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Nobody’s Girl Friday
Nobody’s Girl Friday
The Women Who Ran Hollywood
J. E. Smyth
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smyth, J. E., 1977– author.
Title: Nobody’s girl Friday : the women who ran Hollywood / J. E. Smyth.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026978 | ISBN 9780190840822 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190840853 (Oxford Scholarship Online) | ISBN 9780190840839 (updf) | ISBN 9780190840846 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women in the motion picture industry—California— Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)— History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W6 S639 2018 | DDC 384/.80820979494—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026978
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
In memory of Mary Caldwell McCall Jr. (1904–1986), Ruth Elizabeth Davis (1908–1989), and Barbara Pollut McLean (1903–1996)
Nothing and nobody would take her place away from her. She was fighting every minute of the time, and you gloried in her battle. She was a supreme success; she knew it, we knew it. And the theaters reaped a golden harvest.
Hedda Hopper, 1949
CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Introduction: The Equal Right to Be the Best 1
1. The Fourth Warner Brother 25
2. Organization Women 59
3. Jills of All Trades 89
4. Madam President 119
5. Controlling the Cut 153
6. Designing Women 181
7. Last Woman Standing 211
Epilogue: The Cellophane Wall 239
Notes 245 Bibliography 279 Index 287
FIGURES
1.1 Bette Davis with mother Ruthie and sister Bobby, 1919 (Davis estate, Boston University) 27
1.2 Davis with new friend Helen Hayes on the set of The Sisters, 1938 (Davis estate, Boston University) 32
1.3 Davis with Ed Sullivan receiving her “Queen of Hollywood” crown, 1940 (private collection) 40
1.4 John Huston, stunned to read his orders to report for army duty, with Olivia de Havilland and Davis, 1942 (private collection) 42
2.1 Ida Koverman, MGM studio portrait by Clarence Sinclair Bull, 1930 (USC) 78
2.2 Glamorous executive Anita Colby with David O. Selznick, 1944 (private collection) 84
2.3 Colby on the cover of Time, 1945, flanked by her charges Shirley Temple, Jennifer Jones, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, and Dorothy McGuire (private collection) 85
3.1 RKO Producer Joan Harrison, unimpressed by her Nocturne writer, John Latimer, 1946 (private collection) 102
3.2 Harriet Parsons on the set of Night Song with mother Louella and director John Cromwell, 1947 (private collection) 111
3.3 Parsons joins Teresa Wright and her mother on the set of The Louella Parsons Story, 1956 (private collection) 117
4.1 Mary C. McCall Jr., 1932 (private collection) 124
4.2 McCall as Shakespeare, 1930 (private collection) 126
4.3 McCall taking a break with Dorothy Arzner and John Boles on the set of Craig’s Wife, 1936 (UCLA) 129
4.4 The women who made Craig’s Wife: Viola Lawrence, Rosalind Russell, McCall, and Arzner, 1936 (AMPAS) 130
4.5 McCall with her alter ego, Maisie, 1942 (private collection) 138
4.6 McCall with Eleanor Roosevelt, 1944 (private collection) 140
4.7 McCall, aka “Sir,” as Screen Writers Guild president, 1951 (Writers Guild Foundation, Los Angeles) 149
5.1 MGM studio portrait of its two top editors, Margaret Booth and Blanche Sewell, 1934 (private collection) 160
5.2 Barbara McLean, fresh from another Academy Award nomination, 1938 (private collection) 169
6.1 Katharine Hepburn in Adrian and Barbara Stanwyck in Head, 1941 (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research) 191
6.2 Dorothy Jeakins’s workbook for Joan of Arc, 1948 (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research) 203
6.3 Jeakins’s sketch for Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry, 1960 (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research) 205
7.1 Katharine Hepburn with Judy Garland and Billie Burke at Ethel Barrymore’s 70th birthday party, 1949 (private collection) 232
7.2 Hepburn looking up at Spencer Tracy, Woman of the Year, 1942 (private collection) 235
7.3 Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart pulling an equal share of the burden, The African Queen, 1952 (private collection) 236
E.1 Margaret Lindsay (standing) reads telegrams of congratulations for Arzner, flanked by McCall, Arzner, and Francine Parker, 1975 (UCLA) 242
E.2 Carmen Zapata, Davis, Booth, and Ruth Gordon at the Women in Film Crystal Awards, 1983 (private collection) 242
PREFACE
This book was planned many years ago when I was a rebellious and unrepentant defender of the Hollywood studio system. Growing up, I spent more time after school with Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers than with my peers. I never took classes in film or media studies in college. Film was an essential part of my life—I felt that it would have been as ridiculous to take lessons in breathing. Behind the scenes, I wrote scripts, read old Hollywood memos, and collected production material the way others did comic books. Looking back, I can almost smile at that anxious, driven, double life. I still felt some need to impress people back then.
I’ve grown out of it.
As a graduate student, I tried the odd film class and cringed when I read Andrew Sarris and Laura Mulvey. Hollywood, for me, was always more than male directors—and who said that you couldn’t identify with Errol Flynn or Cary Grant as a girl or that studio-era Hollywood films always objectified and punished strong women? Look at who’s writing, editing, and starring in some of them occasionally, I grumbled under my breath, and you’d been teaching us a different story—and maybe one that could be an inspiration to girls and women today.
And so the idea for this book was born. I started off writing to Janet Leigh, and, miraculously, she wrote back. She was fed up with people wanting to interview her, only to ask about Orson Welles (Touch of Evil, 1958) and Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, 1960). We met, and talked about her “discovery” by colleague Norma Shearer, early career struggles, and commitment to her work. Over the next decade, I would spend more time in the archives, trying to reconstruct a picture of a film industry where women remembered their points of view being taken seriously, fought for and achieved a measure of success, and produced films with women protagonists. Acquaintances often asked why I didn’t look at contemporary films. “Why bother?” I said. “Have you seen the kind of image Hollywood is
pushing of women these days? Things were better for women in the studio era.” They raised their eyebrows, skeptical. “I’ll prove it,” I promised.
Although I admired histories of the silent era by Cari Beauchamp that recalled a period when women were a force in the industry, I didn’t like the prevailing scholarly picture that was emerging: that as Hollywood matured in the late 1920s and 1930s, women were forced out and disempowered, visible only as actresses and, invisibly, as secretaries and seamstresses— good little “girl Fridays” at their boss’s beck and call. When people did talk about Bette Davis, they always skipped her off- screen life as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and of the Hollywood Canteen. I read about the blacklist, but no one ever mentioned Mary McCall, except in footnotes when she was backing up the careers of male screenwriters. Even the Writers Guild seemed to have forgotten about their first female president.
Bob Sklar was a great source of encouragement in the early stages of this project. He liked encouraging rebellions, and he was also one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. I was struggling with a foreign university system and a marriage I didn’t like. On one of my rare visits, the remains of lunch in front of us, he just said, “Stop letting life get in the way.”
So, Bob, it took me a while, but I came back to the original plan.
Part of that original plan was to spend most of my life in film archives, but I had two problems: I can’t eat scripts, and my job was thousands of miles from Los Angeles.
Archivists and colleagues came to my rescue. I owe a lot to Ned Comstock, Hilary Swett, Valerie Yaros, Joanne Lammers, Sharon Smith Holley, Lisa Dosch, Pauline Wolstencroft, André Bernard, Heika Burnison, Sarah Weinblatt, Amanda Stow, and Kristine Krueger for sending me material. I remain grateful to Eric Hansen and Candace Bothwell for access to Katharine Hepburn’s papers prior to her estate bequests. Hilary, J. C. Johnson, Adriana Flores, Tal Nadan, John Leroy Calhoun, Laura La Placa, Mary K. Huelsbeck, and Jenny Romero sustained me on my marathon trips to the archives.
But I have to say a special thank you to Ned Comstock. I’ve known him for nearly twenty years, and in that time I’ve benefited from his knowledge, enthusiasm, generosity, and open-mindedness. When I’ve had to cancel trips because I can’t get a babysitter for the kids, he sends me what material he can. Ned gives the best presents— script memos for Christmas, New Year’s clippings, and a Hollywood phonebook that absorbed me for weeks. The person who says anyone is replaceable has obviously not met Ned. He is one of a kind, and I will always associate him with library basements, boxes of script memos, air conditioning, and the best- spent days of summer.
[ xii ] Preface
I’m deeply grateful to Mary-David Sheiner and Sheila Benson for their memories of their mother and access to the private papers of Screen Writers Guild president Mary C. McCall Jr. It’s true they each have contrasting assessments of her (so different, their mother could be two different women). Sheila’s childhood coincided with a period when “Mamie” was one of the most visible and vocal women in Hollywood; Mary-David grew up with her in the blacklist era, when she had more time on her hands to read bedtime stories and cook.
But if my research on studio-era Hollywood women has proved anything to me, it’s that these women were never easily described female “types,” with all the traits fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw. How else could one explain Hedda Hopper’s consistent support and defense of working women in Hollywood—even Democrats like Davis, Ida Lupino, and McCall? That really resonated with me. Whatever their political affiliations, women during this era tended to support each other off- screen. Sometimes it was a positive comment or celebration of a career move in a column; other times it was recommending another woman for a job; sometimes they supported each other on a committee, on a radio show, or in working together on an enterprise such as the Hollywood Canteen. Certainly women competed for jobs. Davis and Joan Crawford disliked each other; sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland did feud. But too often, the media has reduced women’s presence in Hollywood’s past to a series of catfights. And, to paraphrase Davis, while the studio system was no place for sissies, many women gave the industry credit as a space where they could thrive as professional women.
I wasn’t taught this history, and I didn’t read it because it didn’t really exist except in the archives and in dusty newspapers. I never heard about Mary McCall until a few years ago. She was a workaholic, tough, articulate, charismatic, but also domineering and stubborn. She was a working woman, a mother of four, and the creator of Maisie Ravier, the role Ann Sothern made her own in 1939. When I first began to grasp McCall’s public and private lives, I was astounded, but also felt that I had found an ally who would have understood the challenges women of my generation still face. I wish I could have told her that nothing in life has any business being perfect. When you try being the perfect parent, very often you are agonized to be away from what you feel most fulfilled doing—in McCall’s case, writing and guild leadership. Motherhood is sometimes boring, and marriage— well, show me a successful and fulfilled woman and I’ll show you a woman who’s divorced or single! But colleagues can be even worse than in-laws . . . It’s finding the balance. Whatever the contrasting perspectives of her children, McCall struggled and she did her best. Both
Mary-David and Sheila went on to make their own careers in the world of film and television. They are a phenomenal family, and I hope that I’ve done some justice to their faith in this book.
As far as I have been able, I’ve tried to give a full picture of women’s lives during the studio era. Not just their studio careers, but also their work in the guilds and unions, their interviews for fans, their political lives, and their roles as wives, partners, and mothers. Like McCall, Bette Davis worked hard in all her roles. Her son Mike Merrill gave me permission to reprint images from his mother’s papers and was very encouraging with my project. I am also indebted to Olivia de Havilland, Marsha Hunt, Samantha Eggar, Peter Jeakins Dane, and the late Janet Leigh, Ann Rutherford, and Noel Taylor for reflections on their careers and for being sources of inspiration.
Gary Crowdus, Vera Dika, David Eldridge, Desirée Garcia, Mark Glancy, Hannah Graves, Helen Hanson, Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelača, Julia Kostova, Paula Massood, Nahid Massoud, Sarah Onions, Robert Rosenstone, Alvin Sargent, Tom Schatz, Art Simon, and Tom Stempel have been great colleagues and friends. I am especially grateful to Tom Stempel for a copy of his oral history with Bobbie McLean, certainly the best example of the genre I’ve ever read. Thank you, Tom, for giving us such a lively portrait of Hollywood’s “Editor-in- Chief.” But it’s so typical of the American Film Institute that the only reason we have McLean’s oral history is because it was to be a part of the Darryl F. Zanuck oral history project. Not that I don’t like Zanuck; he hired McLean, after all! And Dorothy Spencer. And Mary Steward.
Even when we’ve been thousands of miles apart, Cynthia and Ray Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Mark Hennessy, Robin Vaccarino, and Donna Vaccarino have been there with invaluable friendship, conversation, and irreverent laughter. I look forward to the next time we can sit down and have a drink and not look at clocks.
At first, my kids Zachary and Zoe did not want to talk about the book at all. The trade-off was they loved Claudette Colbert and the Ale and Quail Club, were thrilled when Bette Davis got rid of another dull lover (the quick but often illegal way), and shared Kate Hepburn’s addiction to Mondel’s chocolates and eyebrow-raising disdain for the idiots we can’t completely get rid of in our lives.
The British Academy supported this project with—by their standards— a small grant. The Writers Guild of America West, the Writers Guild Foundation, and the guild’s women’s committee sponsored the articles, exhibition, and screenings honoring Mary C. McCall Jr. in 2017. They also let Sheila, Mary-David, and me sit down on a Beverly Hills stage and talk
[ xiv ] Preface
about McCall, careers, and motherhood. Hopefully now Madam President’s name is a bit more familiar to the members, although I don’t see any McCall biopic on the horizon at this point. If it happens, I hope to hell they have enough sense to hire a woman to write it.
It’s been a true pleasure working with my editor, Norm Hirschy, and the staff at Oxford University Press. And I want to thank my anonymous reader whose encouragement and astute criticism helped shape the final draft of the manuscript.
This book is meant to challenge and to inspire people who love Hollywood and believe in gender equality. It targets the beliefs, reinforced in too many histories and public comments, that feminism died between 1930 and 1950, that women were not important within the Hollywood studio system and had little creative control, that directors called all the shots, that the most important Hollywood writer you should know about is Dalton Trumbo, and that Katharine Hepburn is the best example of studio-era feminism. On that last point— yes, sad to say, she admitted she was not a feminist.
Today, actresses such as Reese Witherspoon and Geena Davis are taking Hollywood to task for its lack of substantial roles for women. Yet the focus is still on actresses’ salaries and the number of women who direct pictures. There was a time when Hollywood recognized and supported a collaborative, creative environment and women achieved positions of power and influence in the American film industry. Sadly, this disappeared with the decay of the studio system. Even the memory of these women’s achievements has faded. The only historical period currently of any box-office interest, the blacklist, has become a minifranchise enabling white males a space to reenact heroic victimhood. The poor little dears.
Hollywood may be a bastion of male privilege these days. It may have been for the past sixty-odd years. But there was a time when things were a bit different.
Let me take you back to 1942 . . .