THEWOMEN WHORAN HOLLYWOOD
Seventy years before #MeToo, female writers, directors and actors wielded serious power in showbiz. So what happened?
SIX ladies huddled over a lunch table in the MGMstudio canteen in 1938. Five of them remain Hollywood legends eight decades later: Rosalind Russell, Jeanette MacDonald, Myrna Loy, Maureen O’Sullivan and Norma Shearer. The sixth was an unremarkable older woman with bobbed gray hair.
“And yet she happens to be one of the most powerful personages in the entire motion-picture industry,” wrote gossip columnist Jimmie Fidler. “When she pulls the strings, world-famous stars dance, like puppets.”
She was Ida Koverman, second-in-command to studio head Louis B. Mayer, the invisible power behind the throne who kept his 6,000employee operation humming. “To all intents and purposes, she ran MGM,” said reporter Hedda Hopper.
In the age of #MeToo, as actresses expose Hollywood exploitation and female filmmakers are all too rare, it’s astonishing to learn how times have changed — for the worse — in the last 80 years. As historian J.E. Smyth reveals in “Nobody’s Girl Friday” (Oxford University Press), out this week, the American film industry during its “Golden Age” in the 1930s and 1940s was a model of workplace equality, with at least 40 percent of jobs filled by women.
The studio system, Smyth argues, protected talented women with stable, contract-based jobs that allowed many to build lasting careers.
“Hollywood would as soon hire a woman for an important job as a man,” said Julie Hunt, head of publicity at Paramount Pictures, in 1939, “and very often does.”
Studios fostered collaborations that helped many women thrive. Columbia’s “prestige picture” of 1936, “Craig’s Wife,” featured a female-dominated crew, including director Dorothy Arzner, leading lady Rosalind Russell, editor Viola Lawrence, and writer Mary C. McCall Jr.
Arzner, who launched her directing career in the silent era, honed the script with her writer line by line and kept McCall on the set for the entire shoot. Critics raved over the result: “Only women could so deeply get beneath the skin of another woman and so devastatingly expose her,” wrote film reviewer Mildred Martin. Russell’s role as a cold, calculating antiheroine established her as a star.
WITH female writers making up about 25 percent of the Screen Writers Guild’s ranks, women ran the story, scenario and research departments at many major studios. When McCall signed a seven-year contract with MGMat $1,250 a week, she joined a staff that included Anita Loos (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), Frances Marion (“The Champ”) and Frances Goodrich (“The Thin Man”).
Her first script for MGMspawned a 10-film franchise. “Maisie” starred Ann Sothern as a wisecracking showgirl “after money and men in that order.” McCall’s scripts stranded the character in exotic locales — a cattle ranch, a gold mine, the Congo — to seek her fortune. Maisie, with a James Bond-ian knack of landing a fresh slab of beefcake in every picture, became an international phenomenon and later a radio show.
McCall was elected to the first of three terms as president of the Screen Writers Guild in 1942. She negotiated the writers’ first contract with producers, increasing their minimum weekly wage from $40 to $125, and fought to establish rules on working hours, unemployment protections and credit arbitration.
Another screenwriter, Joan Harrison, became one of the industry’s top female producers. Harrison, as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant, wrote the groundbreaking, Oscar-nominated script for “Rebecca” (1940) that put a woman’s voice front-and-center — literally. It was the first film to begin with a female voice-over and presaged the technique as a trope of film noir. When Universal hired her to produce “women’s-perspective mysteries” in 1944, Hitchcock sent three dozen roses for her first day on the set. Spotting them, Harrison “took out a big cigar in full view of cast and crew and prepared to light up: ‘Just to prove I’m the producer,’ ” Smyth writes.
MGM’s supervising editor, Margaret Booth, controlled the dailies of every film the studio made and had the power to order reshoots at whim. She would frequently intervene with directors, writing new scenes when she found story problems in her nightly views of their rushes. Barbara McLean wielded similar editorial authority at 20th Century Fox. “Being the only woman, I’d get my way,” she said. “I was just like the female audience.” Both women scored Oscar nominations in the 1930s and ’40s, and McLean won an Academy Award for her editing work on “Wilson” (1944).
The most high-profile high-powered Hollywood woman of the period was Bette Davis, who relished shaking up the status quo. Her
Bette Davis was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where her changes were so radical, she was ousted after seven weeks.
first major leading role, in 1934’s “Of Human Bondage,” was a critical sensation, but her portrayal of the cruel Mildred was too edgy for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which snubbed her for an Oscar nomination. Outraged actresses, led by Shearer, launched the first and only write-in campaign in Academy history. Davis came within a whisker of an upset victory over Claudette Colbert, who won for the sunny comedy “It Happened One Night.”
Six years later, Davis served a tumultuous two-month term as the Academy’s president as World War II dawned. In solidarity with the war effort, she pushed for immediate changes to the annual Oscar ceremony: wooden statuettes in place of metal ones and a ticket raffle to raise money for war relief. It was too much for the traditionalist board of directors, which forced her out after just seven weeks on the job.
Undaunted, Davis launched a support measure of her own. She established the Hollywood Canteen as a nightclub exclusively for servicemen, who were treated to a free night on the town before being shipped overseas. Davis convinced dozens of her fellow female stars — including Sothern, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr and Betty Grable — to staff the Canteen for dances with “the boys.” (Actors were relegated to dishwashing duty.) Davis herself attended regularly. By war’s end, the Canteen had hosted 3 million soldiers and sailors.
SMYTH links the end of the war with the decline of women’s power in the film industry. Those who had been politically active became targets of the postwar Red Scare over alleged links to Communism. Davis, who had once campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt, was investigated by California’s state un-American activities committee in 1947. She muted her politics and made few films (apart from the classic “All About Eve” in 1950) over the next decade, turning her attention to her three children. McCall’s labor activism got her blacklisted in 1953 and drove her into poverty. She never landed another Hollywood assignment.
The rise of television forced studios to downsize, and female-dominated departments — scenario, research and costume — were the first to go. Some women managed to make the switch to the new medium. Harrison, for example, produced Alfred Hitchcock’s hit TV anthology series from 1955 to 1965.
Meanwhile, a new model of independent film production put “auteur” directors in control. McLean, exasperated by directorial meddling in her editing room, cut her last film in 1955 and moved into an administrative role at Twentieth Century-Fox. But Booth forged a strong working relationship with producer Ray Stark and remained active well into her 80s, editing hits like “The Goodbye Girl” (1977) and “The Way We Were” (1973). In 1978, she was given an honorary Oscar to mark her long and influential career.
But hers was the exception that proved the rule: all too few of her female peers managed to survive the film industry’s upheavals.
“Women owned Hollywood for twenty years,” a nostalgic Davis sighed in 1977. “And we must not be bitter.”