The Star:Fan Responsibility Ratio

Fan Culture.

Surely it encompasses more than what I’m about to talk about – and surely I’m not an expert on all its aspects. But what has stuck in my craw lately is the question: where is the end of responsibility of a famous person to their fan base?

I’m speaking, of course, of Jeanette, but I’m positive that this question can/will/should be asked about millions of other stars – perhaps especially those whose image is “wholesome” – are they responsible to you, the fan, the nameless face in the crowd, the ticket-buying member of the public, the backstage idolater, the writer of the fan letter, the requester of the autograph – are they responsible to you every moment of their off-camera, off-stage lives?

Do you think they should be?

Do they think they should be?

In Jeanette’s case, I feel that at least one or two of those questions could be answered in the affirmative, and I think that’s grossly, damningly unfair.

When Jeanette was young, on Broadway in the Roaring Twenties, she was in a series of not-too-successful musicals (though her personal notices were almost always great), lots of them silly/bawdy/slightly naughty in the style of the day. When she was tapped by Lubitsch for The Love Parade, 1929, right on up through her move to MGM which yielded The Cat and the Fiddle, and SO famously, The Merry Widow, in 1934, before she was teamed with a baritone we know and love and the rest was history, she developed her screen persona as the sexy singing girl who spent a lot of time in her underwear or taking elaborate baths on camera. She was known as the Lingerie Queen of the Talkies, and said, as most of you reading this will know already, “I’m sure people must say about me, on the screen, ‘Good Gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going to take off her clothes – again?’”

But something happened at MGM, the way it so often did at the biggest and best of the grand old studios; Jeanette was given a type. She had a highbrow voice, an exquisite, well-bred face, and a talent for combining the fairy tale damsel in distress with a sassy raised eyebrow. She was a Disney Princess before they were a thing. In her movies with Nelson, she’s nearly always elevated in stature over him – the princess, the opera star, the opera star, the saloon-owning-non-bandit, the rich girl, the—you get the idea. Nelson is the soldier, the Mountie, the music teacher. She’s always a little high above us all, virginal, pure, and, as a magazine of the time commented, one of the best figures in Hollywood suddenly became swathed so deep in ruffles and crinolines that whenever Charles did get Marianne into that wedding night cabin it probably took him 3 hours just to get her undressed…! (The magazine didn’t say that last part, I did. The magazine talked about one of the best figures in Hollywood being hidden in all the period clothes.)

And hey, who am I to argue? (Well, I’m about to argue.) Her movies were phenomenally successful. She was given the class treatment all the way – Adrian, Stothart, C.S. Bull – all the top guys worked on her projects, and she and Nelson made the studio a crapload of money. They had a formula that worked, and so they worked it. Can’t really blame them, but one has only to watch her in Firefly, in Three Daring Daughters and The Sun Comes Up to just weep with bitterness over how horrendously she was limited by that formula. Her Nina Maria is hands down, far and away the smartest character she ever played; politically important, toe to toe with the men, diabolically sneaky, impossibly charming, layered, absolutely brilliant work. We are not distracted by Nelson and her chemistry with him (I mean that in the nicest way, Nels, but you two DO tend to go on…) and she really rolls up her sleeves and gets to work. She got a rare opportunity to be smart. Really smart, not just coyly clever. Her Louise Morgan and Helen Winter could have been the most compelling characters of her career, had their stories been treated as important woman’s stories, instead of “family” fluff. I love both of those movies dearly, but my point is – she had so, so, so, so much more to give as an actress, and in limiting her to the immediately lucrative, MGM stifled her talent such that we’ll never know what she could actually have done.

That’s a small digression, but it works back around to my point that the generation of people who grew up going to her movies, and the generation after them that fell in love with her when her films were re-issued for television – these people got an idea of what she must be like, watching her and hearing her sing.

The fact is, they weren’t all wrong.

And then, in 1939, she started going on concert tour, all over the country. She went a number of times. Over the next two decades, she put hundreds of concerts and recitals and two grand operas under her belt. Anyone bearing a membership card to either of her two fan clubs had a personal invitation from her to come backstage after the show and say hello. She always arranged it with the theatre security, and I cannot tell you how many hundreds of “meeting Jeanette” stories I’ve had the joy of reading. I haven’t read a single negative one. Ever. She took an enormous job upon herself and did it magnificently. When she was tired, when she wasn’t feeling well, when she had already given of herself for hours, she made herself available to these people and gave them amazing memories.

This generous woman also wrote a letter to the membership of each of her two fan clubs, faithfully, for more than twenty-five years, for their three-or-four journals per year. Musical Echoes and the Golden Comet always begin with a letter from Jeanette, as long as she lived. Added to that, she kept up a ridiculous mountain of personal correspondence with these folks, many of whom traveled great distances to her concerts and developed a real and lasting, if distant, friendship with her. She was included in their Christmas card-sending; put on prayer lists at their churches, she heard about jobs and marriages and babies and school grades and everything else. She was absolutely a part of people’s lives. When she dispersed her Bel Air home in 1963 and moved to an apartment at the Wilshire Comstock, she carefully packaged up possessions too numerous to make the downsizing move and sent them out to these people, all across America, little pieces of herself lovingly scattered among these loyal friends of long-standing, these people who had hustled backstage to meet their favorite star some twenty years before, written her their adoration and somehow the conversation had never ceased since.

There is no doubt, especially as her world grew smaller and quieter in the last few years of her life, that these people were a tremendous source of love for her. They made her feel adored, important. They remembered her when she wasn’t professionally active, they cheered her up when she was progressively sicker and sicker. Giving to them was something she could still do, even when she couldn’t perform.

(It may also be prudent to point out here that I’ve taken her heart x-rays to one of the prominent cardiac surgeons in my state, and his professional opinion is that her 1960 films are absolutely damning. She was sicker than most anyone knew, for longer than most anyone knew, and it breaks my heart to type that, when my office is literally filled with her attempts to keep going, even knowing she was a ticking bomb. She wrote(!) the most brilliant TV treatment in 1961 and filed it with the Writer’s Guild. She had so many ideas and wanted so badly to go back to work, but having discussed her case with this completely objective medical professional, her 1959 retirement makes horrifyingly perfect sense. It had nothing to do with her voice. She couldn’t get breath support to sustain the notes. She couldn’t get enough oxygen to her brain to carry a show. Perhaps she had that sort of live-like-you-are-dying approach with the fans, giving of herself as hard and long as she could, with everything she had to give them, because she knew she wouldn’t be here much longer.)

All this to say that Jeanette for sure, completely, absolutely contributed to the public’s perception of her. She knew she had a particular kind of image, and she lived up to it. She never let them know she suffered, that she was unhappy, that things weren’t all they were cracked up to be at home. She got, in her lifetime, thousands and thousands of letters shoving her higher and higher onto a pedestal. As one of her friends accurately commented, she deserved to be on a pedestal. But nobody should have to live up there. It’s unfair and it’s unhealthy. While it’s wonderful that she gave so generously of her time and talent, it’s dead wrong to expect her to conduct her life to the bullshit standards you’ve decided to apply to her – and during the course of her life and really in the half-century since it ended, that’s what has happened.

Jeanette had a truly outrageous sense of personal responsibility. Perhaps it stemmed from becoming the family breadwinner when most kids are busy worrying about ninth or tenth grade; perhaps it was simply in her personal makeup the same way her innate goodness was. She also had – to a fault – a teeming compunction to please. Easily guilted, easy to manipulate into acting against her own personal happiness or best interest in the name of doing what’s best for someone else. So…she was the perfect candidate for what she became: a woman trying with all her might to keep up the image, lest she shatter someone’s illusions.

It’s gut-wrenching, the way she writes a personal letter to club president Clara Rhoades detailing how bad she feels, how she can’t gain weight, how she isn’t getting better, but telling Clara to please not share that with the members, and in the same envelope, enclosing a letter for the Comet, chattering gaily away about this and that. It’s awful to read Happy Birthday Alone and then the details of a brutal fight with Gene in her desk diary on June 18, 1963 – her 60^th birthday – and then to see her lie through her teeth to the fans about how she spent her day. It’s not a malicious lie. She’s not a liar. It’s the necessity of her state, it’s the making the best of her status because she knows she’ll never get out of it.

Private Jeanette and Public Jeanette had vastly different realities. Public Jeanette covered for Private Jeanette as dictated by what Public Jeanette had become: an ideal, a safe, conservative, churchy, ladylike Princess Maytime, always with a kind word and benevolent gesture for a lowly commoner. There was enough of that in her, really in her, to make it completely believable. She WAS so many of these things, it’s easy to think that’s the whole story. Charming, kind, deeply principled, warm, loving, friendly, generous, funny, ladylike – all words that can be used to describe the real woman. No doubt.

Private Jeanette was also lonely, scared, frustrated, self-deprecating, unhappy – sometimes individually, sometimes all at once. I certainly don’t mean to say she was these things all the time, but her circumstances were such that she could not help herself, eventually. It only takes a few hundred happy marriage magazine spreads before the public really gets attached to that idea, and to admit you’re unhappy, tremendously unhappy, have been for years, how the thing is a fricking mess – well it’s tantamount to lying and Princess Maytime can’t do that, because to do that would be to shatter the illusions of the public, and then to be tried and hung in the Court of Public Opinion, especially in the era in which she lived. In so many of her choices, especially in the latter part of her life, she chose NOT to do so many things that might have bettered her state, because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone, she didn’t want to let them down. She believed in the power of one’s illusions. She believed in the power of sentiment, of old-fashioned decency, of make believe and pretty things. Anyone who is familiar with her comments regarding the entertainment industry in the fifties and sixties knows what I mean. She stood in staunch defense of the kind of movie she made, and while I wish she’d gotten to branch out and really test herself and all her prodigious talent, I understand what she means. We live in a world of precious little sentiment. I don’t know what on earth she’d do in 2018.

She tried her best to give her people a life example that lived up to her body of work. Because of that, she missed opportunities for happiness, for love, for improved health, for a potentially longer life, and for simple honesty that would have ultimately saved her so much time and trouble.

Surely she’s responsible for a good bit of that, either deliberately (when she did things like hand-edit articles about her to strike any references to her social drinking, so that people really believed she didn’t), or because of the way she was wired, to be responsible and to please people so they’d love her. Thank Anna MacDonald for that last part. Don’t get me started.

But how much of that is the fan responsible for? Why is it okay for someone to put that kind of responsibility on another human, to make someone else your example for living in such a way that it becomes an unforgivable crime for their foot to slip?

I get where Jeanette was coming from, albeit on a much smaller scale. I teach horseback riding, and have a whole flock of girls ages 9-17, some of whom I’ve had for many years. I feel keenly the responsibility to these girls to model good things for them. Good things with regard to our sport and good things with regard to life. I watch my mouth, in front of them. I watch my language on the social media to which they have access. I watch my behavior. I know they are watching, I know they are listening, and that matters to me. I have the complete trust of their parents, to be a positive presence in the lives of their kids, to be a trusted adult to whom they can turn, to have an environment here in my home and at my farm where they are safe, learning, having fun. I promise there are parts of my life these kids don’t know about, and that’s fine and as it should be. Where I differ from Jeanette (hahahahahahahahahahaha where shall I start?) is that I’m allowed to authentically live my life without apology, in an era that expects me to apologize less.

The demographic of MacDonald fan I have patience for less than any other is the people who “can’t bear to think about it” or “prefer to live in their own fantasy world” – I’ve seen both of those things in print within the last week. My suggestion, then, is to limit yourselves to the movies only, and don’t get involved in biographical discussions, because nobody’s real life is the way Photoplay spins it, and nobody’s real life is smooth sailing from beginning to end, even if that is comfortable for you.

Without allowing this to become political, I saw a cartoon the other day that had two identical illustrations, one labeled RIGHT and one labeled WRONG. “Right” said, I can’t, because of my religion. “Wrong” said, You can’t, because of my religion.

That’s how I feel about this. The inability or unwillingness to process the documentable underbelly of what this woman lived through (with or without Nelson Eddy) does not negate the fact that it happened, even if someone doesn’t want to participate. Just because someone has intimacy issues and/or a very strange relationship with sex does not mean SHE didn’t have it, and like it, with someone she loved. Or multiple partners. In short, and on whatever topic, the fan’s personal shit does not verify or negate her story, and I don’t know what it is about Jeanette that seems to attract the notion that it does. Your inability to process the fact that you spent X number of years buying into a façade, hook, line and sinker really has nothing to do with her life, and you’re really selfish to put that on her and demand that she live up to it. Someone once said that if it was true that Jeanette loved Nelson, that she would burn her entire collection. Like oh my God, really? Do you love the person or do you love what the person represents to you? Do you love the person or do you love the image? Do you love Public Jeanette or do you care about a whole gorgeously flawed being? I’m not sure some of you know.

Jeanette felt so accountable to this nonsense, to upholding people’s ideals, that she ultimately died in a rotten awful way because she did not feel that she could be honest about what was going on, about her health or her home life, because she was not being valued as a whole person, she was being valued as a beautiful beacon of something that doesn’t even really exist. If I knew absolutely nothing else about the relationship between Jeanette and Gene Raymond, Jeanette’s 1963 desk diary would make me ask questions about abuse in her home. True, she lived in an era where people let it all hang out a lot less, and also true, she had her pride. But when an incredibly straightforward and honest woman is doing these sorts of calisthenics to put the “correct” foot forward, it’s about more than that. Her mother didn’t love her enough, no matter what she did, how hard she worked, how high she sang, how much money she made. Her mother loved her conditionally. She lived with that reality until 1947. She knew damn well what conditional love was, and how easily it could be turned off. By the 1960s, the love from her fans was one of the biggest forces in her life. Would she risk turning it off by saying, “Look, I know I’ve made things look good for a long time, but here’s what’s actually going on…” – of course she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She needed what they were giving her. If she’d had a really secure home, I’d wager that would have been considerably less important.

Yeah, it’s sad. Yeah, it’s hard. Yes, it will make you feel deeply. It will make you intensely sad, if you allow it to, and I think you should. It’s depressing as hell to uncover the truth of just how hard some of this stuff was for her. But she lived it, and at some point, it feels incredibly disrespectful to her to simply opt out of dealing with it. Be here or don’t. Don’t dismiss her life because it makes you uncomfortable. If you’re going to get into this story, be open to all of it and recognize that it’s not about you. It’s not and never was Jeanette’s job to be one way or the other FOR YOU. She was hired to sing and make pretty movies. Her extreme generosity after hours and for all those years does not mean it’s okay to continue the tradition of demanding that her story only be written one way.

1962 Color Footage

Hi all!

Here’s a lovely thing that we uncovered in the holdings of The JAM Project! 8mm film of Jeanette (and the members of the JMIFC) at the 1962 ClanClave — which was also the club’s 25th Anniversary.

Most of you reading this will know the details of that weekend: Jeanette was directly involved in planning it, she gave a dinner for the group at The Luau restaurant (my friend Mary Lynn now has the check that paid for that meal…wild), she arranged for the group to tour MGM, have lunch in the commissary, etc. She invited everyone to Twin Gables, she posed for endless pictures… she was in general, generous, warm, delightful and perfect.

We’ve had this footage digitized for several months, but did not ‘break’ it before now because we wanted to show it as a surprise at the Mac/Eddy Club meeting on June 25th in LA. One of our members, Sandy Laderas, was a speaker at the meeting, sharing photos and personal reminiscences of the weekend and of meeting Jeanette and how wonderful she was, so she and I collaborated and The JAM Project provided supplemental material for her presentation. Mary Lynn brought the check and I put together a small talk that consisted of reading Jeanette’s letters – both to the club and to club president Clara, privately – planning the weekend and presenting this footage — in which you can see the then-eighteen year old Sandy in several shots, which was so cool. Why would we celebrate a JMIFC event at the Mac/Eddy Club’s meeting? Because of Jeanette — because that weekend was so indicative of her public self, of her kindness and generosity to the people who had loved her for years. It was just nice.

It meant a lot to Jeanette to give this weekend to her club. Her excitement in planning it was best voiced when she wrote Clara on May 17, 1962, saying in part, “I, too, am beginning to get quite a glow of anticipation. Just think how long it has been since I have met and seen many of the members!”

❤

These were the young people who dogged her footsteps at the stage doors and train stations of the 40s. She was fond of them — she always made time for them. To enumerate Jeanette’s darling, wonderful interactions with her fans is to write an entire volume on the subject. They were a constant, unfailing source of love for her, to the extent that she kept up every kind of charade to allow them to maintain their illusions. It wasn’t deceit, it was selflessness.

Jeanette was not a well woman in 1962 — and she hadn’t been for several years. She would not get better. After ’62, you can count her “public appearances” on a few fingers. Indeed, she left the group while they were touring her home so that she could go to the doctor — and though she downplayed it, and seemingly acted like it was a matter of routine, it’s pretty freakin’ weird that she’d have ‘scheduled’ something like that during this weekend, especially on a day when the group was in her home. One wonders what was really going on — and what this weekend cost her, in terms of health. Sandy Laderas speaks of Jeanette as not looking or acting ill, and, indeed, in the footage, other than Jeanette being extremely thin (her arms in the Luau footage especially give this away), she appears bubbly, charming and charismatic — exactly the way she’s ‘supposed’ to be; exactly the way fans would remember her from previous interactions. I noted that when she leaves the group at Twin Gables, she glides right up the stairs with effortless ease. She was on. She was a professional. She was a star. She was prideful. She was a classy woman, and a good one. She was not going to burden the group with her struggles. She was never going to let these people see her fall. It is absolutely consistent with everything Jeanette is that she be this way, and my inclination is to believe that if that doctor’s appointment could have been avoided, it would have been. So… something else was brewing. For me, this is an excuse to love her more — but knowing more all the time about the hell she kept to herself is heartbreaking.

To bear out my above point, on September 11, 1962, Jeanette wrote Clara, in a letter concerning other club business and general news, “I do feel better, physically, and while the weight hasn’t started to accumulate, I must be patient and know that it will come as my own energy returns to normal. The above is for your own personal edification. But I wonder if, in your letter in the magazine to the members, you could indicate that you have heard from me, and that I am feeling so well again that you thought they would all want to know. For your own edification again – you see, Clara, I have had quite a few personal letters from some of the members saying they are sorry I have not been feeling well, and I feel that these thoughts are not healthy. Instead if they send thoughts to me and for me of good health and energy, etc., it has a more affirmative reaction. I am a firm believer in the power of prayer and good wishes and happiness, as against commiseration, and pity, and all of the negative ideas that are floating around us.”

She closes with, “Thank you for your understanding and patience.”

That ought to tell you a whole, whole lot. And comparing her letters to Clara versus things like her 1963 desk diary and various medical records we now have — Clara knew more than the average bear, perhaps, as in the above excerpt, but Clara was still firmly on a need-to-know basis.

I love that picture.

Here’s the footage. Enjoy this extraordinary human being, giving her very best to people who love her.

 

Thanks once more to all who make this preservation and digitization effort possible. ❤

Guest Blog: The Misused Finances of Mrs. Gene Raymond

Friends, my partner-in-crime Angela has put together a hell of a good blog for you, using some papers from her holdings, and I’m happy to ‘host’ her in this space to share it. Anyone who attended the Mac/Eddy Club Meeting in Sturbridge on May first saw some of this material, but this was really the forum she needed to expand on it more fully. This information will not be shocking news to anyone with half a grain of sense, but you don’t have to take our word for it, as Angela is going to show you. Without further ado, here’s her post:

Pull up a chair folks, I’ve got a little story to tell and Katie, my collaborator in research and various other shenanigans, is kindly letting me use her blog to do it.

You know, sometimes it feels like we are conducting a search and rescue mission, and at other times it feels more like an archaeological dig – a long hard slog through layers of library dust and box upon box of moldering papers. But more times than can be attributed to mere coincidence, chunks of information drop into our laps like manna from heaven.   For example, this fragrant, yellowed folder with the typewritten pink label containing the redhead’s financial papers spanning the years 1954 – 1956 many of which are annotated in Miss MacDonald’s own hand. Actually, the documents in this folder and her “notations” do much of the story-telling. I just had to do a lot of math homework (which I hate) and much pondering (which I love) to whip it into a format I could present at the May 1^st Mac/Eddy meeting in Sturbridge. Alas, there was far too much material to cover in the allotted meeting time so here I am with the rest of the story.

I’ve been responsible for compiling enough financial reports in my over twenty-five-year corporate career to know what I was looking for/at. Jeanette, always astute in matters of business, was clearly in charge of the money according to the documentation in this folder. Emily West’s role as Jeanette’s secretary, was limited to administrative tasks such as organizing financial papers, reconciling bank statements against the check book and corresponding with the MacRaymonds’ various banks as well as with their business manager, Paul Jones. Jones worked for the LA firm of A. Morgan Maree Jr & Associates and the documentation indicates he managed the financial affairs for both Jeanette and Gene. Though one memo bears a signature block specifying the company as Bus. Mgrs. for Gene Raymond so it’s not clear if he was Gene’s business manager and they shared him or if something changed at some point. Of course, this was just a few months after an arrest warrant was issued for Jeanette for being a slumlord. So it was a pretty sensitive time for her and that may have had something to do with the wording. But more about that later.

The papers in this folder don’t account for each and every bank statement. Only records about significant events or circumstances in the couple’s fiscal history during this period were saved. Such records are typically purged every 7 years in line with tax requirements. These were kept because somebody thought it was important to document what happened. That same somebody’s hands were all over them as attested to by her scrawled notations and the lingering scent of her fancy French perfume. Luckily, it also gives us a glimpse at how they managed their money and precisely who was in charge of managing it.

The MacRaymonds’ monthly banking activities centered primarily around the co-signature account in the name of Gene and Jeanette A. Raymond. Household bills were paid from this account, and both Jeanette and Gene wrote checks on it for their day-to-day expenses: food, laundry, liquor, travel, household maintenance, charitable contributions, etc.  Paul Jones, the business manager, arranged to have monies regularly transferred to Gene’s private account or Jeanette’s concert account for their individual, discretionary use.

Like the well trained numbers geekette I’ve become, I put all the account transactions into an Excel spreadsheet, then sorted and summed up the results. The findings were eye-opening but not surprising. Unlike people, numbers don’t lie; they are constants – two plus two always equals four. Which is why a certain lying presidential candidate is balking at making his tax return public. But that’s a hop down a different bunny trail.

As you see above, over a 16-month period of time (February 1955 – June 1956) $8,400 was transferred to Jeanette’s concert account for her use while $13,050 was transferred into the Gene’s account for his. Remember, all the household bills, food, utilities, maintenance as well as travel and other expenses were paid from the co-sig account. Gene Raymond was drawing 1.5 times more money from their joint account for his sole benefit then his wife was for hers. In 1955, the average yearly income for an entire family was $5,000 so Gene was receiving a very generous allowance for what essentially amounted to walking-around money.

So who was funding the co-sig account? Not surprisingly, it was none other than Jeanette Anna MacDonald. Shocking! According to bank correspondence, Mrs. Raymond was the sole approver of fund transfers into the co-sig account from her various bank accounts. Below is a copy of a memo dated June 3, 1954 where Emily is notifying the bank that Mr. Raymond will be using checks on an account. The handwriting at the bottom of the memo is Jeanette’s. She is noting a $1,000 check was deposited to the account that Gene would be writing checks on it when he was traveling.

On the following day, June 4, 1954, Jeanette issues another memo to the business manager alerting Jones of 20k sitting in a non-interest bearing account as well as some mortgage shares that needed attention. Seeking to optimize these assets she gives him the explicit direction, “This, of course is under the Jeanette MacDonald set-up and I shall naturally wish to keep it so.”

Note, she was keeping Gene from getting his hands on her funds a whole year before the Slumlord scandal hit the newspapers in May of 1955. Katie has briefly addressed this embarrassing incident in an earlier blog as follows:

On May 25th, 1955, an arrest warrant was put out for our girl because an apartment house which was titled in her name was not being kept in good repair and she was accused of being a “slumlord” — in actual fact there were property managers involved who may or may not have been doing their jobs, but Gene was the only one of them who had anything to do with the property. (He just probably lacked the funds to make the investment, hence why it was in her name).

Flash-forward a year and a half. Jones addresses Jeanette directly in a memo dated December 15, 1955 informing her that if the business office releases all the checks written, the co-sig account will be overdrawn by $1,200. He suggests a transfer of $5,000.00 from the Jeanette A. MacDonald Property Account to cover everything, which she authorizes the next day, signing and returning the check almost immediately. One can almost sense her embarrassment.  So who do you think overspent the joint account? I am betting it wasn’t the economically cautious MacDonald!

In Hollywood Diva, Edward Baron Turk’s biography of Jeanette MacDonald, when discussing Jeanette’s motivation in marrying Gene Raymond over her former fiancé, Bob Richie, Turk writes” Unlike Richie, Gene had amassed substantial personal wealth. To Jeanette’s mind there was little risk that he would ever descend to the fate of his beloved father and become dependent on her for support.” Well, that’s exactly what Jeanette ended up doing, supporting Gene in a style in which, by 1954, he’d become very accustomed to. He worked in theatre and television when he wanted, played golf, traveled and did Lord knows what else at his leisure all while having the respectability of being a “happily” married man and an air force reservist of rank. Gene, no doubt, had some income from his acting work, but a quick look at IMDB is not terribly impressive. Mr. Raymond’s “substantial personal wealth” is much like the Loch Ness Monster, you hear tell of it often enough, but sightings are rare and specious. The money and subsequent investments amassed by his wife during her heyday as a Hollywood mega-star was the engine that powered the MacRaymonds’ finances. Jeanette, from her earliest days on Broadway, was always the family money-maker. Nothing changed when she married Gene Raymond, she was still a heavy-hitter who, as these documents indicate, was consistently reaching into the deep pockets of her stylishly cut trousers to pay the freight for their comfortable life-style.

The MacRaymonds – Christmas 1949

Speaking of life-styles of famous old-time Hollywood couples and their finances, let’s mosey on over to Pickfair for a glimpse at the MacRaymond’s good chums and fellow honeymooners, Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers.

And here they are in June of 1937, seated from left to right, newlyweds Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers and newlyweds Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond.

If you’ve read Sharon Rich’s book Sweethearts, you know all about the strange honeymoon cruise the couples took together to Hawaii. Seems the two grooms had a love on the high seas thing going on – with each other. If you haven’t read the book, get it and read it.

You just never know where this cast of characters are going to show up. For instance, this summer, I read the memoir of an ex-CIA operative/mob accountant/artist/Beverly Hills theatrical manager/money launderer extraordinaire ­­­­named Chauncey Holt. The book’s title, Portrait of a Scoundrel: A Memoir of Spooks, Hoods and The Hidden Elite, is a good indication of why it was published posthumously. Chauncey has been described as “a man of flexible morals, yet with a conscience.”  Yeah, this guy was crooked as a corkscrew but he knew where the bodies were buried (literally) and was definitely connected.

It was while working as an accountant (under one of his aliases) in Beverly Hills, that he was referred for employment by a high powered client to a CPA firm owned by Edward George Stotsenberg. Turns out this firm handled all of Mary Pickford and Buddy Roger’s accounting work including the Mary Pickford Trust. Holt, who got his start as a mob accountant for the likes of no less than Meyer Lansky, and had helped establish money laundering schemes used by mob joints as well as for legitimate businessmen ­­­(namely Joe Kennedy and Mosses Anenberg), recognized the Trust as a perfect vehicle for laundering money.

Holt, in his role as auditor lost no time in laying the groundwork for channeling dirty monies via the trust thus washing them squeaky clean. He apparently had a knack for making most people like him but more importantly, they trusted him. Holt liked Pickford, he said, “Mary had a very dominate personality, and was an outstanding business woman, the equal of any man before woman’s lib became popular.” In addition to a communal honeymoon, that was another thing she shared in common with Jeanette. Unfortunately, the parallels didn’t stop there. Regretting her haste in divorcing Douglas Fairbanks, Mary went on to confide in Holt, “I should have known I couldn’t dominate Douglas.” She also told him that she’d “been married to two men and a spoiled child.” Chauncey Holt believed her meaning was clear, the two men were Fairbanks and her first husband, Owen Moore. The spoiled child, according to Holt, was Buddy Rogers who he referred to as a closeted homosexual. The Mary/Buddy financial situation was almost an identical set-up to the MacRaymonds. Buddy maintained his separate bank account and their assets were segregated, but his were nothing compared to hers, and she found it necessary to support him according to Holt who was responsible for auditing their finances.

I wonder if Jeanette and Mary every had a good sit-down together to talk this through. Would have probably done them a world of good. Each had long and overly idealized marriages that were more or less shams. Two strong business women married to weak men, the toll that exacted couldn’t be calculated in dollars and cents. These two sweethearts of the silver screen kept their heartbreak concealed from their public. Each, in her own manner, turned away the true love of her life and suffered mightily as a result. Pickford hid from the world, drowning her sorrows in booze. Jeanette, who believed she could use her legendary iron will to make herself fall in love with Gene and out of love with Nelson Eddy had learned a bitter lesson – her heart simply refused to yield.  She worked frantically to keep it all going, the marriage, her career, the secret rendezvous with Eddy. But below the surface, all the guilt, hurt, and disappointment, quietly simmering inside a delicate body, was slowly killing her.

As much as Chauncey Holt liked Mary, he despised Buddy Rogers, calling him “a fading playboy who fell in love the first time he looked in a mirror.” In addition to his accounting wizardry, Holt was a legitimately talented artist making a large portion of his money from the serious illustration of medical and anthropology books –crook or no crook, the guy was brilliant. He painted a portrait of Mary to be used in connection with a retrospective of her films at the LA County Museum. He also did the art work for their Christmas card, a scene for the 1927 film, Poor Little Rich Girl.

Rogers, said Holt, was jealous and commissioned him to paint his portrait as well. He was given a photograph to work from of Rogers holding a golf club. He painted him as if he were outdoors with the Thunderbird Golf Course in Palm Springs, where Mary owned a cottage in the background. Rogers, who was 68 years old at the time objected on two grounds. First, that he looked too old and second, he complained to the artist, “You’ve given me the hand of a working man; I never worked a day in my life.” Hmmm, I guess that’s considered a bragging point in some circles! Holt was forced to paint a second portrait which Rogers again rejected because “I look too old.” I think this is a rather flattering portrait, the artist did an excellent job. At this point, I would have opted for horns and a Snidely Whiplash mustache if I were rendering it.

Portrait of Buddy Rogers at age 68. Artist: Chauncey Marvin Holt

Chauncey exacted his revenge by rationalizing the diversion of funds from the Trust which would in his words, “eventually have ended up with that arrogant parasite, Buddy Rogers, who would probably only lavish the money on one of the handsome, young homosexual prostitutes, that he often took to Palm Springs, or invited to Pickfair, where Mary Pickford was a recluse, who never left her second floor bedroom.”  I bet the photographer from Life Magazine never captured THAT party! Below is a photo of a guests attending a dinner party at Pickfair which the magazine did cover.

Clockwise from Mary Pickford in the foreground are Clifton Webb, Mrs. Harold Lloyd, Gene Raymond, Norma Shearer, Buddy Rogers, Mabel Webb, Marty Arrouge, Jeanette MacDonald and Harold Lloyd.

Back at the Bel Air home of the MacRaymonds’, a series of bank memos beginning early in the year 1954, tell their own story of irresponsible money management by Mr. Raymond resulting in a swift and decisive response by his fiscally meticulous wife who was most assuredly not amused.

On February 23, 1954, Emily sent a request to the bank for a copy of the January co-sig statement, cancelled checks and bank book advising them that by mistake these items were “burned”. Yes, that’s right, burned. Apparently someone was toasting marshmallows in the fireplace and decided to throw a handful of bank documents in to get a really good conflagration going. Yeah. Right. That’s it. One wonders exactly what story the culprit came up with. I bet it was a whopper.

Well, however they came to be burned, they were ashes and Emily was in the proverbial pickle as it was her duty to balance the checkbook, reconciling it with the bank statement and providing it to the business manager for examination. Below is Emily’s request and the bank’s response which was sent airmail special delivery.

Here’s the duplicate statement the bank sent which included dates and amounts but as they didn’t keep Photostats, there was no way from their end to identify what the checks were for. This is the way things were done in the dark ages, kids. Way, way before online banking.

Note the handwritten “It could be – Paradise Inn.”

 

Emily used this information, along with the check registry/stubs, to reconstruct a “record of checks” to submit to Paul Jones in the business office. She was able to account for all but two checks which (surprise) Gene had written but had failed to fill in the check stub. This was assumed to be for his stay at the Paradise Inn in Phoenix where he was appearing in a stage play, Design for Living.­­­

He’d already written one check to the Inn for $96.33 and had entered that on the registry. That obviously didn’t account for his entire stay there. Jeanette was already giving him an allowance and paying his living expenses. Was he now skimming money from the co-sig account to fund his extra-marital activities? Raise your hand if you think this guy was a lying sack of shit who was trying to hide what he was doing and how he was spending his wife’s money.

Then, in a memo to the business manager dated March 19, 1954, Emily sends Jones the reconstruction of the January statement advising, “I told you about the checks and the bank book stubs being burned, and the list attached will account for most of the checks. Perhaps the few left will turn up on the receipted bills. Will you please follow-up for me?” Thus, Emily washes her hands of the matter and no doubt, Mr. Jones will have a discreet talk with his client, Mr. Raymond. As if to leave no doubt of her meaning, Emily adds the following P.S. – “Mr. Raymond arrived late last night from Miami Beach. Mrs. R. is staying for a while as she caught a cold and is going to try to bake it out of her system.”

No doubt Mr. R. beat it out of town due to the extreme drop in temperature when Mrs. R caught wind of his clumsy maneuverings.

Fire and ice, indeed. Brrrr. Chilly enough for his wife to catch a cold. Funny, she didn’t return to the warmth of the California sun with him, preferring instead to remain in Miami to “bake it out”. With assistance, no doubt, from a former co-star of the baritone variety who was more than happy to light a roaring fire in her oven. He was always very helpful that way!

But wait, there’s more. The story takes another interesting twist after this debacle. By June of 1954, Emily is asking Jones for a listing of all the bank accounts and in November this year, Jeanette receives a response from a Bank VP to her inquiry on how to change the name on a specific account from Jeanette A. Raymond to Jeanette A. MacDonald.

By the mid- December, she has issued a series of memos to all the banks listed requesting the same name change be made.

The cracks in the MacRaymond union, which had been patched just a few short years before, were splitting wide open once more. By mid-1954, her relationship with Nelson, though not without problems, was back on track and heating up. Meanwhile, Jeanette is circling her wagons to protect her assets from a husband she no longer trusted. This is just the kind of thing one does in advance of seeking a divorce. The first step on an ill-fated journey that would end in heartbreak for her in 1957 when Nelson storms out of the lawyer’s office after learning his wife would clean him out in a negotiated divorce settlement. Too bad Nelson didn’t have the same foresight as Jeanette, he should have taken similar actions to protect his wealth from Ann!

It seems the shit hit the fan by September of 1954. On the second, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen writes of a MacRaymond divorce a follows: “Friends are shrieking ‘Nonsense!’ and ‘Impossible!’ to the rumors that Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond are writing an unhappy ending to all those happy years.” When, on the 17^th, Jeanette, suffering from a high fever, collapses and is rushed to the hospital, it is later revealed that in addition to a viral infection, the collapse was brought on by nerves and exhaustion. Whatever marital fracas was happening between Jeanette and Gene, it wasn’t a secret. Friends knew and they were talking.

Alas, I wish the story these documents told was a happier one, but tell a story they do. Both Katie and I feel this information has fallen into our hands for a reason and we both feel a tremendous responsibility to Jeanette and Nelson to get it right. Sometimes it feels like a lot of heavy lifting, so much was covered up for so long by people who conspired to hide the facts for their own profit. We have a commitment, a moral obligation to work just a little harder to find out more of the truth – they deserve to have their say. So that’s why we keep researching, digging, wading through boxes of “stuff” long forgotten in dusty storage rooms. Because the devil is in the details, and sometimes he has a name and a face – but he does NOT have the last word.

 

On Opera and Insecurity

In my view, Jeanette Anna MacDonald is one of the most talented humans in an era rife with talented humans. Aside from her obviously glorious voice, she was a better actress than she was given credit for (including by herself) and an excellent dancer. A real Triple Threat. One of the world’s great beauties and most gifted charmers, she held masses in the palm of her tiny hand (Side note: Babygirl wore a size 2.25 ring. What.) whether in a performance venue or later in life with her prolific and endearing letter-writing and card-sending to friends and fans alike. She commanded generations of love and loyalty. As a lot of first generation fans have died, many who love her today were introduced to her by an older person in their lives. Comparatively few remain who actually met her, but in talking to as many of them as I’ve been able, the stories all portray a darling lady, funny and cagey and gracious. I interviewed a soldier who met her — because she insisted on staying after her concert performance until all “the boys” who wanted to meet her were able to do so. She “shook every hand, kissed every cheek” and by the time my interviewee reached her, she had removed her shoes from fatigue and was still signing and shaking away in her stockings. Typical Jeanette. Her core group of insiders remained largely the same over the years. Her secret-keepers. She maintained unbelievably cordial relationships with all the major exes in her life. Bob Ritchie is still calling her pet names decades later when he’s writing her back concerning her autobiography! Sunny Griffin said it best: “Nelson put her on a pedestal. She deserved to be on a pedestal.” Yes. Yes, she did. But not in the creepy JMIFC Golden Voiced Angel Diva Princess Snow Queen Perennial Virgin Doesn’t Cuss or Drink or Smoke way. More in the This is a Good and Kind Human Who is Doing the Best She Can Navigating a Difficult Life Scenario and Trying to Please Everyone with More Plates in the Air than You or I Will Ever Have and People Still Love Her and Want to Help Her because She is Worth It and has a Maddening Tendency to Put Her Own Happiness Last way.

Yet, despite the fact that she, by her own admission, had been, “Very, very blessed,” she also admitted, “My problems, I have glossed over, simply because they’re not as pleasant to tell about, for one thing. There are plenty of them, plenty of vicissitudes I had, many, many set-backs, and many disappointments. I had to do a lot of things I hated doing.”

This woman, who gave so much to so many, who at several different points of her life had the world at her feet, was fraught with crippling self-doubt and a lack of self-confidence and self-worth that is downright frightening. It stemmed from a childhood-then-womanhood of trying to please the mother who didn’t love her enough, who never made her feel that she WAS enough, whose best praise was “pretty good” — and it led into a string of self-sacrificing decisions that would steer the many-times unhappy course of her personal and professional lives. It can be hard to reconcile this side of Jeanette’s nature with the clever, far-sighted woman who sat out of work for months waiting for Gable to do San Francisco, who conducted herself around the country on tours, who was notoriously money-savvy. The fact is, Jeanette was excellent at giving the impression of control, of having a plan, and many times this could not have been further from the truth. Also present here is the adult woman who was afraid of the dark, who had to call secretary Emily into her bedroom at night to read to her and rub her neck (apparently Husband of the Century Gene is not capable of satisfactorily putting the Mac down for night-night) to help her fall asleep, and when Emily would start to creep out, a voice from the darkness would say, “I’m not asleep.”

God. She was such a baby on some levels. It’s the most heartbreaking/endearing thing ever. That’s the dichotomy that is Jeanette. That’s what Nelson Eddy termed the “girl-woman” — and he loved that in her. His nurturing nature (he’s literally SUCH a Cancer and she is SUCH a Gemini) made him a perfect person to handle the MacFreakouts. I am not downplaying his faults, but by God he was good at that, with her. He petted, he reassured, he was guardian to the girl and lover to the woman. Indeed, Nelson got his first kiss from her because he had listened to her cry her eyes out in his car after opera people snubbed her at a party that was their first “real” date. On the subject of Jeanette and sleep, Nelson said once, “There’s nowhere she gets it better than in my arms.” Indeed, she “slept like a baby” without her customary night-light, with Nelson in bed with her. By day, she was a businesswoman, a professional, sharp and astute. By night, she wanted to be held; she wanted to be somebody’s baby, to belong to someone. She never got over that desperate need for emotional intimacy, denied her by Anna at the beginning and by others in her life at the end. Our girl was not a loner. The days and days of interminable solitary waiting for the Inevitable at the end of her life are the cruelest form of torture that could possibly have been conceived. Her tears and insecurities frustrated the hell out of comparatively cold and awkward Gene Raymond. “I had to learn not to make an issue of anything, not to argue…I had to learn early that tears would get me nowhere,” “If I had to weep, I wept alone,” she wrote in her autobiography, continuing, “He accused me once, early in our marriage: You’re putting on an act, just like my mother used to. How could I forget words like those?”

My point in illustrating these sides of the person that was Jeanette MacDonald is that these insecurities followed her throughout her life, causing her to regress surprisingly from the professional adult to the child practically begging to be accepted and loved. As a digression, I believe this is related to why she never REALLY bucked the system, told Mayer to go fuck himself and married the man she loved, warts and all, instead of the store-brand version approved of by Anna B. MacMayer. It wasn’t really in her to break the rules, to disobey. She was too much of a pleaser for that, which is why she was wracked with a lifetime of guilt over the fact that she couldn’t stop herself loving Nelson, that she couldn’t stop participating in his love for her. Her greatest personal source of happiness, shrouded in the feeling that it was “wrong”. When asked, in an interview with Sharon Rich in the early 1980s, about how she felt about the relationship, Sunny Griffin’s instantaneous response was, “Very guilty. Very guilty.” Conversely, there were times when she would say, “The hell with the world, I’m having a good time. I’m in love and I’m being loved, why should I worry?” Those were the good times, the fun and easy times, the times when they would be daring and bold and do things like canceling or postponing professional engagements (yes, dears, they both did it) to be together. Of the thirty-two years they had, the tragedy is that they didn’t/couldn’t spend MORE time putting their love first.

“I want to be a grand opera star and buy a gold bed and a pink limousine for Mother,” the juvenile MacDonald is supposed to have said, according to her eldest sister, Elsie, and, indeed, in the 1940s, at the end of her tenure at MGM, Grand Opera was at the forefront of her mind. Jeanette decried her serious opera goals in later-life interviews, saying (I’m paraphrasing) that the public believes that opera is the ultimate goal for a singer, when it reality the recital (the singer + a piano, as opposed to a concert, which is the singer + orchestra) is the realest realization of a singer’s talent. I mean this gently, but we have a tendency, in life, when we have not met a goal or reached the highest level of our aspirations, to sort of re-arrange our telling of a thing to protect ourselves. All one has to do is look at Jeanette’s face on What’s My Line when she is asked if she ever appeared at the Metropolitan to know that this is a sore subject.

But…she performed in opera! Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette and Faust! In the forties! And got good-or-mostly-good reviews! So what am I talking about?

The Metropolitan and its snobby, political ways…and our Jeanette, whose staunch principles AND desperation to achieve a dream at whatever price absolutely highlight the paradox about which I’ve been going on.

In December, 1942, Jeanette had a meeting with Edward Johnson, the general manager of the Met. According to Jeanette, he “couldn’t have been more delighted” at the prospect of her singing at the Met. He suggested that she prepare Romeo et Juliette, because he had heard her sing parts of it in Rose Marie and thought she’d handled it well. She said she didn’t want to appear to be doing this as a stunt; she wanted to get into the Met on her own merits as a singer. He countered that one way to do that would be for her to enroll in Julliard, that they contribute $25,000.00 to the Met every year and so the Met sees fit to present one of their outstanding singers, every year. Jeanette said she couldn’t abide the idea of being so disloyal to her vocal teacher, Grace Newell, and while I believe that, I think that coaching privately as she did with Grace and Lotte Lehmann was one thing, but formally enrolling in school was not something she was all about—for a myriad of reasons. But I mean really, school??? For Jeanette, in the forties? They left it at a temporary draw, with Johnson’s assurances that he would “work on an angle with the Board of Directors”. So Jeanette left “on a cloud” (This hurts me, she was so freakin’ excited about the Met. I would like this post to not take a dark turn. Alas…) and set about learning the role of Juliet. By February, 1943, she writes Charles Wagner, her manager of some years, who in a few months would be unceremoniously fired, that she can now “sing ‘Juliet’ standing on my head, though I trust this will not be necessary” and goes on to say that she’s very anxious to get going with other aspects of putting the opera together, she’s about to head East and wants to devote March and April to rigorous preparation, so she’s not really feeling the idea of other concert dates unless they’re close by and handled easily and the money is better than what had previously been submitted to her for consideration.

Shortly after that, she attended a luncheon with several Met stars and Johnson, who held her arm and started some smooth French conversation in her ear while cameras went off. Jeanette says in her autobiography that it had “a rather disillusioning effect, and since I couldn’t encourage him, I replied in English.”

So. He makes a pass and she rebuffs it. Remember that. Her principles, and everything. [She also describes him as “handsome tenor / white hair / beautiful features” — a quick Google will bear her out on all counts.]

Meanwhile, as this is going on, she’s busy LAYING THE SMACKDOWN on Charles Wagner, her concert manager. We have a pile of correspondence between the two of them and one thing is abundantly clear: HE was working for HER, not the other way around. (So, anyone who thinks that he had her in some sort of imprisonment on the road where she couldn’t say eff the police and go meet Nelson if she wanted to is not understanding the nature of their relationship. Jeanette, with this man, does what she damn pleases and tells him about it maybe. He is not a Mayer in her life…nor is he an Edward Johnson. In the final analysis with Wagner, he pissed her off one time too many and she got rid of him, something she never did with Mayer, with Anna or with Gene. She loved her mother. She always wanted her mother’s approval and never seemed to totally get it. With Mayer and Gene, she was flat out up against a wall, and with Gene, it’s interesting because SHE was the main breadwinner and CFO. On paper, they are something of a disaster, but she was stuck. Angela is working on a guest blog with boatloads of MacRaymond financial information that is going to pin your ears back. Hate to say we told you so, but we have original paper proof that Jeanette was financing everything and giving Worthless an allowance and Worthless was overdrawing the checking account and “losing” and “accidentally burning” the bankbook.)

Here is a primo example of savvy business Jeanette at her icy, outraged, bossy best, to Wagner:

SHE is the boss and he just better get his act together.

But the other side of that coin is the woman who fiercely wants to perform at the Met, to matter as an important Artist and not just a movie star. She needs validation. She needs approval. The little girl needs to be reassured that she’s loved and valuable and wanted and in her mind, the Met can provide all of that.

So she opens Romeo et Juliette in Montreal on May 8, 1943. She played to a sold out three-week Canadian run, but the houses were such that they couldn’t make more than $9,000.00/night and the show cost $12,000.00/night to produce. Thus, though she and the opera itself (she was surrounded by a supporting cast of Met regulars, having no wish to be a standout among second-raters) were a critical success and a financial failure. Jeanette herself not only went without pay, but ended up digging into her own pockets to the tune of $25,000.00, which, spent more shrewdly, would have gotten her on the Met stage, achieving her dream.

All summer long, rumors are flying thick and fast about Jeanette singing at the Met. Louella says that Jeanette’s Metropolitan debut is “set for fall” but then Hedda Hopper writes on July 3, 1943: It cost Jeanette MacDonald plenty of her own cash to sing Romeo et Juliette in Canada. She hasn’t yet been signed to sing it at the Met. It would be smart of Jeanette and Nelson Eddy to team up for another picture, but quick.

She’s in, she’s out, she’s definitely in. The Met can’t wait to have her. The Met doesn’t want her. Edward Johnson promised her he was coming to Canada to hear her sing, then he doesn’t. This freaks her out not a little, because damn, she’s been spending all this time and now all this money trying to create for him “a Juliet of whom he might well be proud” and he doesn’t even come see it.

Then someone sends her this darling little item:

Not only is that horribly bitchy and unfair of Ms. Hecht, but it also is press that sounds very definite about Jeanette’s signing with the Met, and Edward Johnson’s name is given as the party responsible for signing her, which had not happened. Wagner lets Jeanette know that Johnson is pissed about the press releases and that’s why he didn’t attend her R&J in Canada – he was “put on the spot”. Jeanette takes that to mean that Johnson is somehow accusing HER of planting them to try and force the Met’s hand, things are just not looking so good.

Finally, on October 10th, she writes just about the saddest letter I’ve ever seen. It’s intelligently written (and LONG), but she’s floundering, she’s confused, she’s out a lot of time and money and nobody is talking to her. She doesn’t take to the silent treatment very well, our Jeanette. She spends three pages begging him to explain, apologizing all over herself for stuff she didn’t do, practically doing cartwheels to get him to please please please talk to her. This is totally abnormal behavior for a star of her magnitude. Can you imagine Katharine Hepburn doing this? Of course you can’t.

Here is the letter in its entirety, of which only part has been quoted in the various Jeanette books (including her own). The “enclosure” she mentions is the above item from August 29th.

And Johnson takes that PLEA for an explanation, and this is the response she gets. I kind of want to punch him.

He totally blew her off.

The Met didn’t want her. And he didn’t have the balls to tell her that.

And he let her go through ALL THAT. She said she would have preferred his “cold, brutal no” to all the “shadowboxing” — and you cannot blame her.

#boycottMetOpera (okay I’m mostly kidding but JESUS H. ROOSEVELT CHRIST YOU MAKE MY GIRL CRY IMMA MAKE YOU CRY.)

And the tragic thing is, this is STILL ON JEANETTE’S MIND in February of the next year. Where a Kate Hepburn or a Bette Davis might have thrown that middle finger in the air and pranced away, Jeanette still wants the Met to love her.

To the point where she’ll do anything. Remember how she got all high and mighty before about Johnson making a pass at her?

Well, pipe this letter, which to my knowledge, has never before seen the light of day:

J—-Jeanette. Um.

Honey, darling, love of my life……….did you just gently proposition the manager of the Met?

I–I kind of think you did.

Just let that sink in a minute. Yes, it’s delicately phrased. But this is 1944 and she’s married AND has a hot and heavy on the side who would be none-too-effing-amused by this. This dude Johnson blew her off last fall and now she’s trying AGAIN, this time with the etchings routine!!! Jeanette Anna!!

I’m NOT judging her. It’s pretty common knowledge that this was how you got deals done back in the day. It’s seedy and sexist and super gross, but if you don’t believe that was reality for MANY MANY MANY women, you’re delusional. They did what they felt they had to do and that’s all there is to it. But this is what I meant, earlier, when I said she regressed from professional adult to the child wanting to be validated…at any cost.

Jeanette may have been ready, willing and able to go balls to the wall with small fry like Wagner, her manager. She was a smart girl. And she had so MUCH talent and brilliance that it breaks my heart that she couldn’t just be like, “You don’t want me? The hell with you!” …instead, she keeps going back and back and back, seeking acceptance, and finally, at forty-one years of age, seemingly ready to go back to the early days and debase herself to see if that helps her cause. That is rooted in a deep-seated insecurity. When you have the confidence to believe that you are ENOUGH, you don’t beg someone to want you.

I use Katharine Hepburn as an example because I know her story very well. What did she do in 1938, when she was labeled Box Office Poison? She took her ass back to Connecticut. And then along came the Broadway version of The Philadelphia Story, and when Hollywood called her back, she owned the movie rights and she marched up to Mayer and demanded an UNHEARD OF amount of money for the script and herself as the lead. And we see where that got her. But like, when that happened, when she thought she was done in movies, she didn’t let people see that she was stressed out about it, she just said adios, mofos and bounced.

Jeanette was not equipped to do that. And for all of her acumen, ability and smarts, these people hurt her tender little feelings and I want to cut them. Recognizing and acknowledging that side of her is critical if you’re going to begin to get a real handle on who this woman was. She clung to her principles admirably as long as she could get her way with them, but when the chips were down, she was not above trying an alternate course of action. Long years in New York and Hollywood taught her about that. Sex was a tool, a business move, for a lot of these women. For Jeanette, it wasn’t until Nelson came along that sex got all tangled up with feelings and emotional weight and being in love, and the start of the Nelson Era is, in fact, the end of the Promiscuous Era. He made it good, he made it special, he woke her up and taught her about herself, got her to look through his eyes and understand herself. It’s erotic and amazing, what he did. She learned to value herself and her body no longer wanted to be a tool in the toolbox. Look at the difference in her between Naughty Marietta and Rose Marie. Girl —> Woman. That’s Nelson.

I say this to underscore how crucially, imperatively important this Metropolitan business was to Jeanette, in terms of identity and self-worth, if she was willing to regress to that sort of tired old trick—and even if she didn’t go through with it (this letter seems to be unanswered, so it appears that she didn’t, thank God), it crossed her mind to at least put out the feelers that could lead to her, in effect, selling herself for this ambition.

I’d love to go back in time to find Jeanette as a child and give her a good shake and say YOU. ARE. ENOUGH. You are brilliant and talented and beautiful and you. are. enough. You are not defined by your mother’s lack of approval or the Met’s lack of interest. So many people will admire and respect and love you because you’re awesome, and you don’t have to depreciate yourself for the rest of the world. You’re enough.

She never thought she was. And the ramifications of that are present everywhere in her life.

Many, many thanks to Angela for allowing me to borrow this priceless material for this blog.

 

“I Don’t See It.” / “It’s Just the Dress.”

My Dear Heads-in-the-Sand Saints,

I come to you in humble supplication to tell you that you’re right about something.

There certainly is no way that Jeanette was pregnant during the production of Sweethearts, as Sharon Rich has researched and confirmed many times over. She CLEARLY made it all up, for sure, and we, her faithful band, are so blindly brainwashed that we don’t know which end is up, so none of us bother checking anything out on our own and we just happily accept the “facts” like the little sheep that we are.

So many times over the years, I’ve heard people in Saintdom, when directly questioned about the “Sweethearts Baby” and Jeanette’s visible pregnancy in the movie, say they don’t see anything at all, or assert that it’s “just her dress.”

You know what? You’re so right.

Oh, no, she doesn’t look the same size from both angles in this dress, in that publicity shot and in a screenshot from the movie. Not her.

And here, in this candid shot with the man who is definitely NOT her babydaddy, on her birthday….well, I guess she’d just had too much cake, because she’s 500% not pregnant.

One of the favorite remarks from you, dear Saints, is that she doesn’t look pregnant during the Pretty as a Picture song, the only “questionable” shots are from the dance break. I’m sure she just had a big lunch, since she couldn’t possibly be pregnant. As I have pointed out before, there is a cut right before and a cut right after they dance, indicating that, in all likelihood, it was re-shot at a later date and then spliced in. She’s much, much bigger during the dance sequence. The screen shot above was from the song, from the “original” footage of that number shot at the earlier time, but here are a couple that definitely showcase that pesky dress being all weird and stuff.

This concludes my tutorial on what a pregnant woman doesn’t look like. I mean, I have more pictures, quite a few more pictures, but it’s a little redundant. I just wanted to solemnly support your rightness in all things.

I’m not even going into the details of the pregnancy and the loss of it. It’s heartbreaking. Gut wrenching. But rather undeniable. Read Sweethearts. Ask anyone you know, “Does she look pregnant?” …I’ve never gotten a no. Except from the American Association for the Promotion of Gene Raymond.

Love and kisses!

The Sterilization of Jeanette MacDonald

I’m ba-aack. 😀

So, yesterday, I posted a bunch of photos in one of my favorite Facebook groups, including one of Jeanette, Claude Jarman, Jr., and Lassie (or maybe it was Major, Lassie’s stand in?) sitting in a tent, around a heater, obviously cold, on the set of The Sun Comes Up, Jeanette’s final movie. This picture launched a whole LONG discourse between myself and several of the members of the group about Jeanette’s last two films.

Disclaimer: I love all of Jeanette’s movies. All of them, with the possible exception of The Vagabond King. So understand that the forthcoming criticisms are, yes, criticisms, but there is MUCH to love and appreciate about these movies just the way they are.

Also understand that being personally critical of Jeanette is not something at which I’m super good. I ain’t about getting hit by lightning and homegirl’s aim is pretty spot on. So.

Now, for Three Daring Daughters (can we please agree to refer to it from now on as TDD? Yeah? Great.), MGM cast the current “it” guy, Jose Iturbi, incredible pianist, heavily accented short little fellow, as Jeanette’s love interest. He’s supposed to rock her world so hard that she abandons the “shackles” of being a single mom to three teen/preteen girls and marries him on a whim during an extended boat trip. Oh. Okay. Well, for starters, our Jeanette is a tallish (5’5″), willowy beauty…and she’s legit taller than him in her heels and upswept hair. And for me, that’s sort of an immediate buzzkill. They look …not sexy… together. This is the movies and stuff like that matters, I’m sorry. Secondly, there is absolutely no passion. No clinch. No “I shouldn’t, it’s wrong, I’m so responsible but ohhhhhhhhhhh do it again, don’t stop……” scene that would have lent a shred of authenticity to the idea of this very strong, independent, intelligent single mom (she’s the editor of a high powered magazine) throwing caution to the wind. We don’t see her actually throw the caution. We see her blow out a candle and in the next scene she’s ditched the Serious Mom Wigs and has cute shorter curly hair. And as if to remind us how super wild and kinky the honeymoon was, that scene also has the one kiss in the movie—-an afterthought peck in fadeout. Like they’ve been married 112 years, not approximately 12 seconds.

And see, this ticks me off. Louise Morgan really, if treated better by the script, could have become Jeanette’s most compelling portrayal, but she doesn’t get half a chance. In the scene where she’s wearing this gorgeous orangey-coral dress and hum/singing along to You Made Me Love You, floating in via piano from the next cabin, you get a glimpse of what might have been. You see Louise yearn. You hear this low, soft voice, and the way she’s lounging around on the sofa…yep, this is a woman who is in touch with the fact that she maybe has been missing out on some Man Things since she ditched the girls’ father. She is sexy. She is gorgeous. She experiences desire. She has layers and feelings and longings—it occurs to her, and us, that maybe she’d like a kind of love that doesn’t come from her kids. Maybe she’d like to be a woman and not just Mommy.

(Now just imagine that the camera cuts to Nelson Eddy playing that damn piano. …Now that everyone is a little giddy in the pants, I’ll remind you all that it wasn’t Nelson. Many sorries.)

The fact that Jeanette is able to bring us these layers in that very short space of time is a tribute to what she is capable of as an actress. Then the camera reveals that it’s Mr. Iturbi and the viewer is sort of like, “…Oh.” But see, we see Sexy Jeanette for half a second, and lest that get dangerous (MOM CHARACTERS CANNOT BE SEXY!!!! ESPECIALLY JEANETTE MACDONALD MOM CHARACTERS BECAUSE SHE’S STILL A VIRGIN GUYS.), we have to temper that with Very Safe G-Rated Little Piano Man. I promise, I’m really NOT hating on Mr. Iturbi. I think he’s a great talent, Jeanette said he was good to work with, he was sweet to the kids (particularly Ann Todd who played Ilka, as she was a pianist), and he’s charming in a cute way. But as a romantic leading man for my girl Jeanette he is totally unsatisfying.

And THIS, friends, is the crux of the problem.

MGM—as many things as it did well and right with regard to the motion picture art form—mishandled the MacDonald sexuality.

Let me put you in touch with Jeanette Anna of the pre-MGM days.

They called her The Lingerie Queen of the Talkies.

Famous Quote: “I’m sure people must say about me, on the screen, ‘Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going to take off her clothes – again?'”

   

I mean, hell, Maurice Chevalier measured her boobs in Love Me Tonight:

And she totally mouth-kissed a girl in One Hour With You:

Yeah, yeah, that was all Pre-Code. I get it. I do. BUT……it’s also a little hilarious how the general public opinion of Jeanette contains words like “highbrow” and “prissy” and “proper” and “ladylike” and “icy” and “frigid” and on and on and on. THE ABOVE PICTURES ARE HOW SHE GOT FAMOUS IN THE MOVIES, PEOPLE.

She was on Broadway first. She was Musical Theatre, not Opera—and she really wanted to be “Opera”—something that would fascinate her about Nelson Eddy when they met. HE was “Opera”…..she was “Musical Theatre” and nary the twain shall meet. Usually. She proved ’em wrong. 🙂

So Jeanette gets to Metro and she makes The Cat and the Fiddle, which I think of as sort of a transition for her, because she looks prettier (she was always beautiful but EVERYBODY is a little prettier at Metro, that’s just how it works) but she still is retaining the threads of the Jeanette that the movie audiences know. And there’s some suggestiveness here; the main characters are shacked up but not married, there’s kissing in bed, she tells him about basically dreaming about him naked, etc. It came out in 1934, that pivotal year for The Code, which applied to all movies released on or after July first (Thanks, Sharon, I hadn’t remembered the date)—and it seems to have squeaked out just in time, as most of it was filmed in 1933. Then came The Merry Widow, which Metro produced but which brought together the team she already had established elsewhere: Chevalier and director Ernst Lubitsch. So really, aside from the sheer BEAUTY of the production—the sets and costumes are VERY Metro and VERY lavishly beautiful—it doesn’t really feel like an MGM movie. Lubitsch made everything he did have that pre-code feel. As Jeanette discusses in her interview with Tony Thomas later in life, his specialty was whimsical innuendo.

The big image change happened when she and Nelson teamed up for Naughty Marietta. The movie, as we all know, was a barn-burning sensation, launched the Mac/Eddy team and so on and so forth—it has MUCH to commend it on every level, but the fact of the matter is that gone forever was the Jeanette that movie audiences had known and enjoyed previously.

She’s stunning and startlingly beautiful, to coin a phrase, all swathed in period costume after period costume. She’s coquettish and coy but never seriously sexual. The typical pattern is that we see her first, she gets the first song, he’s usually not as important in life station as she is, he likes her immediately, she doesn’t like him, then she REALLY likes him but is hard to get, then they sing a duet and are officially in love until struggles force them to part but they usually are reunited (and if not, he gets to die on her powdered bosom a couple times). The “formula” is not complicated. Nobody cares about this. When the two of them open their mouths to sing, the rest of the world can go hang itself. They were the absolute best at what they did and that’s all there is to it. You can be someone who likes Jeanette better or likes Nelson better, I think we all have our preferences, but if you can’t recognize that it was TOGETHER that they were best known, best loved and did their best work…….well, you’re an idiot.

But the fact of the matter is that her figure, and indeed, her actual sexual presence, went from being her stock in trade (apart from her voice, obviously) to what Modern Screen (If I’ve mis-attributed that quote, please correct me, but I’m almost positive it was Modern Screen, in the little gossip blurbs, and I think I have the actual copy of the magazine where it’s mentioned) termed the “best kept secret in Hollywood.”

That’s what happens at Metro, friends. Family pictures, you know.

(I’m not knocking that either, really. I think we could use a hell of a lot more family pictures in this day and age.)

The thing is, as their personal relationship developed, so did their chemistry on screen. Jeanette and Nelson can’t help but be sexy together. Please observe this clip, a zoomed in look at their hands duing the Obey Your Heart sequence in Girl of the Golden West. I’m not going to go into all the back story of what was going on (but Sharon did a great and recent analysis of it, go here.) but the fact of the matter is that nobody in 1937 is going to DIRECT this sort of hand play in a very Code-happy studio environment. Just look:

I mean, please imagine that he was doing that to ANY OTHER part of her body. Pick one. That is some seriously sexy business right there, and her thumb is playing right back. My point is, moments of sexy show up in every single movie, whether the studio wanted them to or not, Hayes Code be damned. But why did Metro want her to be seen as such an innocent type? Could it be that Mayer, who long-nursed a personal soft spot for Jeanette, didn’t want her charms on display? Could it be that the more intense the passion looked with Nelson, the less the public would be enamored of the humongous studio sponsored marriage to Gene Raymond? I mean, selling Gene to the public as Jeanette’s husband was a hard enough job anyway. But marrying her off to the absolutely-NEVER-threatening-to-the-ivory-tower Raymond ensured that she was seen as prim, boring, prudish and dispassionate. And then her damn fan club took it from there and here we are.

Amazing too, how they are shunted off into separate pictures when things are a little too risky. Rosalie and The Firefly happened between Maytime and Girl of the Golden West. What else happened in that era? Jeanette’s wedding. Letting them be together at work was too risky. They might decide to rage against the Machine and run off together. Something might slip. They were blissfully happy, even though Jeanette was married, during the making of Sweethearts, until Jeanette lost Nelson’s child at around six months of gestation. The Mayer Machine just BARELY gets away with keeping that under wraps, and promptly ushers Jeanette into Broadway Serenade and Nelson into Let Freedom Ring and Balalaika. And what else happens? Oh, yeah, drunk and majorly fucked up Nelson elopes with Ann Franklin. And Jeanette tries to kill herself at the end of production on Broadway Serenade, to which she always referred as being her least favorite movie she ever did. (As always, these episodes and subsequent documentation can be explored in more detail by reading Sweethearts by Sharon Rich.)

It just annoys me that too many of Jeanette’s Metro pictures have her being a one trick pony—even if it’s one HELL of a trick. She was a good actress, a splendid comedienne, but also capable of beautiful depth of feeling, especially as she aged. Her performance in The Sun Comes Up is absolutely gorgeous. Helen Winter has a little bit more of a meaty script than Louise Morgan does in terms of internal character development, but is just as short on the leading man front. Lloyd Nolan was a great guy and a personal friend of Jeanette’s and Nelson’s, but he doesn’t exactly spark with her on the screen. Which probably suited everyone just fine, because again, Jeanette is not allowed to be sexy, and CERTAINLY not when she’s playing a mom. I mean, it makes you long for her to have played a mom like Maureen O’Hara’s character Maggie in The Parent Trap…THAT is a transformation. She’s a great mom, but the reunion scene between Maggie and Mitch is swoon-worthy. Very romantic and very, very sexy. I didn’t say it needed to be dirty. It doesn’t. That isn’t. But it’s real.

Jeanette was on her way out after I Married an Angel. She did Cairo to finish out her contract (I effing love that movie) and wouldn’t be seen again at Metro until Three Daring Daughters. There was great “Welcome Home” fanfare about her return to her old stomping grounds after years of absence, but it seems that once she was there, they weren’t really sure what to do next. She was still exquisite, still had the best soprano voice in the movies, and wasn’t really old enough (well, okay, she was 43, so according to what she liked to tell people, that would make her 39…and she looked late thirties) to be shoved around the bend into Mom-dom. Nelson strongly objected to her playing Mom roles, perhaps because he knew that once she did that, she wouldn’t be able to go back to playing a real romantic lead—which he knew damn well, publicly and privately, she should have still been doing. She rallied for Nelson to be cast in TDD and wrote Hedda Hopper that it would have been a “hot” box office reunion….and how right she was. That movie with Nelson would have been ENTIRELY different. And Metro would have had to admit that she was sexy. That he was sexy. That they were sexy together. This was no mannered, powdered wig period piece…this was a modern movie. If Louise Morgan had met Nelson Eddy on that ship instead of Jose Iturbi….I mean, can you imagine? Sexy, sexy. Perhaps that’s exactly why it didn’t happen. The studio wasn’t ready to make a grown up movie about grown up people. The idea that you can raise your kids and still feel the tingles for the right man who reminds you that you’re female……yeah, apparently that wasn’t a thing at Metro. Pity. It would have been great. Look at this candid of TDD-era Jeanette (with Iturbi) WITHOUT the wigs that made her matronly in the movie:

She doesn’t look old enough to be the mother of a high school graduate. She just doesn’t. Don’t effing tell me all that was left to her were Mom roles. Nelson, pal, you were EXACTLY right.

A screen capture from TDD. Look how gorgeous. Staaaaaaahp it.

Perhaps the best way to end this much-longer-than-anticipated post is with this anecdote:

Sometime in the 1940s, Nelson Eddy had occasion to see Monte Carlo, one of Jeanette’s Lingerie Queen Pre-Code films. (You know, the one where she runs around in her underwear and sings Beyond the Blue Horizon on a train. That song became one of her signature numbers.) Upon seeing it, his comment was:

“That’s the Jeanette I know.”

The defense rests.