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.

The Year of Ann Blyth - Intro to the Series

This post begins what, by default, I’m calling The Year of Ann Blyth—because I’m going to be writing about the career of actress Ann Blyth for pretty much the entire year. 

About as simpleminded as calling another blog about old movies Another Old Movie Blog.

I’m not terribly clever.

This is also going to be a series, by default, about acting in the 20th century. Actors, from the beginning of the trade, have struggled to find work, struggled in their performing to find fulfillment in self-expression, and then struggled to find the next job. The 20th century, for the first time in the history of theatre, exploded with new outlets for actors beyond the proscenium. “The theatre” became “the media”.

Movies, radio, television—our entertainment industry became America’s greatest export to the world, for better and for worse.  I want to examine this watershed century in the acting profession and the media through the career of one actress, and am particularly drawn to Ann Blyth for different reasons; including that she moved comfortably between the different media and excelled at each, and because long after she performed in her last movie she continued to work when it suited her, on television and most especially, the stage, including plays, musicals, concerts, night clubs and cabaret.  Throw in a few TV commercials, and you can see she tagged all the bases. 

And something else...something intangible and perhaps only evident when you stack her performances on a timeline: if you know Ann Blyth only through her frothy MGM musicals, you don't know Ann Blyth.  In dramas she has morphed into the epitome of hateful, sensual, heartbroken, and shamed.  If you know her only as the demon teen Veda in Mildred Pierce, you don't know Ann Blyth.  The same colossal greedy train wreck of a girl who spit invective at Joan Crawford and smacked her in the jaw also performed a night club act to enthusiastic crowds in Las Vegas, bringing them to tears with the sentimental "Auld Lang Syne" and sang at the California state fair.  If you only know her from The Helen Morgan Story or melodramas, you are missing her genuine gift for screwball comedy.  Sinking herself intellectually, just as much as emotionally into these roles, she swims against the powerful and unrelenting current of studio typecasting . 

The scene of her debut was radio variety and drama, the true child of the 20^th century that, with few exceptions, became orphaned long before the century was over.  It trained her to use her voice, not only as a singer, but as a character.

As Gary Merrill’s character says in All about Eve: It’s all theatre.

This intro post to the series is going to take a while.  You might want to call in sick to work. 

Ann Blyth’s career is interesting for its length—she began at six years old on radio; for its diversity—she leapfrogged from radio to Broadway to Hollywood before she became an adult, then jumped into a variety of screen roles in that common struggle not to be typecast, and continued, during and after raising her family, to appear on television and the stage.  Along with her seemingly effortless versatility, most especially laudable is her ability to successfully keep in perspective her career and private life—yet nothing is simple about the way we weave our lives, particularly for someone who juggled so much even from a very young age.

Her ambition certainly, but also her self-discipline and work ethic, perhaps sense of responsibility to her mother, to directors, fellow performers, her husband and children, her faith--must have been enormous. 

Ann Blyth has been described in the press that always looks for catch phrases, slug lines and labels, as a devout Catholic, and she herself would credit her faith as being of major importance in her life.  Being labeled a Nice Girl by the press eager to call her somethingwas probably better than getting tagged “The Oomph Girl” or “The Dynamite Girl”, which Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith, respectively, hated, but I wonder if it may have sometimes been a detriment.  We’ll talk about that in a later post.  She has also been called reserved (to the point of driving some interviewers crazy over her reticence to speak ill of coworkers), serene, “the calmest person in Hollywood.”

Interviewer Clyde Gilmour of the Vancouver Sun wrote with humorous exasperation that Blyth, “is one of the sweetest gals any columnist could ever hope to talk with—and one of the most difficult to interview.  No matter what you ask her, all she does is smile and nod and chuckle and utter a series of gentle dove-like murmurs indicating her total satisfaction with every phase of human existence on this planet.”

That one cracked me up.

In her senior years, celebrated as a veteran of old Hollywood at benefits or being interviewed at film festivals, Ann Blyth is invariably described as elegant, classy, drawing awed remarks on her still stunning beauty.  Even more thought-provoking is her character and the career choices she’s made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

 

Look at the photo above, which is striking for its sweetness of attitude—we may notice the girl is quite pretty, but there is more to read in the glance she gives the camera.  A slight lowered tilt of the head, a calm, level gaze that invites as much as it withholds from the viewer.  She's studying us as much as we are studying her.  An actor’s audition headshot, or a publicity photo from her Broadway turn in Watch on the Rhine?  I don’t know.  But you can see the girl in this photo, young Ann, is carefully tended. 

She was the gently-bred daughter of an Irish immigrant, a mother she adored.

For this year-long series, I’m not going to dwell on Ann Blyth’s personal life too deeply, rather touching upon her private life only as it bears upon her career.  Nor am I going to proceed in chronological order, for I want to present this series as snapshots of moments.  We’ll be leaping back and forth across the years like time travelers playing hopscotch.

But today we need to start at the beginning, if only for a foundation from which to leap first.   She was born in Mt. Kisco, New York in 1928, but never actually lived there.  Mrs. Blyth was visiting her sister at the time of Ann’s birth.  (Her name was Anne, but lost the ‘e’ on Anne when she went to Hollywood.  Ann remarked in an interview that her surname also once carried an 'e' on the end.  Perhaps for a previous generation?  Silent vowels are easily misplaced in transit if they are not firmly affixed.)  Ann grew up in a fourth-floor walkup by the river in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a world narrowed to her mother and a sister who was some ten years her senior (her father left the family when she was still a child), and a few city blocks.  They struggled financially.  Her mother took in washing to make ends meet.  (One columnist would later write that Mrs. Blyth once worked for actor Joseph Cotten as a housekeeper.)

In an interview quoted by author Karen Burroughs Hannsberry in Femme Noir-Bad Girls of Film, Ann recalls a "rather meager" childhood:

The fact that my father left my mother with two daughters to raise is, of course, something many families and children have to face...My mother faced it, as indeed anyone who knew her and loved her felt she would.  And she always saw to it that my sister and I had enough to eat, and clean, pretty clothes on our backs--but I know that it wasn't easy for her.

Ann’s very early desire to sing and perform, and perhaps a precocious talent for both, led Mrs. Blyth to seek outlets for her daughter, which led to auditions and lessons, and soon, jobs.  Ann began singing and reciting on New York’s WJZ (on the NBC Blue Network) at six years old in the middle of the Depression.  She was one of the regular gang for several years on a children’s program called Coast to Coast on a Bus, where the bus "conductor" was Metropolitan Opera announcer Milton Cross...

“Coast-to Coast on a Bus—The White Rabbit Line jumps anywhere, anytime!”

It was a show to discover talented children. Future Metropolitan Opera star Risë Stevens appeared here, and other kids on the bus included Billy and Florence Halop, Billy and Bobby Mauch,Walter Tetley and Jackie Kelk.  They sang songs and hymns and recited poetry, and picked up guest “passengers” along the way.  Other shows she did were The Sunday Show, Our Barn, and Jean Hersholt's  Dr. Christian program.  (On the other network, little Beverly Sills, future opera star, was also doing a kids’ show.)  WJZ also gave us Little Orphan Annie, Amos n' Andy, and Death Valley Days. 

A teenage boy working as a pageboy in the same NBC building while little Ann was working at the microphone in one of the studios would meet her for the first time only many years later in California.  His name was James McNulty, her future husband.  Kismet, you might say.  (Yeah, we'll get to that movie down the road.)

Of these early years, Ann gives us a brief glimpse in an article syndicated in newspapers and published in a collection of stories of faith conquering adversity, edited by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and published as Faith Made Them Champions. (The chapter is posted at the SE Entertainment blog here.)

“Mother worked very hard and her tiny body wasn't nearly as big as her heart.”

Mrs. Blyth was Ann’s cheerful emotional rudder, her advisor, and her close companion.  It’s interesting that for someone who did not come from a show business background that Mrs. Blyth, with apparently no “stage mother” temperament, was still able to guide her daughter through a world that was strange to both of them.

From an interview with The New York Times in 1952: "Life was one big struggle then, but mother managed somehow to keep me in parochial school and later in professional school.  She provided me with singing and dramatic lessons besides."
 

Ann was given minor children’s roles with New York’s San Carlo Opera Company, in Carmen, Pagliacci, and La Boheme, where she was introduced to the colorful and irresistibly larger than life storytelling world of opera.  She became a lifelong fan.  The opera company performed during these years at the Gallo Opera House on West 54^th Street, and Ann’s world stretched a little wider, all the way uptown.  (The opera house later became the site of the disco era’s Studio 54 nightclub.)

She had some small parts in minor plays, along with her radio work, and actor, later agent, Richard Clayton, who knew Ann as far back as their New York casting days and appeared on different radio shows with her, recalled for interviewer Sue Chambers in 1954 how the stage mothers of other kids at auditions would look pityingly at Ann, “the quiet, skinny little girl effacing herself in the corner.  But when the time came to read for the part, the other kids didn’t have a chance.”

But there were other jobs she did not get, and the Depression rolled on while she attended parochial school, later dramatic and singing lessons at the Professional Children’s School (then at Broadway and 61^st Street), and stood before the mic in the radio station.  

“When I tried for something better and failed, she would smile her wonderful warm smile, put a pert new feather in my hat, and together we'd go to St. Boniface's to pray.

‘Just have faith, my darling,’ she'd say cheerfully as we walked home in the fading light. ‘Something better will come.’  And it did.  It came so fast it was like riding a giant roller coaster clear to the top.  We two looked out over the whole world.”

Ann was called to the principal’s office at school.  Usually a heart-stopping moment for any kid.  Her fate was behind the door, literally.

Herman Shumlin and Lillian Hellman were there, asking if she would read for a part in Miss Hellman’s new play Watch on the Rhine.  Ann Blyth was 12 years old.

 

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

She did not know anything about the famous producer-director or the famous playwright, but she passed the auditions and spent the next year at the Martin Beck Theatre on West 45^thStreet (renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003) as her world now included Broadway.  Any Broadway play would have been a feather in her cap and a terrific notch on her résumé, but Watch on the Rhine was a major theatre event and its illustrating the danger of foreign fascism on American soil in the home of one sheltered family made it one of the most meaningful productions of the era.  Brooks Atkinson’s review in The New York Times lauded the power of that play to glaringly reflect the current political climate which inspired it.

“Lillian Hellman has brought the awful truth close to home…Curious how much better she has done it than anybody else by forgetting the headlines and by avoiding the obvious approaches to the great news subject of today.”

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

Cast members included Paul Lukas, Mady Christians, Lucile Watson, and George Coulouris.  (Lukas, Watson, and Coulouris would, of course, reprise their roles in the 1943 film.)  It was a monumental play, and if Ann, who turned 13 during its Broadway run, was not mature enough to fully appreciate the political message, she must certainly have been impressed by the prestige the production garnered.  Especially when she, along with other cast members, was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

She could also appreciate that, as author Hannsberry quotes, "It meant that for the first time in years, my mother wouldn't have to work so hard."

 

Postcard advertising the play, author collection.  Ann Blyth is in the top right photo.

Here are some photos of the production as published by Life Magazine in April 1941.

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

 

 

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

The show closed in February 1942; afterward it toured for nine months across the country, and Ann joined the touring company.  It was during this period they gave a command performance for the President and had dinner at the White House.  She recalled for The New York Times in 1952, "I was so excited that I still can't tell anyone anything coherent about it.  I still have a souvenir, though, which the President gave me--a beautiful green match box which has a ship embossed upon it with FDR worked onto the boat."

At the age of 14, her world grew wider still with every train stop in towns and cities across the continent.  Finally, they played the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles, where Henry Koster, a director for Universal, saw her and she was given a screen test.  By the time she performed with the touring company in San Francisco, Ann was signed to the Universal studio.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper spread the word in February 1943: "Henry Koster has little Ann Blyth...who was so good in Watch on the Rhine...when talking to her, he discovered she could also sing."

Her first four films, all released in 1944, were a series of small roles in B-musicals (which we’ll discuss in later posts), and then the big break when she was allowed to test for Mildred Pierce at the Warner Bros. studio.  (We’ll cover her role in that film, also, in a later post.) 

 

It was five days after wrapping this major film that Ann Blyth experienced an horrific event, and would spend her remaining teen years in a most heartbreaking series of personal challenges.

Her mother took Ann and some friends up to the Lake Arrowhead area in the San Bernardino Mountains to have a few days’ holiday in the snow in April 1945.  Ann was injured in a toboggan accident.  From her article on the incident in Faith Made Them Champions:

“One minute we were sailing down the hard-packed icy hillside like snow birds, then there was a crash and I fell on my back with a sickening thud.”

She was 16 years old.  She had fractured her spine.

“I didn't cry out.  The feeling was too big for that.  Involuntarily, from long habit, my spirit reached out for faith and halting prayers rose to my lips.” 

First newspaper reports called it a “near-fatal accident.” 

“At the hospital, the doctors were grave; my back was broken.”

She was told she might not walk again.

“At first, I couldn't look at my mother.  When at last I raised my head, I was startled.  Those warm, hazel eyes under her crown of auburn hair were actually smiling.

‘Have faith, my darling,’ she said.  ‘You'll walk.’”

Ann spent several months flat on her back in a body cast.

“I concentrated on high school work, determined to graduate with my studio class.  But still there were those long periods of just lying down.  The busy, exciting world I had known faded away and my life slowed down to little things.”

It may be at this period that Ann learned her later-to-be-celebrated patient demeanor.  From a 1953 Miami News article she was: “…long noted as the most serene actress in town…”

“A visit with her is like taking a tranquilizer pill,” according to a producer interviewed for an article syndicated in the Miami News in 1957.

“Miss Blyth is a singularly soothing young lady to have around,” noted an article in The New York Times from 1952, that called her “serene and almost childlike.”

And something else, a faith in which she’d been trained since childhood began to evolve into a source of strength that would take her into adulthood.

“I found myself blessed, for a new sense of prayer began to unfold to me.  Now there were not the busy times of telling Him what I needed, but rather, times of listening communion, of gathering strength, when my human strength and courage seemed to ebb away.”

After seven months, she was freed from the body cast, put into a steel back brace from her neck to her lower back, and allowed to take a few steps.  She spent several months in and out of her wheelchair, in therapy (which included swimming in Joan Crawford’s pool) and finally did graduate with her studio school class in her wheelchair. 

Years later, her teacher at the Universal schoolhouse, Mrs. Gladys Hoene (pronounced "Haney"), was interviewed on what it was like to teach at the studio school by the syndicated columnist Bob Thomas, who noted that so many child stars had unhappy adult lives.  Mrs. Hoene agreed, having seen first-hand the pressures faced by child stars and the peculiar circumstance of playing roles “that are far apart from reality.  You can’t expect them to have a down-to-earth attitude toward life.”

 

Publicity still from Universal Studios in front of schoolhouse. 

I believe Ann is 2nd from right, with Sabu just to the right.  Can you name the others?

Mrs. Hoene was prompted to “tell tales out of school,” as it were, on her former students.  She recalled that, “When Ann and Donald O’Connor were put together, they could cut up,” but she put Ann, who was reportedly one of her favorite students, in a different category than the other kids who might grow to unhappy adults.

“I think the exception is Ann Blyth…I would stake everything I had on her chances of success.”

She was not speaking of career success.  Nor did Ann, apparently, regard career success as her only yardstick on happiness, though she certainly remained very keenly ambitious and loved to work.

“Now, at last, my life was again the same.  Only, not quite the same.  I found within me an immense gratitude for simple things.  An acute appreciation of all I might have lost, all the things I had accepted unconsciously before.”

There was a bright, shining moment during her convalescence when she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Mildred Pierce (a heck of a get well card), and she attended the Oscars ceremony with her mother, a sublime evening of personal triumph they both shared.  The studio arranged for a special gown to be made for her which would hide her back brace.  The gown was pink, made of pre-war bengaline silk.

 Ann & Mrs.Blyth at Grauman's Chinese Theater, March 1946,
from a newsreel of the 1945 Oscars
 

What anguish Mrs. Blyth endured over Ann’s injury and long recovery anyone can only imagine, but the dark days were left behind by the renewed prospect of Ann’s return to good health and a bright future as a Hollywood actress. 

In April 1946, gossip columnist Louella Parsons remarked, "Ann is extremely ambitious.  Her career comes first in her life, and I think you'll see that she'll go far...I couldn't look at the sweet young face of Ann Blyth without feeling that she was something very special, and is not the ordinary girl.  She's well bred, quiet...."

This happy, hopeful time was cruelly brief, and in turn, eclipsed by another, greater tragedy.

Four months after the Oscars, over a month after Ann was finally allowed to remove the back brace for good, only a few weeks after her returning to work on a new movie, Mrs. Blyth died of cancer in July 1946. 

Ann was 17 years old, less than a month shy of her 18^th birthday. 

Despite sympathy from those around us, grief is inevitably an agony faced alone, even for the very young.  The very depth of our mourning isolates us.  Fortunately, her mother’s sister and brother-in-law around this time gave up their home in Connecticut and moved out to California to help during the family crisis, and stayed.  As guardians and parent-figures her aunt and uncle thereafter had a huge supportive part in her life.  Ann dealt—forever after would deal—with the loss of her mother through the prism of her religious faith.

“There was an aching emptiness.  Until it came to me, almost in a revelation, that she had not left me.  She had prepared me for her going as she had prepared me for everything else I'd met in life.

Reaching out again for my faith came the assurance that she would be by my side in every good, beautiful, and true experience, wherever I might go; a part of every decision, every success and every happiness –for they all stemmed from her inspired teaching.  They would become the flowers of the mustard seed of faith she had placed in my heart.”

Now we jump ahead several decades.  Have a look below at the video taken at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco July 6, 2006 for a special screening of Mildred Pierce.  Miss Blyth is interviewed on stage by Eddie Muller.  She is 77 here, elegant, classy, gentle, stunningly beautiful, and delightfully funny.  She’s slaying her audience.  Note how effortlessly she launches into imitations of co-star Butterfly McQueen and director Michael Curtiz.  She's good with accents; we can imagine the first accent she ever learned to mimic as a child may have been her mother’s Irish brogue.  Her mother was Nan Lynch of Dublin.  (‘Tis a grand name, to be sure, but I’m sorry to say I have no reason to believe we are related.)

Note how, at the very end of the video, she is prompted to sing a line from Kismet’s “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” – the strength and loveliness of her voice, the almost startling power of it.  We have to marvel at the still prodigious talent of a lady who, we sense, as Emerson said, became the person she decided to be.

Consider as well that, unlike everyone else in that theater, Ann Blyth has just watched the screening of Mildred Pierce not as a favorite classic noir, but something more akin to a home movie of herself as a teenager only weeks before her life so shockingly changed.  The other actors on screen were all friends and colleagues—and all of them, down to little Jo Ann Marlowe who played her younger sister Kay, are all gone.  They are ghosts on the giant screen.  A thousand people in the theater have watched the intimacy of her, a solitary survivor, watching her own past.

The whole interview is not recorded on this video, but you can read a bit more of the conversation in a transcript of the interview at Michael Guillen’s blog The Evening Class.  Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

Come back next Thursday, and we’ll talk about Ann Blyth’s underwater adventure, which included a four-foot long fish tail with lead weights in it to make her sink, in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948).

 ________________________________________

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 162.

The Evening Class blog, July 28, 2007

The Film Daily, July 24, 1946, p. 2.

Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs.  Femme Noir - Bad Girls of Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc.) pp. 32-33.

Ladies Home Journal, article by Cynthia McAdoo Wheatland & Eileen Sharpe, "Young Hollywood at Home", February 1957, p. 104.

Life Magazine, April 14, 1941, pp. 81-84.

Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1946, p. A8; also August 12, 2013, article by Susan King.

Miami News June 26, 1953, p. 6A; November 23 1957, p. 10B

The Milwaukee Journal, syndicated article by Sue Chambers, May 1, 1954, p. 3

Muller, Eddie.  Interview on stage with Ann Blyth, Castro Theatre, San Francisco, July 6, 2006.

The New York Times, article by William Brownell, October 12, 1952, p. X5.

Peale, Dr. Norman Vincent, ed. Faith Made Them Champions (Guidepost Associates, Inc., 1954).

The Radio Annual, 1944, p. 732.

SE Entertainment blog, August 5, 2012.

Spokane Daily Chronicle, syndicated article by Dorothy Roe, July 29, 1955, p. 11.

St. Petersburg Times, syndicated article by Hedda Hopper, February 18, 1943; syndicated article by Louella Parsons April 21, 1946, p. 39.

The Tuscaloosa News, syndicated article by Bob Thomas, May 11, 1955, p 5.

Universal Studios Entertainment Tumblr site.

The Vancouver Sun, article by Clyde Gilmour, June 28, 1952, p. 45