Polio Wars (72 page)

Kenny's claim to have contributed to polio science was also avoided. The film offers a safely domesticated story of scientific discovery. Kenny's understanding of polio comes from her heart and from her clinical experience. Kenny succeeds in healing a paralyzed child because she does not understand polio and is thus free from the constraints of any orthodox medical knowledge. Her hands, her knowledge of sick bodies, and her ability to use tools of the domestic environment such as strips of blanket and hot water build on her “natural” understanding of healing. In McCarthy's words, she succeeds “using nothing but her shrewd eyes and her common sense, plus her great knowledge of the muscular system.”
⁹⁴
In the bush cabin where she meets her first patient, she directs the girl's parents to tear up blankets, pour boiling water over them, and twist them so that every drop comes out. After treating the pain and spasm she and the parents realize that the girl's legs still cannot move. The mother cries, but Kenny in cape and long-sleeved white uniform keeps her emotions under control. She tells the child she is “going to have to teach them [her legs] how to walk.” She gently moves a leg and, when she notices a tendon react, she tells the child calmly “your leg just told me something.”

The film makers, perhaps pressured by RKO, stayed away from the direct portrayal of groups of “deformed” children. In the film Kenny and her mentor examine a textbook by “Sir Robert Jenkins,” which is identified as Brack's “bible,” and note the similarities between its images and some of the patients she has recently treated. One of the scripts proposed a close-up of a plate from the Jenkins book “showing us a typical posture in the acute stage,” but the film does not show any such images.
⁹⁵
In fact, other than a scene of a ward of children in splints and braces, there are very few groups of severely disabled children. In the final script this ward was described as “full of horribly crippled children, in wheel-chairs, braces, walking cages, etc.” but the camera avoids any close ups and there are no wheelchairs or walking cages.
⁹⁶
Brack doubts Kenny's evidence that her method works and dismisses her first healed patient, saying “this child never had infantile paralysis … the symptoms were not accurately observed.” He suggests that Kenny “stick to nursing and not meddle with orthopedic medicine. It's a complicated subject which is difficult enough for those who have spent a lifetime studying it.” Meanwhile, the film lingers on Dorrie, one of Kenny's patients (child actor Doreen McCann), turning cartwheels while Brack's own patient David, a small boy in braces and crutches, whom Brack proudly shows as an example of orthodox success, watches morosely. This image is interpreted with horror by Kenny who ends the scene saying quietly “I will never forget David.”

By 1945 Kenny had constructed a story of her life that downplayed the role that the NFIP had played in her career. She reminded Nichols that O'Connor was not responsible for the introduction of her work to America; rather, that a group of Australian doctors had arranged for her to arrive “as an official visitor … with a definite statement that I had made a brilliant contribution to medicine.” In fact, O'Connor “told me to go home.”
⁹⁷
Russell believed that the movie script had been sent to the NFIP for approval, but O'Connor later assured a reporter that he had stayed away from “the movie.” While Fishbein's role as a movie censor has been well documented for other scripts, his role here is unknown.
⁹⁸
In any case, although Kenny's 1943 autobiography had dwelt for some chapters on her struggles to convert American physicians, the filmmakers avoided mentioning either O'Connor or the NFIP and depicted very few of Kenny's experiences in the United States, omissions that must have seemed strange to American audiences when the movie came out in 1946.

Despite these omissions and the script's many additions to Kenny's history, the film was promoted as a “true” story. RKO publicity claimed that Russell's depiction of Kenny herself was accurate. The studio told reporters that Russell was doing an intensive course in the Kenny method, and had “the nurse's magic hand motions down pat.”
⁹⁹
Mary Kenny recalled that Russell, a great mimic, was able to copy Kenny's own accent perfectly. But after Kenny protested that she did not “sound like that,” Russell used a bland English accent instead.
¹⁰⁰
The movie's appearance of cinematic documentary was reinforced by old-fashioned clothes and backdrops. A newspaper reported that the Toowoomba hospital, where a member of the merchant marine had been treated during the war, was being copied by the same man, who was now a set dresser at RKO.
¹⁰¹

Convinced that accuracy was important, Kenny warned Nichols that the script had a “few little things that will annoy Australians exceedingly.” A story about a bull added to dramatize the founding of the Sylvia stretcher would lead to “a lot of criticism” and “give the whole picture a phony atmosphere.” Her clinic in Brisbane also had not been in “an old dilapidated building” but one that was “wonderfully renovated and beautifully
equipped.”
¹⁰²
Chuter was asked to assess scripts for their accuracy and in 1945 the managing director of RKO in Sydney thanked him for cooperating “in the research that we have been required to carry out by our Studio in the interests of authenticity.”
¹⁰³
Chuter also dispelled what he considered to be misapprehensions about Kenny's main antagonist. To some who had seen the script, Brack suggested orthopedist Harold Crawford, whom Kenny had named in her autobiography. But Chuter was sure that Brack was meant to be Sir Raphael Cilento. “No one will waste any sympathy on this person,” Chuter assured an RKO official; “he has been Sister Kenny's most implacable enemy, and really deserves all opprobrium which can be heaped upon him.”
¹⁰⁴
Two years later, Chuter was able to use his authority to counter protests about the content of the film. In 1947, just before the film's premiere in Australia, Queensland's state censor threatened to cut a dramatic scene between Kenny and Brack, claiming it was not “authentic.” Chuter prevented this, arguing: “This scene is, in my opinion, the great scene in the picture. It focuses and crystallizes the issue fought over many years and in many Countries. The brave nurse forces her way into the teaching citadel and fights out the issue. Dr. Brack portrays the concept [and] attitude of traditional medicine admirably and accurately.”
¹⁰⁵

In promotions for the film RKO was able to highlight the danger of polio, the hope of Kenny's work as a cure, and the allure of romance. A full page advertisement in
Life
featured Kenny, Dorrie, and her parents inside a bush cabin, while the text referred to the darker side of polio: “it might strike in far away Toowoomba—or hit next door.”
¹⁰⁶
In a letter from Rosalind Russell to Kenny ally James Henry that was intended to be published in the local paper, she described the previews of the film to “bobbysoxers” in San Francisco, shipyard workers in Oakland, “high type[s]” in Burlingame, Mexicans in Indio, and a mixed group in downtown Los Angeles. Every group, she said, “pull for Kenny like mad … [and are] ONLY interested in the polio part of the story. That amazed us so that the love story will be cut quite a bit. It still runs through the picture, but the polio part of the story predominates and you can hear a pin drop during the medical portion of the film.”
¹⁰⁷

But it was the love story that appeared in most advertisements. Another advertisement in
Life
feted “the drama of a desirable woman who turned her back on all that
most
women hold dear—love, family, home—to write in glorious deeds one of the most thrilling chapters in all human history.”
¹⁰⁸
In one poster Russell stood in a bridal gown (never shown in the film) under the heading “The wedding gown that waited” with the caption “Tucked away in a cedar chest for half a lifetime by a courageous nurse who wanted desperately to wear it … but wanted even more to help children walk again.”
¹⁰⁹
An advertisement in
Colliers
referred to “one of the greatest love stories ever screened.”
¹¹⁰
In another poster Russell faced Brack with the words “She won FAME … but lost LOVE!”
¹¹¹
For a Hollywood woman to succeed in the world of medical science she had to sacrifice everything else.

One casualty of the filmmaking process was Kenny's friendship with McCarthy. As McCarthy's original scripts were discarded, she began to worry that she would lose credit for her work. But when she tried to have Kenny defend her, she found that Kenny was no longer her champion. Friends later speculated that the end of their friendship was the result of Kenny's discovering that McCarthy was a lesbian. But Kenny already knew this and had even offered advice to McCarthy over a break-up.
¹¹²
In fact the break was caused by Kenny's assessment of movie politics. As she learned that the studio did not like McCarthy's scripts, she distanced herself from the writer. While Kenny recognized that for McCarthy receiving screen credit “would mean a lot for her future financial status,” in
her view the script was based partly on McCarthy's first script and partly on Kenny's own autobiography with “a dash of
The Kenny Concept
book.”
¹¹³
“Mary rather amuses me with her protestations of a great friendship,” Kenny commented to Nichols, yet “the first time anything occurs to interfere with what she considers her financial position the friendship takes a very secondary position.” Mary had “many good qualities,” Kenny added, but she needed to “cultivate them and try to obliterate her bitterness and mischief making propensities.”
¹¹⁴
McCarthy sent Kenny and her Minneapolis friend James Henry an angry telegram, threatening to spread scandal about Russell, but Kenny “threw it in the waste basket.”
¹¹⁵
After Nichols agreed to give McCarthy screen credit as co-writer in August 1944, Kenny urged her to “forget that the picture ever existed.” Kenny thanked her for her friendship, but declared that she had “no time to waste on Hollywood jealousies,” and added “for the sake of my own peace of mind which affects my work, I respectfully request that all further associations and bickering shall cease.”
¹¹⁶

In 1944, as the Hollywood machinery slowly ground on, Kenny decided to replace her short silent films with a longer sound film to be produced by Ray-Bell Films, a St. Paul production company. She financed
The Kenny Concept of the Disease Infantile Paralysis
by selling some of her property in Queensland, and with donations from local businessmen and Rosalind Russell.
¹¹⁷
At one dinner, Russell later recalled, Kenny was going “on & on” about what the Hollywood movie had to include. Frederick Brisson finally said Kenny must realize his wife could not make an “honest” picture but an “entertaining and commercial” picture. If Kenny wanted to make a documentary film, she needed to recognize that was not what Hollywood did. That, Russell claimed later, was “how I happened to pay for the [technical] film.”
¹¹⁸

Initially, Kenny saw this film as a supplement to the Hollywood movie. It would “contain material the lay people would not understand or appreciate.”
¹¹⁹
But the Hollywood movie was taking years longer to make than she had anticipated, so the technical film had to stand on its own. The film was part of Kenny's effort to control the meaning and significance of her work. It was intended to dramatize her theory of polio, using the camera to point to what the viewer should be seeing while her voice as narrator told the viewer what the scene meant.

Her allies in Minneapolis assumed that it would be a teaching film but Kenny initially resisted this, saying she did not “expect to include anything about treatment in the film.” Instead it was intended to provide evidence “to the world of science” so that scientists could explore her ideas “further,” a task that seemed even more urgent after the critical AMA report in June 1944.
¹²⁰
But she soon recognized that if the film were to “explain to the Orthopedists of the world how to keep the body straight when affected by this disease,” it would need to have a teaching component. She therefore produced 2 reels:
The Kenny Concept of the Disease Infantile Paralysis
and
Second Phase of the Kenny Treatment
. The second reel provided practical information about the making and applying of hot packs and demonstrated specific muscle exercises that would help “to stimulate the muscles from their focal point,” but she usually showed both under the title
The Kenny Concept
.
¹²¹
Kenny noted that the film was the result of a direct request from
medical officers of the Army and Navy, who had come to the Mayo Clinic for postgraduate study in physical medicine and had traveled to Minneapolis to attend a course at the Institute. They had told her, Kenny claimed, that “it was impossible for them to absorb (as they explained it) one or both of my presentations in the short space of one week, and advised me to make a documentary film explaining the revolutionary concept and presenting result[s] of my clinical research.”
¹²²
This gave her film, produced during the war, the approval of both physicians and the military.

In September 1944, during the NRC committee visit, Kenny invited the committee to see an early version of this new film.
¹²³
In their subsequent report the NRC committee members praised the film as “persuasive and interesting, especially with regard to results accomplished by muscle reeducation.” But they criticized its style as “spectacular and definitely of a propaganda nature” and found fault with its use of unscientific-sounding statements such as “the muscle is host to the virus.”
¹²⁴
Nonetheless, the committee recognized the potential power of Kenny's film for both medical and lay audiences and urged the NFIP to make a “series of teaching films for the professions on the care of individuals with poliomyelitis, including the Kenny method.”
¹²⁵
NFIP officials did not initially follow this recommendation and continued to rely on films produced by other professional groups. Then in 1945 the NFIP produced
Your Fight Against Infantile Paralysis
for the public and later
Accent on Use
for physical therapists.
¹²⁶