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“When I have a song to sing,” says Betty Grable, by way of explaining her success as a movie star, “I feel good singing it. I don’t think, ‘Gee! I’m the greatest singer.’ ” Neither does Miss Grable think, gee! she is a great actress: “I just say and do the things I do every day of my life. Gosh, it could be me up there on the screen.”
Betty Grable up there on the screen is about all that millions of U.S. moviegoers really want. This week, the Grable fans who flock to see her latest picture, a Technicolored trifle called That Lady in Ermine (20th Century-Fox), will be bitterly disappointed if it is not very much like the last 15 Grable pictures. By sedulously being her pretty, blonde, brittle self, in one cinemusical after another, St. Louis-born Elizabeth Ruth Grable has become one of the highest salaried (close to $300,000 a year) women in the world.
In a business fraught with hazardous gambling and desperate financial uncertainties, Betty Grable comes about as close as Hollywood can get to a surefire, gilt-edged investment. The profits from her movies (something like $15 million over the last eight years) have left her boss, Producer Darryl Zanuck, free to dabble with such weighty but financially risky topics as political history (Wilson), lynching (The Ox-Bow Incident) and anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement).
Each week, some 10,000 admirers (zealously cheered on by her studio’s press-agents) take the trouble to write Betty fan mail. For six years U.S. theater managers have ranked her among the top ten in box-office pull.
Attainable Goal. As Betty herself readily admits, her talents are unremarkable. Unlike some other movie stars, she can lay no claims to sultry beauty or mysterious glamor. Her singing and dancing are pleasant and spirited, but not highly skilled. Her peach-cheeked, pearl-blonde good looks add up to mere candy-box-top prettiness. Even her intensively publicized legs (immortalized in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, along with Gable’s ears and Barrymore’s profile) cannot compare in symmetry to Dietrich’s.
Why do moviegoers flock to Betty’s pictures with an ardent persistence they have never offered to other stars of greater beauty and larger gifts? Betty Grable, long-shanked, blue-eyed, 5 ft. 3½ in., no pounds, knows one answer. “Girls,” she says, “can see me in a picture and feel I could be one of them.” A wag with a parody spoke for the male audience when he sang, with no perceptible rancor toward Betty’s bandleader husband:
I want a girl, just like the girl That married Harry James.
To millions of Americans, the pert, sexy, but basically “nice” girl that Betty plays on the screen is young American womanhood at its best. To the eager young man, the ambitious stenographer, the Hollywood-hungry mother resolutely dragging her little daughter off to dancing school, Betty represents an attainable goal, a daydream that might come true. Grable’s own life is a proof of the dream.
Tops & Traps. “My mother,” says Betty, “was always my driving force.” Like many another sacrifice to matrimony, Lillian Grable never stopped hankering for the show-business career she left behind to marry Stockbroker Conn Grable. She first pinned her vicarious hopes on her elder daughter Marjorie (now a housewife in Beverly Hills). Marjorie soon refused to take another dancing lesson. Elizabeth Ruth Grable, born Dec. 18, 1916, was more obliging.
By the time Betty was four, she was diligently studying the saxophone. At five, she was working at toe dancing and ballet. Mother moved her on to the piano, trap drums, tap and acrobatic dancing. “I don’t think I missed a thing except eccentric dancing,” remembers Betty. “I dreaded every lesson and I especially hated acrobatic.”
Mrs. Grable’s persistence was soon rewarded. Scarcely had Betty matriculated into the toe-dancing class when she was picked to play a part (a piece of coral) in a ballet at the school’s annual kiddie show in St. Louis’ Odeon. A few years later redoubtable Betty began to show up among the local talent in Christmas shows presided over by such professionals as Frank Fay and Jack Haley. The disapproval of her relatives served only to add more iron to Mrs. Grable’s determination.
“They said Betty wouldn’t ever get anywhere in the movies, either,” she remembers grimly. “Well, I just wanted to show those people in St. Louis.”
Outside the Gates. Between times Betty went to Mary Institute, one of St. Louis’ “nicest” schools for girls. In summers she could look forward to a dancing-free vacation in Michigan. But by 1929, Mrs. Grable decided that Michigan was a waste of time; that summer Betty was enrolled in a dancing school in Los Angeles.
Conn Grable brought his family home that fall, but Lillian Grable eventually talked him into letting her and Betty go back. While waiting for the gates of fame to swing wide, Betty and a little dancer friend named Emylyn Pique put together an act in which Betty tootled her saxophone while Emylyn did high kicks. The act was just smoothing itself out when Emylyn got a better offer and set off for New York, where she made a name for herself as Mitzi Mayfair. Betty, stranded without an act at 13, lied about her age and landed her first job at Fox. In February 1930 she made her film debut in a chorus of 60 girls, all in blackface.
The studio, threatened with tightening child labor laws and suspecting that Betty might be underage, soon fired her. Undaunted, she went over to the Goldwyn lot, where Sam Goldwyn and Dance Director Busby Berkeley were signing a chorus line for Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee. Some 1,500 other girls were waiting for the job, but by grimly determined jockeying for position, Betty managed to get hired first. “I had that girl under contract once,” says Sam Goldwyn now of the original Goldwyn Girl. “I wonder why I never did anything with her.”
The Old Ox Road. During the next eight years or so, Betty went from job to job, attracting little more notice from others than she had from Goldwyn. After Whoopee, she had speaking parts in a series of Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers, a featured spot in a touring Frank Fay-Barbara Stanwyck stage show, 15 months on the road as the singer with Ted Fio Rito’s band. “The trouble with me,” says Betty of that job, “was that I couldn’t sing.” Back in Hollywood, she wangled herself a specialty in Fred Astaire’s Gay Divorcée. Then came ingenue leads in Wheeler & Woolsey comedies and an unbroken chain of college pictures. When Betty wasn’t brightening the screen halfback’s life on the Old Ox Road, she was in the still gallery posing for leg art to brighten the walls of real dormitories.
For several months Betty made movies by day and sang with Jay Whidden’s orchestra at night. But despite her tough hours and hard work, and Mrs. Grable’s earnest chaperonage, there was still not enough of the artist’s single-minded dedication about Betty’s career to suit mother. Betty’s habit of falling in & out of love wasted quite a bit of time on the long road to the top. In 1937, convinced that she was finally settling down, Betty gushed prettily to newsmen: “I want to be Mrs. Jackie Coogan for life.” The Kid felt the same way, but in less than three years the Coogan romance was stranded. Jackie, it said in the divorce complaint, was cruel, stayed out all night and sold the family furniture to buy a car. At just about that time, Lillian Grable decided to divorce long-suffering Conn, who had stayed behind in St. Louis through the years.
Broadway Hit. It is fan-magazine legend that actresses spring overnight into stardom, and Betty helps to justify this legend. Her rise to stardom dates from the moment in 1939 when Darryl Zanuck ran across a routine cheesecake shot of Betty in his morning paper. Since the age of 13 she had been careful to remain in the public eye, but Zanuck suddenly saw something that he had never noticed before. Without further ado, he signed her up.
All Hollywood was soon applauding his shrewdness. Feeling that she had been overpublicized and underplayed in Hollywood, Betty had taken a job supporting Ethel Merman in the Broadway musical, DuBarry Was a Lady. With a cool professional competence founded on nearly 20 years of constant practice, Grable proceeded to steal just enough of the star’s thunder to make the critics whoop. Hollywood, as usual, was deeply impressed to find one of its own a hit on Broadway. Zanuck wasted no time putting his new employee to work.
Alice Faye, then the reigning musicomedienne of cinema, came down with appendicitis and Betty was yanked from DuBarry to take her place in the elaborate, expensive Fox musical, Down Argentine Way. Both the picture and Betty were a hit. The studio consolidated its gains by putting both Faye and Grable in its next, Tin Pan Alley.
Transparent Pantaloons. In this maudlin backstage romance, Betty was supposed to play second fiddle to Alice, Jack Oakie and John Payne. But full of the zest of triumph, she easily stole the show. Alley turned out to be the template for all the uncomplicated, uncluttered Grable musicals (Moon Over Miami, Pin-Up Girl, Mother Wore Tights) that have followed. For one thing, the picture provided ample opportunity for the contemplation of Betty’s obvious photogenic attractions, especially in the sequence when she gyrated through a harem scene, clad brilliantly in sequined bra and panties, her legs shining and sinuous beneath transparent pantaloons. For another, it set Betty firmly in the character pattern that her public has insisted on ever since: the hot-looking number who is really just a good kid waiting for Mr. Right.
Family Fans. Betty’s marriage (in Las Vegas on July 5, 1943) to Harry Haag James, the trumpeter son of a circus bandmaster and an aerialist mother, was all that a fan-magazine editor could ask for. James himself is no minor breadwinner ($100,036 in 1946). When he married Betty, the Grable fan clubs and the James fans merely merged into “The James Family Fan Clubs.” When Betty had her first baby, her G.I. admirers promptly wrote their No. i pin-up girl to tell her all about their wives and their babies.
Like other Hollywood homes, the James residence (a rambling affair, Old English outside and Early American inside) has a swimming pool. Like many another U.S. home, it has a television set, but no library. Harry and Betty seldom leave this pleasant place for parties, never for nightclubs. When they do go out it is usually to a ball game or the movies (preferably westerns) or the race track. Aside from the children (Vicki, 4, and Jessica, less than 1) and the poodles (Wow and Gaffus), the James’s major hobby is horses. Both Betty and Harry own horses, but their ownership like their betting is an individual rather than a family enterprise.
The Anatomy of Happiness. Do wealth and fame bring happiness? To Betty Grable the answer is yes. “I have what I want,” she says, “and I am what I want to be.” When her contract at Fox expired recently, she annoyed businesslike husband Harry by signing a new one with no raise in salary and no provision for outside pictures. When Boss Zanuck, who sometimes begins to believe his own press-agents, grows overambitious for Betty, she recalls him to reality. “Betty,” he told her excitedly in 1945, “you’re going to get the break of your life. I want you to play Sophie in The Razor’s Edge.” Betty knew that it was a part for an actress (it won Anne Baxter an Oscar) and not for her. She coolly refused it. “People would expect me to end up as a mermaid and rise with seaweed in my hair,” she said, “and that wouldn’t be very good for your picture, would it?”
At 31 Betty knows perfectly well what she can do, and she knows what her fans expect of her. It has been said that the Grable legend is so secure that she could play an entire picture in an iron lung (Technicolored, of course) and send her admirers away happy. This might be true, provided she could remain her buoyant blonde self, complete with legs. When she tried to hide behind long skirts and a prim Victorian manner in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, the faithful were outraged. Many of them got the word and stayed away altogether; more than 100,000 others complained of the sacrilege by mail. Miss Pilgrim, an attempt to tinker with the Grable formula, is that rare Grable picture that lost money.
The New Picture, That Lady in Ermine, presents Betty as an Italian countess (she is also an ancestress who conies down from her portrait on the castle wall—but no matter, it is only Betty again). She is struggling to save her domain from the grip of a handsome Hungarian hussar (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). “It wasn’t exactly down my alley,” Betty confesses, “and it looked as if it might have been pretty hard for me to do.” But the late Ernst Lubitsch, the director whose magic made exquisite comedy of Jeanette MacDonald’s look of bovine bewilderment in such musicals as The Love Parade and The Merry Widow, probably had some good idea what he was about when he picked Betty (Lubitsch died before it was finished and Director Otto Preminger took over). Betty plays a sort of royal compound of Russia’s Catherine, Sweden’s Christina and the cutie behind the cosmetic counter.
As a sprightly femme fatale who dreams of a perfect marriage “full of quarrels and making-up and everything,” Betty and her square-jawed artlessness fit oddly into an atmosphere of languorous waltzes, yearning tziganes and dark, uncontrollable passions. Determined Lubitsch fans may find her presence there a satiric leg-pull in the Lubitsch tradition. Although Grable fans are less likely to enjoy this subtle kind of continental joke, they will at least see plenty of Betty. Caped in ermine (900 skins, $28,000) and daintily barefoot, or garbed in flossy period costumes, Betty is all over the place. She dances on the tabletop with the hussar in the skintight pants. She rides through a snowstorm. She sings:
“Ooo, what I’ll do to that wild Hungarian
Ooo, what I’ll do to that wild barbarian.”
It is certainly no Lubitsch trick that the lush countess, who at one point considers planting a dagger in her Hungarian’s back, ends by dragging him briskly off to say “I do” to a priest, while snowflakes flutter past the window. The “nice-kid-after-all” formula is what the Grable public loves, and that is what it gets.
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