Babes on Swing Street, and Bowery to Broadway - 1944

Babes on Swing Street and Bowery to Broadway, both released in 1944, are examples of the old studio system as both an incubator for talent, and a factory assembly line devoted sometimes more to quantity than quality. They were the last two musicals Ann Blyth would appear in for many years as her career took a sharp dramatic turn with far more challenging roles. It is astounding to think after Bowery to Broadway, in which she appeared only a few minutes at the end of the film, that her next project would be Mildred Pierce for Warner Bros., and an Academy Award nomination.

We covered her first two films under her new Universal contract, Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans, also released in 1944, here. Lightweight musical comedies featuring teen stars, they were a good start for the young Ann Blyth, new to pictures, though she was coming to Hollywood with the impressive pedigree of a prestigious Broadway show under her belt, Watch on the Rhine. It was likely this reputation as a serious child dramatic stage actress, the prestige of that show, her own prettiness and demure demeanor that caused the casting directors to launch her film career in the persona of a sophisticate, a rich girl, a nice girl, or all three. Another factor to her being cast as the all-American girl everyone wanted as a friend or daughter was her soprano singing voice.

Jack Ano, in his introduction to Hollywood Players: The Forties aptly puts it:

The Hollywood definition of “class” knew no boundaries and there was nothing ritzier at the time than a soprano. Gloria Jean, Mary Lee, Ann Blyth, Susanna Foster, Kathryn Grayson, and Gloria Warren, at various times, served as the junior league Deanna Durbins…

As mentioned in a previous post, though MGM grabbed the “lion’s” share of attention when it came to so-called “backyard musicals,” it was really Universal that produced more teenage talent. When Deanna Durbin abandoned ship, the void was filled not by a single replacement, but by a cadre of young adults. The ritzy sopranos listed above were joined by Grace MacDonald, Donald O’Connor, and Peggy Ryan, and The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. We’ve noted in the post on Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans that the dance/comedy team of O’Connor and Ryan was something special and couldn’t be beat.

By the time Ann Blyth arrived at Universal to make the duo a trio, several movies were put into production at once to use Donald O’Connor as much as possible before he entered the army. It was a quick splash into movie making for the newcomer, but Ann felt, “It was an incredible and enriching experience.”

Babes on Swing Street (a cheeky coincidence but no relation to MGM’s Babes in Arms, Babes on Broadway, etc.), starred Peggy Ryan and Ann (sans Donald). Except for the old one-reeler comedies with Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd (or others), I can’t think of a female team given top billing together. To be sure, this was more B movie than A list, and the predominantly youthful cast and focus on ambitious teens “making good” (are young people encouraged to “make good” anymore or just make money?), the critics who bothered to review the film dismissed it as “one of those minor league musical affairs…”

Directed by Edward C. Lilley, the movie lasts just over an hour, and though brief, is stuffed with songs, gags, and a plot somewhere in there if you look hard enough. Peggy Ryan is the president of kids’ club at the local settlement house where teens meet to play ping pong and get off the streets.

They are also all very talented singers, musicians, and tap dancers, and want to “make good.” A music academy (headed by our old pal Ian Wolfe) will give ten of them partial scholarships if they can come up with the rest of the tuition.

Ann hangs out at the settlement house, too, but she’s a rich girl who lives with a domineering aunt, played by Alma Kruger, and befuddled uncle, played by Leon Erroll. Her attempts to help the kids are constantly rebuffed by the resident heartthrob played by Billy Dunn, who resents her for her wealth. Why she’s stuck on this unpleasant boy, and why he suddenly turns around and falls for her at the end is never really clear. He just does. Probably because she’s the soprano.

Ann uses the word, “solid” as a compliment to prove she is hep, as do others in the movie to remind us these teens are in the groove. They’re not groovy; they’re just in the groove.

The gang decides to open a nightclub for teens to raise the funds. Ann donates her aunt’s empty rental property, a hall, and the kids scramble getting tables, food, aided by swell grownups Kirby Grant, Ann Gwynne, and Andy Devine, who plays Peggy Ryan’s father. We mentioned in this previous post on Ann’s stage career that Mr. Devine played her pop, Cap’n Andy, in Showboat on tour in the 1970s.

June Preisser has a flashy role as the eye-rolling junior vamp (which was her stock in trade, no matter what studio she roamed or what teen couple she tried to break up), and demonstrates astounding skill, as usual, in her ability as an acrobat and contortionist, with rolling flops on stage that seem to indicate she was without vertebrae. June was actually older than the other kids, something like 23, already a wife and mother when she made this film, some eight years older than Ann Blyth, but with her cute looks and cherubic grin, she played young. Her junior Mae West number: “I’ve Got a Way with the Boys.”

 

She is Ann’s rival for Billy Dunn’s affections, but, interestingly, nobody is paired with Peggy Ryan, despite her being the lead. A comedienne hardly catches a romantic break, though she could do much more than comedy. (I like her handling of the line, “Lay off the sarcastics.”

“You mean sarcasm.”

“I like sarcastics. It sounds more…sarcastic.”)

Peggy, with three dance numbers, is showcased more than the other kids. Her routines here are not quite as athletic as her slam-dunk partnerships with Donald O’Connor, but demonstrate her really fine versatility in balletic, tap and comic novelty dancing.

One number she sings and dances is a parody of a Russian folk dance, in deference perhaps to our wartime allies. Why critics seemed to write off this prodigious talent as mere clowning, or why Universal didn’t widen her range of roles, I don’t know, but Peggy Ryan was one of the most talented performers of the era.

Ann sings “Peg O’ My Heart” backed by a male chorus, demonstrating a pretty voice, but nowhere near the range or power she developed down the road. We don’t see much of the other acts, which are filler, except for Sidney Miller as a wise guy emcee who does imitations of Hollywood stars, including Katharine Hepburn, complete with calla lily.

The movie ends with the finale and everybody on a stage much too large to accommodate this rented hall, and this must mean the kids have “made good.”

You can see the entire movie free on the Vimeo site here. Below, the trailer.

Bowery to Broadway turns the reins over to the grownups, though Susanna Foster, Peggy Ryan, Donald O’Connor, and Ann Blyth all have brief roles in specialty acts. Jack Oakie and Donald Cook are the stars. They are competitors and later partners in producing shows from…the Bowery to Broadway. You’ll remember Donald Cook as Ann’s father in Our Very Own (1950), covered here.

It’s a passing parade of years story of vaudevillians and impresarios stealing acts from each other, spanning from about 1900 to about 1930. Everybody on the Universal lot showed up for a scene or two in this one: Maria Montez, Leo Carrillo, Andy Devine, Evelyn Ankers, Thomas Gomez (our old favorite, who appeared with Ann in Swell Guy here and who squires around Louise Allbritton as Lillian Russell), Snub Pollard, Walter Tetley—who, like Ann, performed on the Coast to Coast on a Bus radio show as achild in New York, see our intro post.

Most reviews were disparaging. Syndicated columnist Harold V. Cohen:

Universal has put a lot of people into Bowery to Broadway and virtually nothing else. In talent, or at least in the abundance of talent, it goes sky-high. In originality and imagination, it hits rock-bottom.

Buck Herzog of the Milwaukee Sentinel thought the movie:

…is a rambling musical…there can be little in the story that can termed refreshing, much of it being a rehash of shopworn cinema situations. But there is music, glittering production scenes…

It is a hodgepodge, and the material is familiar, but I think that is what makes the movie enjoyable. These are the good old days, even the sad times, and nostalgia works when parody is teasing, but not mean or condescending. Most of these theatrical show movies are really valentines to the art and era, and especially poignant when you know that many of the actors in such movies began in vaudeville. Or even, like Ann, had hit “the big time” on the legitimate Broadway stage. They are, in a sense, paying homage to their own roots.

A charming scene were Lillian Russell leads an impromptu sing-a-long with “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and another bright spot in the film is the comic patter between Ben Carter and Mantan Moreland, whose fortunes rise to become owners of a Harlem night club. In a really funny routine, their old vaudeville act really, they finish each other’s sentences with impeccable timing. At one point when Donald Cook and Jack Oakie are down and out, and Mr. Carter and Mr. Moreland offer to loan them money, flush with success and driving their own big convertible, a rare scene for African American performers in a movie from this era.

Susannah Foster was riding a crest of popularity from her best role as Christine opposite Claude Rains in the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, but her film career would be brief, and after taking time to study in Europe to improve her operatic voice, an expected and desired comeback never happened.

We get a little bit of everything here: the footlights, the neon, the headlines from Variety and Billboard, the Lambs Club, the star treatment, the bum’s rush, a tossed garter, a tragedy. Frank McHugh and Rosemary DeCamp are a pair of hoofers, who struggle for years to make “the big time.” They never make it. In one of the most poignant scenes, they overhear a producer for whom they’ve auditioned call them “old hat—they don’t belong here.” Dejectedly, they ponder the lights of Broadway out a window in an empty hallway, when an elevator operator asks them,

“Going up?”

Frank McHugh shakes his head, “Going down.”

We see them next struggling to run a children’s dance school in their apartment. One little girl is particularly terrible. She has no rhythm and does everything opposite to what the other kids do. She’s about as coordinated as an elephant. She’s their daughter.

You have to laugh. The one thing they want more than being on Broadway is seeing their kid succeed, but a pirate with a peg leg is a better dancer. But the husband-and-wife team of McHugh and DeCamp is really the spirit of the movie, the joy of performing and the broken hearts that result from rejection. At one point Jack Oakie, on the outs with his partner, is fed up with producing shows because he has been shoved into the position of bean counter, and the gloss of the modern shows has no heart like the old time variety. Rosemary DeCamp puts his misery succinctly, “It’s just business, not show business. Not the part that gets under your skin. The all-night rehearsal, the put it together, pull it apart.”

But the years pass, and finally Oakie and Cook decide to reunite and stage a new show, nothing high falutin’ or artsy, just good old fashioned entertainment, (I love the line, “It’ll make Blossom Time look like a one-night stand.” The Sigmund Romberg hit ran a year and a half in the early twenties.) They have a new singer they found in some theater amateur hour and give her a chance. She turns out to be McHugh and DeCamp’s ungainly daughter, now grown up and pretty as a picture—and not a dancer at all, but a singer. She is Ann Blyth.

Mom and Pop are fit to bust with pride to see their kid’s name in lights, even if still chagrined that she can’t dance. You’ll remember, by the way, that Rosemary DeCamp also played her mother in The Merry Monahans.

Also appearing in their great new show are Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan performing the parody of a Gay Nineties cad and the tragically duped woman lured by his promise of wealth, “He Took Her For a Sleigh Ride in the Good Old Summertime.” It’s a funny and fun number, but the dancing is merely just a gentle soft shoe here. O’Connor is especially humorous with his careful rolling R diction as a “mellerdramer” villain, complete with waxed handlebar mustache.

Ann is given the spotlight in the finale with the frothy production number, “Sing What’s in Your Heart.” She enters on a throne, with a chorus of springtime nymphs around her.

An interesting scene shows Jack Oakie and Donald Cook in the plush lobby of the Broadway theater in which their big show is going on, and as they head up a grand staircase, we see large portrait paintings of whom we might assume to be great theatrical headliners of the past.

Look closely. One is of Donald O’Connor, and one is Ann Blyth, which looks like a version of one of her publicity stills of the time.

Bowery to Broadway had been on YouTube for a time, and a possibly gray market DVD might be found, otherwise you’re out of luck.

Interestingly, Ann is billed with the stars and ahead of others in the cast with larger roles (she’s really only in this movie for a matter of minutes), which I think signals the fact that Universal, in disbanding their Jivin’ Jacks and Jills youth unit, were putting all their chips on Ann as someone who could grow beyond a teen performer. Three movies were released one after another in successive months: The Merry Monahans in September 1944, followed immediately by Babes on Swing Street in October, and the last, Bowery to Broadway in November.

Then she had a screen test over at Warner’s for a new Joan Crawford movie: Mildred Pierce. The leap from teen nice girl soprano to the glossy Noir and one of the screen’s most nasty characters is astounding, and we can attribute it to Ann’s tenacious and insightful agent named Al Rockett who got her a screen test; an indulgent star who offered to make the test with her: Joan Crawford; and that screen test.

According to an article in Photoplay, January 1956, Mr. Rockett fought for the test and told Warner’s “Throw the toughest scene you have at her.” It was the confrontation scene where Ann slaps Joan.

The director, Michael Curtiz, was convinced. Ann won an Academy Award nomination for the role of Veda Pierce, at seventeen years old, the youngest person to receive the honor up until that time.

Twelve years later, Ann did another screen test for Michael Curtiz, also for Warner Bros. She was not considered a likely candidate for this role, either, perceived as being too sweet, but agent Al Rockett came through again, and she was allowed to test. Lightning struck twice, and Ann blew everybody away with her screen test. She won the lead in The Helen Morgan Story. It would be her last movie.

We’ll talk about it next Thursday.

©Jacqueline T. Lynch, 2007-2014. All rights reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Another Old Movie Blog, please be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.

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Ano, Jack, introduction to Hollywood Players: The Forties by James Robert Parish and Leonnard DeCarl (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 14.

Dick, Bernard F. City of Dreams – The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures (University Press of Kentucky, c. 1997) pp. x, 129

Milwaukee Sentinel, December 23, 1944, review by Buck Herzog, p. 6; February 16, 1945 review by Buck Herzog, p. 6.

Photoplay, January 1956, “Her Guardian Angel Kissed Her” by Maxine Arnold, p. 82.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 25, 1944, review by Harold V. Cohen.

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THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear; and actor/singer/author Bill Hayes.  And thanks to all those who signed on as backers to my recent Kickstarter campaign.  The effort failed to raise the funding needed, but I'll always remember your kind support.

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 HELP!!!!!!!!!!
Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.


Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from The Dennis Day Show (TV), The DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

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A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out in eBook, and in paperback here.

I’ll provide a free copy, either paperback or eBook or both if you wish, to bloggers in exchange for an honest review.  Just email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com with your preference of format, your email address, and an address to mail the paperback (if that’s your preference).  Thanks.

Ann Blyth - Teen Years in Hollywood

Ann Blyth was a teenager from 1941 to 1948.  To spend most of one’s teen years during World War II was the defining experience of her generation.

To one blossoming in one’s career while at the same time coming of age, this era must have been an added adventure and source of excitement, and anxiety.  She did not know the tragedy of war firsthand, but she knew tragedy. 

Long post ahead.  Get cozy.

The war was pervasive.  Even in the enviably safe United States, the war reached everybody on some level.  For a young person, it must have seemed as if the war had always been, just as growing up in the Depression had been all they knew.  No one navigated the perils of these events alone; all society were touched in some way, some more than others, but the experience was universal.  To a child, with no long past to make comparisons, it must have all seemed...normal.  Perhaps this added to the resiliency of that generation.

Ann Blyth was certainly resilient.  She was a baby when the Great Depression began and a mere child of six when she got her first job on radio during its worst years.  She had just turned 11 when World War II began in 1939, and two years later, in 1941, she was chosen as part of the original cast of Watch on the Rhineon Broadway, which we discussed here in our intro post to this series.

According to a girls’ magazine article of a few years later, Calling All Girls, in a piece probably not a little built-up by the Universal publicity department:

She was lavishly praised in all the reviews.  A huge party was given in her honor at the Astor Theater, where the orchestra played her favorite selections.  Her room was heaped with flowers.  Congratulations arrived in a steady stream of telegrams.  This moment of triumph was the culmination of a long apprenticeship in radio acting and solid practice on her own.  Luck had little to do with it, though—just to be on the safe side—Ann had gone on the stage that opening night with a rabbit’s foot and a four-leaf clover in her pocket and a horseshoe in her dressing room!

Times Square.  The Astor Hotel is middle right.  1938, NYC Archives

It sounds like a movie. 

She might not have understood much of the political intrigue, at 12 years old, of playwright Lillian Hellman’s story of one American family visited by fascism and the cost of fighting it in their own living room, but the play must have become somehow more real for her, certainly for the grownups, on December 7, 1941 when fighting fascism was no longer an ideal or a theory for Americans; it became necessity.  It was the news of the day. 

That day, Ann was 13 years old, her teen years begun at the then height of her achievements as a child actress, while the world spiraled to its worst years of horror.  It was not the best of timing, perhaps, but the strange crisscrossed trajectory would lead her to fame as a movie star before she turned 20 years old in seven years’ time.

The Broadway run of Watch on the Rhine concluded in February 1942, and then she joined the national touring company only two days after the closing – it was on to Philadelphia.  In March, they played the Bushnell in Hartford, Connecticut, as part of the New England tour.  Later it was out to the Midwest and the Cass Theatre in Detroit in April, and the Davidson Theater in Milwaukee by May, and the Grand Opera House in Chicago that month.  She traveled with the company, and with her mother, by train to big city theaters where the play enjoyed enormous success, including a command performance for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a visit to the White House. 

She was earning a living and supporting her mother and building a career, like a grownup, but she was still child and childhood was still an even bigger reality.  There were two boys in the cast as well, who played her brothers.  She recalled in an interview for the Easton, Pennsylvania Express-Times in 2000:

“You’d think it would be fun, not having to go to school, but it didn’t work that way.  We had to do our homework every day, and it was mailed back to our teachers.”

She turned 14 the summer of 1942.  When they played the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles, she was noticed by Universal director Henry Koster and producer Joe Pasternak.  They invited her for a screen test, and later signed her to a seven-year film contract, to take effect when the play’s run concluded.  By 1943, she and her mother said goodbye to home and family in the New York area and settled in an apartment at the Highland Towers near Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.  LA was a company town, booming in the 1940s, equally committed to the war effort and its own bottom line in fantasy-making and dream-spinning, and would be her whole world.  It was both a career and an education.

Ann responded in a radio interview in 1992 about whether she felt a seven-year contract was a  kind of bondage:

“I didn’t feel that way about it.  I know I’ve heard and read a lot of stories about people who felt that, indeed, it was a sort of bondage.  It was a wonderful place for me to be, maybe because of the temperament, but as I look back on it now, it was the best way for me to be at a studio.”

She recalled for syndicated columnist Vernon Scott in 1976:

“Universal was a second home to me,” she said, “I went to school there and made my movie debut with Donald O’Connor in Chip off the Old Block.

It was a beautiful place then, full of lawns, trees, and cottages.  I thought of it as a sort of college campus.”

We discussed her first two films, Chip off the Old Block, and The Merry Monahans in this previous post.  These movies, along with two others we’ll discuss down the road, were all released in 1944, pushed through quickly so the studio could use Donald O’Connor as much as possible before he was drafted into the army—another reality of the day for teens.

Ann played a patriotic teen in Chip off the Old Block who wants to throw away a show biz career in order to devote herself to war work.  Ann, in real life under the auspices of the studio, was able to do both, volunteering at the famed Stage Door Canteen in Hollywood, and performing in shows for servicemen at Camp Pendleton, California, where in July 1944 she was proclaimed Sweetheart of the Regiment of a Marine Corps unit just back from horrific fighting on Tarawa. She received award certificates for her volunteer activities from the Hollywood Canteen, the War Activities Committee, and the U.S. Army.  

She affirmed for the above-mentioned radio interview that working at a Hollywood studio did not mean an end to schooling:

“Even though you find yourself in Hollywood, you still have to go to school.  Oh, they’re very strict about that.  I know when I was very young, other young people would say, ‘Oh, that must be so easy.’  But, really not so easy.  Here you find yourself doing a very dramatic scene and 15 minutes later, you’re back in your dressing room doing algebra.  And, it was far from easy, but it was a wonderful education in a way, because there were very few of us in class.  When you weren’t doing a movie, you really attended a small, little schoolhouse on the lot, and it was a lovely experience.”

We discussed in a previous post her teacher Mrs. Gladys Hoene, who noted in a 1955 article that Donald O’Connor and Ann Blyth were among her favorite pupils.

Ann would turn 16 in the summer of 1944, when her first four films, all light teen musicals for Universal, were released.  She began to experience the dubious honor of capturing the notice of fan magazines for the first time and to deal with one of the most trying, yet necessary, aspects of a performing career—publicity. 

The above-mentioned article in Calling All Girls published July-August 1944 was one of the first of these forays into building up her stardom.

One quality of Ann’s which always astonishes the veteran picture people who work with her on the set is her unusual coolness in front of the camera.  Crises in production which send experienced players and staff personnel into tantrums leave her completely unruffled.  Charles Lamont, director of The Merry Monahans…says she is the most poised and composed young actress he has ever encountered…she has yet to forget or bungle a single line of dialogue in her cinema career.  She has never spoiled a scene by nervousness.

These early interviews, in deference to her still being a young teen, were light pieces on her favorite school subjects, the names of pets, her favorite actresses and actors (Merle Oberon, and Paul Lukas, who played her father in Watch on the Rhine.)  Later, when she began to date, the scrutiny would be more personal and presumptuous.  Of that period, Ann would comment:

“This is a phase of your life—even if you’re in pictures—that’s quite private and special.  Not that you’re unwilling to share a certain amount, but only so much.”

For now, despite the evidence of many unhappy childhoods experienced by studio contract players, for Ann Blyth, it was a marvelous adventure and a happy period.  She responded to The Hollywood Reporter interviewer Scott Feinberg in 2013:

“It was like finding gold all over again in California.  For me, it was a wonderful studio because it wasn’t a big studio…and you felt, the people that I met in publicity, others, certainly the gaffers, the grips, became friends.  It was like the same people were on all of the movies I did, and I felt cared about and cared for.”

For the Bay Area Reporter in 2006 she remarked,

“I felt very protected.  But it wasn’t good for everyone.”

She would need this support from her studio and her colleagues when two shocking events seriously threatened her.  As we discussed in the intro post, one was the spine fracture she suffered while tobogganing in April 1945.  What might have been a fatal accident soon became instead anybody’s guess as to whether she would walk again.

It was certainly speculated by many that her career was over.

A few days later, President Roosevelt died.  Having been in office four terms, he was the only president young people ever knew through the course of their lives.  Ann had met him at a dinner at the White House.  Time seemed to move too slowly in the Great Depression.  Now it was moving too fast.

Except for Ann Blyth.  Ann spent several months in a body cast, on which, when the first danger was over, she collected the autographs of friends.  She was bedridden for much of the rest of the year, celebrated her 17^th birthday in this manner. 

It was the summer the war ended.  What was a tumultuous series of events for billions of people was perhaps more quietly noted in her hospital room when Germany surrendered, and later in her bedroom in the apartment she shared with her mother when Japan surrendered. 

Like most women of her generation, she would marry a veteran.  She would not meet him for another several years.  In the meantime, Dr. James McNulty was a medical officer in the U.S. Navy from 1941 through 1949.  He served as a battalion aid surgeon with the 26th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division on Iwo Jima.  He also served in Sasebo, Japan, and Peleliu, Palau, and with the Pioneer Regiment, 6th Marine Division in Tsingtao, China.

Ann managed to attend the premiere of Mildred Pierce, (which we discussed here) her breakout movie and what would be one of the most important films of her career.  According to an article in Modern Screen:

…she had to see that triumph lumpily in her cast with the biggest dress she owned—a corduroy jumper—squeezed over it.

When the body cast was removed, she was put into a removable back brace that extended from her neck to her lower back and wore that for several more months until the spring of 1946.

Oscar night: Joan Crawford at home, Ann, and director Michael Curtiz.

During this period, as noted in the intro post, she attended the Academy Awards in March 1946 wearing a gown the studio made specifically to cover her back brace.  She was a Best Supporting Actress nominee. The honor, and her own determination to recover, saved her career.

She also reached another personal triumph, the one most teens look forward to: her high school diploma.  Her teacher from Universal, Mrs. Hoene, came to her apartment three times a week to tutor her. Though studio minors were taught at the schoolhouse on the lot, they submitted to testing by the local Los Angeles school system, and took part in the formal graduation ceremony at University High School.  Ann graduated high school in a wheelchair.

Ann wrote in an article for Modern Screen in 1949:

…it was more difficult to study at home with only the aid of my teacher, Mrs. Hoene, and my mother, than it might have been in a classroom full of happy schoolmates, but the trials and tribulations of that year did help me mature.  I was lucky enough to be able to join my classmates at their graduation exercises.  Because I had been confined to my apartment for so long, that event meant far more to me...

Mrs. Hoene remained a good friend, and appeared as a guest on the This is Your Life episode that celebrated Ann Blyth in 1959, as we noted in this previous post.

The high school diploma, framed, would decorate a wall at home, along with autographed photos of movie stars.  Unlike most teens with similar bedroom decor, she knew these movie stars personally. She had worked with them.

The worst event came hard on the heels of her recovery from her back injury.  Ann’s mother died, as we discussed in the intro post, just before Ann’s 18^th birthday. 

One does not recover from a loss such as this in a matter of weeks or months, particularly when she was so close to her mother, but she had a source of strength in the religious faith in which she had been brought up, and support from an aunt and uncle who moved out to California to share her life and make a home together.  Toward the end of the following year, 1947, Ann and her aunt and uncle moved to a new home in nearby Toluca Lake, the first house she had ever lived in.  She was nineteen, and her teen years would come to an end in a world very different—indeed, unrecognizable—from the one in which they began.

Another driving force getting her through the tough times was her career, to which she returned at Universal, and on loan-out to other studios in the next few very busy years.  She also enjoyed friendships with other young actors and actresses who made up a community of their own.

Joan Leslie and Jane Withers became important and life-long friends.  Jane Withers recalled in author Daniel Bubbeo’s The Women of Warner Brothers:

“There was a regular group of us, Ann (Blyth), Diana Lynn and Joan, who would get together and go to the movies…since I had a convertible, I would drive everyone.  We’d get some fast food and take it with us to the theater.  We’d usually call the manager ahead of time to let him know we were coming.  The balconies would be closed off for other people, and when we would get there, they’d open it up for us and we could eat by ourselves.  It was just a lot of fun.”

Years later, Jane Withers and Joan Leslie would be two of her bridesmaids.  Others were Marjorie Zimmer, Peggy Kelley, Betty Lynn, and Ann's stand-in, Alice Krasiva.  Her cousin, Betty Lynch, was her maid of honor.

Roddy McDowall’s home was a regular hangout for movie teens.  Jane Powell, another long-time friend, noted in her memoir, The Girl Next Door and How She Grew:

Every Sunday, Roddy’s house was a gathering place for all us Hollywood kids.  His mother, Wynn, liked and wanted her children – Roddy and Virginia – close to her, so she would invite all their friends, her friends, every Sunday – it was a big open house.  Everyone, it seemed, was there – Ricardo Montalban, Elizabeth Taylor, Darryl Hickman, Ann Blyth.  People came and went all afternoon; we’d swim, play badminton, dance to records, have dinner, go home about nine or ten o’clock.

Roddy McDowall and Ann became lifelong friends, and dated for a while during the period of time when fan magazines were chasing her every move.  For one, Screenland, Roddy, likely with the help of the publicity department, wrote an article about Ann and how he had come to know her as a guest at one of his Sunday parties.

She was at the house most of the day and I thought was one of the sweetest and nicest people I’d ever met.  I’d say that gentility was the right term to use to describe her.

He goes on to describe, or to attempt to describe, her personality for a readership, but more for the press that had since her coming of age regarded Ann as an enigma.

When you take her to a party, as I have on several occasions, she really can throw you.  To begin with, and not many know this about her, she is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.  She’s a tremendous story-teller and when she gets started on one of dialect stories you laugh so hard you almost fall on your face.  I’ve never ceased to be amazed at how quickly she changes when she’s being the comedienne.

Ann really loves parties—especially if charades is the game of the evening.

She also liked roller coasters.

When they met up for a date in New York City, she took him, with a New Yorker’s savvy and sense of humor, to the Automat for dinner.  

McDowall also notes, as others have:

She simply does not like to talk about herself.

That is perhaps her most unusual characteristic—her reserve.  She’s a great introvert.  It’s as though there was a wall around her.  Maybe you’d call it self-sufficiency, but I really don’t know.  It does seem, however, that she lives a good deal within herself.

Roddy McDowall, among his many accomplishments, was also an excellent photographer who published several volumes of his photographs.  In Double Exposure: Take Four, he includes a portrait photo he took of Ann Blyth.  It’s in black and white, taken in the early 1990s when Ann was in her early sixties and remarkably lovely, and the pose and facial expression—serene, enigmatic, with a touch of humor in her soft eyes—is strikingly similar to the cast head shot of her when she started in Watch on the Rhine in 1941, which you see in our intro post.  The photo is accompanied by a quote from Jane Withers, in part, “She radiates beauty from within in everything she ever does.” 

Despite her reputation for being reserved and enigmatic, in the contemplative setting in the pages of this book, she is clearly supported by the understanding of two loving friends who had known her since they were all teens together in a special place at a special time.

She made 12 films in her teen years, including her most important dramatic roles: Mildred Pierce, Swell Guy (discussed here), A Woman’s Vengeance (discussed here), and Another Part of the Forest (discussed here).  One-third of all the movies Ann Blyth made in her career were made when she was still a teenager.

Mark Hellinger, who produced Swell Guy, said of Ann, “Outside, she’s as untouched as a convent girl—and inside, she’s as wise as a woman of 50.”

On his blog Last One on the Bus, blogger Tom Gilfroy writes about growing up in the 1940s in the Sunland neighborhood of Los Angeles, where one day at Lancaster Lake a couple of scenes were shot for Mildred Pierce.  He was a boy when Ann noticed him and his friends watching.

I remember thinking how friendly she was when she made it a point to come over to tell us what a nice little town we lived in and how great it must be for kids to grow up in Sunland…In reality, taking the time to say “hello” to scruffy, barefoot, local kids was perfectly consistent with Ms. Blythe’s [sic] wholesome and friendly reputation.

In 2009, Ann and an assortment of former Hollywood teens got together at the annual Thalians Ball in Los Angeles. The Thalians, an organization of actors, have worked since the 1950s to raise money in support of children with mental health problems.  On this particular gala, the theme was a salute to the troops, in a little retro World War II USO setting.  Ann sang at the gala as one of several former USO performers.  A different honoree is chosen each year at these events and that year, the man of the hour was Mickey Rooney.  She had met Mickey Rooney early in her career, playing opposite him when she was 19 years old in Killer McCoy (1947).

Come back next Friday when we talk about Killer McCoy as part of the getTV Mickey Rooney Blogathon hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken& Freckled and Paula’s Cinema Clubtaking place throughout the month of September.

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The Bay Area Reporter, “The Real Veda Pierce: a Serene Ann Blyth,” by Tavo Amador, July 20, 2006.

Bubbeo, Daniel.  The Women of Warner Brothers (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2002), p. 146.

Calling All Girls, July-August 1944, “Blyth Actress” by Jean Brownlee, pp.7-8.

The Hollywood Reportervideo interview by Scott Feinberg, April 2013.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajwQiKORcHg

Last One on the Busblog by Tom Gilfroy- http://last1onthebus.com/guest-post-growing-up-in-the-foothills-sunlands-lancaster-lake-part-3-of-4/

Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2007, James Vincent McNulty obituary.

McDowall, Roddy.  Double Exposure, Take Four. (NY: William Morrow and Company, 1993).

The Milwaukee JournalJanuary 27, 1976, syndicated article by Vernon Scott, green sheet p. 1.

Modern Screen, December 1949, article by Kirtley Baskette; October 1950,  “The Faith My Mother Taught Me” by Ann Blyth, p. 71; October 1955, article by Ida Zeitlin.

Powell, Jane.  The Girl Next Door and How She Grew (NY: William Morrow and Company, 1988) p.92.

Screenland, March 1951, “What I Know About Ann Blyth” by Roddy McDowall; February 1953, p. 66.

Victoria (Texas) Advocate, June 25, 1953, "Ann Blyth Weds Saturday; Cardinal to Perform Rites," p. 8.

WOR radio interview with Casper Citron, NYC, November 14, 1992. 

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As  most of you probably know by now, this year's TCM Classic Cruise will set sail (proverbially) in October, and one of the celebrity guests is Ann Blyth.

TCM has just published the itinerary for the cruise.  Ann will be doing a couple hour-long conversation sessions, and will also be on hand for a screening of Mildred Pierce.

Have a look here for the rest of the schedule and events with the other celebrity guests. Unfortunately, the cruise is booked, so if' you're late, you can try for the waiting list.

I, sadly, am unable to attend this cruise, but if any reader is going,  I invite you (beg you) to share your experiences and/or photos relating to Miss Blyth on this blog as part of our year-long series on her career.  I'd really appreciate your perspective on the event, to be our eyes and ears.  Thanks.

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 THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; and Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.  And thanks to all those who signed on as backers to my recent Kickstarter campaign.  The effort failed to raise the funding needed, but I'll always remember your kind support.

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TRIVIA QUESTION:  I've recently been contacted by someone who wants to know if the piano player in Dillinger (1945-see post here) is the boogie-woogie artist Albert Ammons. Please leave comment or drop me a line if you know.

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 HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Switch, The Dick Powell Show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

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A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out in eBook, and in paperback here.

I’ll provide a free copy, either paperback or eBook or both if you wish, to bloggers in exchange for an honest review.  Just email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com with your preference of format, your email address, and an address to mail the paperback (if that’s your preference).  Thanks.