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.

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

“Plymouth Adventure” (1952) presents the Pilgrims in an unexpected kind of soap opera about the captain of the Mayflower lusting after the wife of future Governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford.

Any film about any point in history is bound to be lacking the complete story, possibly because there never is a complete story. History is a lot more chaotic than a movie script; things don’t tie up quite as neatly as we might wish. Sometimes the attempt to bridge the gaps often leads to complete fabrication, producing a movie that may not have very much value at all historically, perhaps not even as entertainment.

“Plymouth Adventure” invents some things, like the romantic triangle between the captain, and William and Dorothy Bradford. It disregards others, like the relationship the settlers had with the Indians. The Wampanoag are given short shrift, and their importance in helping the settlers to survive the first few winters is not even mentioned. The film ends even before what we call the first Thanksgiving. Despite this, it is an earnest attempt at dramatizing what was surely one of the most remarkable voyages in history.

Spencer Tracy plays the captain, a cynical, crude man of the sea who is contemptuous not only of his Pilgrim passengers but of people in general. Gene Tierney is Dorothy Bradford, the object of Mr. Tracy’s sarcasm, lust, and eventually, love. Van Johnson plays John Alden in a rather small role, and a young Lloyd Bridges is the ratfink first mate.

We might forgive the fact that the costumes are a bit too Disney-like and clean, and that there are no authentic accents employed. The dialogue is strong and sharp, with some great lines especially by Spencer Tracy, it is really his movie, but the dialogue is not at all the correct speech of Englishmen of that era. What the film does well is special effects, with a terrific replica of the Mayflower used, and a storm at sea that is truly scary. It is the first chink in the armor of seeing the Pilgrims as all pious and brave. This film is probably the first attempt to show them as businessmen, as opportunists, as jealous and fearful, as zealots, as human beings. It is remarkable that a setting with such inherent drama and turmoil should be so little visited by Hollywood.

Directed by Clarence Brown (whose transition from the automotive industry to motion pictures is mentioned in this 2007 blog post), the film attempts to shrug off the fairy tale aspect of the Pilgrims and gives us corrupt company sponsors of the trip, and a lot of bare-chested, barefooted sailors climbing the rigging to unfurl the enormous sails. There is excellent camera work, with some terrific deck-to-topsail shots. We are given a fascinating and somewhat funny demonstration by Miles Standish on the cumbersome and dangerous operation of the 17th century percussion musket.

We are also treated to a brief sampling of songs authentic to the era, including a scene when land is spotted as the Pilgrims burst into the song whose words come from the Henry Ainsworth Psalter, Psalm 100:

Shout to Jehovah, all the earth,
Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;
before him come with singing mirth
Know that Jehovah he God is.

It's he that made us, and not we;
his folk, and sheep of his feeding.
O with confession enter ye
his gates, his courtyards with praising.

Confess to him, bless ye his name.
Because Jehovah he good is:
his mercy ever is the same
and his faith, unto all ages.

You can listen to another version of the tune here.

But as the journey concludes, the story begins to focus on the captain and Mrs. Bradford, and their hunger for each other. It makes John Alden’s flirtation with Priscilla Mullins look like puppy love, despite that he is a lonely bachelor and she is the only adult unmarried female on the trip.

An especially dark ending involves the actual historic event of the death of Dorothy Bradford and the actual dispute as to how she died. Before the English settlers (to avoid confusion, not all the passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims), established their settlement, while the Mayflower was still safely moored in the harbor at Provincetown, Dorothy Bradford drowned.

Her drowning was noted in history as far back as Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia”, but in 1869, a story in Harper’s New England Monthly suggested she had commited suicide. Though much of this story has been discounted, there are continuing discussions as to whether she could have committed suicide.

What is interesting is that the film even hints at this controversy. It could have ignored it altogether for a more prim and pious, and uplifting ending. Bradford, played by Leo Glenn replies that she would not have done such an ungodly thing and is immediately comforted, though with never a strong effort to convince, that she must have fallen overboard accidentally.

To help us accept the Pilgrims as human beings, more authentic representation from that era could be employed, rather than viewing their story through a 20th century prism. Another song of the period, a sweet and almost mournful tune by Thomas Ravenscroft, not used in this film, takes us to emotions even Pilgrims felt, and without the use of 20th century screenwriter’s dialogue:

Canst thou love and lie alone?
Love is so disgraced!
Pleasure is best wherein is rest
In a heart embraced.

That they loved and lost, and lusted, and felt deeply about it should not come as a shock. At least Hollywood acknowledges that.

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the film may have the look of one of the Hudson River School of romantic impressionist paintings. Maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Part of telling a story is re-affirming what we already know, as much as it is an effort at imparting to us something we do not.

Aside from this film’s slight attempt to crawl out from the iconic image we have of the Pilgrims, I wonder if the reaction of Americans in general to this portrayal of the Pilgrims is anything as strong as the reaction of someone from Massachusetts.


Massachusetts possesses the Pilgrims and to some extent is possessed by them. These names of the characters in this film: Winthrop, Bradford, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, Miles Standish, this is a roll call of the pantheon of icons of early Massachusetts history and are also the names which live among us today. Their descendents live here still, their names are on towns, schools, and it is possible to drive through Plymouth past the Miles Standish State Forest and stop in at the John Alden Gift Shop for a box of salt water taffy, and then head back to your room a block up at the Governor Bradford Inn. The pensive Pilgrim standing on the deck of the Mayflower II replica in Plymouth Harbor at the beginning of this post is not a Thanksgiving prop. These reinactors are with us the year round at Plimoth Plantation. (For more on Plimoth Plantation, see my post here from 2007 at my New England Travels blog.)

To watch this film and see John Alden portrayed by Van Johnson is more than a little startling and amusing to someone from Massachusetts. I imagine it could be likened to what a scholar of Greek mythology might react to him playing Zeus.

Something as basic as that can keep even a very good film from being taken too seriously. But then, no film should probably be taken too seriously anyway. For how many of us across this country is seeing our historical figures-cum-folk heroes brought to life in Technicolor by Hollywood’s latest hearthrobs an obstacle to making us believe?

The other thing missing in this film is turkey. Which reminds me…I’m about due to take the bird out of the oven. Happy Thanksgiving.

Dragonwyck (1946)

“Dragonwyck” (1946) is a fine example of gothic suspense, beautifully filmed. Another in our series this month of movies where the setting of a house drives the story, Dragonwyck of the title is a manor on the Hudson River of upstate New York in the days of the great Dutch landowners or “patroons.”

Set in 1844, at the height of the land reform battles wherein sharecropping farmers were demanding entitlement to their farms, Vincent Price plays the patroon of the Dragonwyck estate. He is a haughty autocrat unwilling to bend an inch in the life of hereditary privilege he has known. Gene Tierney plays a Yankee girl from Connecticut who is brought to Dragonwyck as a companion and teacher to Mr. Price’s young daughter, and finds herself captured under the spell of elegant living among the rich. But it comes at a price, for Dragonwyck is a place of secrets, and family curses, and restless spirits, and murder.

The mansion in this film does more than just provide a setting for the story; it serves to represent the proud heritage of its owner, Vincent Price, and the source of his haughtiness, his self-superiority. It is the brick and mortar personification of the man himself. Even his tower room, where he seeks privacy and solace, the highest room in a great mansion on a hill, places him physically above everybody else.

Price plays his cultured, arrogant autocrat with an irresistible mixture of charm and implacable stubbornness. Probably another actor might not bring the same multi-layered characterization to the role, and might play the patroon as only conceited or stomping about with one-dimensional meanness. But Price brings a fascinating appealing nuance to the role, and seduces the audience as much as he does Gene Tierney. It is his film.

Mr. Price as master of Dragonwyck, the sole ruler of this minor kingdom, controls with almost god-like power the lives of his tenants who must remove their hats before him and pay tribute.

He is self-satisfied, and stands before his ornamented windows admiring the requisite “dark and stormy” night outside, “There is no thunder in the world like the thunder of the Catskills. The lightning seems to set the mountains on fire and they roar back.” The only source of his displeasure is his gluttonous, neglected wife, who has given him a sweet daughter, but whose being female makes her useless to him. His wife can bear him no more children, not the son he desires for the sole purpose of inheriting Dragonwyck. Enter Gene Tierney.

The gothic premise of an innocent young girl brought to an imposing mansion where evil may lurk had been a device used by writers for nearly a couple of hundred years. It was already so popular at the turn of the 19th century that Jane Austen parodied it in her novel “Northanger Abbey” (1803), and was just as successful for Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (1847).

The difference here is we have an American story, and though the mansion and the Dutch heritage of its patroon does give the setting an “Old World” feel, nevertheless this is a film that explores the entirely American story of antebellum land controversy in the state of New York, where patrician landowners manipulated the peasant class which worked their lands, and consolidated power against the urban businessmen and the first rush of the rabble of immigrants. The Roosevelts were part of this Dutch wealthy elite, but their 20th century progressive programs would have made their ancestors, like the character played by Vincent Price, blanch.

Walter Huston steals scenes as the crusty Yankee farmer father of Gene Tierney, who prays aloud that the Lord will deliver them “from hankering after fleshpots,” and Anne Revere brings her customary authentic hardscrabble mother role as his wife. Jessica Tandy has a small, but scene-stealing role as the sprightly, steadfast and comical Irish maid devoted to Gene Tierney. Spring Byington has one of the most interesting roles of her career as the housekeeper of Dragonwyck. She plays the role with a slightly off-center brittleness, punctuated by a nervous giggle and somewhat crazed demeanor. She appears unstable, perhaps dangerously so.

She notices things and speaks aloud what she should not, remarking to a newly-arrived Tierney, “You like the feel of silk sheets against your young body. And one day you’ll wish with all your heart you’d never come to Dragonwyck.” It is prophetic, for Miss Tierney matures from a flighty young girl to a sadder but wiser woman through tragedy.

We have class wars, a lesson in regional American history of the 1840s, murder by oleander, drug addiction, and a ball sequence. You can’t beat that for stacking the deck.

Unlike many costume dramas of Hollywood’s heyday where the depiction of certain historical eras seems like somebody’s wild guess, this film actually portrays the 1840s in hair styles, costume, furniture, and props with admirable accuracy. I take exception with only one minor point, the line where Gene Tierney, dismayed at being rebuffed by the wealthy young ladies at the ball who represent the Dutch landowning families, laments, “I’m not from the top of the Hudson. I’m from the Connecticut River bottom.” Her hometown Greenwich, Connecticut is not located on the Connecticut River.

(Come to think of it, Katharine Hepburn lived on the Connecticut River bottom at Fenwick, so it must not have been such a bad address.)

Here, like “The Spiral Staircase”, (see post here) an outside character in the form of the local doctor provides a lifeline to the heroine, a hero upon whom she can depend for a sane point of view, who represents a brighter, kinder reality beyond the walls of this sinister place. Just as in “Staircase”, the doctor does not actually save the young lady; she must save herself. But we imagine that they will be together when the dust settles.

The mansion, we are told, is haunted by the ghost of a tragic ancestor, and we see how both Price and his daughter fall under the spell of this restless spirit, but the real horror of the story comes not from the supernatural, but from Price’s own actions, and his inability to adapt in a changing world that is ever encroaching upon his cocoon of Dragonwyck. Two terrific close-ups of Vincent Price are the scene where he gazes into the bassinette of his newborn son, like a greedy man looking upon a stash of gold he has found, awestruck that he has it, but somehow anxious that someone might take it away from him.

The second is at the end of the film when he notes with prideful satisfaction that the tenants before him are removing their hats, and he assumes it is because of their respect for his position as patroon. He never faces the truth. The gothic film ends with an inspired note of irony.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s read the novel on which the film was based.

Here is an interesting series of clips of photos and production stills from “Dragonwyck” as posted on YouTube. Accompanied by Enya’s “Tempus Vernum”, it drips gothic intrigue.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

“The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947) is notable for Gene Tierney’s charming performance as the spunky widow who shares a seaside cottage with her young daughter, a meek housekeeper, and a ghost.

Set in England of 100 years ago, we meet her in mourning black, which she eventually sheds when she establishes herself living independently after the death of her husband. In a time when widows with small children were taken in by relatives, this one avoids her husband’s dour family by striking it out on her own, upsetting the notions of proper female behavior held by them, the nervous real estate agent, and society of the day.

The irascible ghost of Captain Gregg tries to get her to “shove off” at first, but then the macho misogynist sea dog, played by Rex Harrison, takes a liking to the lady and allows her to remain, even dictating to her his memoirs, “Blood and Swash” so that she may sell it to a publisher for an income. It is an interesting irony that a character so boldly vocal about the faults of women, is also the one to accept her presence on an equal partnership.

They become fast companions, broken up only by the brash and flirtatious George Sanders, who helps get her foot in the door at the publishing house. Sanders is a writer of children’s books, and a painter as well who paints a saucy portrait of her in a bathing costume on the beach.

The Captain disappears, leaving her for her own good to a more practical romance with a human, but when Sanders is revealed to be already married, our spunky Mrs. Muir seems to lose some of her whimsical personality. The film shows the passing of long lonely years with only her housekeeper for company. As a child, her daughter is played engagingly by Natalie Wood, but the child grows up, and an elderly Mrs. Muir is still waited on by an even more elderly Martha. When Mrs. Muir dies in her sleep in her familiar chair, the Captain returns, and they walk out to some celestial horizon where we are meant to believe they will be together always.

What to do about a friendship with a ghost, let alone a romance with a ghost, is not an easy plot for a writer or director. How funny that we can spin endless fantasies about any manner of unlikely scenarios: time travel, aliens, monsters, etc., but a love story between a living person and the soul a person long deceased gets a bit tricky. We are stubbornly apt to try to infuse logic into the plot. This keeps us grounded to reality, but reality is just what the plot isn’t.

As well known as the movie, the television series which it inspired in the late 1960s also runs into a similar problem. The Captain and Mrs. Muir, played on TV by Edward Mulhare and Hope Lange, present a more romantic pairing, with part of the romance obviously being the longing over the fact that they cannot really be lovers. Rather than have the spirit of Mrs. Muir being united with the Captain in death, the show was simply cancelled after a couple seasons, avoiding this “resolution.” The search for a resolution when there is none is the conundrum.

The television version is also notable for the part of Martha being played by character actress Reta Shaw, who was no dishwater servant, but a more feisty housekeeper and companion to Mrs. Muir. She could make any line funny, dripping with sarcasm, and carelessly referring to the Captain in his grim portrait as “Laughing Boy.” Reta Shaw, who had performed extensively on television and the stage, made her film debut in “Picnic” (1955) which airs on TCM on Tuesday.

The Muir home interiors in the TV version are quite similar to the film’s interiors, particularly Mrs. Muir’s (and the Captain’s) bedroom, which pays homage to the film’s wonderfully evocative setting of living in isolation by the sea.

More sad than a romance that cannot be, is the part where the Captain, hoping that Mrs. Muir will marry George Sanders, magically convinces her that her relationship with the ghost of a sea captain was nothing but a dream, removing all her memory of him. Not having read the novel by R. A. Dick, I wonder if this was part of the original story, or an affectation of a studio uncomfortable with the unresolved romance with a ghost?