Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

his voice. It was a terrible sound. Anyway, the song was called ‘Ah, Sigh Not So,’ and even with the bad singing, the two of them were so enchanting, so romantic, that everyone was moved. Through that little melody the characters they were playing were supposed to fall in love. And shortly after that, Peggy and Hank announced that they were going to be married.”

When the season in Baltimore was over, the Fondas moved up to New York. Mother was under contract to the Shuberts. She claimed that they put her in seven consecutive flops. A contemporary account of her initial meeting with Lee Shubert went like this:

A Shubert scout saw her [as understudy for Elizabeth Love in Strictly Dishonorable] and she was eventually haled into the presence of the great Lee Shubert himself. At the moment she was suffering so greatly from a heavy cold that she really cared very little whether she saw the great Lee Shubert or not.

“Who are you, and what sorts of parts do you want, and all that sort of thing?” asked the great man.

She told him.

“You’re hired,” said the great Mr. Shubert, getting up and reaching for his derby.

“What do you mean—hired? You haven’t even heard me read a part.”

“You have a voice like Helen Morgan, a voice like Ethel Barrymore,” said the great Mr. Shubert.

“What I have is a bad case of laryngitis,” said Miss Sullavan.

“Laryngitis or no laryngitis,” replied the great Mr. Shubert, “you have a voice like Ethel Barrymore and you’re hired. Report on Wednesday to Elmer Harris.”

Which is how Mother had come to star in her first show on Broadway, A Modern Virgin. (She used to tell us, half jokingly, that after that interview with Mr. Shubert she coddled her laryngitis into a permanent hoarseness by standing in every available draft.)

Dinner at Eight was Mother’s first real success. Suddenly Universal wanted her for a movie, Only Yesterday. Even then she was hard to get. In 1931, she’d signed up with the American Play Company. She was quoted at the time as saying, “I didn’t want a manager, but I signed up with a fellow just so I could tell the others I had somebody.” The fellow who talked her into signing the agency contract was Father. By the time Universal was interested in her, she had already directed him to turn down offers from Paramount and Columbia for five-year contracts. It took all of Father’s skills to negotiate, on behalf of his recalcitrant client, a deal satisfactory to both her and the studio.

She wrote her brother, Sonny, whose college education in Virginia she was proudly financing with her various short-lived theatre salaries:

Dearest Son:

Here’s a secret—for God’s sake treat it as such—I think I’m really going to Hollywood. It means discarding what might be termed youthful ideals about Art—but when ideals get tangled around your feet they’re not much good. Would you like a Stutz Bear Cat Roadster, model 1925?? If so, we left one in Baltimore, two-toned blue, lots of chromium, and very ritzy—probably has to have a new battery, but swell tires. Write me immediately.…

And, leaving behind her youthful ideals, her car, and her marriage to Hank, she arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933—her twenty-fourth birthday.

The Universal make-up department and Mother went to war immediately. Make-up wanted to remove a wart and to extract a snaggletooth; also, in line with prevailing fashion, to thin her eyebrows and bleach her hair. Make-up won on the eyebrows and wart, Mother on the tooth and hair. The studio heads conceded that a girl with brown hair might be a novelty. They took test after test, all of them disappointing. They changed the lights and took some more. The strain wilted the subject and frustrated the experts. They ran off the film with its monotonous close-ups of Mother’s face.

Suddenly John Stahl, the top director at Universal, in whose hands the movie rested, called out, “That’s it! Stop the projector! That’s the way we want her!”

It was a profile. For that split second she looked marvelous. Eight different cameramen tried to recapture that second and failed. The ninth got it.

Mother wrote of the incident:

It seems that the trouble was my shallow chin. It wasn’t long enough, and threw my face out of balance. The ninth cameraman set lights higher than my head and put others down low, directed at my chin, and there I was at last, a beautiful girl with a nice long chin, so the experts said.

“You’ll be a star when this picture is over,” predicted John Stahl one day, after shooting sixty-seven takes of a tiny scene.

“Stop kidding me,” replied Mother.

But he was right. “THIS GIRL’S NAME will be as famous as any star’s on the screen when she makes her debut in JOHN M. STAHL’S ‘ONLY YESTERDAY,’ ” blurbed a full-page advertisement. “A NEW STAR WILL ARRIVE!” proclaimed another. “BOW—GAYNOR—DIETRICH—GARBO—HEPBURN—NOW IT’S MARGARET SULLAVAN.”

Much more interesting to Bridget and me were some of the magazine articles.

Colliers, March 17, 1934:

What will eventually drive the press department of the Universal Film Corporation of Universal City, California, entirely insane is the news that Margaret Sullavan, on the eve of the opening of her new Super-Super-Super Special, has been discovered acting the lead in a stock company [with Henry Fonda, as it happened] playing the American Legion Hall at South Amboy, New Jersey. Upon the opening of her first picture, Only Yesterday, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, an honor of some importance in the amusement world, she was home trying to finish a jig-saw puzzle. She won’t make personal appearances, she won’t show up on opening nights when the flashlights are booming, and when she is in New York, she spends most of her evenings barging up and down on a Third Avenue streetcar, dressed in something which looks as if it had been discarded by the Salvation Army.… Just now she is back in Hollywood acting in Little Man, What Now? …

Radie Harris:

ORIGINAL! One-word description of the new