How to Be a Movie Star (8 page)

The various players sat according to type. "I'm not sure if it was structured that way or if they just naturally gravitated together," Donahue said, "but the younger players sat together, and the western players. The comics were always together, horsing around, always very loud and cutting up. It seemed every day Red Skelton would stand up on top of the table and deliver some routine. Everyone would be laughing."

George Cukor observed, "I think people don't understand how a place like MGM needed to be fed, sustained, and organized every day." It wasn't just actors, directors, writers, cameramen, and editors who populated the lot, but also hairdressers, manicurists, tailors, musicians, architects, film loaders, electricians, prop men, script girls, sound technicians, bricklayers, painters, cooks, and dozens more. The wardrobe department went on for blocks. Studio press releases boasted that with just one day's notice MGM could costume one thousand extras. That's not even counting the regular background players, "the $75-a-week people with standard contracts," Donahue said, "who came to work every day and were told where to report, what film they'd be in that day. Crowds of people were always moving back and forth across the lot."

And by 1943 MGM lived up to its claim of being the most star-studded of all the studios. More than sixty top names—from Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn to top character players like Edmund Gwenn and animal stars like Lassie—headed the Metro roster during the war years.

Now her mother was telling Elizabeth that she'd be a movie star herself. It all depended on Clarence Brown—and producer Mervyn LeRoy and, of course, Mr. Mayer—signing her for
National Velvet
. Brown, to his great relief, finally managed to shake off his pursuers that day, but the passion they'd displayed stayed with him. "What impressed me most," he said, "was [Elizabeth's] conviction that the picture ... would provide a vehicle for her eventual stardom." Of course, it was her industrious mother whispering in her ear every morning who convinced the eleven-year-old that
National Velvet—
and stardom—were her fate.

In these years it was hard to discern where Sara ended and Elizabeth began. One movie-magazine writer immediately recognized the "spiritual affinity" between mother and daughter upon meeting them. They thought the same things; they used the same words to express them. And in the spring of 1943, even as war raged throughout Europe and the Pacific, one goal and one goal only existed for both of them—and it wasn't world peace.

Hustling Elizabeth back across the lot to the studio schoolhouse, Sara remained fired up about
National Velvet.
She knew the importance of breakout parts and how rarely they came along. She'd had a taste of fame herself once, playing the ingénue in Channing Pollock's play
The Fool,
which made her a sensation for a brief moment. After the London premiere in September 1924, Pollock remembered Sara being mobbed by fans, "clamoring for bits of her frock and locks of her hair."

A heady experience for the daughter of a laundryman from Arkansas City, Kansas. Sara was born "Sarah" Warmbrodt in August 1895. Her mother's family were Ohioans; her father's father had emigrated from Switzerland. Growing up in a neighborhood of railroad clerks, blacksmiths, and masons had made Sara quite the aesthete: She recited poetry at church socials with such eloquence that the locals declared her destined for the stage. In that booming industrial town with its busy intersection of rail lines that led to bigger cities like Wichita, Tulsa, and St. Louis, Sara's mother, who played the piano and the violin, encouraged her daughter to dream. After seeing Aline McDermott, the leading lady of a touring stock company, perform at Ark City's opera house, Sara went backstage and confessed her hopes of being an actress. McDermott did her best to dissuade her. "She was afraid ... that I didn't know the world," Sara said. "So I thought the best way to know the world was to go out and be in it."

From then on, like Dorothy, she kept her eyes peeled for a way out of Kansas. Her own personal tornado came in the form of an itinerant moving-picture cameraman, who came through town looking for a leading lady. The local newspaper hosted a contest. Sara got a call in the middle of the night telling her that she'd won. "I was so excited," she said. "I dragged my poor dad out of bed and made him go downtown with me." In the little amateur thriller, the teenaged Sara played the damsel in distress "without any makeup." Her experience served her well. When a stock company from the Orpheum circuit came to town a short while later, Sara won a part—and not even a sprained ankle could keep her from it. Her brother teased her that she'd sprained it "romping down to the theater so fast to get a job." No matter the pain, she hobbled through her part for the week of the show's run. "I just felt as if my whole future depended on my sticking it out."

Her passion was so single-minded that she never had time for a serious beau. Channing Pollock thought Sara rather "plain," a "wallflower" even, delicate and petite. To Sara's way of thinking, the theater offered far more than any beau could: illusion, applause, and the opportunity to get out of Kansas on her own terms.

At an age when most girls were getting married and starting families, Sara, twenty-one, packed her bags for New York. Breaking away from the dusty back roads of Ark City and the steam of her father's laundry was an extraordinary sort of rebellion for 1917, when women didn't even have the right to vote. Few women of Sara's means ever thought of such independence. Certainly no one in her family had blazed a trail for her; as Sara boarded a train for New York, her brother remained safely behind in Kansas to run a small photography shop.

The first thing Sara did in the big city was change her name. Warmbrodt would never do; Sothern was the elegant substitute she had picked out. After Sara played a few bit parts on Broadway, the actors' strike in 1919 sent her into stock. A run with a Winnipeg company was followed in the fall of 1920 by a contract with the Thomas Wilkes troupe at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles. Sara played everything from ingénues to vamps.

In sunny California, Sara finally landed a beau at the age of twenty-six—unlikely as he was. Even back then Franklin Pang-born was known for his fluttery performances—the same kind he'd later bring to the Hollywood screen. Perhaps embarrassed by what was obviously a press agent's ploy to pair her off with such an obviously gay man, Sara told a reporter that she and "Pang" were just "pals" who went to the beach together on their days off. And Pang made sure she got home safely after every performance, for which Sara was "very grateful." An affinity for gay male friends was one more trait Sara would pass on to her daughter.

It's been assumed that Sara was merely a minor player during her stage career, her own frustration flowering into her ambition for her daughter's success. Yet between 1920 and 1922, Sara enjoyed quite a lively local fan base. Gossip columns noted the stir that she caused when she wore a "hectic" (read: sexy) bathing suit at Corona del Mar beach. While she might not have been known beyond the outskirts of the City of Angels, her name was mentioned in the same local columns as Lillian Gish's and Gloria Swanson's, and almost as frequently.

Then came
The Fool.
Playwright Channing Pollock, then riding high, intended to take the show to Broadway after its premiere at the Majestic.
The Fool
had "national dramatic importance," according to one critic—a real coup for the Majestic. Sara was thrilled to accept one of the play's most important roles, a lame girl cured by her own faith. Sara instinctively got what the part could do for her. If she scored in Los Angeles, there would be Broadway.

Pollock's choice was no mistake. When
The Fool
opened on July 13, 1922, in front of what the
Los Angeles Times
called a "brilliant first-night audience," Sara gave one of the evening's standout performances. Reviews for the show itself were mixed, but all of them singled her out. She was genuine, even moving, in a part that could easily have been sappy or cloying. The esteemed Russian actress Alla Nazimova told Pollock that he should keep Sara when he headed to New York. But it wasn't until mid-August that Sara got the word. By the time columnist Grace Kingsley reported the "shock" that local fans felt about losing "their fair Sara," she was packed and ready to go.

Beginning a practice that would reverberate throughout the lives of both mother and daughter, a bit of autobiography was layered onto Sara's public persona to capture the interest of the press. Sara had been such a hit in
The Fool,
Kingsley averred, because, as a real-life convert to Christian Science, her faith had cured her when she was "very ill" a few seasons earlier. "So she puts a real devotion into the role," Kingsley said. Clearly Sara's miraculous real-life "cure," true or not, was a publicity bonanza that Pollock could use to his advantage as the show headed to the Great White Way.

The Fool
opened at the Times Square Theatre on October 23, 1922. Notices for the show ranged from outright pans to inclusion in critic Burns Mantle's ten finest productions of the year, but Sara was heaped with praise once again.
Theatre
magazine thought everyone "creditable but not startling," with the exception of "a little girl named Sara Sothern" who was "outstandingly fine."

The "little girl" was, of course, twenty-seven years old, but her diminutive size and delicate manner suggested a teenager. For a few heady months Sara lived her fantasy, hobnobbing with Clifton Webb and Elsie Janis and being caricatured in the theater pages of the
New York Times,
always a sign of an "arrival."
The Fool
ran for eight months and 272 performances before moving on to London, where for another five months it drew rapturous audiences to the Criterion Theatre. "A complete triumph," the
Times
declared of Sara's performance. One night after the show, Mary, the future Princess Royal and daughter of King George V, came backstage to bestow upon the little lame girl a diamond brooch "the size of a belt buckle." The brooch would remain among Sara's treasured possessions all her life, raising the question of whether an addiction to diamonds is genetic.

Two decades later Sara may well have thought back to that exciting time in London. It was her pinnacle. Her return to the United States in March 1925 was followed by a series of Broadway flops. Sara never managed the transition from ingénue to leading lady. And so there she was, seventeen years later, sitting in the waiting room outside the Little Red Schoolhouse with the mothers of Juanita Quigley and Butch Jenkins, listening to the click-click-click of their knitting needles. And she vowed yet again that she would make Elizabeth a star.

***

Across town, Hedda Hopper strode into her office seven floors above Hollywood Boulevard wearing one of her trademark picture hats, a silk daisy seemingly sprouting from the top of her head. "Hello, slaves," she called out cheerily to her assistants, passing through her austere reception area—likened by one reporter to the anteroom of a dentist's office—and into her "sanctum sanctorum," the headquarters from which she coordinated her various machinations and manipulations of the film capital.

Pausing in her typing, Hopper's secretary handed over several telephone messages as her boss passed her desk. At least one was from Sara Taylor. For weeks Hedda had been bombarded with Sara's pleas to help Elizabeth get
National Velvet.
The columnist had promised to do what she could—but the badgering was getting on Hedda's nerves. Glancing down at the shorthand hieroglyphics that only she and her secretary could read, Hedda considered inserting something into her next day's column—but then decided against it. Maybe another day.

Sara would be disappointed. "A few words from Hedda,"
Time
magazine would observe, "can make or break a director or an actor, cool or clinch a deal. Hedda's chit-chat can materially affect the outcome of schemes involving millions of dollars."

From the windows of her office Hopper had an unobstructed view southwest over the plain of orange and palm trees toward the place where many of the studios were located. If she squinted and imagined hard enough, she could even make out Culver City, home of MGM, where Hedda herself had toiled for many years as a well-dressed supporting player. Stardom had once been a dream of Hedda's. But it was here, behind her plain desk adorned only with a big black typewriter and a leather-framed photo of the late actress Marie Dressler, that Hedda found her true calling.

She was fifty-eight years old, an age when most other women in Hollywood had retired or faded into walk-on parts. But Hopper was neither retiring nor fading. In 1936, just when she thought her career as an actress was over, she had landed a gossip show on a Hollywood radio station, sponsored by Max-O-Oil shampoo. So popular did Hedda's "dispatches from Hollywood" become that the Esquire syndicate ordered up a daily newspaper column that was intended to rival Hearst's Louella Parsons, who'd been telling tales on Hollywood since before the talkies. The trouble was that Hedda, at least on paper, was too nice: no juice, no scandal. People who knew her well, like her manager, Dema Harshbarger, failed to recognize the ironic, sarcastic, private Hopper in her sanitized writerly persona. Harshbarger, a no-nonsense, heavyset lesbian who dressed in men's suits, told Hedda plainly that if she kept on being nice, she'd starve to death. "Wake up," Harshbarger advised. "Be yourself."

It worked. Hedda's newly aggressive style sold. Suddenly she was a personality, a household name. In 1940 she left Esquire for the Des Moines Register & Tribune syndicate, and in the following year scored her biggest coup: contracts with the
New York Daily News
and
Chicago Tribune.
"On that day," observed
Time,
"Lolly Parsons arched her back but moved over on the fence."

Now Hedda commanded nearly 23 million readers. Hollywood honchos courted her, flattered her, showered her with gifts—and took her name in vain behind her back. All for a few words in her column. On any given day Hopper's office would be filled with the fragrance of lilies from Joan Crawford or lilacs from Rita Hay-worth, the cards attached usually saying something like "Just because." Staying on Hedda's good side was essential—because her venom was lethal. She'd gone after Orson Welles when
Citizen Kane
had offended her and was now leading the charge against Charlie Chaplin over the paternity case brought by starlet Joan Barry. Readers lapped up Hopper's vitriol. "Bitchery," she once said, when asked to explain her success. "Sheer bitchery."