How Irene Dunne Succeeded Without Glamour

Here is one of the most remarkable success stories ever told - about the girl nobody thought would survive

(Remark: My copy of this article came without the original photo; obviously someone collected Irene Dunne photos. If someone knows which picture they used please let me know. I  always try to stick as closely as possible to the original layout.)

There is a tale accepted in Hollywood's innner circle concerning a major story conference where the problem was to find a title for the celluloid masterpiece just completed.

 After a couple of hours of debate the producer had an inspiration. "Hey, look, are there any bugles in the picture?" he said.

 "No, sir," said the author, looking pained. "Certainly not. Not bugles of any kind."

 "Then," said the producer thriumphantly, "we'll call it 'Without Bugles'."

 Based upon this bit of Hollywood folklore I propose to call this portrait of Irene Dunne "Without Glamour." Because there is no glamour in it and that makes it one of the most remarkable success sagas ever told.

 Somewhere back in the early '30s, Irene Dunne was working for RKO. So, as it happened, was I. We had at that time two women stars on the lot and we were concerned chiefly with their futures and their box office and getting stories for them. They were the glamour girl de luxe, Miss Constance Bennett, and the famous beauty, Miss Ann Harding.

 On other lots Mae West was knocking over exhibitors and audiences, Marlene Dietrich was spreading glamour thicker than honey and Garbo, who invented glamour but couldn't patent it, was Queen. Jean Harlow, God bless her, was the platinum blonde dynamo and - well, everybody had glamour. All Hollywood's gals had glamour.

 All but Irene Dunne.

 Even after her enormous success in "Cimarron," you could still get a thousand to one on Irene Dunne in the winter book. The picture, the part, the direction - sure, it had given her an outstanding performance.

 "But," said practically everybody, "she'll never last. Never really get anywhere. Nice girl - fine girl. Beautiful. Sings, too. Fine little actress. Good reputation. But you know yourself - she hasn't got what it takes. Might as well face facts. No glamour. There you are. No sex appeal. Too bad. She'll never get anywhere - you can't survive in this business without glamour."

 With all due respect to the glittering glamour girls of that day, time has told a different story. For if you take a good look at the screen and the box office of 1939 you will discover that Irene Dunne has survived. Not only has she survived but she has distanced most of her competition. Her position is at the absolute top and its security grows with every picture. And her real and deep hold upon the affection and admiration of American audiences is unequaled.

 To write a story about Irene Dunne is supposed to be a hazard. The spectacular qualities so dear to the writer's heart are, frankly, missing. So you will forgive me if, in trying to get over you via the typewriter the truly amazing and spectacular facts about Irene Dunne and what she means to the public, I wander about a bit. Because to me she is one of the loveliest and most worth-while women I have ever met and I'd like you to know her as I do.

 When I was in Hollywood, a few weeks ago, I was taken by my brother out to the St. Anity race track. On a Saturday you will find a great many Hollywood celebrities watching the horses run in that incredibly beautiful setting among the Sierras and the eucalyptus trees and the blazing flower gardens.

 Sitting peacefully at a table with Virginia Bruce and a group - just above us were Mary Pickford, the Grand Duchess Marie and Jimmy Roosevelt - I was suddenly started by such a wild rocket of cheering as I had never heard even over a Notre Dame touchdown. Sixty thousand people were standing up whooping as the horses came out on the track.

 "What in the world - " I said.

 "Wait," they told me. "Wait and watch. See that horse there - the last one - well, that's Malicious."

 "Who," I said, "is Malicious?"

 "Malicious has never lost a two-mile race on this track in four years," they said. "He's wonderful. Just watch."

 Well, Malicious did no cutting up at the barrier. Other horses rocketed and pawed and broke, but Malicious stood - a little bored, I thought - and got away to a fair start. Now, a two-mile race is a very long race, indeed. But when the field came by the grandstand at the end of the first mile I was bewildered and disappointed. Malicious was running easily and quietly and very unconcerned - fifteen lengths behind the rear horse in the pack.

 "You're all crazy," I said. "Why, I wouldn't give you a nickel for his chances."

 "No?" they said.

 The field went into the far turn and suddenly the loud-speaker boomed down to us. The announcer's voice was shaking with glee and excitement, "Here comes Malicious!" And again sixty thousand people begun to yell.

 Just how it was done I'll never know. Still running with the supreme ease of the thoroughbred, here came Malicious. At the mile and the three quarters he was even - coming into the stretch he began to make his bid. And sailed under the wire with uncredible aplomb - seven lengths ahead of the place horse.

 When he came back to the grandstand for his jockey to weigh in, he turned his head and looked up at the crowd and I swear he winked - well, maybe not, but his expression conveyed the impression that he wished to wink.

 When the parade of champions takes place at St. Anita each year, the stars and greats of Hollywood stand and salute - not the great Seabiscuit, not the Handicap winner, Stagehand - but their favorite, Malicious. It is the same with the entire crowd. They salute and cheer some quality in Malicious that they do not find in the more spectacular winners. 

KNOWING Irene Dunne's divine sense of humor, I am quite sure she will not mind being compared to that great thoroughbred, Malicious.

 There is something in her that isn't glamour, that isn't sex appeal, that isn't genius or temperament or beauty. It's the thoroughbred quality that never lets you down, no matter how long the distance, how tough the opposition, how far behind in the early race.

 It hasn't been as much advertised as glamour and it's quite as indefinable. But it's written all over Irene Dunne's thoroughbred face. The real qualities of screen favorites, I believe, come through to us by some soul-searching ray in the camera. We knew, for instance, that Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow matched each other, great soul for great soul, big heart for big heart, though no two women ever looked so differently.

 When you see Irene Dunne on the screen your heart warms because there, say you, is a good girl in a pinch, a girl who will stay the course, who will always be trying and giving you her best. There used to be a song about "She was bred in old Kentucky..." and that's where Irene Dunne was born and bred and she belongs to its best traditions.

 One of my first experiences with her was on the radio. The radio hadn't discovered Hollywood in those days, or Hollywood hadn't discovered the radio. Anyhow, it was one of the first radio interviews with screen stars - and I had the remarkable combination of Jean Harlow and Irene Dunne, I've forgotten why.

 Around the lot Miss Dunne had the reputation of being pretty high-hat, very poised and very, very much a lady. While Jean, who had just come through deep waters of tragedy and scandal, was known as a package of dynamite. And when we went down to the radio studio I was in some trepidation as to whether I'd be blown through the mike by Jean or frozen stiff in front of it by Miss Dunne.

 In my long experience I've never seen such a case of mike fright as the poised and stage-experienced Irene Dunne got for herself. There is nothing worse, let me tell you, in human experience than mike fright. Two seconds before I popped the first question at her, she was rigid, there was sweat on her pretty forehead and her eyes were glassy. I made ready to take over with Jean, who was bubbling with adventure, as usual.

 But Irene Dunne never let anybody down. Here responses were not only charming, they were clever, warm and spontaneous. If her hands and knees shook her voice darn well didn't.

 And I shall always remember that going home - Jean and her mother had left - she said. "That's the first time I'd met Miss Harlow. I didn't know she was such a fine woman - and such a lady."

 Since a great many people didn't know that about Jean, the thought came to me that it took a lady to recognize another. 

IRENE DUNNE resisted a good many temptations in her early career - oh, believe me. They wanted her to put on an early burst of speed. They wanted her to make headlines. They wanted her to acquire glamour.

 But the girl from Kentucky bluegrass knew it was a long race. She knew she had enough to stick in there with for the first mile - and she wanted to have enough left for the finish.

 I've always had a very strong hunch that Miss Dunne has a deeper understanding of the American way, the American heart, than a great many other actresses have had. A great many of our biggest stars, as we all know, have been born across the Canadian border, or across the seas. Irene was born in Kentucky and her father built and owned and captained Ohio River steamboats. There isn't anything closer to the heart of America than those arteries that have meant so much in our history of war and peace and pioneering and development.

 From the very beginning, Irene Dunne had quite consciously an idea of remaining herself. I know that because she told me so. She admired extravagantly the glamour girl. Admired the spectacular - for actresses. People, she said, wanted excitement and drama around the colorful figures shining on the heights of Hollywood.

 "But it's not for me," she said. "That's one side of it. There's another. It's smart to be conservative  - if you're born conservative. I was. I'll play along that way - being myself."

 Therefore, today Irene Dunne is in many ways closer to the real American woman than any other screen star. In magazines we have a phrase known as "R I," which means reader identification. The thing which makes the reader identify himself with the character or story or background - either by means of hope or familiarty or application to himself in some way.

 Irene Dunne has more audience identification than anyone else because, while we may admire and envy the glamour girl, we do it from a distance. When we see Irene Dunne we know we're like that - or almost like that - and we might have those things that happen to her happen to us.

THERE isn't much historical data on Irene Dunne. In 1926 she graduated from the Chicago College of Music. For one season she was under contract to the Metropolitan Opera Company. She sang light opera - prima donna roles - and while appearing in "Irene" made a screen test. Once in Hollywood, she decided to make pictures her goal.

 She has been married for almost eleven years - since July 16, 1928 - to Dr. Francis Griffin, a New York dentist, who has moved his practice to Hollywood. They have one adopted daughter, Mary Frances Griffin, now four years old.

 Irene's house in Holmby Hills - between Hollywood and the sea - is a bright, charming, delightful place which is not pointed out by the sight-seeing busses because it looks exactly like most of the other charming, conservative houses around it. Very few people in the Movie Capital know Mrs. Griffin, not because she does a Garbo, but because she doesn't care for society in a big way. When you dine with her, you might be dining with any other well-bred American woman.

 Now, as a rule, I do not care for my actresses to be just like everybody else. It bores me. I like 'em to be temperamental and get into trouble and have love affairs and live a life that is exciting. The "cooking is my hobby" and "I'd rather be alone with a good book" school has never intrigued me.

 The point is that Irene Dunne means it, is it - and has quietly, conservatively and smartly made it pay enormous dividends. It's real and it reaches out to your heart and mine.

 As a matter of fact, she doesn't like cooking and she prefers music to books. Her collection of phonograph records is priceless and her radio brings her the New York world of music from which she is seperated most of the time.

IT isn't the outward mask of Irene Dunne that is like the ideal American woman. It's her heart.

 When you think of anyone you like and admire a great deal, some one characteristic always stands out. In Irene Dunne it is indubitably her sense of humor. I don't in the least mean that she goes roaring around the place laughing at nothing or that she puts electric batteries under guests' chairs or that she is always getting off some quotable wisecrack. Looking back over the story conferences upon which we have happened to be present together I can't remember anything she ever said that was particularly witty. Only little quiet, very sane comments, put in a shrewd, twinkling little way.

 "It's very nice of people to call me a lady," she said once. "But I do hope they'll remember it's important to be a woman first."

 Her sense of humor is particularly American. It serves her twenty-four hours a day, but it never bobs up at the wrong time. I mean she hasn't that dreadful habit of suddenly starting to talk about night clubs like someone out of a bad novel just when you actually want to be serious.

 Only, it's there. It's the kind of a sense of humor you'd like to think St. Peter will possess when you arrive at the pearly gates. It's the sort that Abraham Lincoln possessed - it comes out strongest when things are most difficult. It eases situations. It is tied up with a sort of divine tolerance and it can be turned upon herself.

 You can't work on the same lot with a woman for a year without knowing her real character. Irene Dunne would be the most amusing, most balanced, most adorable "best friend" in the world.

THERE is another thing about which she has thoroughly understood us and, following that understanding, has given us something refreshingly dear to our hearts.

 We are not, actually, a hectic nation. We go along humorously amused by life as long as anybody will let us. We like a bit of excitement, to be sure, but all this wild merry-go-round business really isn't for us. We grow very weary.

 Let me see - well, again I must depend on Irene's sense of humor.

 My favorite sport is six-day bicycle races. During the six days that they go on in Madison Square Garden I am completely demoralized. I get no work done. My family, as far as I know, eats off the pantry shelves. I spend my time watching the bike races.

 When my startled friends want to know why I adore this form of sport far more than anything else, I am bewildered - or was. I have finally solved it.  I like it because of the in-between-times. Of course, I am as good a fan as any and during the hour sprints and the wild jam sessions, when forty bicycles are leaping about at fifty miles an hour and crashing like comets, I stand and yell without ceasing.

 But then it's over for a while. Everybody sits down and relaxes. The riders coast around with a gentle rhythm. Everybody eats peanuts and drinks lemonade and drifts around talking to friends or gets into long conversations about this and other races with perfect strangers. Sometimes you even doze a bit, if it's early in the morning or very late at night. Hot dogs taste delicious. A cigarette can be enjoyed to the last puff. You get up and walk all the way around the Garden and discuss the scores and the points and sometimes you get the chance to visit your best friend or you find yourself in an argument about labor or Roosevelt or anything at all.

 Then, suddenly, there's a yip, a mad scramble - they're off again and your're tense for another twenty minutes - or two hours.

 That is the way I like life, sports - and people.

IRENE DUNNE has that quality. Sometimes she can be hectic, exciting, thrilling and appealing. But she doesn't do it to you all the time, either in her performance or her personality. She doesn't wear you down. Or out. Part of her charm is that sometimes you can relax and wait for the next bit of excitement. Men don't want to make love to women every minute - they like to sit and talk. Women don't want their best friend always to be in the midst of some tragedy or drama - sometimes they just like to sit and talk.

 That's the American way, at least.

 In those things lies the secret of Irene Dunne's phenomenal success - without glamour. The girl nobody thought would survive has, in the long race, come in ahead of many who seemed far away from her - because in her own wise and witty way she's a real American gal and she understands us.

 Sometimes she rises to fine heights of acting. Sometimes she's a magnificent comedienne. Sometimes she's beautiful  - romantic melody at its best. It's all real. And between times, you can sort of be right friendly with her, and sit down and share a hot dog and a bag of peanuts.

(Photoplay, May 1939)

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