The star and her ‘Starfish’
The MFA has on display a brooch once owned by the legendary Hollywood actress Claudette Colbert
In the female firmament of Studio Era Hollywood, Claudette Colbert has a curious, even unique place. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were European exotics, so much of their glamour having to do with how unreal they seemed. Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Joan Crawford were American through and through, their glamour grounded in a heightened (and not infrequently overwrought) reality. Garbo and Dietrich inspired awe, even consternation. Davis, Stanwyck, and Crawford were almost aspirational. They were exalted versions of the women who sat in the dark watching them.
Colbert (1903-96) split the difference. “You look like you got class, yes, sir, with a capital ‘k,’” a fellow bus passenger tells her in “It Happened One Night” (1934), the movie that won Colbert an Oscar for best actress. The classiness was unmissable, but so was the fact she was riding a bus.
On the one hand, there was that flouncy name, pronounced in the French fashion (just like the host of “The Late Show With Stephen ColBAIR”). There was also the vanity that led her to insist that when photographed in profile it had to be from her left side. That insistence has become as much a part of Hollywood legend as Crawford’s abhorrence of wire hangers or Garbo’s passion for anonymity.
Colbert wanted her right profile avoided because it highlighted a bump produced by a childhood broken nose. Yet who would have noticed with that kewpie-doll face, a model of democratic beauty, with its large, wide-set eyes and big cheeks? (Colbert could have been Jodie Comer’s great-grandmother.) The same woman who played the title role in “Cleopatra” (1934) and a marquis’ daughter in “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” (1938) could also play the lead in movies with titles like “Secrets of a Secretary” (1931), “Torch Singer” (1933), and “She Married Her Boss” (1935).
It’s Colbert’s continental-sophisticate side that’s currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts. “From Paris to Hollywood: Claudette Colbert’s ‘Starfish’ Brooch” runs through Jan. 16. The brooch, which the museum purchased in 2019, is roughly 4 inches by 4 inches. On a base of 18-carat gold are set 71 cabochon rubies and 605 pavé-set amethysts. The brooch’s five arms are hinged, allowing them to move in starfish fashion. It’s quite something.
The exhibition also includes 11 studio publicity cards, an Alfred Eisenstaedt portrait of Colbert, and a short video, with MFA curator Emily Stoehrer talking about the brooch, which was designed in 1935. Colbert bought it in 1938.
Born in France, she was genuinely European. But her family moved to America when she was 3, and Colbert’s most famous movie scene is as American as you can get. It’s in “It Happened One Night.” She hikes up her skirt when she and Clark Gable are hitchhiking, quickly getting a driver to pull over. It’s pragmatism of the sex-appeal sort. The movie’s opening scene nicely encapsulates the Colbert duality. She’s on her father’s yacht (fanciness!) and to get away from him she dives into the ocean and swims to shore (can do!).
Colbert’s second-most-famous scene takes place in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Sign of the Cross” (1932). Playing the Roman Empress Poppaea, she takes a bath in asses’ milk. It’s preCode Hollywood at its most lascivious and most pretentious both. Two years later, playing a different empress, in “Cleopatra,” she wears a series of hotsy-totsy outfits, the most striking of which (because least concealing) is the halter top she has on when she rolls out of that famous carpet when she first meets Caesar. Yet being a Colbert character, she never forgets her manners. When this Cleopatra dies by suicide, she places the asp back in its basket and closes the cover before fading to black. Try to imagine Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor doing that.
Colbert would later play a frontier wife in John Ford’s “Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939), a heroic Army nurse, in “So Proudly We Hail!” (1943), and a noble upper-middle-class mother who goes to work as a welder to help the war effort, in “Since You Went Away” (1944). Such roles make it easy to forget how sexy Colbert could be. Looks were only part of it. Her throaty contralto may have been the foremost weapon in the Colbert arsenal. It was a voice with a splash of brandy in it.
DeMille directed “Cleopatra.” He was one of several notable directors she worked with: Ernst Lubitsch (”The Smiling Lieutenant,” 1931; “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife”), Frank Capra (”It Happened One Night”), Ford, Mitchell Leisen (”Midnight,” 1939; “Arise, My Love,” 1940), Preston Sturges (”The Palm Beach Story,” 1942).
The best of those movies are comedies, which speaks to what may be Colbert’s foremost talent: lightness of touch. “From the moment you looked at me,” she says to John Barrymore in “Midnight,” I had an idea you had an idea.” It’s hard to imagine another actress who could have done better by such a marvelous line, which came courtesy of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. Her reading is at once knowing and blithe, amused and reproachful, worldly and down to earth. Which is another way of saying it’s also very Claudette Colbert.