Cinema: A Star Is Born

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But scarcely had Metro's massive procurement machinery begun to move than it stalled. L.B. was ready & willing; Miss Kerr was more than ready & willing. But Pascal had so thoroughly snarled up his half of the contract that it seemed impossible to untangle. The chief difficulty was that Pascal had guaranteed Deborah a certain sum after British taxes. To Hollywood the price seemed prohibitive. Poor Deborah languished as helplessly as the rich man with the needle's-eye view of heaven. Then, suddenly, she became more like a bone at the vortex of a dogfight. MGM, Sam Goldwyn, Loew-Lewin, Hal Wallis and J. Arthur Rank were all trying to get at her. It was M-G-M which finally bought out Pascal, and gave her a new contract. For an unknown it was fairly fabulous—a document to raise loud whistles in front offices and low moans in dressing rooms; seven years at $3,000 a week, 52 weeks a year, no options; Miss Kerr to be starred or co-starred in all films.

How a Star Is Born. Miss Kerr was bought but she still had to be sold—to her employers. The obstetrics of star-bearing often seem to have as little apparent relation to the finished star as forceps have to a baby. How Miss Kerr came into her first Hollywood role is a fair sample.

M-G-M had paid $200,000 for the screen rights to Frederic Wakeman's cross, best-selling novel about radio, The Hucksters; Mayer had thought it would be good for Gable. Gable claimed shudderingly that the hero's flagrantly libertine outlook would ruin him forever as a great lover. The book's big sales and a denatured script brought Gable around. Metro decided to create its own star (Metro can create a star overnight as surely as Hormel creates Spam). Why not Deborah Kerr? But the producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr., was still worried. The Hucksters, he pointed out, is budgeted at $2,500,000 and Gable is one of the most valuable properties in pictures; why risk a new girl? The High Council compromised. It scheduled Miss Kerr tentatively for the role, pending a screen test, and cabled her marching orders.

From that moment, she entered a strange, new, hermetic world, beguiling, hypnotic and gently self-destructive. Thenceforth she would be bombarded by the ultraviolet and infrared rays peculiar to Hollywood, and the anthropophagous attentions most peculiar of all to MGM. She might imagine M-G-M saying, like the doctor in James Thurber's cartoon: You're not my patient, Miss Kerr, you're my meat.

Solicitude is nine-tenths of stellar possession, and MGM's solicitude began with the choice of transatlantic passage. As an R.A.F. pilot, Deborah's husband, Anthony C. Bartley, had shot down 15 confirmed planes. But in her new studio's opinion, it was inadvisable to risk flying flesh & blood that is worth many times its weight in gold. So Deborah and Tony crossed on the Queen Elizabeth.