A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (13 page)

Arlen had an idea, in his usual jot form, which he played for Gershwin. "I
know how Ira's ear works, [said Arlen] and was sure he would like the theme,
one that I'd had for some time-an eight-bar phrase." Gershwin did like it,
particularly the insistent movement of the rhythm; he listened a while and
[then] suggested as a possible title "The Man That Got Away." It was
Arlen's turn to be impressed. "I like" was his simple indication of approval
and work began.

Jablonski points out that "interestingly, none of the music Arlen played for Gershwin is the accompaniment for the words of the title. What Gershwin heard was merely the introduction, the first four bars of mood-setting music and the melody, for which he devised:

According to Lawrence Stewart, a UCLA professor who visited Arlen and Gershwin several times while they were working on the film and who wrote an unpublished piece on Gershwin and Arlen's work on the film, the original lyric was to have been:

That, in turn, had supplanted:

Equally interesting are Gershwin's rejected phrases for the end of the song:

and:

For a time, the two men even toyed with a structurally different ending:

According to Stewart:

Gershwin's manuscripts reveal how difficult it is to write a song such as this, where the language is the colloquial diction of the dive singer and the rhymes, rhythms and the allusions must be consistent with her character. Arlen's music for the song can be described only in Gershwin's own term, "sweet and low-down." The mournful theme, repeated and repeated in its rising climax ... and the elongated last line brings the song to its emotional height, while the repetition of the title at the conclusion (done at Gershwin's suggestion for a sort of coda) created the effect of a resigned amen.

About his inspiration for the title, Gershwin remarked: "[Some people] called it 'The Man Who Got Away,' a whodunit title I wouldn't have considered a lyric possibility ... but this had to be 'The Man That Got Away' because, actually, the title hit me as a paraphrase of the angler's 'You should have seen the one that got away.' "

When they had finished the two songs, Arlen recalled:

We had been working about two weeks.... We'd been at it every afternoon and I wanted to go away for the weekend. "Ira, I want to go to Palm Springs." "Don't." "Why not?" "Well, Moss is there, and Judy [and Sid are going down] there, and you'll be playing the songs for them and it's much too early." And he was as vehement as Ira can get. He said: "You'll spoil things." I said, "Ira, I promise you. I'm not going there to see Moss and Judy; I just want a break." I went up to that golf course where Ben Hogan was the pro-the Tamarisk-and I went out that Saturday morning. Because I wasn't feeling too well, I wasn't supposed to play. But I saw Judy and Sid,
large as life, just teeing off. I said: "I'll walk around with you." Nobody said
anything about the picture. Then about the middle of the round ... I started
to whistle, very softly. I don't know what tempted me. She was about twenty
yards away-it was kind of a tease and I couldn't stand it. I love Ira and I
love Judy, and well, I just whistled the main phrase of "The Man That Got
Away." Suddenly, on the third or fourth whistle, Judy turned around. "Harold, what are you whistling?" "Nothing. I don't know." This continued.
"Harold, what are you whistling? Don't tell me it's something from the
picture." I said "No." "Harold, I've got an idea it must be from the picturedon't hold out on me." Finally, on the eighteenth hole, Sid hit the ball 320
yards into the sand trap, and while he dug it out, Judy insisted: "Harold,
there's a piano in the clubhouse, and you've got to play it." I kept playing
it down: "It's just something we've been working on. I don't know how well
you'll like it." So I played both songs, and-well-they were the first songs,
the script wasn't finished, it was their first picture-and they went wild with
joy. "Ira, Shmira, he'll be happy about it," I thought. So I went to see Moss
and Kitty. Same thing. They wanted to call Ira. I said, "Oh, don't! I've
promised him not to play them." But they insisted and phoned Ira and said
how wonderful it was, and he was delighted. And when I came back he was
beaming and never said a word about my broken promise.

Hearing "The Man That Got Away" must have galvanized Moss Hart
into returning to his work on the rewrite with a renewed zeal. Having
completed his restructuring of the original, he now began to flesh it out
with more realistic dialogue and to replace the somewhat caricatured comedy of the original with a wryly observant attitude that provoked the
laughter of recognition rather than the laughter of derision. This was
carried through in his approach to the subsidiary characters. The grandmother was eliminated, but the function she served at the end, the "you
must go on" speech, was necessary, so Hart retained the character of Danny
McGuire from the original, making him a pianist with the band, a nebbish,
evidently in love with Esther and loyal to her throughout.

The character of Oliver Niles, the "famous producer," Hart left relatively intact. In both the original and the Hart rewrite, Niles is a paragon
of Hollywood virtues; Hart describes him: "late forties, robust, an excellent
example of the latter-day successful Hollywood executive. He is cultivated,
intelligent, industrious, warm, dignified. He is the antithesis of the old-time
Hollywood producer so widely parodied. He is a sophisticated and able man." Niles seems to have no life outside his studio. He sleeps alone in a
small bed in a spartan room discreetly stacked with scripts. There is no overt
humor either in the character or in Hart's approach to it.

The "demon publicity man" Matt Libby had been written by Dorothy
Parker et al., and portrayed by Lionel Stander, as a brash, wisecracking
hyperbolist of the old school: "There go a couple of rats I raised from
mice," he mutters after Norman and Esther double-cross him by marrying
quietly. He is forever searching for a "big angle" ("We'll have a thousand
school kiddies spelling out 'LOVE' on the Santa Monica beach") and
distorting facts ("Are you sure there's no Russian in your background? It'd
make great copy!"). He is cynical, sour, and nasty, for no apparent reason.
In rewriting the character, Hart recast him in the mold of a modern-day
public-relations man. Hart's outline describes him as "in his early forties.
He is a big man, fast with his tongue, sure of himself, expert at his work.
But he is a machine. There isn't much heart or warmth here. He is not a
parody of a `Hollywood Press Agent'-he is merely more intense and less
aware of some of the niceties of life." He is also, in this rendering, a much
more understandable human being; the cynicism is still there, but it's
leavened with an understanding of the frustrations of his job, the humiliations, the condescensions. He is coarse and brutal ("I don't like you, I never
did like you. And nothing made me happier than to see all those cute little
pranks of yours catch up with you and land you on your celebrated face"),
philosophical ("This is how the world ends-not with a bang, with a
whimper. T. S. Eliot, my friend"). And he is still funny, cynically so, in the
execution of his duties (giving instructions for the upcoming wedding of
Norman and Esther: "Have the traffic routed out of Beverly Hills for three
miles on either side of the church. . . . Which church? The big one,
dummy!").

But it was in the characters of the two leads that Hart made his subtlest
and most illuminating changes. Hart's Esther Blodgett has little in common with the idealized Selznick original. The 1937 Esther/Vicki, though
an orphan, still has a family. She is spunky, goal-oriented, movie-struckand she desperately wants to make something of herself. Her grandmother
sends her off to Hollywood with a speech that gives Esther's background
and states the moral of the film: "If you're my granddaughter, you'll go to
your Hollywood. . . . You've got the blood of pioneers in your veins.
... Your grandfather and I came across the prairies in wagons because we
wanted to make something out of our lives.... You go to your Hollywood ... but remember, Esther, for every dream of yours that comes true, you
pay the price in heartbreak." You knew exactly where this Esther came
from and what she wanted. And as sweet and tearful as she occasionally
was, there was an air of invulnerability and indestructibility about her.
Because her grandmother doesn't want her to be "a quitter," she gives up
her own identity and becomes "Mrs. Norman Maine"-and a star is born.