Sunset Boulevard, Strange Girls: Betty Hutton

Sunset Boulevard had a strong impact on me, and perhaps that is why I still have the script, the only one I have ever kept. When you read it today, you realize the particular art form that making motion pictures is. The strong feelings this film evoked from people in the industry demonstrates how powerful it was. It is so rare when a story hits exactly the right notes and touches on all the right nerve centers. There was a famous moment after a small private screening that Louis B. Mayer attended. Mayer stood up and walked over to Billy and shouted, “How could you do this to us?!” Billy turned to him and said, “Get over yourself!,” and walked out. This film tells the brutal truth about a part of the motion-picture business and how it can ruin one’s life. To be exploited for other people’s profit can be both painful and humiliating. Even though one is paid a great deal, and receives tremendous ego-fulfilling rewards, to be portrayed as larger than life is distorting and destroys the delicate balance between reality and fantasy. At the time, creating stars sold tickets. The studios were constantly hyping the qualities that created an irresistible commodity. This was particularly possible when someone had not only all the tangible and obvious assets (beauty, personality, talent, etc.) but also the most important quality of all, vulnerability. A perfect example was Marilyn Monroe. 

Empowering vulnerable people in the movie industry is as irresponsible and contemptuous as our current political parties empowering ignorant and angry citizens. What distinguishes an attempt to create a work of art from the actual creation of a true work of art that everyone understands? Everything that has been written, painted, or composed was to share an understanding of a unique view of life, to interpret and explore it—to expose it, and perhaps ultimately to embrace it. In other words, a great work of art reveals the truth. Charlie Feldman was a brilliant and enigmatic man, a Hollywood agent whose most famous clients at Famous Artists included Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks and Lauren Bacall. Feldman invited me to a party where I met our future president JFK.

Jack Kennedy was the quintessence of cool. I enjoyed talking to him that night; I loved speculating about politics. Although I persisted, who was I to have an interesting or worthwhile opinion? I was, after all, some little doctor’s daughter from the Midwest, an actress under contract to a studio. I don’t mean that he wasn’t interested in us (women), but it was rather like the overwhelming craving for chocolate. Once he had that rich piece of chocolate fudge, he could then go on with the real craving in his life, which was an incredible ambition deftly pursued and attained by a unique and visceral intelligence. That combination, along with a sense of this country and where we should be in the world, was what I always thought was his core and understanding of his destiny. I challenged him with the kind of conversation that was barely polite, but I couldn’t help myself. I told him that I knew what he was thinking and where he wanted to land. I said quite fearlessly, “I know what you’re after! Jack Kennedy—you want to be president someday!” He was sort of taken aback with this conversation, but I felt he was fair game. I can only assume that several years later when our mutual friend Chuck Spalding mentioned my name to Jack, Jack’s response was, “You always did like strange girls!” 

Perhaps this is the place for me to describe Marilyn Monroe, which is a daunting challenge almost impossible to execute. One evening I was invited to a small cocktail gathering at 20th Century-Fox with some producers and a group of young up-and-coming actors being groomed for screen stardom. I was there for about twenty minutes when I noticed everyone turning and watching a young woman making a somewhat awkward and yet utterly fascinating entrance. It seemed clear to me that she was terrified, even knowing that she was making an incredible, if somewhat bizarre, impact. But her voice and what she said made the greatest impression on me. She talked like a little baby—cooing, beguiling, pleading, flirting, hanging onto the arm of the person she was talking to. I was always intrigued with her as her career developed and blossomed into superstardom. I never forgot her vulnerability and wondered what would become of her. The next time I saw her was years later at a large party at the home of Paula and Lee Strasberg on the Santa Monica beach. Marilyn wanted to become a more serious actress and had been working with Lee Strasberg, who was the leading drama coach of that time. She was now married to Arthur Miller, the renowned American playwright, a union I could never quite understand. When she saw me, she recognized me and, holding onto her husband’s arm, cooed, “Daddy, it’s Nancy Olson! You remember her from Sunset Boulevard.” I always think of Marilyn with great sadness—a tragic figure who haunts us all.

Alan Livingston and I were invited to many parties for the Reagans after their return to Los Angeles. As thrilled as everyone was to be with the Reagans, I was surprised that I was always the one left talking to Ronnie. He loved telling stories, and he loved an audience, but his friends had heard the same stories repeated again and again. They gave him a warm greeting and then left me alone with him, making their getaway as quickly as possible. I must have heard one particular story about building a fence at the Reagans’ ranch about ten times. I think my gift for reacting as if I were hearing the story for the first time was one of the reasons Alan and I were always included at their parties. ―A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour (2022) by Nancy Olson Livingston

Film critic James Agee, and other scribes at TIME, described Betty Hutton variously as "rubber-jointed," "super-dynamic," "bouncing, bawling," "raucous, rampageous." But Hutton could also find the aching heart in plaintive ballads à la Mary Martin; her versions of "It Had to Be You" and "I Wish I Didn't Love You So" made the top five pop charts. Hutton made it tough on everyone: her audience, her colleagues, her family, and herself. By 17, she had hooked up with Vincent Lopez' band, to which she brought immediate verve. One night when impresario Billy Rose was in the audience, she did one of her madcap routines. That stunt earned her roles in the Broadway musicals Two for the Show and Panama Hattie, where her number was filched by Ethel Merman on opening night. Betty's revenge came eight years later, when she played a role Merman had originated onstage: Annie Oakley. Hutton found a valuable patron in the Broadway songwriter Buddy De Sylva. When he was named Paramount's production chief, he took Hutton to Hollywood and made her a star. Rather, she did it herself. He just turned the cameras on her. 

Which was easier said than done. Directors complained that she was too peripatetic to keep in view. According to the TIME cover: "De Sylva had a camera dolly rigged up and told the director to follow her all over the set if necessary." The film frame was a cage she was bound to burst out of. This extreme-rendition style went against the grain of the Hollywood '40s, when actors tended to whisper their threats and endearments. Not Hutton: she stuck her face into the nearest klieg light and shouted her lines and lyrics, cascaded all that talent and adrenaline. It's hard to find a Hutton equivalent among her contemporaries, let alone now. Martha Raye did a lot of broad comedy, but without Betty's fresh-scrubbed glamour. Doris Day was another band-singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. June Allyson, who had been Betty's understudy in Panama Hattie, was remodeled into an odd mix of charm and domesticity. Betty had the whole package. She was a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau mot juste,  hatched a new one: "cinemusicomedienne." 

One of her biggest mistakes is when she turned down the role of Ado Annie in “Oklahoma”. Hutton later regretted turning down the role when she saw Rogers and Hammerstein were personally overseeing the film, which  really could have jumpstarted her career. Though she loved her children, Hutton said she never should have tried to maintain both a career and her family. Hutton was one of the Hollywood stars who seemed endlessly creative in finding ways to hit bottom. Her motto might have been the Johnny Burke–Jimmy Van Heusen novelty number she sang in the movie Duffy's Tavern: "I Have to Do It the Hard Way." In 1949, Buddy DeSylva had a plan to star her in a movie version of the silent vamp Theda Bara but Betty turned it down, in spite of her devotion to the producer. Increasingly beset with personal problems, a stubborn and expensive perfectionist, Betty found her confidence crumbled when Buddy DeSylva had a fatal heart attack. 

“Buddy guided my career at Paramount,” Betty told years later, with tears in her eyes. “When he died, the world stopped for me. That’s when they first started bringing in independent producers. They divorced the theatres from the studios. Now comes the uncreative people that got money, they got stations (whatever), but what do they know about creative people? Nuthin’! Most of the major studios. . . they have been bought up by multinational corporations and have become subsidiaries. For example, Warner Bros. became a subsidiary of Kiddie Leisure and had questionable ownership itself linked with certain unseeming areas. Paramount, a subsidiary of Gulf + Western, that multi-national corporation which controlled much of the economy of the Dominican Republic and owned vast numbers of oil shells off the coast of Vietnam during the war. As terrible as the old movie moguls were, at least they were movie makers. Now, it’s all into the corporate suites and the skyscrapers of the New York bankers. They’re the ones who make the decisions.” —Source: Rocking Horse: A Personal Biography of Betty Hutton (2016) by Gene Arceri