The Secret Lives of Hollywood Stars in Children's Novels

Deanna Durbin had a secret life, at least as evidenced by her two adventures told in children's novels: Deanna Durbin and the Adventure of Blue Valley, and Deanna Durbin and the Feather of Flame.  These began a popular, if sometimes rather odd, series of girls' books by Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin.  We learned about the adventures of other stars as well in exploits never told in fan magazines.

These two books were published in 1941 and spearheaded the collection that would be known as the Whitman Authorized Editions, though whether any star actually authorized these stories is quite doubtful.  They do stand as creative examples of not only the studios' ownership of its stars, but its wide-reaching commercial exploitation of the stars as its products.

One of the more interesting of the series was Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak, which was actually written by her mother, Lela E. Rogers, so Ginger must have at least known about the novel even if she didn't authorize it.  The story has Ginger dealing with a rough relationship with her mother, meeting her father for the first time, and in her job as a night switchboard operator for a hotel, ferrets out enemy spies in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.  A full day's work.

Most, but not all, of the books in the series were written by Katheryn Heisenfelt.

We see by the titles that many stars had a lot going on in their lives. There is:

Bonita Granville and the Mystery of Star Island

Jane Withers and the Hidden Room

Ann Rutherford and the Key to Nightmare Hall

Betty Grable and the House with Iron Shutters

Jane Withers and the Phantom Violin (Jane Withers was very busy.)

Betty Hutton and the Romance of Palmetto Island

Ann Sheridan and the Sign of the Sphinx (Look at her casting that wry eye at the whole idea.)

Jane Withers and the Swamp Wizard (Jane's back again in a weird swamp story.)

Judy Garland and the Hoodoo Costume

Shirley Temple and the Spirit of Dragonwood

Shirley Temple and the Screaming Specter (because why should Jane Withers have all the excitement?

Gene Tierney and the Invisible Wedding Gift (I find this title the most intriguing.)

Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse

And just so you don't think the ladies have all the fun, we have:

John Payne and the Menace at Hawk's Nest

Gregory Peck and the Red Box Enigma

Van Johnson, the Luckiest Guy in the World.

If any of you have read any of these books, I'd like to hear your book report. 

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In this previous post from 2010, I discussed some children's novels that were centered around World War II and published in that era.  I'll be writing a book on this subject, something that's been on the back burner for, obviously, a very long time.  My to-do list is so long it sometimes strangles me, and I have to shoot it.  But I'd like hear your input as well on books like the Cherry Ames series, the Dave Dawson series, the Ann Bartlett series, etc., all the pre-teen novels about the war.  I'll post more on this down the road.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.

Youth Runs Wild (1944) and Youth in Crisis (1943)

Youth Runs Wild (1944) and Youth in Crisis (1943) show us American teens led into juvenile delinquency during World War II.  For children on the home front, the war means neglect – and danger.

This is the third post in our series on how Hollywood depicted the experiences of children during World War II.  Have a look at The Piped Piper (1942) here, and On the Sunny Side (1942) and You, John Jones! (1943) here.

Youth Runs Wild, directed by Mark Robson, features Glen Vernon and Tessa Brind as star-crossed pair of teens successfully navigating their awkward years and the nation at war. They are left behind and left out.

We are shown even in the film’s first moments the message that, in the wartime emergency, we are not taking proper care of our children.  Jean Brooks walks down a city street with her three-year-old son, while a truck plows over a sign cautioning drivers about children at play.  As she proceeds through a working-class neighborhood, she stops at one rundown workers’ row house. Her parents live here with her fifteen-year-old brother.  Miss Brooks is returning home to live with them while her soldier husband is away.

Art Smith and Mary Servoss are her folks, who both work the night shift at the local war plant and sleep during the day. Their son, played by Glen (or Glenn) Vernon, is in trouble at school, skipping class to work in a local garage to earn money for a present for his girl.

Tessa Brind, literally the girl next door, is the oldest of three daughters of a couple who also work at the war plant. Her parents are even more neglectful, they go out to bars after work, or bring friends home to play cards (one friend openly leers at their teenage daughter) leaving the housework and the care of their younger daughters to Tessa. (Using her birth name of Smylla Brind, she was Ann Blyth’s understudy in the Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine in 1941, and went on to play the role of Babette in a touring company.  A writer and an artist as well, Brind would later take the name of Vanessa Brown in her acting career.)

Glen and Tessa have a sweet, rather innocent relationship, a stark contrast to their rough surroundings and rougher companions. Interestingly, they carry the story, unlike more established stars playing supporting roles including Kent Smith, who plays the soldier husband of Jean Brooks, discharged from the military hospital; Lawrence Tierney, a shady guy (he’s Lawrence Tierney, what else?); and Bonita Granville, who is a smart-talking tough moll for Tierney.  She provides the only gloss for this B-movie.

The neglected teens – seemingly thrown under the bus by their parents – will have unlikely support from Kent Smith, Tierney, and Granville, adults on the periphery of their lives and with no responsibility toward them, but who actually help them turn their lives around. Tierney, at first leading Tessa Brind astray, helps Glen get away from the cops when he and his buddies (including Dickie Moore) are committing a crime.  He regularly sends kids to the war plant at night to steal tires off the cars in the parking lot to sell on the black market in his garage.  Tires of course were rationed during the war.  This time, he doesn’t want Glen involved because he’s such a nice kid from a nice family.  (The car the boys are robbing has a toddler in the back seat crying.  This is probably the most heart-wrenching scene of the movie, but it actually happened that parents busy in war plants locked their children in their cars, having no other place to put them and no babysitters. There are no comments made about the baby in the car, we just see it and so the effect and our shock is far more profound.)

Bonita Granville takes Tessa under her wing when her folks kick her out of the house and she gets her a job in a dive. Ultimately, it is up to Kent Smith to put things right, taking Tessa to his in-laws house to live where she will be safe and protected; taking the boys under his wing and being responsible for them when they are paroled for stealing the tires; and helping his wife run a daycare in the small backyard of the company row house.

Things we may wonder about but which are never discussed in this movie: fifteen-year-old Frankie smoking openly in front of the grown-ups and no one seems to mind (cigarettes were rationed too.  Where did he get them?) And the fact that Kent Smith never gets to have a reunion scene with his wife and baby.  It’s all about the teens.

Not every kid can count on a Kent Smith in his life and so the message of Youth in Crisis (1943), an Academy Award-nominated March of Time short subject is quite important in wartime.  More terse and blunt, this interesting documentary carries the same message about the tension and anxiety of children during war and the teens going astray.  We begin with a line of young men stripped to their shorts undergoing examination at the Army induction center.  Most of them look no older than teens themselves.  We are told that many men are being rejected because of mental and emotional problems and the documentary explores what could be long-lasting effects on our society from these young people who are so troubled during the war years.

Teens without supervision are shown flaunting authority, getting in trouble, smoking marijuana, and the girls are portrayed as being the easy prey of servicemen on leave.  There is a mixture of frankness and delicacy in the delivery of the message of sexually transmitted disease and the alarming statistics of the sharp rise in crime since 1941 in burglary, rape, and prostitution.  Crime rates had actually dropped during the Depression.

Latchkey kids are seeing coming home to a house of dirty dishes and no mom.  Women are seen at war plants.  As a remedy, we are shown teen clubs and with a positive message and image of an articulate African-American youth speaking his mind in front of a group of white peers, and a roster of boys letting out their pent-up energy in the gym with the names showing variety of ethnicities.  There’s a lot packed into this short documentary: toddlers needing daycare, rising prices, rationing, race riots, and teens growing up too fast.

What happened to this generation of wartime excitement and angst?  They began smoking early, drinking early, and suffered growing pains like perhaps no other generation before.  Not old enough to fight in the military, they still felt the fallout of the world at war.  They were told they had to do their bit for the war effort, but there was apparently no assigned role, or not enough for them to do.

The documentary, though showing parents at the war factories, particularly women, does not indicate that women workers are to be blamed for the delinquency of the children.  It was still 1943 and moms were still needed the war plant.  But one wonders if, upon the end of the war, when so many women were let go from the factories, even ones who wanted to keep their jobs, their being forced out of the factories was a result of messages in such films as Youth Runs Wild, and Youth in Crisis?  Teens developing too much autonomy for good or ill was a concern during wartime, but it was a necessary evil when our hands were tied fighting a bigger evil.  The 1950s would see a return to what was considered a woman’s traditional place in the home. But the teens?

That did not stop the teenager from becoming a new force in society.  The genie was already out of the bottle and there was no putting it back.  We’ll take up that topic in a future March of Time documentary.

Come back next Thursday when we take up the plight of a child concentration camp survivor in post-war Berlin with Montgomery Clift in The Search (1948).

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

Movie Stars in Children's Books

“Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak” was a book for pre-teens during the 1940s, published by the Whitman Publishing Company. In an era when movie fan magazines and studio publicity men were batting around truth and lies for older kids and adult fans like a badminton game, the younger kids were fed pure pleasant fantasy to peak their interest in Hollywood stars and ensure their patronage for years to come.

Not only did Ginger Rogers have mysteries to solve, but Deanna Durbin and Ann Rutherford also had a go round at “Deanna Durbin and the Adventure of the Blue Valley,” and “Ann Rutherford and the Key to Nightmare Hall.” Clearly, you don’t need Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes when you have Deanna Durbin and Ann Rutherford on the case.

Joining the sorority of sister actresses who sleuthed when they weren’t shooting a picture, was “Jane Withers and the Hidden Room” and “Bonita Granville and the Mystery of Star Island.”

I don’t know if any young male stars were featured in any of the Whitman books, but if you know, or if you’ve read any of these potboilers, I’d like to hear from you.

Nancy Drew - Detective (1938)

Bonita Granville made four Nancy Drew B-movies based on the famous character in the series of novels for girls. This first entry gives us beginning and end titles with the silhouette of Nancy drawn as a shadow in the dark, carrying a flashlight and with the wind blowing her hair, her scarf, and her skirt before her. It is a typical image found in the illustrations for the books by Carolyn Keene (actually a pseudonym for a team of writers), and is wonderfully evocative of that girls’ mystery genre.

Warner Bros. specialized in hard boiled crime films of detectives and gangsters, but there is nothing hard boiled about the Nancy Drew series, which does not even follow the novels that closely. We do have Nancy, plucky, clever teen who sticks her nose in other people’s business, but Bonita Granville plays her with more cheerfulness and humor than her literary counterpart. Carson Drew, her lawyer dad played by John Litel, an intelligent kindly authority figure and seems to defend only innocent people, and spends a lot of time warning Nancy to stay out of trouble.

Ned Nickerson becomes Ted in this series. Played by Frankie Thomas, Ted is a bit more bumbling but a lot more funny than his counterpart in the books as well. Ted’s and Nancy’s relationship is more teasing than amorous, but the chemistry between the two young actors brings a lot to the films. Nancy’s other chums, “boyish George” and “plump Bess” are nowhere to be seen. Just as well, there’d be nothing for them to do.

In this first outing, the plot is fast paced, almost as fast as Nancy’s speech. A rich elderly woman is kidnapped, and Nancy drags poor Ted along on a spree of clues, thugs, and ineffectual police represented by Captain Tweedy to save the day. Ted is useful because he can tackle people and knows a lot about carrier pigeons.

Nancy’s famous roadster (for those of you who grew up on the original stories, you will recall she never drove a car; she drove a roadster. She never wore a dress; she wore a frock), is about the size of the Queen Mary. We can tell by the rear-screen projection whizzing by us just how maniacally fast Nancy drives. Nancy leaves the comfort of her palatial suburban house with its enormous curved staircase and goofy maid Effie, to scour River Heights for clues. (Or clews, depending on which editions you read.)

There is a lot of racing about in Nancy’s roadster in this film. We have a wonderful, essentially trouble-free world of two all-American kids who change their own flat tires, fly in biplanes with helmets and goggles, shooting aerial pictures with a Brownie camera and develop their own black and white prints, send Western Union telegrams, and also distress signals through the radio. They use Ham radios and know that bluebells are also called larkspurs. They face surly gunmen and Ted, good guy that he is, even consents to dressing in disguise as a female nurse of that era to help free the old lady held hostage in a sinister rest home. Resplendent in a dress white nurse’s uniform, white stockings and cap, and cape, he looks like Cherry Ames on steroids. (Unlike Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames never got her own B-movie serial. Must not have had a good agent.)

The real nurse (played by Mae Busch, who we last saw as the battleaxe Mrs. Hardy in “Unaccustomed As We Are”) inside the spooky house is being very mean to the old lady, who has a lot of money, which is why everybody is bothering about her. Ted is a much nicer nurse. When one of the bad guys flirtatiously hits on Ted, our hero bravely pulls out his compact and begins to reapply his makeup, virtuously giving the ne’er do well the brush-off.

Add a rumble seat and a roadster with a broken starter than needs to be cranked in order for the engine to turn over, and you have one swell adventure, at least one for the time capsule.

That’s all for this week. See you Monday. Have a good weekend.