A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (2 page)

The interviews and notes and portions of the manuscript were transcribed and typed by Bill La Vallee, while Carole Logie did the final
typescript (over and over and over again). For their tireless efforts, my
heartfelt thanks. Writer/historian Rudy Behlmer was kind enough to read
the first draft, and his sharp eye caught errors of fact and misstatement that
only someone with his detailed knowledge and generous spirit would have
noticed and corrected, while Robert Cushman greatly aided the quest for
accuracy with his examination of the text. Copyeditor Patrick Dillon did
a detailed and valuable job in ordering the syntax, catching inconsistencies, and making suggestions which added greatly to the overall quality and
readability of the text. The late Bill Whitehead spent some of the last weeks
of his life reading an old friend's manuscript, and his comments and
suggestions were detailed, sensible, and humorous. Bill Whitehead was
unique, and his untimely passing leaves a void in my life; I think everyone
who knew him feels the same.

And a note of appreciation is due Alec White and Lou Hickam, both
of whom provided assistance and encouragement.

I'm grateful to Earl A. Powell III, director of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, for allowing me to take time off from my duties there to
finish the manuscript.

Special thanks to Robert Cornfield, my agent, for his enthusiasm, his
support, and his talent for finding the best publisher for a project. In this
case that is Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in the persons of Martha Kaplan and
Bob Gottlieb. Martha is the most patient person on earth; she listened to
almost two and a half years of complaints, excuses, and all the other
lamentations that insecure authors can find to explain why they aren't
delivering a manuscript. She did this with warmth, humor, understanding,
and affection, all of which are typical of Martha. Added to that are her
considerable gifts as an editor-and a chef. In the words of Ira Gershwin,
"Who could ask for anything more?"

And then, of course, there is Robert Gottlieb, the man who-as he is
constantly reminding me-picked me up out of the gutter and gave me
several reasons to believe in life: VCRs, plastic purses, Japanese films, and
a one-month trial subscription to The New Yorker. To Robert, I'll just say
thanks-for the belief, the encouragement, the intelligence, the advice, the
affection, the friendship. And his (almost) never-failing sense of humor.

Finally, my gratitude to Jack Warner, George Cukor, Moss Hart, Harold
Arlen, Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, Charles Bickford, Jack Carson, Tommy
Noonan, and the 220 other people who worked on this version of A Star
Is Born. Without their efforts, there would have been nothing to write
about in the first place.

R.H.

January 1988

Hollywood, California

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1954

The piercing beams of huge arc lights sweep the night sky above Hollywood. They circle and criss-cross in a stately minuet of their own; outlining,
for a brief moment in a stream of light, the Hollywood Hills, the panorama
of the city gleaming in neon below the Hills and seeming, as they flash across
the horizon, to endow the legendary landscape of Hollywood with the very
magic it sends forth to the four corners of the world.

hese words of Moss Hart's, which open his screenplay for the
1954 remake of A Star Is Born, distill as much as two sentences can the
essence of the marvelous flummery that engulfed Hollywood on premiere
nights and enthralled any tourist lucky enough to be in the vicinity.

On the day of this particular premiere, close to one hundred thousand
visitors from all over the world are basking in the eighty-degree heat of Los
Angeles and its environs, of which Hollywood is the most famous part.
They have arrived by car, by bus, and in the new dieselized transcontinental
trains offering lavish service and cut-rate fares. Some, more adventurous,
have flown into the city on one of the new twice-daily low-cost flights
offered by most of the major airlines. It's the second year of the Eisenhower
administration, and the postwar boom is giving the United States a decade
of unparalleled prosperity. The Korean "police action" ended in an uneasy
cease-fire in July 1953, and the ensuing peace, while tempered by fears of
atomic war with the Soviet Union, is putting money into the pockets and
the bank accounts of most Americans, giving them, for the first time in a
generation, security and the leisure time to enjoy themselves. And for
people seeking surf and the all-pervasive glamour of the movies, Los Angeles is the Emerald City.

Most of the tourists have come from the Midwest and the South. White,
middle-class, high-school-educated families, they suffered the rigors of the
Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean "conflict" while simultaneously being nurtured on the myths of the movies. The same movies
that fed their fantasies reinforced their values and beliefs by demonstrating
that hard work, honesty, fidelity, and faith in God, government, and the
guy next door inevitably made for a better life.

And a better life is what most Americans have this September 29th.
Unemployment is low, unions are strong, the forty-hour work week is in
force, and the average family income hovers around $4,000 yearly. You can
buy a two-bedroom house in the suburbs for $i6,ooo, furnish it completely
for another $1,500 (including a seventeen-inch Magnavox TV set), feed a
family of four for $15 a week, and put a brand-new Ford convertible in the
garage for another $2,4oo-and finance it all through a bank at the prevailing interest rate of 4 percent. If you decided to drive that new car on a
cross-country vacation, gasoline costs you an average of twenty cents a
gallon, hotels and motels two dollars a night, and meals in a first-class
restaurant can be had for a dollar fifty. For some recreational reading, you
may have taken along one or two of the current best-sellers: Morton
Thompson's novel about the medical profession, Not as a Stranger, is the
number-one book in the country, followed by Daphne du Maurier's historical romance Mary Anne; singer Lillian Roth's candid autobiography, I'll
Cry Tomorrow; Norman Vincent Peale's self-help treatise, The Power of
Positive Thinking; the harrowing Cell 2455, Death Row by convicted
murderer Caryl Chessman; Herbert Philbrick's account of his career as a
counterspy, I Led Three Lives; and John Steinbeck's tribute to Monterey
cannery workers, Sweet Thursday.

As you head west on your trip, you depend on your car radio for news
of the world. All seems quiet on the international front. Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles is heading a United States delegation to a conference
in Manila that is trying to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
to deal with the future of Indochina-specifically, South Vietnam. On the
domestic front, you're hearing a great deal about a new subject, school
desegregation: in May the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the
"separate but equal" concept that had been used in seventeen states to keep
black children from officially mixing with white. The Senate is also in the
news, with a subcommittee recommending that Senator Joseph McCarthy
of Wisconsin be censured for "conduct unbecoming a member of the United States Senate" and for tending "to bring the Senate into disrepute." And the World Series pits the Cleveland Indians against the New
York Giants.

As you drive across the country, you can't escape the ubiquitous disc
jockey with his top ten tunes of the week. Rosemary Clooney is everywhere
this last week in September; she has two hits on the charts: "Hey There"
("This is the one where she talks to herself, folks!") from the Broadway
musical The Pajama Game and "This Old House," with its novel basso-
profundo male vocal. Hot on her heels is a new group called the Crew-Cuts
with their nonsense song "Sh-Boom" (`yatata yatata yatata'). Eddie Fisher
is belting out "I Need You Now"; Doris Day is singing "If I Give My Heart
to You" (". . . will you handle it with care?"); Kitty Kallen sings "In the
Chapel in the Moonlight" while the DeCastro Sisters raise many eyebrows
with their suggestive "Teach Me Tonight." If you're driving through the
South, you hear a new sound: a group called Bill Haley and His Comets
is pounding out something called "Shake, Rattle and Roll," whose rhythms
and ideas are outraging parents and delighting teenagers. Some songs are
hits regionally: if you drive through parts of Mississippi and Tennessee, you
may hear a raucous new voice belonging to the unlikely name of Elvis
Presley singing his second record, "Good Rockin' Tonight." Then, of
course, there are songs from the movies. As you near California, Hollywood
is literally in the air: Don Cornell is singing the number-three song, "Hold
My Hand" from Susan Slept Here, while LeRoy Holmes and his Orchestra
have an even bigger hit with the theme from The High and the Mighty,
the John Wayne movie about a crippled airplane. And as you finally reach
the outskirts of Los Angeles, you hear a new song from one of the most
anticipated pictures of the year, "The Man That Got Away" from A Star
Is Born, sung by Judy Garland. If you're a teenager, you have vague
memories of Judy Garland at kiddie matinees of The Wizard of Oz, but
you haven't seen her in a new movie for a long time. Your parents like her,
but then they like a lot of those old stars: Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, John
Wayne, James Stewart, Randolph Scott, Bob Hope. You have your own list
of favorites: Elizabeth Taylor, Susan Hayward, Dean Martin and Jerry
Lewis, Marilyn Monroe (though if you are a girl, you think she looks
"cheap" with all that thick red lipstick), and people like Jane Powell,
Robert Wagner, Terry Moore, and Pier Angeli.

If you are a teenager in 1954, you're definitely a movie fan. You have
the movie habit-you've been going twice a week almost all your life. The first-run theaters downtown are the most expensive, twenty-five or fifty
cents depending on your age or the picture, but they are the most funcavernous, imposing palaces, with rainbows of indirect colored lighting and
multiple balconies, redolent with the odors of popcorn, musty air conditioning, and disinfectant. Uniformed ushers come by with flashlights to tell you
to keep your feet off the seats or to stop talking. It's an exciting time to
be going to the movies; to paraphrase a trade term of the time, "Movies
are bigger than ever." This Is Cinerama opened the movies up wide; 3-D
made them deeper, if not better; then CinemaScope and stereophonic
sound arrived with The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Knights of
the Round Table: big pictures, literally and figuratively, and with the new
technology of the times they are dazzling in their impact. If you are a
teenager, you are part of the first stereophonic generation; the effect of the
images that engulf you and the sounds that surround you with orchestral
fury in "four-track magnetic splendor" leave you reeling with the conviction that what you are experiencing is truly magnificent. You talk about
these movies with your friends, discuss them in your drama or English
classes, read about them in the fan magazines in the supermarket.

Westerns are still the pictures you see more than anything else-not
because you like them best but because that's usually what's playing. And
sometimes they are good: High Noon or Shane or even Gun Fury. Romantic dramas on the order of Magnificent Obsession and Three Coins in the
Fountain or action adventure stories such as The Wild One and Creature
from the Black Lagoon are the next two most popular categories of movies.
These three categories make up the bulk of the 35o Hollywood movies that
you could see in the year leading up to your September vacation. And all
(or most) of them are made in Hollywood.

If you are a movie fan and you are there that day and night of September
29, you see Hollywood live up to its legend, and then some. For while it
is first and foremost the home of the movies, it is also where most of the
country's favorite radio and TV shows are done; if you wrote far enough
in advance, you may have tickets and actually watch them make "I Love
Lucy," "You Bet Your Life" (the Groucho Marx show), or "Queen for a
Day," the daytime sob-and-sorrow show. NBC Studios are located at the
corner of Sunset and Vine, an address that has become even more famous
than Hollywood and Vine, mainly due to the thousands of radio and
television broadcasts that originate there. Two blocks east on Sunset are the
local stations of CBS. Most of CBS's national television programs, however, originate from the year-old multimillion-dollar complex dubbed Television
City, located in the mid-Wilshire area at Third Street and Beverly Boulevard, adjacent to the famous (and expensive) Farmer's Market. This is just
one of the spots that any self-respecting tourist wants to visit after checking
in at one of the numerous motels that line the streets of the city, offering
rooms for a dollar fifty a day, or two dollars if you want a TV set. To
properly see all the sights spread throughout the Los Angeles basin, you
have to get a free map from any of the hundreds of gas stations, or perhaps
buy one of the maps to the stars' homes that are hawked on the streets and
boulevards by sandwich-boarded preteens.