June Allyson's advice to young girls

The reason I dare to cry out, “Stop kidding yourself, girls” to every teenager is that I know what I’m talking about. When I was in my teens, I had to learn the hard way how to get on speaking terms with personal happiness. The teens can be such a miserable experience. Mine often were. I know from the letters that so many of them write me that they are a having bad time. So let me tell you, that doesn’t have to be. If you will just get wise to what is your own personal self, you’ll be able to have the world on a string. You can be happy as Christmas 365 days a year if you will just get your thinking in the right channel. And remember that nobody—but nobody—makes you a droop but you. It’s all a matter of not kidding yourself. It’s all you. As the song says, you are the one. I used to kid myself, just as much as you probably do, when I was in my teens. I used to dream. I seldom “did anything.” 

I used to have elaborate daydreams about the rich, handsome man I’d marry, the big house I’d live in, the comforts I’d have. Fantastically enough, I achieved all that. For instance, the other evening, my husband Richard came home and gave me a present. It was a diamond in a most unusual setting. A shadowbox of gold had been put around the stone to make it glitter even more brilliantly than it would have naturally. Now it wasn’t our anniversary or anything. Richard and I try to make every day a cause for celebration. So whenever I open a box and saw the lovely presents, my thoughts wandered back to my teens. At that time I would have wanted the ring for the ring itself. Now I was happy with it because of the love it expressed. My husband had completely surprised me with it because since I’ve been married my plain gold band was all I wanted. If Richard had brought me a rose, I would have been just as pleased. And this, I think, proves a point: when we don’t keep wanting “things” but learn to appreciate the values we have, the good things are added unto us when we least expect them. You think that you have to be beautiful to be happy? That’s crazy! Just remember that a middle-aged plain woman with a mole on the side of her face, took Edward VIII off the throne of England—and they lived happier ever after! 

The other day I heard Doris Day saying: "Dick Powell is one of the most intelligent, nicest and richest men in Hollywood. Did a tall, beautiful, madly-dressed doll get him? No, Dick belongs to a wonderful gal with a sense of humor and a big heart, June Allyson." Doris is such a sweetheart, we are very good friends. The trouble is when we are growing up, we fool ourselves. We say to ourselves, “I’d be more popular if I were prettier.” George Bernard Shaw, who conceded his first official interview in America to Louella Parsons, said it originally. “Youth,” he said, “is so wonderful that it shouldn’t be wasted on the young.” I can’t top that, but as one woman to another I want to say—why waste your youth? Get wise to the great special gift that life has given you. Part of the reason I am sounding off at this particular time is those terrifying headlines in the papers, telling about high school kids taking drugs. Shocking as these headlines are, overwhelming as the figures on addiction prove to be, you and I have the blessed assurance that in terms of the teen-age population of this country, they are still small. But the very fact that the drug habits have spread to such extent—is a ghastly symptom of the unhappiness too many teenagers are experiencing. Such a habit is the ultimate end in self-deception. It is the absolute summing up of wrong values. It not only drags its victims down into a living hell, but often their families and friends too. The pathos of these addicted girls and boys is that they aren’t “bad.” The touching thing is that they, and their families, have to pay such a killing price just because they have their values all wrong. These unwise kids want a momentary thrill, a purely physical thrill, which, when it wears off, will leave them in such agony as to be almost unendurable. 

But a girl who says, “If I used my brains more, I would be more popular,” you can count on the thumbs of one hand. When I was fifteen and “in love” for the very first—and I was sure the absolute last—time, I thought my life was unendurable because my mother wouldn’t permit me to see that boy morning, noon and night. My mother said, “I absolutely will not you go steady with any boy until you are at least eighteen.” I thought then that she was cruel. I know now that she was right. Memorize this truth: The thing that you want to do secretly, or any act or deed you want to do surreptitiously, isn’t probably the best thing for you. In contrast, think of those wonderful words in the marriage ceremony “in the face of God and this company.” The right things you will always want to do that way. That’s how you know they are right. When those nearest and dearest to you are looking on, you begin on a sure foundation. When we are growing up, we fool ourselves. We tell ourselves, as an alibi, “I’d be more popular if I were prettier” or “better dressed.” Or “had a nicer home.” It took me ages before I realized that to go out every night was idiotic.

Now I know that my happiest evenings are spent at home with my family. It’s just a case of growing up. Once I sang a love song in a night club with the tears running down my face. I thought I had lost a love that was important to me. It was a cold, winter night in New York. I felt so sorry for myself. I told myself I had given “everything” to that love. I would, I told myself, “never love again.” The thing you have to learn about love is that it is inexhaustible. The more love you give, the more love you still have. When you aren’t yet sixteen, you haven’t the experience to distinguish between quantity and quality. You haven’t, I mean, unless you are a lot smarter than I was at that age. Your aim is to be a popular girl. I don’t blame you for that. But what do you mean by popular? Are you getting quality or quantity? Stop kidding yourself. Find your real values. When I see beautiful girls like Hedy Lamarr or Ursula Thiess, I’m amazed I’m on the screen. When I see an actress like Shirley Booth, I ask, “And I get by with acting?” Think of it this way: Do you know everything about any one subject in the world? Or do you know one thing about every subject? Of course you don’t. Nobody does. But every single thing you learn puts you that much ahead. And every kindness you do puts you that much ahead, too. —June Allyson for Photoplay Magazine, August 1953

"The Enchanters" (featuring Marilyn Monroe): James Ellroy's new noir novel

James Ellroy's new novel The Enchanters goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth. Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmarish L.A.— and as he confronts his own raging madness. The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. Source: amazon.com

Fred Otash was a disgraced former cop turned private eye and freelance menace who worked with the notorious Hollywood tabloid Confidential; he claimed to have hot-wired every bathhouse in L.A., to have spied on Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, and to have eavesdropped on Marilyn Monroe as she died. Ellroy knew the man (Otash) a little and loathed him a lot. “You don’t go out and wreck lives en masse the way he did with Confidential and retain your humanity,” Ellroy once told an interviewer. In The Enchanters we expect and find redheads and racists, shock and schlock, pearl-gray suits and straw fedoras, weak men and strong women—noir stock types. 

Marilyn is the bait girl nonpareil; no one can touch her. About seven hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies have been published in English alone. There have been biographies by her friends, her foes, her siblings, her household staff, two of her husbands, and two of her stalkers. Norman Mailer didn’t hesitate to publish a glossy art-book appreciation of the actress. In “The Enchanters” she is depicted as a pill-popping, ditzy dilettante, deluded and drunk and self-centered and into some very shady stuff. Here, however, he’s messing with an icon (not to mention two popular political figures, the Kennedy brothers, who met tragic deaths), so the transgressions feel more severe. We get disquisitions on how uninteresting the characters find one another. Freddy on Marilyn: “She worked people. She used people. She possessed three modes of address. She was bossy, she was demure, she was effusive. I didn’t like her. I didn’t get her. Her acting chops and alleged va-va-voom hit me flat.” Monroe, who could have been the book’s making, is instead its undoing—which is, consoling thought, an odd sort of triumph on her part. Source: www.newyorker.com

Glamour, Glitz, & Gossip at Historic Magnolia House: Joan Blondell, Dick Powell

“Joan Blondell was the screen’s sexiest female, and I’ve bedded Ava Gardner” —George C. Scott

At the end of her national tour in the play Crazy October (1959) Joan Blondell had bonded with its author, James Leo Herlihy, American novelist and playwright, who would commit suicide at the age of 66, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles. Herlihy also directed actress Tallulah Bankhead in the touring production of his play Crazy October. Three of his one-act plays, titled collectively Stop, You're Killing Me were presented by the Theater Company of Boston in 1969. According to author Sean Egan in his biography of Broadway playwright James Kirkwood, Ponies & Rainbows, Herlihy co-wrote the play UTBU (Unhealthy To Be Unpleasant) with Kirkwood but demanded his name be taken off the credits. Herlihy reportedly said to Kirkwood he'd bonded with the legendary Joan Blondell. “Of all the movie stars I’ve interviewed or known, she was that special someone,” he said, “a great lady who’d seen and done it all. I adored her, especially when she came with me to the Magnolia House during her stopovers in New York. In Hollywood, I became her guest. She even cooked for me her favorite vegetables, rutabagas mashed with potatoes.” 

“The reason I agreed to take the second lead in Crazy October was that it gave me the chance to work with the great Tallulah Bankhead,” she said. “But after I joined the cast, I was terribly disappointed in her. She appeared on stage drunk most of the time—one of the most unprofessional and foul-mouthed actresses I’ve ever starred with. After our first tryout, she realized I had the better part, and was getting the most laughs, and she resented me for it. I’d been cast in the play as an over-the-hill actress, remembering the loves of yesterday that seemed to have been blown away by the summer wind. And as the tour moved on, I became more sympathetic to Tallulah. She was a lonely and depressed woman, staging a kind of last hurrah.” “Crazy October was anything but a masterpiece, but we soldiered on,” Joan added, “playing to packed houses. We found our most receptive audience in San Francisco. Tallulah was virtually a gay icon there.” 

“We toured everywhere,” Blondell said about her nomadic childhood. “My father even took us to China. My big number was called ‘In a Rosebud Garden of Girls.’” With her itinerant family, Blondell had spent six years in Australia before moving to Texas, where in 1926, she became “Miss Dallas.” “A year later, I almost became Miss Universe,” Joan bragged, “and I was fourth runner-up representing the Lone Star State in the Miss America competition.” James Cagney was one of Joan's fervent admirers. “She looked like a tootsie, so I called her Grandma. It was a joke, of course. She might have gotten better roles than the stuff that Warners dished out. I don’t mean she could have played Lady Macbeth but she might have made a fine dramatic actress. Jack Warner cast her as a floozie, a gun moll, a gold digger, or as the sister of the leading lady.” Blondell was cast with Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse (1931), playing the star’s insolent, gum-chewing sidekick. In Night Nurse, Clark Gable, in one of his first films, was cast as an amoral chauffeur. “I swooned when he came on the set,” Blondell said. 

“Gable had such animal magnetism. We shacked up one night. And although he went on to other seductions, he was not gone from my life completely,” she said. After Gable returned from World War II, Joan played the third lead in his comeback picture, Adventure (1945), co-starring Greer Garson. As an airplane pilot, Gable had flown dangerous missions over Germany. He told Joan, “Hitler wanted me to be captured alive. As I was told, he planned to exhibit me nude like a caged animal, mocking my image as King of Hollywood.” “On the screen, Greer Garson was his lover, but she and Clark had no chemistry at all,” Joan said. “Offscreen, he made love to me, not Greer.” 

“Clark adored women but not in a lechy way. He worshipped beauty. His eyes would sparkle when he saw a beautiful woman, and he’d set out to get her. Usually, he succeeded. When he grinned, you melted. He had the hormones of any gal working overtime unless she was dead, and then I’m sure he could have revived her with a kiss.” In the late 1940s, during her marriage to the movie producer Mike Todd, Gable phoned Joan and set up a private dinner with her. He’d heard how awful Todd was, and he urged her to divorce him. “Even though she’d died in an airplane crash in 1942, Clark was still mourning the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard.” “I found that he was very lonely, so I kept inviting him over when Mike was away. I still remember those juicy steaks he brought from his ranch and even fresh milk for me.” “On occasion, he said I was the only woman in Hollywood who reminded him of Carole. One night, he even proposed marriage, but I turned him down—imagine, me turning down the great Clark Gable. 

But I did. I told him that no other woman, not even me, could replace Carole Lombard in his life.” In Adventure (1945), a romantic drama made a few months after World War II, Blondell played a slightly giddy blonde who goes for sailors, particularly Gable. Motion Picture Herald called her “a sheer delight.” Bogie escorted Joan to the premiere of Night Nurse and later spoke about her to his best friend, actor Kenneth McKenna. “She’s my kind of broad. I like her tremendously, but I’m not in love with her. Besides, Dick Powell is always knocking on her door.” Joan's father was one of the original “Katzenjammer Kids,” based on the popular comic strip. Both of her parents, Ed and Katie, were eccentric vaudevillians, hitting the stage in elaborate costumes with a carefully rehearsed schtick. The four of them, including sister Gloria, toured Honolulu, Australia, and New Zealand. Joan remembered the white sand beaches of Hawaii, running through a rice field wearing only a bra and a “shredded wheat skirt.” In Australia, she briefly fell in love with the son of a hotel manager, but the family kept on moving. 

In Three on a Match (1932), Joan was pleased that Bogie was also in the cast, which otherwise starred Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak. In the late 1920s, Davis had been her classmate when they attended the Robert Milton/John Murray Anderson Theatre School in Manhattan. On the set of Three on a Match, Davis approached her. “I’m miffed. Your part is better than mine.” The balance eventually swung in Davis’ favor. In 1934, Davis, not Joan, was selected as Cagney’s co-star in Jimmy the Gent. Adding to the perception that Davis was supplanting Joan in box office appeal, Bogie, too, would make several pictures with Davis, notably The Petrified Forest in 1936. On the set of Big City Blues (1932), Bogie told his co-star Joan: “I’m pissed off that Mervyn LeRoy has given me such a small part. I’m a leading man, not a bit player.” Bogart later told LeRoy, “The only good thing about working on this turkey is that I can resume my affair with Blondell.” 

In Big City Blues, Joan was cast as Vida, a street-wise Manhattan gold digger who’s tangled with too many Stage Door Johnnies through her day. Her fourth appearance with Bogie—or fifth if you count that 1930 short Broadway's Like That, also featuring Bogie's second wife Mary Phillips—was the romantic comedy Stand-In (1937). Joan played a character called Lester Plum, a cheerful former child star cast in the film as a stand-in for the actual star. Born in Pasadena in 1892, George Barnes had been nominated for an Oscar at the dawn of the Academy Awards for his work on The Devil Dancer (1927), costarring Clive Brook and Gilda Gray, before the movies had learned to talk. Over the course of his professional life, Barnes would be nominated for his cinematic skill a total of eight times, but he won only once for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), co-starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Joan recalled: “At last, George started to notice me. One day, he told me he was working diligently to capture my beauty on camera. What actress wouldn’t love a man who told her that? We began to date. Was I impressed! Hollywood was a small town in those days, and an important guy like George knew all the Hollywood elite.”

“During our second date, he took me to a dinner party at the home of Ronald Colman, one of my screen idols. A suave, English gentleman with that seductive voice and those impeccable manners. One by one, Miss Nobody from Dallas was hanging out with all these big stars. No one was a bigger name than ‘The Great Profile’ himself, John Barrymore. He invited me for a walk in the garden. Over the next few weeks, as George and I dated, I also met George Arliss, Wallace Beery, Ruth Chatterton (a big snob who insisted she be billed as Miss Ruth Chatterton), Adolphe Menjou, and even Slim Summerville—that ugly former Keystone Cop was the least likely movie star ever to hit Hollywood! My favorite times with George were private dinners alone with him.” After his divorce came through, Barnes and Joan were married in January of 1933 in Phoenix, Arizona. In a bizarre fit of indiscretion, Joan’s father, Ed Blondell, told Barnes that Joan, at the age of eight, had lost her virginity backstage in an accident involving the jagged edge of a costume trunk. It kind of sounded suspicious in my book. A month after their wedding, Barnes stridently insisted that he did not want to have any kids with Joan. 

Joan sighed: "I refused to have another abortion, and our son, Norman, was born. But George was indifferent to him. Later I had a daughter with Dick Powell. We named her Ellen, and she took after her father. Dick adopted Norman and we changed his name to Norman Powell. George never got over the resentment of my giving birth to our son,” she said. “He often fought with me, insisting that I loved Norman more than I loved him. It was dreadful.” Suffering mental troubles, the great cinematographer fought with directors whenever he insisted on filming Blondell “only from the neck up.” Joan was strolling toward the Warner commissary when she encountered her future second husband Dick Powell. Both of them were new to the Warner Brothers’ lot. They struck up a conversation, and Powell invited her to lunch. She found him “amiable, boyish, and bursting with energy.” Born in Arkansas in 1904, he had dark, wavy hair and cute dimples. He’d been an adroit crooner and a band-leader before landing a contract at Warner Brothers. 

As one critic had claimed, “Dick Powell’s most lasting image is still that of the wide-eyed hoofer, face alight with joy, tunneling through the splayed legs of Busby Berkeley’s chorines in 42nd Street (1933).” Another critic referred to him as “Warners’ crooner-in-residence glowing with a kind of gosh-and-golly ebullience.” Joan didn’t know at the time of their inaugural meeting that she’d costar with him in so many movies. After an unsuccessful first marriage to Mildred Maund, a childhood friend, Dick Powell would eventually become a fixture in the bedroom of legendary comedienne Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. Powell would go from there to seduce Ginger Rogers, his co-star in 20 Million Sweethearts (1934). Mary Martin and Evelyn Keyes will each lay in his future conquests. Gold Diggers of 1933 became the most famous Depression-era musical. In it, Busby Berkeley directed a swirling kaleidoscope of all-girl dancers who was reviewed as “intoxicating.” Joan rendered her most stirring song, “Remember the Forgotten Man,” with 150 male extras cast as hobos unfairly thrown out of work. It was later defined as "the most socially compelling of any song to emerge from the Great Depression." 

Dick Powell appeared with Joan again in Footlight Parade (1933), featuring James Cagney as the hoofer star. Some critics have hailed this movie as “the best of the Depression-era musicals.” The romantic leads were played by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Along with Adolphe Menjou, Joan was given top billing in Convention City (1933). Dick Powell, along with Mary Astor, was a supporting player. Joan didn’t want to make the picture, but Jack Warner threatened her with suspension. Back on the lot, she was grateful to be reunited with Powell in yet another movie. “He was looking better and better every time I saw him,” she said. “I kept wondering if he and I might hit some high notes.” Convention City ran into trouble with the newly formed Production Code, its board members interpreting the characters as “amoral.” Joan fought with Warners until the studio raised her salary to $1,600 per week. In Colleen (1936) Joan was cast as Minnie, “an adenoidal, chocolate-dipping swindler,” as the script defined her character. By September of 1935, Joan and Powell were dating steadily, and her divorce from Barnes came through on 4th September, 1936. 

The press took notice of the odd pairing, giving echo to some insiders who maliciously called them "Floozie and Dopey". But Powell was no dope, as his career as a producer, director and as a tough guy star would prove later. “We rushed through the shoot because we were to get married in a yatch wedding on September 11, 1936.” During filming of Stage Struck, she fell and “nearly broke my ankle,” Joan claimed. “And my darling crooner came down with a case of laryngitis.” Hundreds of their fans showed up for their wedding. But after five years of marriage, and finding that they had vastly opposite personalities and tastes, Powell and Blondell began to drift apart. “We were married for seven years, but he was more like a friend to me in the end. Eventually, Dick and I slept in separate bedrooms. He spent more and more time in his study, working in his real estate business and listening to Bing Crosby, my former co-star when we’d made East Side of Heaven [in 1939 for Universal]. I suspected that Dick was having a fling on the side, that's the reason I fell into the arms of Mike Todd.” 

Joan’s final co-starring roles with Powell were at Paramount in the aptly named I Want a Divorce (1940) and Model Wife (1941). “I think Paramount was trying to tell me something,” Joan laughed. “They didn’t invite me back for the next twenty-five years.” As the war-torn 1940s rolled in, many of Joan’s rivals from the 30s had evolved into big stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and the Warner Brothers' queen Bette Davis. “During my marriage to Dick, our best friends were Ronald Reagan and his wife, Jane Wyman. We dined with them either at their home or at our house once a week,” Joan said. “Dick and Ronnie always talked politics, while Jane and I caught up on Hollywood gossip.” As her marriage continued to unravel, Joan saw less and less of her husband. She learned that he was slipping around and seeing June Allyson, being billed at the time as the “America’s Sweetheart,” usually opposite the gay/bisexual actor Van Johnson. Soon, Powell and Allyson’s affair became more visible, in part to their many appearances as a loving couple at the Mocambo, Ciro’s, Chasen’s, and Romanoff’s. Joan’s divorce from Powell followed her appearance in court on July 15, 1944. “Actually, as the years went by, I began to feel sorry for Dick for having married that Whimsy-Pooh woman, Allyson.  

And I felt sorry for her, too, because Dick was too controlling and scheduled. I kept up on the gossip. Allyson even had an affair with John F. Kennedy.” During their marriage to Powell, Allyson seemed to have flirted with some of her leading men, notably Peter Lawford when they made Good News in 1947 and James Stewart when they shot The Glenn Miller Story in 1954. Allyson fell in love with Alan Ladd (one of her life's most important affairs) and supposedly carried on with Dean Martin during a wild weekend in Las Vegas, according to Confidential magazine. Probably Blondell was prone to imagine that Powell and Allyson would maintain affairs on both sides in their marriage, since Joan's marriage to Powell had been affected by mutual infidelity, but Allyson insinuated that Powell could never have accepted infidelity on her behalf. And Allyson said she never found evidence of Powell's infidelity, either. Actually, Powell was an old-fashioned man and Allyson had to learn to rein in her impulsive nature. In fact, their marriage would be very different from that of Powell and Blondell, where there had been reports of mutual infidelity, Blondell supposedly having affairs with co-stars Bogart, Clark Gable, and John Wayne. 

Powell had been romantically linked to Rosemary Lane (his co-star in Hollywood Hotel and Varsity Show). There was always bad blood between Blondell and Allyson. But, as so often happens in Hollywood, rivals get cast in the same picture. Such was the case when Joan & June starred together in The Opposite Sex (1956). In spite of their failed marriage, and despite the forceful objections of June Allyson, Joan eventually attended Powell’s funeral on January 2, 1963. Mourners reported that Joan was teary-eyed at the services, and that she was greeted by Richard and Patricia Nixon, James Stewart, Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Some eight hundred mourners, including part of the elite of Hollywood. 

“I’ll never marry an actress,” Mike Todd, the theater and film producer, had once claimed. “To live with an actress, you gotta be able to worry about her hair. When her bosom starts to drop, she gets panicky. You gotta pay all those bills from the headshrinker.” Obviously, Joan Blondell and Elizabeth Taylor changed his mind about marrying actresses. In film history, Todd was known mainly for the 1956 release of Around the World in 80 Days. Its all-star cast included, among others, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, David Niven, Cantinflas, and a cameo by Evelyn Keyes. Joan Blondell also talked at Magnolia House about the unhappy trajectory of her marriage to Mike Todd. In 1943, Joan—married at the time to Dick Powell—began to know Todd more intimately. She thought that Damon Runyon’s description of him was accurate: “A short, chunky and dark kind of guy, a human dynamo with a big cigar hanging out of the corner of his fast-moving lips, spitting out orders to his flunkies.” —Glamour, Glitz, & Gossip at Historic Magnolia House: From the Silver Screens of Hollywood to the Lights of Broadway (2019) by Danforth Prince

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

"Life Among The Cannibals: The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe" by David Marshall

‘There are no second acts in American lives,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote – and he should know. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Fitzgerald’s flame burned brightly, but was all too soon extinguished. David Marshall’s first book, The DD Group (2003), confronted one of the mysteries of the twentieth century – why did Marilyn Monroe die alone in her bed on a Saturday night in 1962, at the age of 36? While not claiming to know the answer, Marshall traced all lines of enquiry, adding his own commentary to the diverse findings of his discussion group. Now, in Life Among The Cannibals: The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe  (August, 2023) Marshall asks another question – if Monroe had survived her overdose, how would her life have progressed? Would she have continued along the road to self-destruction, or found a path to fulfilment? The book’s title evokes the cut-throat atmosphere of Hollywood, where Monroe made her name. Shortly before her death, Marilyn reflected, ‘Everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like a chunk out of you… but you want to stay intact and on your feet.’ Marshall’s narrative treads a tightrope between past and present, fact and fiction. He places himself, unobtrusively, within the narrative through a chance meeting with Marilyn at Joe DiMaggio’s funeral in 1999. Marshall then acts as her biographer, covering the period from 1962 to 2003. He begins by waking Marilyn from a coma in August 1962. She dismisses her entourage of shrinks and drama coaches, and stops taking so many sleeping pills. 

After completing her next movie, she surprises her bosses by leaving Hollywood for good. Marshall depicts a woman no longer ruled by stardom, finding renewed success on her own terms. Marilyn re-establishes herself as a leading character actress, and takes control behind the scenes. Turning to private affairs, Marshall explores a possible reunion between Marilyn and her former husband, Joe DiMaggio. Sceptics have argued that DiMaggio was too jealous, and staid, to satisfy Marilyn for long. Nonetheless, his enduring love for her has been confirmed by numerous biographers and friends. Some readers may wonder if Marilyn really had the willpower to beat her demons and turn her life around. However, the tragic aspect of Monroe’s life has already been recognised, whereas her capacity for survival has not. Marshall pursues this prospect in depth and writes about Monroe with sensitivity. Life Among The Cannibals is an important addition to the wealth of speculative literature on Monroe, because instead of mourning what was lost, Marshall celebrates what might have been. In this highly entertaining book, Marshall gives Marilyn Monroe the second and third acts she surely deserved.

David Marshall: "There’s her stunning beauty of course – I think that’s always been the starting off point for everyone. It’s very true that it is nearly impossible to notice anything else once she’s on the screen. But the inspiration for me and the continuous hold, that came from forming an idea of the type of person she was, her actual character beyond the physical attraction. Hers is a story of an incredibly strong will overcoming exceptional obstacles–and not only persevering but reaching the very pinnacle of her profession. Add in basic human kindness, compassion and empathy, and quest for self-improvement, and you’ll just start to understand why this woman should be held up for emulation. Of course she was also very human and far from a saint. Her continuing appeal, even for those who know nothing of the real person, I think, comes from the simple fact that she is incredibly fun. You can’t help but smile when seeing her image. Even though you are looking at a movie that is seventy years old, the appeal is timeless and contemporary. Fun, beautiful, and timeless. But that’s just scratching at the very surface of her appeal." Source: themarilynreport.com

Mary Martin, Dick Powell: Happy Go Lucky

‘My heart belongs to Daddy’ by Cole Porter set Mary Martin's good reputation in many hearts in 1938. Her sudden success led to her performing late-night serenades at the popular Rainbow Room, the capstone of the Rockefeller Center complex. During her stint at the Rainbow Room, Mary Martin dated Winthrop Rockefeller in early 1939. After dancing at El Morocco club they were voted ‘The Handsomest Couple’. Mary Martin was a woman who seemed to live life to the full. Did these relationships with Rockefeller and others fail because Martin could presage the libidinal demands of a full-on heterosexual relationship? Or did she just put her career first? Were Jean Arthur and Mary Martin lovers? It was a hot topic of Hollywood speculation for years. All the persistent rumors probably had bearing on Martin eschewing Hollywood for Broadway. She was emotionally more suited to success in the theater and that is where she found it. As Martin put it herself: “I was not thinking of the past or the future. I was very much living in the present.” And that is exactly how she lived.

In 1942, Dick Powell signed a contract with Paramount Pictures on condition that he vary his roles and would occasionally do some dramatic films which Warner Brothers had refused to cast him in. But his first film for them was Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and his bit part in that wartime musical was with Mary Martin doing probably the best number in the film, Hit the Road to Dreamland. They certainly seemed well suited for each other onscreen. With that in mind, Powell got to do his first color film Happy Go Lucky (1943) with Mary Martin the following year. But for some reason Mary Martin never quite clicked with film audiences, which was quite strange because she certainly had a sparkling personality. Powell did this film reteaming with Martin with the hope that more interesting parts would eventually come his way and Happy Go Lucky is certainly a very amusing Paramount comedy. Martin plays a cigarette girl pretending to be a débutante and hoping to land a rich husband. Her sights are set on Rudy Vallee, reprising his role from Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. Along for the ride is Betty Hutton who is a fellow cigarette girl traveling with Martin and an old flame of Eddie Bracken's character.

Mary Martin flashes a great pair of legs in the film's show stopper, "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay". Miss Martin has set out for Trinidad for the sole purpose of catching herself a millionaire, Rudy Vallee, who is a forerunner of Mister Howell of Gilligan's Island fame. Marjory (Mary Martin) decides to sail off for New York with her new beau, Alfred, who generously offers $2,000 to Pete (Dick Powell) for introducing him to his bride-to-be. A despondent Pete later is delighted to find Marjory waiting for him at his home. Powell and Martin have a very realistic chemistry. After Marjory accepts Alfred's proposal, we can see Pete feeling a pang of jealousy. Broadway producer James Kirkwood learned about Mary Martin having been smitten with Dick Powell (her co-star in Happy Go Lucky and True to Life). Martin recalled how devastated Powell was when Joan Blondell left him for Mike Todd. 

"Dick was going to marry Mary Brian, but Joan played her cards well. Mike Todd gifted her a mink coat and she went to New York. Dick and I were good friends for years. One night Dick invited me to his apartment. He was great in bed and all, but I couldn't leave Richard [Halliday]." Mary Brian (1906-2002) was married twice. Her first husband was a magazine illustrator named Jon Whitcomb who she married in 1941... for six weeks. Her second marriage was much happier and lasted much longer. In 1947, she married the film editor George Tomasini and they remained married until his death in 1964. Neither marriage produced children. Mary had some pretty famous boyfriends in Hollywood: Jack Pickford, Gene Raymond; she was engaged to Dick Powell in the early 1930s and engaged also to Cary Grant in 1936. When Blondell asked Powell if he loved Brian, he didn't know what to say. When Powell, who was thinking of marrying Brian,  asked Blondell for advice, the blonde bombshell made him doubt of his true feelings. Powell broke up with Brian in 1933 and dated Margaret Lindsay, while he initiated a romance with Blondell in late 1934.

According to Hedda Hopper: Mary Martin was "the most gullible of all them, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil." In the New York Post, Clive Barnes claimed that “Mary Martin's special charm was an innocence that was never sugary, a voice that never cloyed and a personality that happily combined the indomitable with the vulnerable on a spectrum that made it possible for us all to identify with.” Hedda Hopper noted in The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1962): "Michael Todd taught Elizabeth Taylor an awful lot about sex. Todd was one of the most ruthless men in show business. Todd had gone through the jungle of Broadway and taught Taylor everything he knew about sex, good and bad. He proposed to Liz Taylor in the office MGM gave him at the studio when he was shooting Around the World in Eighty Days. He said: “Elizabeth, I love you, and I’m going to marry you, and from now on you’ll know nobody but me.” Only he didn’t say “know.” They were married and they started one of the craziest, fightingest, most passionate love matches recorded in modern times, repeating Todd's pattern with previous wife Joan Blondell. Unlike Blondell, Todd bought Taylor the world, or as much of it as he could lay hands on: a dozen of jewels every Saturday; a plane; a villa in France; dresses by the hundred. Whatever she wanted, she got. Todd knew he was spoiling her rotten, but he loved to see her face light up when she saw his presents."

"For the Academy Award show where he expected her to collect an Oscar for Raintree County, he bought her a diamond tiara. “Hasn’t every girl got one?” he asked blandly. He gave her a Rolls-Royce and a $92,000 diamond ring. In return she gave him a daughter, Liza. Todd used to say: “If you want to be a millionaire, live like one.” For the London opening of his picture, Elizabeth was draped in a ruby-and-diamond necklace, with bracelet and earrings to match. It was straight out of Arabian Nights. Todd was frantically busy with two spectacular shows to put on, on the screen for his premiere and at Battersea Festival Gardens, where he threw a shindig for two thousand people to celebrate, scoring a triumph that gave him every front page in London, except The Times. What some of the London newspapers said the next morning about that bit of ham-handed showmanship would have driven a more sensitive man into a knothole. Then came the day when the plane, Lucky Liz, dived into the desert in New Mexico, and Mike Todd was dead. Everybody clustered around Taylor as though she were a queen. I am sure she believed she was. Mike Todd had been dead not quite six months and Taylor started a romance with Eddie Fisher (married to Debbie Reynolds). This is what Elizabeth Taylor said on the phone that set me alight: “Well,” she said calmly, “Mike’s dead and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?” —Sources: "Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin" (2016) by David Kaufman and "The Whole Truth and Nothing But" (1962) by Hedda Hopper

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