-tick ribaldry of “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” seemed entirely suited to a milieu where shows are born of sweat and desperation, and the syncopation and game lyrics evoke more of the real Broadway than Bradford Ropes’s 1932 novel 42nd Street in which the story was based. 42nd Street was nominated to two Oscars: Best Picture and Best Sound Recording.

Preston Sturges's A Cup of Coffee (turned into Christmas in July) was another essay on the American success syndrome, a microcosm of youthful exuberance indulged by fate. The hero was young Jimmy Mac Donald, lowly office worker for the conservative old Baxter Coffee Company. Jimmy thinks the company suffers from a hardening of the corporate arteries and pontificates at length about turning the place around. But Jimmy has his head in the clouds. He is a compulsive contest enterer—slogans, jingles, drawings. He daydreams of winning a fabulous amount of money and marrying Betty Casey—the company’s secretary. One day Jimmy is cleaning out his desk when word comes he has won the rival Maxwell House slogan contest with “If you don’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk!”, a promotional gem.

Sturges streamlined Christmas in July, tailoring the Jimmy MacDonald part for Dick Powell as the first picture under Powell’s new Paramount pact. Ellen Drew, from If I Were King, would play his girlfriend Betty. Shrewdly, Sturges built the situation with the audience knowing, unlike in the play, that the telegram was phony and that Jimmy’s day of glory is quickly going to end. The notices for Christmas in July were uniformly outstanding. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a ten-strike for Sturges as a writer-director.” Rival Variety labeled it “bright, crisp, refreshing entertainment.” Said Time magazine, “As director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly twisted comedy with a background of pathos. He ably remodeled Powell from the boyish crooner of Warner Brothers musicals into a convincing prototype of a drudge with a dream of sudden wealth with which he can buy his mother a convertible settee and his girl a fancy wedding. Pretty, pale-faced Ellen Drew was coached into a realistic likeness of a practical $18-a-week stenographer. A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them act like people.” 

“How does he do it?” asked Bosley Crowther rhetorically. “Well, through the creation of solid comic characters, for one. His hero—and inevitable heroine—are just nice, honest youngsters, that’s all. They want a break so they can get married. But against them are arrayed such a scatter-brained lot of practical jokers, business tycoons, and slightly off-center store clerks that the attainment of the break becomes a gantlet. Then Mr. Sturges contrives some wholly bewitching surprises. Details are worked out with elaborate ingenuity. Things pop out when you least expect them. He keeps you laughing with, not at, his youngsters.” Howard Hughes suggested a moviemaking partnership with Sturges. The two men discussed preliminaries through the latter half of 1943 and into February of 1944. “They were trying to negotiate a contract,” said Louise Sturges, “and they could not get together. They could agree perfectly on their ideas of engineering but not on anything that constituted a good contract.” On the afternoon of February 12, Hughes phoned Sturges saying “We have a deal,” he told Sturges. News of their plans soon reached the outside world. 

“Last fortnight,” Time magazine reported on March 6, “two of the most combustible personalities in Cinema, airminded Howard (The Outlaw) Hughes and gadget-brained Preston (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek) Sturges, announced their cinemanschluss. A new studio was born. Hollywood braced itself for the sort of thing that happens when hydrogen and a match flame meet.” Sturges-Hughes, Inc. (California Pictures corporation) was off to a shaky start. Almost immediately the new enterprise leased five sound stages and a suite of offices at Harry (Hopalong Cassidy) Sherman’s California Studios on Clinton Street, across from Paramount. Sturges' salary of only $2500 a week, less than the $3250 Paramount had been paying him, and considerably less than the $6000 Frank Orsatti figured he was worth. Sturges covered his disappointment and humiliation by Mr. Hughes’ dismissal. “The son of a bitch fired me at seven o’clock in the morning,” he reportedly told one friend. “I could have forgiven him if he had waited until noon.” —Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (2000) by James Curtis

Christmas in July has one of zaniest premises of any Hollywood comedy. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), a modest clerk from the Lower East Side, has never succeeded, but his paralogical optimism never falters. His current plan is to win the $25,000 prize for suggesting a new advertising slogan for the Maxford Coffee Company. His foolproof idea is: “if you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.” This stupefying phrase is the story’s fixed center of gravity. Jimmy thinks it’s smart and witty because it’s a play on words. But neither meaning of the pun makes any sense. “Bunk” could be an uncomfortable bed, or the supposedly bunkum notion that coffee keeps one awake. So, Sturges has set up our hero in an impossible situation. Jimmy and his faithful fiancee Betty (Ellen Drew), who believes in Jimmy even though she doesn’t believe in his slogan-making prowess or his luck, are basically “technical leads” like the juveniles of romantic comedies from 1930s.

Dick Powell had recently moved from Warner Bros. to Paramount and was anxious to break from his otherwise successful pigeon-holing as a cheerful, crooning Howdy Doody. Powell often comes off as hardened by experience and skepticism, foreshadowing the noir actor yet to come. Just when we think we’ve reached maximum stalemate, Sturges flips the script. Jimmy’s martinet supervisor, Mr. Waterbury (Harry Hayden), has been observing that Jimmy is not keeping his eye on the job. He calls him to his office and gives him what begins as a solid management-Protestant ethic lecture. But as soon as Jimmy explains that he hasn’t been doing his work because he can’t stop daydreaming about the prize, Mr. Waterbury delivers a surprise. He’s completely sympathetic. Instead of arguing that dreaming about winning a prize instead of doing hard work is a sure sign of failure, he argues the opposite. It shows initiative. It shows hopefulness. And if he fails to win the prize, that doesn’t mean he’s a failure.

Jimmy follows the telegram’s instructions to pick his check up at Dr. Maxford’s office. In a normal world that the pranksters were relying on, this would be the moment when the truth is revealed and Jimmy is thrown out as a fraudster. But that’s not how it works in Preston World. Reading the telegram, Maxford, flummoxed and frustrated, believes that the contest’s decision has been made without his being informed of it. Maxford hands the check for 25k (worth almost 500k in today’s money) to the grateful Jimmy, who now feels fully justified in his talent. Shindel demands that Jimmy be arrested—in fact, the whole neighborhood should be arrested. The beat cop (Frank Moran), who’s known Jimmy all his life, compares the very Jewish Shindel to Hitler and refuses to arrest anyone. Then arrives Maxford himself, calling Jimmy a fraud and he, too, demanding he be arrested. 

Betty appears to make a compelling American case that the only thing that really matters is not achieving success, but having the chance to achieve it. Baxter appears to accept this, grudgingly. He relents and decides not to fire Jimmy, if only because his name has already been painted on the office door. Bildocker arrives triumphantly in Dr. Maxford’s office to inform him that a winner has finally been decided, which is, surprisingly, Jimmy’s very absurd slogan. The story then actually supports the slogan isn’t bad because it doesn’t make sense, it’s good because it won. And the “reason” it won is because Bildocker stubbornly refused to accept the plausible one that his fellow jurors all agreed about, and basically forced his solitary choice through. And the audience that has been tossed around in the comic vortex isn’t sure about any of it. The great French film theorist Andre Bazin famously called Sturges a moralist. Bazin argued that Sturges consistently satirized American ideological values, revealing them to be myths sustained by popular will alone. —"Crooked, but never common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (2023) by Stuart Klawans

"Preston Sturges's second feature as writer-director, Christmas in July (1940) is in many ways the most underrated of his movies—a riotous comedy-satire about capitalism that bites so deep it hurts. Jimmy MacDonald believes he has won the Maxford House Coffee Slogan Contest and brings his fiancée Betty to Shindel to buy her an engagement ring. Like much of Sturges's finest work, this film captures the mood of the Depression more completely than most 30's pictures, and the brilliantly polyphonic script repeats the hero's topsy-turvy slogan so many times that it eventually becomes a kind of crazed incantation. As usual, Sturges's supporting cast (including Ellen Drew, William Demarest, and Raymond Walburn) is luminous, and he uses it like instruments in a madcap concerto." Powell's dissonant jingle is for Sturges a metaphor of the barbed American Dream. Sturges does not provide the characters (and the viewer) with any form of consolation. Instead, he leaves them to face their own naiveté. Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.com

That is why, in contrast to other classical fables of poverty rewarded by a benign fate (like those by Frank Capra), Christmas in July does not provide us with any sort of illusory relief. In the end, Jimmy is still granted the chance of a lifetime (Dr. Maxford, after all, decides not to pull back his promotion—only the raise), but he is deprived of that enthusiasm and confidence in the system and his own self that his boss wanted to instill in him. Jimmy not only learns that chance and opportunities seldom turn dreams into reality, but he also faces the contradictions of a system based on the power of self-deception. Ellen Drew's Betty’s final plead to Mr. Baxter clearly reflects this disillusionment: Jimmy (Dick Powell) belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails… because it’s one thing to muff a chance when you get it… but it’s another thing never to have had a chance. —"The Cinema of Preston Sturges" (2010) by Alessandro Pirolini

Hedda Hopper: The Cause for Classic Glamour

At the Toluca Lake house, Frank Sinatra, his wife Nancy, and their friends used to stage little Christmas Eve revues, running for an hour and more, complete with scenery, costumes, props, original score by Sammy Cahn and Julie Stein, sketches and performances to pitch in. One sketch set its sights on Dean Martin, a celebrated party-goer from the day he arrived in Hollywood and an actor whose performances in some pictures would scarcely show up under a microscope. When the bigwigs at Columbia heard about the shows, they asked Sinatra to put on a similar affair at Harry Cohn’s house to celebrate his birthday. The guest list included Rita Hayworth, José Iturbi, Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and the Sinatra regulars. The studios couldn’t afford to have Louella Parsons out of action. She was too useful to them. They knew how to handle her, where I was a tougher nut to crack. If she laid hold of a scandal, she didn't not print it unless the studio involved was willing. When scandal came in range of my telescope, I’ll print it so long as it’s news and true. Press agents can’t stand it; the business they’re in should be called suppress agentry. My taste runs closer to that of Dema Harshbarger, whom I have known since she first put me on radio. “I have three friends in the world, and I don’t want any more. The average Hollywood friendship today wouldn’t buy you a ham sandwich.”

Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein. “I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?” “You’re right, that Einstein was a dummy,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. Dean said: “I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, Martin has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm. I regard him as a supreme egotist, for want of a better term. He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income, can’t be dragged to a benefit. Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees. [Dean Martin was a father of eight children]

Breaking a contract is a refined art, which skillful performers like Dick Powell conduct with the finesse of a brain surgeon. Powell had an odd choice of partners, specially 30's wisecracking gal Joan Blondell. She left him for ruthless Broadway producer Mike Todd. I still remember one night dining in a restaurant, with Mike Todd complaining about how hard he’d worked already and us (Marlene Dietrich and I) not listening to him. Before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis could start work for Hal Wallis in movies, they had some more night-club dates to fill, including one in Philadelphia. They were joined in that City of Brotherly Love by the wives of two of our more respected Hollywood personalities, one of them a perky blonde who had dragged her patient husband to Slapsie Maxie’s night after night to ogle Dean. If you can prevent catastrophe, you’re bound to give it a try. So when I found out what was going on in Philadelphia, I went to see Hal Wallis. “Unless you nip this in the bud,” I said, “you’re going to start your first Martin and Lewis picture with a couple of divorces to contend with.” Hal was petrified. “What can I do?” he pleaded. “Stop it before the news gets out.” He called his partner, Joe Hazen, in for consultation. 

“How would you handle the situation?” they both asked. “Telephone the boys right now. Tell them that unless those women get out of Philadelphia immediately, you’ll cancel the contract. And tell them why.” Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia to New York. I advised one of the husbands [Powell]: “When you meet him, you should punch him right in the nose.” He knew who I was talking about. There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup, Jerry Lewis was visiting New York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa, drawing such crowds that they waited outside in lines that stretched halfway around the block. 

The cause of glamour, for which I’ve been fighting for years, is a losing battle. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now. Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants. The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl next door, go next door. In its rosier days, Hollywood Boulevard saw glamour by the carload on Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide across the sidewalk like some splendid race of the beautiful and the blessed; gowns swishing, hairdos immaculate, diamonds gleaming together. Just watching them walk in was as good as a ticket to a world’s fair. 

During World War II the women of Hollywood let the producers talk them into surrendering every shred of glamour even on Oscar nights. “If you go out, you mustn’t be well dressed,” the front-office men argued, “or else the public will be offended. What you’ve got to do is to look austere.” I knew this was malarkey. From the mail that poured in, it was as plain as a pikestaff that servicemen were starving for glamour. They wanted pin-up pictures of glamorous girls. I sent out ten thousand of them, until the studios rebelled and pretended they couldn’t afford any more. Marilyn Monroe's fame and misery were always mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an overly trusting creature whose career was professionally and emotionally complicated. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as Marilyn did. In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress had edges sharp as razor blades. She was a nervous, amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself. She was simultaneously a lovely and pathetic woman, but she kept her sense of humor.

The most gullible of all was Mary Martin, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil and, by a miracle, lives by it and through it. Mary was the daughter of a Texan lawyer (Preston Martin), and she was friendly as a kitten when she drove her bright, new, yellow convertible to Hollywood in 1936 from Weatherford, Texas, which boasted a population of 5000 people at the time. She’d always been the girl who sang the sweetest in church, stood out in school plays, and worked the most enthusiastically in civic causes. Her father gave her $500 as stake money on the strict understanding that as soon as that was gone, she’d come back home. He also saddled her with her five-year-old son, Larry, who resulted when Mary eloped from finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee, with a boy from Fort Worth. That marriage was dissolved after five years. “Larry’s your responsibility and you’ve got to take him along,” her father insisted, figuring this was a fair means of keeping his wide-eyed darling out of new romances and would bring her back home quicker. 

Around the studios they got to calling her “Audition Mary.” She sang for everybody, and everybody turned thumbs down. “Nice voice, fair figure, but impossible to photograph that face,” was the verdict. She sang for Oscar Hammerstein II—remember South Pacific?—at his house on Benedict Canyon at the end of my dead-end street. He knew she wasn’t ready. Years later Mary told me Oscar Hammerstein taught her how to phrase a song, how to read lines, how to move. “In fact,” said she, “I learned show business from Oscar Hammerstein.”  When he thought she was ready, he and Richard Rodgers adapted a play called Green Grow the Lilacs, and she was offered the leading role. At the same time, she had also been offered a lead in a play produced by Vinton Freedley, who’d given Mary her first Broadway chance in Leave It to Me. “I was torn between the two offers. Talking to Hammerstein over the phone, I said: ‘Will you give me a minute?’ I tossed a coin and Freedley won. The play was a success in Boston, but I felt certain it’d never reach Broadway—it didn’t.” Green Grow the Lilacs also failed and later was rewritten in a new version called Oklahoma! 

When her $500 had melted away, she picked up what jobs she could find. She sang for $60 at a little night spot. She taught slew-footed stars how to get through dancing scenes. Her voice was dubbed on sound tracks for tin-eared girls who couldn’t sing. Then she managed to get signed by a producer named Lawrence Schwab for a Broadway musical he had in mind. When she got to New York, she found that plans for the show had come to nothing, but Schwab lent her to another producer, Vinton Freedley, for Leave It to Me. It had a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” by Cole Porter, which Sophie Tucker encouraged Mary to sing with the innocence of a lamb. Soon she was singing on radio, then back in Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. Her father Preston Martin went to his grave believing that “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was written especially for him. 

But making movies is a cold-blooded, impersonal, highly technical business. Some performers slowly freeze inside when they work for staring cameras instead of for human beings sitting in a theater waiting to burst into applause. Mary was like that. “I beat my brains out,” she says, “and I like to hear the echo.” She didn’t cotton to Hollywood. Helpfully, her contract stipulated that she could leave the studio every Thursday to attend rehearsals and broadcasts of Dick Powell’s Good News radio program, for which she was earning $1,000 per show. Happy Go Lucky (1943), Martin’s eighth picture, was a Technicolor movie musical in which she plays Marjory Stewart, a Texan “cigarette girl” and falls in love with Dick Powell. Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in curls and ruffles. Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in that!” The thought itself puts a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her lips, making her just what she fancies herself to be. 

I only once saw Mainbocher cringe at the sight of his pride and joy. That was in New Orleans, when we sat together watching Mary’s opening in Kind Sir, produced by her longtime friend and Connecticut neighbor, Joshua Logan. I smelled a fiasco during her rehearsals, but I did whatever was possible to boost her morale. She poured out her gratitude in a telegram: ONCE BEFORE ANOTHER GREAT WOMAN SOPHIE TUCKER HELPED ME IN MY VERY FIRST SHOW STOP NOW YOU BY SOME MIRACLE WERE SENT TO ME GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS—MARY. But nothing helped Kind Sir. On opening night, when the last-act curtain fell, even the flowers that were pushed into her arms were tired. In the seat next to me, Mainbocher, who’d done her costumes, slid down almost out of sight so he wouldn’t be asked to take a bow. But he took it with a smile like all the rest. I almost made an enemy of Josh Logan by nagging him to use Mary in the movie of South Pacific instead of Mitzi Gaynor. 

“There are make-up men today who’ll make Mary look like a young girl,” I told him. “Mitzi’s a fine entertainer, but she’ll be only a carbon copy of Mary as Nellie Forbush.” Josh wrote me a twelve-page letter explaining why I was wrong. South Pacific turned out to be only a modest success as a movie, earned around $5,000,000, but it would have done better if Mary Martin had starred in it.  She played Nellie in London, of course, and reported rapturously, in red ink yet: “Dear Hedda: Look where we are! Exactly where you said we’d be! And—oh!—it has been just as wonderful as I had hoped and dreamed it would be. All of it has been unbelievably perfect.” When she came home she was bone-weary. She and her husband, Richard Halliday, had booked passage on a slow boat to South America. Then Leland Hayward told her: “I’m going to do a big TV spectacular, and I can’t do it without you.” She begged off and started on the cruise. When they reached Brazil, Adrian talked her into buying land near the house he and Janet Gaynor built in the middle of the jungle that he loved. Mary had as much need for a Brazilian hideaway as for two heads, but she can’t go on saying no to anybody. She and Richard, who was the only big reward she won in Hollywood, discovered that the first jungle real estate they bought was sold to them by a woman who didn’t own it. The local authorities hushed that up since they couldn’t afford to have the news leak back to the United States. So Mary, $40,000 poorer, sank another $50,000 into some other property, which the surrounding, giant-sized greenery constantly threatens to steal back from her. 

When Leland Hayward heard about her proposed rest cure in Brazil, he flew down ahead of the Hallidays and was waiting for them as they landed. Brushing aside her pleas of fatigue, he told her: “Ethel Merman says she’ll do my TV show if you will.” Mary, as ever, couldn’t say no. After the two of them made television history that season, she asked Ethel casually one day: “How did Leland get you to do it?” “At first I told him to go to hell,” said Ethel, “but then he said you’d do it if I would, and I couldn’t refuse.” Mary hasn’t a clue as to the size of her bank account, and I’ll guarantee she never looks inside a checkbook. She waded trustingly into theatrical ventures where she found herself up to her ears in problems. “But that’s all ended,” she declares. 

“Never again would I do a play that I’m not suited to and take another two and a half years out of my life.” But so long as she can go on flying, she’ll be happy in the theater. As Peter Pan, which was a lifetime dream come true, she’s the world’s most celebrated flying character. The other member of the Halliday family, daughter Heller, “eloped” with her fiancé, Tony Weir, along with her parents, his parents and family, and the twenty-six guests. They’d planned a reception at New York’s River Club. Her bridal gown by Mainbocher was made but never worn. Heller decided that instead of a big wedding, she’d rather have cash to get her household started, so Mary’s big production plans went up in smoke. —The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1962) by Hedda Hopper

Dick Powell's Murder Mystery Party

Dick Powell certainly set forth for St. Louis in 1925 with high hopes, determined to go just as far as talent and luck would take him. What he had not counted on was failure, the need to beg for jobs in movie theatres on amateur nights or the necessity of splitting $15 for two nights work between himself, the piano-playing Scott, and their agent. Years later, in Hollywood, he confided to Linda Heath details of the experience: "There was a winter in St. Louis, when I was 19, that I almost starved. With a piano player as partner, I managed to get a few bookings at the cheaper neighborhood theatres. I'd tell jokes and sing. And, oh, how we'd flop. After the whole winter of living in cheap boarding houses on practically no money at all, I had made just enough to get myself back home again." The fact that he was a straight-from-the-shoulder kind of fellow worked against him. For the typical vaudevillian created a stage personality so definite, rounded, unique, and so entirely his own, that he was recognized whenever he appeared on stage. By way of contrast, Dick's very strength depended on his resemblance to the boy next door, upon his being so obviously an average boy from an average family in an average-size town.To that town (Little Rock) he returned to hitch his ambitions to the phone company. Yet, even as he was battling to establish himself in just that sort of situation Ewing Powell could approve, Dick continued to sing with local choirs, secretly hoping to turn an avocational career into a professional future, as well as from his various singing engagements. It was enough to get married on, and his choice to be Mrs. Dick Powell was Mildred Maund, a "gorgeous brunette" from Shreveport, Louisiana, who was visiting her aunt in Little Rock. Powell met her while taking orders for phones. A Pittsburgh friend, Darrell Martin, says of the couple's meeting: "He was available, and she was willing." And so they were married in Benton, Arkansas, on May 28, 1925.

June Allyson quotes her husband's after-the-fact recollection of his first marriage: "It was a boyhood romance. She used to come visit some neighbors and I thought marriage was the proof of my manhood. The marriage didn't work and we parted friends." Dick told an interviewer: "She couldn't understand why I was not satisfied to work for the telephone company. I couldn't understand why she didn't realize that I would never be happy doing that. What I had to do was try to sing my way to whatever success I'd make." It was not his banjo playing but his singing of "My Blue Heaven," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," and "At Sundown" that was responsible for each of the four shows daily being a sellout and for the crowds waiting in the lobby for the next performance. Back in Indianapolis in February, Dick sang with Emil Seidel's Orchestra at the Apollo Theatre for three weeks and then for two additional weeks in May. His good fortune was provoked by the reported intemperance of Eddie Pardo, master of ceremonies of the Circle shows. The latter had apparently downed one drink too many, and been fired on the spot. For his replacement, the management selected Dick Powell, who was to double as master of ceremonies and vocalist for the weekly stage productions. The first of these in which Dick was featured was "Spices of 1928," touted for its "peppy acts" and "snappy girls." The newsman who reviewed the ensuing week's show found the success of Pittsburgh's favorite something of an enigma. Had the writer been aware of Dick's Arkansas beginnings, he might have possessed an answer to the enigma: to the "honesty" and "modesty," to the boyishness which were in a large degree responsible for his success as a master of ceremonies in both Indianapolis and Pittsburgh.

Take "Revue of Song, Dance and Fun" that opened at the Stanley the week beginning February 13, 1932 - only two months away from Powell's departure for Hollywood to appear in his first film Blessed Event. Darryl F. Zanuck, who was about to embark upon 42nd Street, a motion picture rich in the atmosphere of the New York theatre. George Brent, one of its principals, felt "lost" in the film. Not so Powell. For him, there was always a place in a Horatio Alger tale asserting that hard work, diligence, and a little luck are preambulary to a meaningful, happy, and rewarding life. By 1935 a Quigley Publication poll ranked him seventh among Hollywood's money-making stars - just behind Claudette Colbert. A year later, motion picture exhibitors ranked him sixth among the ten moneymakers of 1936. Three years later, between films, he returned to Pittsburgh on a tenweek personal appearance tour. Those who greeted him at the station found Powell "smilingly boyish and modest." To more than ten thousand well-wishers he was "the same shy, retiring young man" they had long known. And, some thirty years later, adjectives like "decent" and "considerate" were coupled with Powell's name in Little Rock. To those who had known him during his apprentice years, he was yet "wholesome, considerate of the other person, full of life and fun." —"Dick Powell Scrapbook Collection" (1984, UCLA Library) 

I never speak to June Allyson, my dear lovely wife—about those nightmares I suffer every night. They all have a violent sameness. And I am the corpse. I think one night I’ll be the corpse propped up on the witness stand with the district attorney yelling at me, “Don’t you sit there trying to tell the court that the defendant is guilty just because he mowed you down with a machine gun. You can’t prove murder without malice, and when he shot you he was the happiest man in the world!” Then again I’ll be lying stone cold in a pool of blood, knifed to death by a butler. Detectives are swarming all over the place, suspecting everybody but that sanctimonious servant standing right in their midst, laughing out loud and looking like Orson Welles. When I try to tell them who did it they sneer and reply, “Some detective you are. You’re just a ham actor. Besides, everybody knows the butler is never guilty.” I wake up in the middle of the night out of these horrors and look over at Junie. She’s smiling in her sleep. I’d ask her what she dreams about but she’d only ask me the same thing and in the end insist that I go to a psychiatrist. That’s why I decided, humorously you understand, to do something about these grim nocturnal visitations of mine. 

I figured that if I could concoct a plot crazier than my dreams the nightmares would go away or at least simmer down. So I invited a few friends into coming to the studio for a party after my Tuesday night show. We had a good radio show that night. If I have to say so, Richard Diamond (that’s me) did very well. He got kicked around quite a bit but in the end he solved the mystery. It's not any mystery he did it with people like Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Field, Richard Greene, Mona Freeman, Pat Nerney, Mara Lynn, Joan Evans, and Jack Grey, for an audience. As soon as the announcer said, “This is NBC,” I put down my script and took up my guests, who I'm sure never have participated in the fine art of murder. They were delighted. June, who couldn’t be on hand due to the pending blessed event, had written the word 'Suspect' on little slips of paper. One for each guest, except for a lone slip on which was written "Victim." We drew the slips out of the hat and, for the sake of staying in character with my nightmares, I palmed the slip so I’d be the corpse, a role with which I’d become familiar. 

The idea behind all this, in case you should like to give a murder party, is to confuse the victim. The guests get in a huddle, have five minutes to decide on a plot and who among them did it. Then the victim stretches himself out in corpse position. If he can find out who killed him he’s certainly allowed to live—or he might even get a prize. They stretched me out on a table in studio C, ran me through with a prop knife and told me to take it from there. There were practically no clues at all. Just a gang of innocent looking characters. Virginia Field for instance. She looked as if she had a halo spinning around her head, so I passed her up as a suspect. Too beautiful. I saw the Frankenstein-like equipment Mona Freeman and Pat Nerney were toying with and thought, “Well, maybe.” To make a short case of a hilarious party, I lined up all the suspects, still wearing that knife through my middle. Don’t worry, it only hurt when I laughed. Before long I had the answer.

Dick Greene was the killer. Why? Well, for one thing, all detectives (that’s me) have an instinctive hatred for Sherlock Holmes. He knows too much. For another, Greene is an expert fencer. It was only natural that he should choose the rapier as a murder weapon. The motive? When Dick confessed, he explained that the guests figured the only reasons there could be to kill a radio detective would be (1) he was a lousy performer, which they insisted I wasn’t, and (2) he might be exposing a murder plot on his show. Hence the solution: Richard Greene, disguised as Sherlock Holmes, planned to heist a jewelry store. He was tipped off that the exact crime had been written into my show that night by a writer he knew. Result: if he eliminated me and stole all the scripts the cops would never suspect him. And how did I find out? 

Very simple, my dear Watsons. Looking around the studio—I noticed that right after the broadcast every script had disappeared, except the one in Dick Greene’s pocket! That did it. The case resolved, it was time for a celebration! I want to point out that actors do like to raid a table loaded with food, though, because quite a few of us have been hungry at one time or another in our careers. So we all hiked over to Bob Cobb’s Vine Street Brown Derby, where they tossed a fine repast for the people who had killed me. P.S.: I don’t have those nightmares any more. After all, how could I dream up a plot crazier than this one? —Dick Powell (Screen magazine, February 1951) 

Dick Powell, Landmark Musicals, Memories

A team of neuroscientists from the Universtiy of Dublin presented a new study with respect to how our forgetting processes affect particular memories in the brain, its results published in leading international journal Cell Reports (August, 17, 2023). The team studied a form of forgetting called retroactive interference, where different experiences occurring closely in time can cause the forgetting of recently formed memories. The neuroscientists genetically labelled a contextual “engram” (a group of brain cells that store a specific memory) in the brain, and followed the activation of these cells. Crucially, using a technique called optogenetics they found that stimulation of the engram cells with light retrieved lost memories. Dr Thomas Ryan, Associate Professor in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, is lead author of the just-published journal article. Dr Ryan, whose research team is based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI), said: “Memories are stored in ensembles of neurons called ‘engram cells’ and successful recall of these memories involves the reactivation of these ensembles. By logical extension, forgetting occurs when engram cells cannot be reactivated. However, it is increasingly becoming clear that the memories are still there, but the specific ensembles are not activated and so the memory is not recalled. It’s as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can’t remember the code to unlock it.” This research was supported by the European Research Council, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Irish Research Council, and Science Foundation Ireland. Source: www.cell.com

Moviegoers in the 1930s knew better than modern audiences; they knew intuitively that Dick Powell was just the hero and Ruby Keeler the heroine for the Great Depression America. And it is a point in its favor that Golddiggers of 1933 was not just set in the Depression but that it was about the Depression. Yesterday's audiences identified with the juvenile and the ingenue—especially with Peggy's aspirations. It is a kinship that Richard Lamparski perceives in his profile of Keeler: "She had a quality during those bleak Depression years that people could identify with. Her roles, those of a kid trying to get a break on Broadway, were so close to her own story that it didn't matter how she read the lines, because she felt them, and audiences were rooting for her to make good." In the wings, as the company waits for Peggy's entrance, Marsh offers words of encouragement, telling Peggy that though she's going out a "youngster," she's got to come back a star. 

But it's the opening lines of this particular speech that are important, that is if Peggy is to be seen as a heroine of the Depression; he tells her that two hundred jobs are at stake. Not for the director, not for herself, but for her peers she goes out and gives to them. Marsh's point is that the first night audience has "got" to like her and they do, caught up in just the story with which they (and by extension moviegoers) could identify: a success story. And, in 1933, that audience was starved for success stories—the more dog-eared the better. They wanted, needed, to be told that lots of hard work and diligence together with a little luck would be climaxed by tangible success. Ruby was Peggy Sawyer, as Dick was Billy Lawler. They were the juvenile and the ingenue. Young and fresh, they were the hope for many in the darkest hours. 

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, those perennially wholesome, likable youngsters, were always on hand. Theirs was a mediating presence, and to be cognizant of their particular contribution to the film, their story scenes have to be rescued from the shadow of Berkeley's grand scale production numbers as well as from the enveloping grit of the backstage life—unquestionable attention-getters. And while the tale of an old-school aristocrat who attempts to break up his songwriting brother's attraction to a chorus girl may not represent the "solid story line" that Mervyn Leroy, the film's director, was seeking, it did have, as audiences of the day were quick to note, the quality the director called "heart." And, in Dick Powell, the film had a handsome hero for the Depression whose all-engrossing concern comes to focus upon helping others to get, and then to keep, the jobs they have set their hearts on. A reviewer noted the next film 42nd Street had Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler "falling in love again as only those delightfully young kids can." And once Footlight Parade was released before the public, reviewers like Harold Cohen of Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette called it "Dick's best break so far," for "he shows a flair for comedy and he gets the chance to do good acting on the side, too." The New York Times reviewer agreed: "Mr. Powell pleased enormously with his skilled singing and also with his acting."And what acting were the two newsmen talking about? Dick's portrayal of a hero for the Depression audiences, surely.

To appreciate Dick Powell's increasing popularity nationwide, his activities just prior to the shooting of Footlight Parade need to be noted. For it was at this time that he was dispatched on a ten week personal appearance tour, appearing at a number of the larger and more prestigious movie houses across the country. Now he was the headliner in live shows like that advertised for the third week in May at New York City's Capitol Theatre. He sang several songs from 42nd Street, demonstrated his ability to play on several musical instruments, and entered into a dialogue with Joan Blondell, who shared the top of the bill with him at the Capitol. But then wherever he appeared on this tour, Dick was received as "one of the brightest of local vaudeville presentation," even at the Baltimore's Century Theatre, where, at the beginning of June, he sang, with a temperature of 102 degrees, "I'm Young and Healthy" from 42nd Street. The flu brought the tour to a hasty conclusion, and, on his return to Hollywood, Dick was hospitalized, missing the first days of shooting on Footliglit Parade. 

His peers certainly recognized his special status: Dick Powell received more mail than any other star at Warner Bros.; 1,768 letters in January 1934; subsequently 3,000 and more a month. And in 1935 and 1936, the Motion Picture Herald acknowledged the whole country was "Powell mad." They ranked him seventh and then sixth among the money-makers in 1936. Louella Parsons, speaking of Broadway Gondolier (1935), was with the majority of viewers: "Personally, I loved every minute of it and if it doesn't put Dick Powell over as a star, there is something wrong with movie audiences." Powell was the young man "who makes you forget your troubles and smile"; he represented "the spirit of youth and generosity." Together Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler were of and for the times with an especial gift of convincing a generation that, indeed, there was happiness ahead. —DICK POWELL AND THE LANDMARK MUSICALS OF 1933 (1986) by John L. Marsh Source: www.jstor.org

Head Over Heels: Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, David Brooks on Marriage

Their love story is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman became not only movie stars and stage actors, but also artistic collaborators, political activists, and philanthropists whose legacies are expansive and enduringly modern. This visually immersive oversize book chronicles their romance through the photographs of an impressive list of contributors, including: Richard Avedon, Sid Avery, Ralph Crane, Bruce Davidson, John Engstead, Leo Fuchs, Milton H. Greene, Philippe Halsman, John R. Hamilton, Leonard McCombe, Gordon Parks, Sanford Roth, Roy Schatt, Lawrence Schiller, Sam Shaw, Bradley Smith, Stewart Stern and David Sutton. These striking images—many rare and some never before published—are accompanied by snapshots, letters, handwritten notes, and family treasures. Together they beautifully illuminate the connection between two complex, passionate artists who opened their hearts and minds to each other for over half a century. This book is an homage to the possibility and power of love. Source: amazon.com

Ethan Hawke: We live in a scandal-obsessed society. Paul and Joanne worked very hard to avoid a public scandal. That humanness of their story is really beautiful. Paul is a guy who comes back from the war, goes into summer stock, falls in love with the first woman he meets, marries her 18 months later, and then they’ve got two kids by the time he’s 24. That’s a lot of pressure on a young couple who didn’t really know each other. And then he meets Joanne Woodward, the love of his life. What’s he supposed to do, live a quiet life of desperation so as not to hurt his children? It’s a terrible choice to have to make. Paul and Joanne followed their love. And they worked really hard at it, something that we can learn from. It’s interesting, we think of Paul Newman as this really handsome stud with these gorgeous blue eyes, but he didn’t think about himself that way. He always thought of himself as being kind of awkward and somehow uncomfortable with his physicality. Joanne was the one who was more comfortable, and Paul said it was Joanne who turned him into this great sex symbol. Even into their 70s, people who knew them said that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

"To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career" (August, 17, 2023), article by David Brooks: Many people have shifted the way they conceive of marriage. To use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s language, they no longer view it as the “cornerstone” of their life; they view it as the “capstone”—something to enter into after they’ve successfully established themselves as adults. Partly as a result of these attitudes, there is less marriage in America today. My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters. This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.

Last month, for example, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much. As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.” “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. 

They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’ average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects. We could do a lot to raise the marriage rate by increasing wages—financial precarity inhibits marriage. But as a culture, we could improve our national happiness levels by making sure people focus most on what is primary—marriage and intimate relationships—and not on what is important but secondary—their career. My view is that sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious by waiting longer to have sex and having fewer partners. I see the so-called culture war as nearly over, because today's young people seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. Source: www.nytimes.com

Emotional Tears, Hollywood Hotel

A recent study "The gender‑specific impact of emotional tears", published in the Motivation and Emotion Journal published by Springer Science (Volume 47, Issue 4, August 2023) was funded by Marie-Curie Actions (Grant Number FP7). The authors of the study: Marie Stadel, Judith K. Daniels, Matthijs J. Warrens, and Bertus F. Jeronimus build their research on previous work of Vingerhoets et al. (2016).  New to the literature were tests of gender differences among the observers (the subjects were all western Psychology students). Additionally, perceived connectedness with the depicted individual only mediated willingness to help in female participants. In males, the willingness to help was significantly lower for a crying male than a crying female. Also, men benefited more from crying when observed by a woman than by a man. Consequently, the preregistered hypothesis that men will display more willingness to help tear-displaying women than men was supported. These results could be interpreted in line with the research by Goodey (1997) that men are traditionally more discouraged from emotional display and especially crying due to cultural norms of hegemonic masculinity. The two-way interaction between displayed gender and participant gender proved significant (F(1, 138) =7.12; p = .009; η2G =0.004). The plot of this interaction revealed that male participants report a significantly lower willingness to help males depicted with tears than females (Fig. 1). 

In the same vein, it has been suggested that men learn to use help-seeking displays such as crying less frequently as it results in less received support (Addis and Mahalik 2003) and, depending on the context, comes with negative appraisals regarding the subject’s competence (Fischer et al. 2013). A refining interpretation given by Reigeluth et al. (2016) posits that men tend to be emotionally expressive only in close relationships but not with strangers, since the latter situation might pose a threat to their reputation. Moreover, research shows that heterosexual men usually form such emotionally close ties in cross-sex friendships and romantic relationships (Coombs 1991), thus always in interaction with a female counterpart. One way to explain the current findings might be that this male support-seeking pattern is also mirrored in their willingness to give support, which would mean that men more readily turn to women for emotional support. Source: https://link.springer.com

Hedda Hopper strongly supported the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, and was a speaker of the Women's Division at the 1956 Republican National Convention held in San Francisco to renominate the Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. She was so well known for her conservatism that rumor had it she planned to stand up, unfurl an American flag, and walk out of the 23rd Academy Awards ceremony in March 1951 if Jose Ferrer, who was known to be a socialist, should win Best Actor. Screenwriter Jay Bernstein related that when he told Hopper that many people in Hollywood privately called her a Nazi because of her extreme conservatism, the gossip columnist began to cry and replied: "Jay, all I've ever tried to be is a good American." Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons had a combined readership, they claimed, of 75 million in a nation of 160 million. Actually, the heads of the studios had all the real power, but they were nervous too, so they all—stars and bosses—handed the two women heapings of power on a silver platter.  During the Second World War, the Nazis used photographs of Hopper in her extravagant hats for propaganda, as a symbol of "American decadence". 

Her annual income was $250,000, enabling her to live an luxurious lifestyle and maintain a mansion in Beverly Hills, which she described as "the house that fear built." Hedda decried racial intermixing, was a feverish Commie hunter and led the attack that drove Chaplin to Europe. Hopper’s mean-and-nasty take on Hollywood gossip immediately siphoned readers away from Louella Parsons. Some Hollywood insiders speculated that Hopper had been set up with the column thanks to her old friend, mega-producer Louis B. Mayer, who decided Louella Parsons was getting to be too influential for her own good. She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame thanks to her contributions to the motion picture industry. Many would argue she robbed from them, but one thing is for sure—she left an indelible mark on Old Hollywood. In Hollywood, musicals, comedies, and war films reigned: Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, The Seven Year Itch, Battle Cry. As film attendance continued to decline—figures had dropped by 50 percent since 1946—studios developed new gimmicks like 3-D movies and widescreen film to lure audiences back to the big screen. Top stars included Grace Kelly, June Allyson, John Wayne, William Holden, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando, and Clark Gable—all victims of Confidential magazine. Confidential went through like a wrecking ball, smashing idols, tearing down reputations, and devastating egos with too revealing articles.

By the end of 1955, Confidential was selling more copies at newsstands than any other magazine in American history. That summer 1955, Confidential also exposed June Allyson, voted by fans as the nation’s most popular actress. To the public, Allyson was the embodiment of cuteness, perkiness, and spunk. MGM had carefully crafted her screen image as a loyal, steadfast girlfriend and wife with a pageboy haircut and cute dresses with Peter Pan collars. In 1945 she'd wed actor Dick Powell, thirteen years her senior. Their marriage was celebrated as ideal, but it was fraught with conflict. Hollywood had buzzed with whispers about their marital troubles. Some said Allyson was having an affair with Alan Ladd and linked her to the breakup of Ladd’s marriage. “In the last few weeks,” wrote one columnist in February 1955. “It's been rumored a reported split between Alan Ladd and his wife Sue, and there are also whispers of a reported tiff between Dick Powell and his wife June Allyson.” But by the middle of the month, columnists were reporting that Powell and Allyson had “ironed out their difficulties and are off to Sun Valley for a second honeymoon.”

“Do you think June Allyson is too nice to be naughty? Dick’s been hitched to her for 10 years but that doesn’t keep June from busting out all over,” wrote Confidential in Jay Breen’s article “How Long Can Dick Powell Take It?” Allyson was a “five-foot-one inch petite little blonde who looks nice enough for an angel award. But she is one little book that can’t be judged by its cover. June’s fans will howl their heads off at the charge that the cutie with the page boy bob and the Peter Pan collar could ever be a hubby-snatcher. Nor can they be blamed, after swallowing years of a publicity build-up typing her as the ‘girl next door,’ ‘cute as a button,’ and just too nice to be naughty.”

“The one-time Broadway chorus dolly is 31 years old now, a veteran of nearly 10 years of marriage with Powell, and has an uncontrollable itch to push the sugar bowl aside and reach for the spice shelf,” Confidential reported. “It long ago reached the stage where she was admitting it publicly—although off the record.” Every time the studio assigned her to a new leading man in a movie, “her flirtatious ways gave patient Dick Powell something new to sit up nights biting his nails about,” Confidential wrote. Her favorite “stunt” at Hollywood parties was to “latch onto some handsome actor”—usually years younger than Powell—and “duck into a corner until her glowering husband came to take her home.” Confidential described how she “cavorted” with Dean Martin and described her latest “caper” with Alan Ladd. “Alan Ladd and his wife separated—after 13 years of marriage, but both carefully refrained from naming the reason. Who was it? None other than that sweet little Allyson lass, who’d been assigned to make a movie with Ladd and—as usual—had gotten ideas that weren’t in the script.” 

Dick Powell and Allyson contemplated suing Confidential over the pungent article, but they were dissuaded by Hedda Hopper, who advised them to better ignore it altogether. In private, Hedda (not specially friendly towards June, yet sympathetic to her husband), said to Powell, presumably about Dean Martin (who was not her cup of tea): “When you meet him, you should punch him right in the nose.” As TV producer David Susskind would recall: “A good example of rumor-spreading has been in progress, sticking to easy targets in Hollywood, whose inhabitants are losing their patience."  

At the end of the Hollywood Hotel’s three-year radio program, approximately two million dollars worth of services had been extracted from actors for free. As a result, the entire program cost only between $12,500 and $15,000 a week to produce, a fraction of what it would have cost had the actors been paid. Looking back, many stars found it hard to believe that they had actually agreed to appear on the show. Recalled Myrna Loy, who read scenes from The Thin Man on the program, “We didn’t want to—those scenes don’t come across on radio—but the studio made you do it to keep in Louella’s good graces. Talk about blackmail!” The movie stars got points with Louella—and Campbell’s soup. At the end of the show the actors were given a free case, either tomato or chicken. At least that choice was theirs. Producer Bill Bacher was a notorious taskmaster, and rehearsals at times devolved into shouting matches between Louella, Bill Bacher, and the program’s emcee, actor Dick Powell (who defended Louella). 

Some speculation sprang from the fact Louella, being chummy with Powell, had overlooked his affair with Rosemary Lane. Louella knew Powell had avoided Marion Davies' advances to be in good graces with the powerful W.R. Hearst. Joan Blondell had been banned from the Hearst publications, which derived not only due to Davies' jealousy, but also probably due to Louella's trade mentality that considered it a fair swap. Apparently, Louella had minimized in her 1930s columns Blondell's wantonly conduct with some of her co-stars. This succession of complicated personal dynamics would soon reach its breaking point, eventually exploding in the divorce of Powell and Blondell.

When Bacher criticized any aspect of Louella's appearance in Hollywood Hotel (1937), starring Dick Powell and Rosemary Lane, she threw a tantrum. After Warner Brothers had put the project on hold for the winter of 1936, Louella told her readers in the spring of 1937 that Dick Powell, Hollywood Hotel’s emcee, and Ginger Rogers were slated to play the leads. But Rogers backed out of the film, as did Bette Davis, who had also been approached for the lead, and the film was stalled over the summer. Finally in September 1937, the film went into production with Powell and sisters Lola Lane and Rosemary Lane in the starring roles. In addition to Warner Brothers actors Ted Healy, Alan Mowbray, Glenda Farrell, and Hugh Herbert, the real-life Hollywood Hotel players Frances Langford, Ken Niles, and Raymond Paige would appear in the film, along with bandleader Benny Goodman. In the film, Ronnie Bowers, a young saxophonist played by Powell, comes to Hollywood on a short contract with the fictional All Star Pictures. All Star actress Mona Marshall (Lola Lane) reads in Louella’s column that she has been passed up for the starring role in an upcoming film; angry, Marshall refuses to attend a film premiere scheduled for that evening. All Star then finds a stand-in for Marshall to attend the premiere, an aspiring actress named Virginia Sanders (Rosemary Lane), and Bowers is asked to accompany her. 

Though W.R. Hearst was happy with the film, he was still upset with Warner Brothers, and shortly after Hollywood Hotel’s release, Hearst left the studio and went on to produce films at Twentieth Century Fox. In 1934 Louella celebrated her sixth anniversary on the radio with a special broadcast featuring Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, Marion Davies, Mary Pickford, Claudette Colbert, and Jack Benny. She ended the show with a tribute to William Randolph Hearst, who had made “it possible for me to be on the radio all these years.” —Sources: "The Whole Truth and Nothing But" (2017) by Hedda Hopper and "Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine" (2018) by Samantha Barbas