White lies

Movie stars had the worst teeth imaginable until an LA dentist invented fake smiles

THE Great Depression could have spelled certain doom for the film industry. Instead, the 1930s ended up being a boom time for Hollywood — 60 million to 80 million Americans went to the movies each week as an escape from unemployment and bread lines.

At the same time, the silent films that had been the gold standard of entertainment since the mid-1890s were being phased out in favor of “talkies.” But to talk and sing, actors suddenly had to open their mouths — often revealing a nightmare.

“Some of the actors had been poor, or lived hard and fast,” writes Mary Otto in her new book, “Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America.” “There were shantytowns around the studio gates, where aspiring performers camped and hoped for big breaks. The director King Vidor found many of the stars of one of his films adrift on the streets of Los Angeles.”

The 1920s and ’30s also represented a low point in American oral health: Brushing your teeth hadn’t yet become a standard, while easy access to sugar made tooth decay more likely.

Meanwhile, it was a time of upheaval for many silent-film stars. Now that they had to speak, a mouth full of bad teeth could signal the end of a career — especially for those known as sex symbols.

Enter a young Los Angeles dentist, Charles Pincus, who would soon become known as “the Dentist to the Stars.” He had opened a practice on Hollywood and Vine just before the stock-market crash of 1929, and business was slow. But when Pincus went to the movies, he saw future patients.

“The camera is cruel in its relentless exposure of the slightest flaw in the mouth,” he wrote in a newsletter. “A tooth turned even slightly out of line casts a shadow before it.”

His patient Joan Crawford had successfully made the jump from silent to talking films. But early publicity photos show a lot of gum tissue; Crawford, who previously had a hardscrabble life, suffered from root decay. In the early 1930s, she had her front teeth capped, making them appear whiter and longer; this, combined with a new habit of not raising her front lip too high when she smiled, helped hide her problem.

Even stars who became legends for their smoldering good looks started off their careers with bad — or no — teeth. James Dean was an Indiana “farm boy” who was “missing all of his back teeth,” Timothy Gogan, a Los Angeles-based dentist and protégé of Pincus, says in the book. “He wore partials [that Pincus made for him].”

Pincus would soon make even greater strides in dental innovation. Taken on as a consultant by the Factor brothers — of the Max Factor cosmetics empire — the dentist created a mixture of powdered plastic and porcelain that could be shaped into caps and snapped into place over the actors’ flawed teeth. Voilà: The veneer was born.

Among his starry patient list were Montgomery Clift, Fanny Brice, Mae West, Judy Garland and Bob Hope. For a few years, child star Shirley Temple was never seen without her veneers.

“Losing her [baby] teeth during the production [of the 1934 film “Stand Up and Cheer!”] entailed many different types of restorations, which had to be constantly changed,” Pincus said in a presentation to other dentists in 1948. “All this had to be planned so as not to hold up the shooting schedule, as one day’s loss meant approximately $15,000 to $20,000 [in] cost to the studio.”

Pincus’ “Hollywood veneers,” however, generally lasted just 10 years — putting some stars back at square one.

“Judy Garland had a bunch of spaces [between] her front teeth. So [Pincus] would make . . . slip-ons,” Gogan says. But when the star hit hard financial times in the 1950s, following her departure from MGM, she could no longer afford replacement veneers.

Ironically, it was Garland’s smile that had helped start the American quest for Hollywood teeth. Seeing the actress in radiant Technicolor in 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” after years of black-and-white films was a perfect ad for Pincus’ work.

Americans, buoyed by prosperity at the end of World War II, turned to cosmetic dentistry for themselves. Teeth tinkering has been popular ever since: As of 2010, the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry estimated it to be a $2.75 billion industry.

Pincus, for one, knew better than anyone that a killer smile could disguise a multitude of flaws.

As he once said, “A captivating smile showing an even row of natural-appearing, gleaming teeth is a major factor in achieving that elusive dominant characteristic known as personality.”