In Defense of June Allyson

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p> As Betty Hutton's understudy in Panama Hattie she got to fill in a few times. The show's director, George Abbott, was pleased, and gave Allyson a lead role in his next musical, Best Foot Forward. When MGM did the movie version, Allyson went west, and stayed there. So did Stanley Donen, who would soon graduate from chorus boy to choreographer and director, and Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, whom the studio signed to write the score for Meet Me in St. Louis, starring the MGM princess Judy Garland. The diva and the ingenue would become lifelong friends.

The Sweetheart of Culver City

Allyson's first starring role was as Navy man Robert Walker's bride in The Sailor Takes a Wife. Walker had been all dewy moonlight as a soldier courting Garland the year before in The Clock, to which this film is an uneasy sequel, but now he learns the price of romantic impulse. The newlyweds, holed up in an improbably palatial Greenwich Village apartment (at MGM, even squalor was laid out on the grand scale), are so ill-matched, the happy ending is either a reversal or a strenuous act of Hollywood's wishful thinking. Presenting the hard facts of postwar accommodation, then glossing over them, was MGM's way of offering a panacea, or placebo, to millions of men back from the war, wondering if they were returning to the best years of their lives.

That was one of the few times when Allyson's prim allure as a movie wife was questioned. (The Shrike, 10 years later, was the other big critique.) Mostly, her job was to talk sense into her men. Football star Peter Lawford, say, in Good News — she wanted him to hit the books so he'd be eligible to win the big game. Her only severe competition came not from the script but on the screen. Her sweetness might get upstaged by a flashier femme, as she was by Joan McCracken in Good News. Sometimes Allyson lost to a rival from deepest movie memory. In Little Women she played Jo Marsh, the role a much nervier young thing from Broadway, Katharine Hepburn, had taken in the 1933 version.

Still, back when wife roles were solid ones, Allyson was The Wife. But the movies weren't always glaringly sunny. Her three films with James Stewart tested Allyson's innate chipperness. In Strategic Air Command, a hymn to '50s flyboys, her co-respondent is a bomber, which almost takes Stewart to his death. She perseveres and sees to it that he does too. In The Stratton Story Stewart loses a leg; in The Glenn Miller Story he loses his life. She must support him, literally and emotionally, in the first; and in the second, she shows, with great delicacy and understated power, that grief is the inevitable last act for a wife's devotion.

The unspoken message of these films was that a woman, especially a good woman, has to settle. Compromise was the minor key in a movie's final fanfare. Allyson lost out on a few good roles: Royal Wedding with her idol Astaire (because she was pregnant with her and Powell's child Ricky), Johnny Belinda and All About Eve (because MGM wouldn't loan her out to other studios).

Her meatiest role, and the meat was deliciously rancid, was opposite Jose Ferrer in The Shrike, where she's the harridan who nearly drives her husband to suicide. Her performance was both stark and nicely judged — "good (and nasty)," Thomson says, approvingly — but it didn't vault Allyson into the realm of Serious Actress. It didn't set her on a new, thornier path, paving the way for her to play roles suitable for the decades to come, when the Wife role would be replaced by the Woman With a Past. Casting directors thought only of Allyson's past, as the sonorous voice of responsibility, and they decided, in effect, that her past was passe.