Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's WATCH ON THE RHINE, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in MILDRED PIERCE (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

This exploration of her career covers in detail her films, television, theatre, and radio performances from a wealth of sources and is illustrated with 275 photographs, some rarely or never before seen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jacqueline T. Lynch
• Release date: Jan 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386908364

Jacqueline T. Lynch

Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional and national publications, several plays, some award winners, one of which has been translated into Dutch and produced in the Netherlands.   Her several books, fiction and nonfiction, are available in eBook and print online.  She has recently published the first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth – Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  She writes a syndicated newspaper column on classic films: Silver Screen, Golden Years, and also writes three blogs: Another Old Movie Blog (http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com)  A blog on classic films. New England Travels (http://newenglandtravels.blogspot.com)  A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England. Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. (http://annblythactresssingerstar.blogspot.com) website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing --  https://www.etsy.com/shop/LynchTwinsPublishing?ref=search_shop_redirect

Book preview

Acknowledgements:

This book is truly a group effort, for if certain longtime fans of Ann Blyth had not contacted me and shared with me their treasured articles, souvenirs, photos, videos, and most especially, memories, I could not have gotten very far with this project.  To Ellen B. Hare, Gerald Waters (and Jim Stuart for his expertise), Doug Trembearth, and James Padovano, I am especially indebted.  Mr. Waters’ generously shared collection of rare audio and video was a particular treasure.

Thanks to Dan Pagel, who, because of his devotion to keeping alive the memory of Milwaukee’s former Melody Top Theatre, has created a marvelous website in tribute to that theatre company, and has been very generous with items from his collection.  Summer theatre is a particular love of mine, and it’s a thrill to be able to know people who feel the same.

Actor/singer/author Bill Hayes and John Gordon, former developmental director for the St. Ignatius Nursing & Rehab Facility in Philadelphia both graciously consented to interviews and shared valuable insights on working with Ann Blyth.  Special thanks to John Meacham, administrator; and Karin Purcell, current developmental director at St. Ignatius, for the loan of photographs and for facilitating my interview with Mr. Gordon.

Thank you to Sheryl Mandel for articulately answering some last-minute questions with such speed and graciousness.

Thank you to Ralph Moratz, Laura Grieve of Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings, Janet Sullivan Cross of Sister Celluloid, and Brian Stephens for sharing their encounters with Ann Blyth.

This project began as a year-long series on my Another Old Movie Blog, where Kevin Deany of Kevin’s Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear all lent a hand in my research in the early days.

My thanks to Peggy Skelly of the Springfield (Massachusetts) City Library Inter-library Loan Department for her help in obtaining materials; to Dom Menta of the USS Wisconsin Memorial Association, and to Louise Martzinek of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for help in researching photos.  For permission to use photographs, I’m grateful to photographer Craig Schwartz; the Chicago Sun-Times Media; Doyle Piland of the White Sands Missile Range Museum; Alex Teslik of Eileen Darby Images, Inc.; and the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; and the Vandamm Studio/© Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Cover design by Constance Metzinger.  Author photo by Gretje Ferguson. 

Thanks to my friend and editor, John Hayes, for helping me to be a better writer.

Thanks to my fellow classic film bloggers for your support and camaraderie.

And a final hurrah to my posse for, in ways large and small, their support and providing the means to an end: Tom and Gail Watson, and my most beloved twin brother, John T. Lynch.

Foreword by the Author:

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This book grew from a year-long series of posts I wrote on the career of Ann Blyth for my blog on classic films, Another Old Movie Blog.  It was suggested by readers that I turn the material into a book, well before I thought of it, and I’m grateful to them.  This has been an extraordinary journey for me and it is my very great pleasure to pay tribute to a remarkable actress.  This book will concern itself with her career and will touch upon her personal life only as it has bearing upon her public career.

The twentieth century, for the first time in the history of theatre, exploded with new outlets for actors beyond the proscenium.  The theatre became the media and through movies, radio, and television, our entertainment industry became America’s greatest export to the world, for better and for worse.  I wanted to examine this watershed century in the acting profession and the media through the career of one actress, and am particularly drawn to Ann Blyth for different reasons; including that she moved comfortably between the different media and excelled at each, and because long after she performed in her last movie she continued to work when it suited her, on television and most especially, the stage, including plays, musicals, concerts, night clubs and cabaret.  Throw in a few TV commercials, and you can see she tagged all the bases. 

And something else...something intangible and perhaps only evident when you stack her performances on a timeline: if you know Ann Blyth only through her frothy MGM musicals, you don’t know Ann Blyth.  In dramas she has morphed into the epitome of hateful, sensual, heartbroken, and shamed.  If you know her only as the demon teen Veda in Mildred Pierce, you don’t know Ann Blyth.  The same colossal greedy train wreck of a girl who spit invective at Joan Crawford and smacked her in the jaw also performed a night club act to enthusiastic crowds in Las Vegas, bringing them to tears with the sentimental Auld Lang Syne.  If you only know her from The Helen Morgan Story or melodramas, you are missing her genuine gift for screwball comedy.  Sinking herself intellectually, just as much as emotionally into these roles, she swam against the powerful and unrelenting current of studio typecasting.

Along with her seemingly effortless versatility, most especially laudable is her ability to successfully keep in perspective her career and private life—yet nothing is simple about the way we weave our lives, particularly for someone who juggled so much even from a very young age.  Her ambition certainly, but also her self-discipline and work ethic, perhaps sense of responsibility to her mother, to directors, fellow performers, her husband and children, her faith—must have been enormous.  Ann Blyth has been described in the press that always looks for catch phrases, slug lines and labels, as being a devout Roman Catholic, a demure good girl and Hollywood’s Little Lady, and she herself would credit her faith as being of major importance in her life.  Being labeled a Nice Girl by the press eager to call her something was probably better than getting tagged The Oomph Girl or The Dynamite Girl, which Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith, respectively, hated, but it may have sometimes been a detriment to meatier roles she wanted.  She has also been called reserved (to the point of driving some interviewers crazy over her reticence to speak ill of coworkers), and serene, the calmest person in Hollywood.

Interviewer Clyde Gilmour of the Vancouver Sun wrote with humorous exasperation that Blyth...

...is one of the sweetest gals any columnist could ever hope to talk with—and one of the most difficult to interview.  No matter what you ask her, all she does is smile and nod and chuckle and utter a series of gentle dove-like murmurs indicating her total satisfaction with every phase of human existence on this planet.

As much as she was admired for what was viewed as her decency, humility, and serenity, she was also apt to be overlooked for juicier roles because of it.  In a double-edged tribute, Richard G. Hubler in an article for Collier’s Weekly wrote:

...the people who work with her know her as a soft-spoken, gentle woman who, if she does not wear a visible halo, probably comes closer to any other living movie actress to deserving at least a merit badge for angelic behavior...Ann is always surrounded by an unnatural hush.  She never raises her voice.  Instead, she speaks in tones so dulcet that several acquaintances swear they understand her only by lip-reading.

Living up to such wry and begrudging reverence is almost as difficult as living it down.

Her work as an actress included many years in radio, (a facet that most film biographers tend to ignore or give short shrift to, and so I wanted to cover it in this book—the appendices include synopses of many of her radio performances), along with her TV and stage work (which usually also rates little discussion by authors who arrogantly and ignorantly dismiss the rigors of summer stock and the joy it brings to people who can’t possibly travel to Broadway as a fallen actor’s laboring in obscurity).  These venues show not only how Ann Blyth mined opportunities and surfed the currents of change in her decades-long career, but show what was happening to actors in the twentieth century, how entertainment became an industry and how the entertainment industry evolved—and how it left many behind.

To a great extent, the careers of performing artists are the sum total of their press.  This is why, in part, I’ve relied upon magazine and news articles of the day to illustrate her place as it evolved in the entertainment industry and the media.  I’ve tried to avoid using information I could not verify.  Instead, I’ve used these sources more as a window on the world in which Ann Blyth forged her career and what her contemporary critics and audience thought of her. 

The old Hollywood studio system certainly knew the value of publicity and worked hard to create it, exploit it, and at times, manipulate it to its best advantage.  Occasionally, an actor-employee would come along who would not cooperate, or proved to be a particular challenge.  A young woman whose stunningly sensual appeal on screen, but whose private life was a hotbed of church activities was, amusingly, a conundrum for them, and perhaps as well for the audience.  It was hard to package a devout vixen, and the nice girl image sometimes worked against her professionally, even if it gave her a satisfying private life.

In her senior years, celebrated as a veteran of old Hollywood at benefits or being interviewed at film festivals, Ann Blyth is invariably described as elegant, classy, drawing awed remarks on her still stunning beauty.  Even more thought provoking is her character and the career choices she’s made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

In 1949, columnist Ida Jean Kain wrote of Ann:

She is poised and genuinely unaffected...and in a quiet, confident way, she knows where she is going, and she is neither deviating nor taking short cuts.

What fascinates me about that statement is it was made so early in her career; she was twenty years old at the time, and yet this rang completely true and would remain true.  She, with remarkable constancy, knew indeed where she was going or wanted to go...yet decades later, it would be asked, as it often is of actors....Whatever happened to...? 

Whatever happened to Ann Blyth?

Many of her films are not available on DVD, most are not shown on Turner Classic Movies, and much of her work, because of this inaccessibility, has been forgotten by younger generations.  So, just what did happen between Mildred Pierce and The Helen Morgan Story? 

A lot, and beyond.  It is a story of variety and versatility, and adapting to constant new challenges.  There is so much richness to discover in her films, so much that she attempted and mastered in her career, and I hope this book will spur new fans to rediscover this marvelous actress.  I hope it will at least help put to rest the image of Ann Blyth only as the super-brat Veda Pierce and "that actress who was dubbed in The Helen Morgan Story and then retired." 

An actress lives many lives.  First, there are the scores of roles that overshadow her real self.  Then, as part of the business rather than the art, a necessary wearing of different hats: publicity, training in the craft, being the CEO of the image that has been created.  If actors are particularly fortunate, there is a private life, a family to nurture and to be nurtured by in turn.  But even apart from the family, there is another private chamber of the soul belonging to all of us.  For some, it is a rich haven of memory and experience, hope, dreams, and spirituality.  For some, it is, sadly, a black hole of emptiness to be desperately escaped in any way possible.

In the past few years, possibly as part of the Turner Classic Movies parade of movie star resurrections—but most especially because of its frequent airing of Mildred Pierce—interviewers of Ann Blyth inevitably want to know what it was like to slap Joan Crawford.  It is the question she gets asked most these days.  Had Christina Crawford’s tell-all book Mommie Dearest never been written, I doubt it would occur to anyone to ask that—Ann had slapped and been slapped in other movies.  I sometimes wonder if Ann thinks to herself, bravely smiling at the interviewer, I worked my ass off for eighty years, and this is all they remember?

This is the story of a young girl who became a woman in very public circumstances; a star before she was old enough to vote, who had been a trouper since not long after she had learned to tie her own shoes.  Her mother’s early loving support in making her costumes and taking her to auditions was replaced by an army—agents, publicity men, directors, producers, costumers, photographers, critics, and gossip columnists.

She once played the character Emily in Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town on stage.  There is a scene where Emily, in spirit, is allowed to revisit a scene from her childhood, to move around her loved ones without them noticing, so that she can look upon again all the miraculous minutiae of everyday life and discover how precious they are.  It is a joyous and bittersweet moment, painful in its simple honesty.

One wonders if Ann Blyth were allowed to have the power to re-visit a similar scene in her own childhood, perhaps the last apartment where she lived in New York with her mother and older sister during the Depression, before that tap on the shoulder by Herman Shumlin and Lillian Hellman that brought her to Watch on the Rhine on Broadway, what would she see there?  If she could speak to her child self, eleven-year-old Anne, what might she say?

AB late 40s portrait 2.jpg

Chapter 1

Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go

The photo is striking for its sweetness of attitude—we may notice the girl is quite pretty, but there is more to read in the glance she gives the camera.  A slight lowered tilt of the head, a calm, level gaze that invites as much as it withholds from the viewer.  She’s studying us as much as we are studying her.  One can see the girl in this photo is carefully tended.  She is about fourteen years old here, already a beauty, and already professionally well on her way.

AB 1st photo 96 dpi TEST.jpg

She was the gently-bred daughter of an Irish immigrant, a mother she adored.  Years later she would remark in an interview:

A good part is just that: a good part.  It has nothing to do with who you really are or how you live your life.

It would be a major theme of her career, and her greatest stumbling block—for who she was would be a paradox for the movie industry and the media that packaged actors like a product.  For the most part, she assiduously avoided being packaged; and devoted fans admired this most about her.

Anne Marie Blythe was born in the early morning of Thursday, August 16, 1928, in Mt. Kisco, New York, but she never actually lived there.  (She lost the ‘e’ on Anne when she went to Hollywood.  The ‘e’ on the end of Blythe was jettisoned first when she worked on Broadway.)  Her mother, Mrs. Nan Lynch Blythe had been visiting her sister, Catherine, and brother-in-law Patrick Tobin at the time of Ann’s birth.  Home was Manhattan.

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Manhattan gave voice to the roar of the Roaring Twenties.  Here, in that era, were the hundreds of speakeasies and thousands of average citizens who broke the law nightly visiting them.  Here were the headline-making gangsters, hucksters, and chorus girls.  It was, for many, a party that lasted a decade and rose to a sparkling crescendo by 1927, the year around 300 shows opened on Broadway, fifty of them musicals, a record number that has not been topped. 

Broadway, probably more than the famed speakeasies, flappers, and gangsters, gave the roar to the Roaring Twenties, if only because it was the source and driving engine of popular culture like none other, and it drew such attention to those larger-than-life figures, but not only to them.  Prestigious dramas of pivotal historical moments and figures, and the light and airy operettas of Sigmund Romberg were joined by a lot of fluff about spirited orphan girls making good and marrying a millionaire to the tune of Tin Pan Alley hits.  Above them all, one seminal musical opened in the last few days of that fabulous year: Show Boat.

Show Boat opened at the Ziegfeld Theater, new itself to the city, built earlier that year of 1927, at 151 West 54th Street.  Helen Morgan, one of its featured players, would repeat her role as the tragic Julie La Verne in the 1936 film, and it became her signature role, one that she played many times on tour.  Miss Morgan had preceded her Broadway fame with her enormous popularity as a torch singer in clubs (herself running afoul of the law as regards its position on speakeasies). 

A movie biography of her life released thirty years later in 1957 would star Ann Blyth in the last film of her movie career.  It was not Ann Blyth’s only link to the Jazz Age of New York into which she had been born.  One of the most prolific and successful newspaper columnists of the day was Mark Hellinger, of the New York Daily News and later the New York Daily Mirror, who wrote in his flip and witty style about Helen Morgan, and Texas Guinan, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Al Jolson, Florenz Ziegfeld, all the luminaries, famous and infamous, of New York in the 1920s.  By the 1940s, he’d shucked the column and took his brash and flinty words and attitude to Hollywood, where he wrote and produced films in which the bubbly sarcasm of the 1920s was squeezed into a new cynicism, decades later dubbed film noir.  Ann would come to know him, and appear in two of his films during her years at Universal.

Ann would star in Sigmund Romberg’s greatest shows on film and on stage.  She would get a chance to sing a song from Show Boat in the very theater it played, the Ziegfeld, reawakening old ghosts in 1958.  Here she was a guest on The Perry Como Christmas Show, broadcast live on December 20th, and sang a strikingly beautiful rendition of You are Love, long after it was performed in this venue, and another decade and a half before she would sing this song playing the part of Magnolia in summer theatre.

However, this world of Broadway and the characters that paraded through the daily deadline-inspired prose of Mark Hellinger and of Walter Winchell (who also appeared in The Helen Morgan Story with Ann), was the not the sphere in which Ann Blyth belonged—but it only took her until about the time she was twelve to reach Broadway.

For her immigrant parents, New York City was less the sparkle of Broadway and more the struggle of survival in small walk-up apartments in polyglot neighborhoods that hovered in brick side street caverns off the main grand thoroughfares.  Her father, Harry Blythe, left the family when Ann was still a baby, and the 1930 census lists Mrs. Blyth as head of household of three: herself, Ann, and Ann’s older sister Dorothy.  At that time, they resided on East 31st Street.  Mrs. Blyth took in laundry and sewing to support her daughters, worked in a beauty salon, many endeavors which required her to constantly work, and constantly seek opportunities to earn money.  Ann recalled in an article her mother’s industry, and also her mother’s apparent sense of pride in self-sufficiency, and optimism:

Mother worked very hard and her tiny body wasn’t nearly as big as her heart.  Yet I never heard her complain.  In our walk-up flat on New York’s East side, she would jubilantly finish a batch of ironing for her select Park Avenue clientele and call to us to admire its crisp freshness.

With her father absent, and her older sister some ten years her senior—Dorothy was in high school before Ann was even old enough to go to school—Ann’s chief companion of her childhood was her mother.  Ann received three great gifts from her mother: a sure sense of identity, a religious faith that was a source of strength, and a fearless imagination for what was possible.  Imagining a career in show business would have been deferred until Ann was observed playacting or bursting into popular songs to amuse herself, but the strong sense of identity was instilled at the start.

Who she was, in ways both strong and simple, was Irish and Catholic.  She associated these aspects with her beloved mother and wore them all the rest of her life as a protective cloak her mother had made for her.  In his essay in The New York Irish, Forging Forward and Looking Back, Lawrence J. McCaffrey paints a thoughtful image of the New York Irish in the years before World War I when nineteen-year-old Nan Lynch and some of her siblings arrived from Ireland.

Catholicism, as well as nationalism in politics instilled pride, dignity, and hope.  Catholicism played a particularly important role: its liturgy and sacraments bridge the chasm between rural Ireland and urban America, providing psychological and spiritual comfort in a strange and hostile environment.  Catholic parishes in American cities functioned as rural villages, preserving a sense of community...because Catholicism insists that the sacraments are essential to salvation, its priests have enjoyed more respect and power than the clergy of other faiths.  In Ireland, the laity have been especially partial to their priests because they symbolize a religion that is also part and parcel of Irish culture and nationality.  Unlike Continental Catholicism, the Irish variety has been associated with peasantry, not the aristocracy.  Priests praised popular sovereignty and participated in agitations for economic and social justice, and national independence.

But the New World was not only new; it was modern and accelerating at a breakneck pace.

On the day of Ann’s birth, The New York Times ran an excerpt from Pope Pius XI addressing feminism, for horrors of the New York City flapper had evidently caught his attention in Rome.  He lamented that, woman is apparently doing everything possible to destroy in herself those very qualities which render her beautiful, namely modesty, purity and chastity, and, though he need not have feared for the modesty of the baby girl, Hollywood’s future little lady, yet in the same speech addresses a kind of woman perhaps not unlike her hardworking mother:

Modern feminism, continued the Pope, preaches that woman must be self-sufficient, must render herself independent of man, and must be able to make her own way in life.  ‘If,’ he declared, ‘all this means that woman is entitled to the respect that is owed every conscience with full regard to divine and human laws, then the Church encourages and recognizes feminism.’

The Pope concluded by urging the Modern Woman to...

...turn her eyes to the example of the saints and to the teachings of the Church and she will find in them a just and holy answer to all her aspirations.

The aspirations of the little girl would evolve from her playtime and a fanciful imagination at this stage, contentedly absorbed in a world of make-believe.  In the same article Ann remembered her mother’s hard work, she noted an early wish:

When I was a very little girl I remember praying fervently for a pair of red wings.  After several days of watching and waiting, I took my shaken faith and spread it out before my mother.

Why?  I demanded.  Why don’t I get red wings?

My mother had, skillfully balanced with her sensitive Irish wit, an enormous respect for a serious problem.  Together we examined mine.  Faith, my darling, she told me, is believing that God is very wise.  Wiser than you.  Somehow you must be praying wrong.

As I grew older, I was filled with gratitude that I need not walk through life wearing red wings. But, I was equally grateful for her gentle lesson.

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Ann’s reliance on her faith was, as much as her Irish ancestry, an important part of her self-identity and would help her through tragedy in her teens.  It was as much a staple of her personal reputation as an adult, and conversely, and ironically, became an aspect of her professional reputation that may have limited the kinds of roles she would be offered.  In adulthood, as in childhood, her faith remained firm and trusting, and offered her comfort.  It was perhaps her mother’s greatest legacy to her.  However, the credit for her acting career was she felt due to her mother as well, acknowledging that there would have been no career without the hardworking little Irishwoman with the imagination for what was possible.

Nan Blyth, with no background in show business, was not turning impresario when she brought Ann to her first music lessons.  It was an era when children took lessons in music and dance, where pianos were far more common in middle class and even lower class homes than they are now.  Children learned musical instruments, manners, ballroom dance, social skills that would make them better people, better able to survive in a society where anything was possible—but not possible without conforming to what their parents, often immigrants from societies where very little was possible, imagined was admirable and enviable.  Ann learned to play the piano because it was good for her, that’s what one did when one aspired to a better life.

Ann’s sister Dorothy also took music lessons as a child, but she had no interest in pursuing a career in entertainment.  She had a career as a stenographer and secretary before marriage.  She died as the result of an injury when Ann was in her early twenties.

Ann’s lessons took on more meaning than just the improvement of a shy little girl when it became apparent that she displayed some raw and immature talent, and more especially, a keen desire to pretend and to sing.  A game, an outlet for self-expression, a nurturing of imagination, all these things as it is for most children; but the possibilities existed that it might become more.

Her mother’s sister and brother-in-law, whom she had been visiting at the time of Ann’s birth, moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and summertime visits to her Aunt Cis and Uncle Pat gave Ann a new venue to perform in and an appreciative audience.  This kindly and indulgent couple would come to figure prominently in Ann’s life as a young woman when they became her future guardians and surrogate parents.  They started off as among her earliest fans.

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Playacting at her aunt and uncle’s Connecticut home.

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In an interview for Modern Screen in 1949, Ann confessed,

I was a show-off.  I was always putting on Mother’s dresses and singing, dancing, or trying out some kind of act—even before I knew what an act was.

Back in Manhattan, the city was growing with the child.  The Chrysler Building sprang up when Ann was a toddler.  The Empire State Building, the world’s tallest at the time, was finished just shy of Ann’s third birthday.  Radio City Music Hall, where some of Ann’s future films would play, was finished in December 1932.  The RCA Building, part of the brand-new Rockefeller Center, was completed in May 1933, a couple months before she turned five years old. 

RCA bdlg WPA 1940.jpg

Ann was six years old when she went there on her first audition and acquired her first job as a performer in radio, at station WJZ (most of her early press erroneously records her as being five years old).  For her audition, Ann stood on a box to reach the microphone, and sang the late hit Lazybones by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.

Years later, she would be required to stand on a box to kiss Gregory Peck, as well as many of her other tall male co-stars.  Some of the best things in life are just out of reach.

Unless one perseveres.

By this time, New York, and all of America, was in the worst years of the Great Depression.  A Hooverville of tar paper shacks occupied Central Park.  The roar of the Twenties faded into a sick moan and a silent stare.  Though in later years Ann mentioned in interviews that her mother was encouraged by others, who’d heard Ann sing, to take her for the interview, possibly it occurred to Mrs. Blyth that this pretty little daughter who seemed also quite talented might have gifts that would earn a living some day.  It was not an unusual dream in the Depression, where armies of moppets trudged to tap class to learn to be Shirley Temple, the little girl who saved 20th Century-Fox from bankruptcy.

In terms of popular entertainment, however, radio was still more influential than the movies and launched the careers of many eventual movie stars. 

Madge Tucker 1935.jpg

Madge Tucker, a small, slim, blonde woman headed the department of children’s programming in New York City for NBC.  She saw, as of a 1939 newspaper article, over 50,000 children audition for her in the twelve years since she had been charged with ferreting out young talent.  Among her discoveries were Alfred Ryder, Nancy Kelly, Walter Tetley, Billy and Bobby Mauch, Huntz Hall and Billy Hallop—some going on to find work on stage, some continuing in radio, and some making their eventual careers in film.  Ann’s future stardom made these children’s careers pale by comparison, but if Miss Tucker had any premonitions as to Ann’s future talent, or marketability thereof, the only indication is Tucker’s appearance on an episode of television’s This is Your Life in 1959 which feted Ann Blyth. 

Tucker, introduced as Mrs. Burke Miller on that episode, seemed intensely to search Ann’s face for the little girl she once hired, as if fascinated to watch over twenty years melt away in her memory, touching the face of the major star, and still seeing the child.

We were holding an audition for my radio show when this little girl came in.  She looked so sweet with her long curls and she sang in the loveliest voice.

But a child’s career in show business was a long shot, even for a pretty little girl with a cascade of dark curls, blue eyes, and a promising soprano voice.  In the above-mentioned article, Tucker stated:

Every week from fifty to 100 children are auditioned at our studio in New York...for every 100 who come, full of hope, only one is selected for our programs.  In the movies, the proportion of disappointments is even greater; only one child in a million really makes good.  Miss Tucker explains, If only I could reach parents and explain to them how limited a field there is for child entertainers.  Parents so easily get the wrong idea.  They come to radio expecting their children to become immediate successes.

Tucker, a former stage actress, was a pioneer in children’s radio broadcasting, and wrote many of the scripts of her shows Coast to Coast on a Bus and Our Barn, in which she also played the role of The Lady Next Door, and another show called The Lady Next Door.  These charming children’s shows were broadcast nationwide and were a variety show scenario where regular and guest performers sang, recited poetry, and acted in skits loosely tied together to a theme or storyline for that episode. 

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The host for Coast to Coast on a Bus, also known as The Children’s Hour was Milton Cross, better known to grownups as the erudite and impassioned announcer for the Metropolitan Opera on its weekly Saturday afternoon broadcasts for some forty-three years until his death in 1975.  A trained singer himself, he sometimes joined the kids and sang a song in his best concert baritone voice.  It was a gentle and delightful hour-long program that ran Sunday mornings, live.  Performing a live show—singing, reciting, and performing the latest antics in the continuing story: The Adventures of Peter Pig taught the child performers to be troupers, and to bounce back, no matter what happened on a live show. 

As Madge Tucker remarked, Talent is not enough for success today.  A child must have presence of mind, intelligence, and initiative.

For an article on working with children in radio for Radio Guide in 1935, Tucker wrote that she did not make stars of average children, that they were already blessed with talent before she got them, but that they needed someone to teach them proper radio technique.  She describes her young cast as typical among children in their attention span, their playfulness and sometimes uncontained energy, and especially, their vivid imaginations.

...it isn’t acting to them any longer.  They live the parts—they really think they are pirates or football players or whatever the character is in the part...Adolescents, of course, realize it’s only a play.  They feel like actors and not like pirates; during rehearsals, they’re very often giggly and self-conscious.  But this is a natural adolescent trait and my older children make up for it by helping with sound effects, by showing the younger ones how to fade in front of the microphone, and by teaching them other microphone tricks.  But the little children don’t act—they actually live their parts.  They are totally absorbed by the story.

The children were given scripts to study at home, and mark their parts in red pencil.  Rehearsals for an episode of Coast to Coast on a Bus, to be performed live on Sunday morning, were begun on Thursday night at 6:00 p.m. in one of the third floor studios at NBC, when the mimeographed scripts were handed to the kids.

As for the actual method of teaching parts to the youngsters, I try to make the rehearsals and the performances as much of a game as possible.  I’d rather put up with confusion, a few incidental games of tag and a little hop-scotching on the side, than to spoil the fun.

The cast of an episode could run upwards of sixty children.

Cast Coast to Coast on a Bus 1935.jpg

Quite often I appear a bit late for these rehearsals, and when this happens, I am greeted by a very gratifying sight.  I half expect to see my youngsters playing crack-the-whip or pole-vaulting with a standing microphone when I arrive.  But instead, I always find them seriously at work.  They have their heads buried in the scripts, reading and rehearsing lines.  One of the older children usually acts as director and helps the younger tots with words they cannot pronounce properly.

Ad-libs get invented and sprinkled through the scripts, and the children, as well as Tucker, decide where they go and who gets to say them.

They are taught how to step up to a microphone and how to back away; how to act out a script and how to put the proper inflection on the proper words.

Children who began in radio received a good grounding in those very elements of timing and articulation that would be so helpful in the theatre, as well as in the movies, and this was a big part of Ann Blyth’s early training.

The pay for appearing on Coast to Coast on a Bus at the time of a 1939 article on Madge Tucker was $2 per weekly performance, and $7.50 for Our Barn, which Tucker noted were high salaries in comparison with most children’s radio shows.  The money might have aided the Blyth family finances somewhat, but it certainly would have enabled Ann to pursue more lessons to help her develop her talent.

Performing on radio for the next six years, she appeared on both Coast to Coast on a Bus and Our Barn and a number of other programs, including Jean Hersholt’s Dr. Christian program, Keep ‘Em Rolling, Song of Your Life, and other serials in guest appearances.  From one of her first press bios, at thirteen:

From time to time when various soap operas needed a convincing child’s voice they all upon the young veteran.

Another child radio performer at this time plied her trade over the airwaves at rival station WOR on Uncle Bob’s Rainbow House, a Saturday morning children’s show, and on the long-running serial Our Gal Sunday.  Future opera diva Beverly Sills played the role of Elaine Raleigh, who, as she dryly mused in her autobiography, Bubbles, was a little mountain girl whose drunken father continually abuses her, forcing her to take refuge in song out in the hills. 

Ann recalled in a videotaped interview with Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter in 2013 that she and Sills enjoyed reminiscing about their radio days in Manhattan, Through the years, whenever we would see one another, she would talk about that.

A teenage boy from the Bronx working as a pageboy in the same building while little Ann was working at the microphone in one of the studios would meet her for the first time only many years later in California.  His name was James McNulty, her future husband.  Kismet? 

The work on radio, going on auditions for programs and little theatre productions came at a cost of what would usually be called a normal childhood, but living hand-to-mouth in the Great Depression was the normality of the day for Ann’s family and millions of children.  Her performing provided, beyond a small income, a view of a more colorful world, where make-believe was more normal, certainly more pleasant, than living hand-to-mouth.

I had a rather meager childhood, but on the other hand it wasn’t the worst.

Ann attended St. Stephen’s parochial school on East 28th Street, later St. Patrick’s, making her Confirmation at nine years old.  A photograph of her on that day shows a small child in her white dress, under a long white veil, and cradling a bouquet of mixed flowers.  She does not look at the camera; she looks lovingly at the bouquet in a divine pose.  Is she pretending?  She looks completely comfortable, like someone who just stepped out of a Renaissance painting, and appears completely oblivious to the photographer.

We would never know it was taken on the roof of her apartment building.

AB confirmtion.jpg

Actor, later Hollywood agent, Richard Clayton, who knew Ann as far back as their New York casting days and appeared on different radio shows with her, including Coast to Coast on a Bus and Our Barn, recalled for syndicated columnist Sue Chambers in 1954 how the stage mothers of other kids at auditions would look pityingly at Ann, the quiet, skinny little girl effacing herself in the corner.  But when the time came to read for the part, the other kids didn’t have a chance.

Madge Tucker recalled, again, on This is Your Life:

"She was just a darling.  She was so sweet and quiet and thoughtful, so many talents.  She started in small parts...but I remember once I wrote a whole show for her where she could sing Irish songs and she could talk with a bit of a brogue...There was the time when she caused such a commotion on one of the shows among the boys...I don’t think she realized, but I did because we almost lost the show.  It was the time we did the Christmas show about the toymaker and his daughter.  [Ann was] just breathtaking and something happened.  I don’t know.  Everybody began to look.  You were growing up.  And cues were missed and lines were missed and hearts were breaking and two boys almost had a fight backstage.  And I thought that was the show that wouldn’t go on...It wasn’t Ann’s fault.  She wasn’t flirtatious; she was just growing up to be so beautiful."

When she was about nine, Ann began taking classes at the once-famed Ned Wayburn School of Dance up on 59th Street at Columbus Circle.  Ned Wayburn is a name almost unknown today by anyone who is not a theatre historian, yet his impact on musical theatre staging and dance was enormous around the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1930s.  Little of his work has been captured on film, but he would help to shape the styles of many dancers and choreographers for decades to come.

Wayburn, born in 1874, was a man belonging to both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and both influenced his work.  A kind of Renaissance man, he worked as architectural draftsman (which led to his creating unique sets for the theatre), a musician, a songwriter, a choreographer, a dance instructor who founded several dance studios, and an author who wrote The Art of Stage Dancing first published in 1925.

In his career, he staged an astounding number of dances: several in each of his more than 300 full shows and around 200 vaudeville acts.  He pioneered methods and styles in tap dancing, interpretive dancing, most especially in the presentation of chorus figures, and was said to have created the famous Ziegfeld walk for the Follies to accommodate the elaborate sets he created.  A thorough and detailed analysis of his work is found in Barbara Stratyner’s Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine – From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies.

Along with Florenz Ziegfeld, Ned Wayburn worked with songwriters Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, among many others; hired George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin early in their careers, staged work for some of the most famous entertainers of the day, including Fanny Brice in her comic ballet numbers.  Some of the future greats who trained with him or worked for him included Fred and Adele Astaire, Marilyn Miller, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, and Clifton Webb.

By the 1930s, Wayburn had, for the most part, hung up his tap shoes and tapped into a new market—the young professionals, and even younger, the army of moppets who took lessons not only in dance but in the complete grooming package Ned Wayburn offered at his school.

Ned Wayburn school ad 1936 600.jpg

The ad shown for the Ned Wayburn Institute of Dancing and Radio Broadcasting School illustrates his prowess for promotion, adapting to new markets, and keeping current in a period of what for most people was an economic strain and for New York performers, an economic apocalypse.  Here to this studio, to learn at the altar of Ned Wayburn’s fame and reputation, came little Ann Blyth and so many others.

In an interview for Photoplay in January 1956, Ann said of the school:

I loved Ned Wayburn’s.  The studio occupied one whole floor of a building on Madison Avenue near Fifty-eighth Street, and I’ll never forget walking through those double doors—and seeing the rows of pictures of personalities such as Fred Astaire and Marilyn Miller on the wall.

Ann also received dramatic coaching from Irene Beck, and vocal training from Fern Goltre, as well as at the Bown-Adams Professional School on Broadway at 81st Street.  In an ad run by the school in later years, it notes famous alums taught by Bown Adams and Virginia Daily included Ann Blyth, John Forsythe, Rita Gam, Barbara Nichols, Jay Robinson, and Rosemary Rice.

Apt building east 49th Motion Picture & TV mag July 1952 p 27 600 dpi.jpg

By the late 1930s, Ann, her mother and sister had moved to an apartment on East 49th Street, close to the warehouses and docks by the river, and then afterward to another apartment on East 49th closer to Second Avenue, next to the former Midtown Hospital, where perhaps they could hear the rattle of the El barreling up and down Second Avenue.  None of those buildings exist today: the first two were demolished in slum renewal projects of the 1960s, and the final home was torn down, along with the Midtown Hospital, for newer apartment buildings.  Both parochial schools have been closed, as was her parish church, St. Boniface.  New York City is in perpetual evolution.

Because of the difficulty of attending auditions, rehearsals, and performances around regular school hours, Ann was eventually enrolled in the Children’s Professional School, then located at Broadway and 61st Street.  The school was founded in 1914, begun as the Rehearsal Club for kids in entertainment who were not able to attend regular school because of the demands of work.  In October 1939, Helen Hayes and Philip Merivale gave a performance at the Martin Beck Theatre (which Ann would come to know very well within the next couple of years) to benefit the school, which, according to a New York Times article, served kids from moderate or low-income families.  The benefit was for scholarships to the school, more equipment, and more teachers.  At that time some 270 kids were enrolled, most of which were working on the legitimate stage, with some forty-odd kids in radio, and the rest in vaudeville or night clubs, working as models, musicians, circus performers, a couple in the Metropolitan ballet.  Only nine were in motion pictures.  The famed institution we may know from the film Fame (1980), and subsequent television series, really began as a kind of settlement house project for kids who were not eating regularly, let alone attending school.  Part of the mission was to educate the children so as to be fit for other work if a career in entertainment was no longer desired, or just did not pan out.

Here Ann could continue a regular school curriculum, but also be allowed time for professional training and jobs.

In the 1950s when her stardom reached its zenith and she was on the cover of enough movie magazines to choke a horse, some of the writers of these articles tried inevitably to trace her development back through Ann’s earliest years to explain the phenomena of her stardom.  They painted a sketchy picture of a child both reserved in manner, and yet imaginative and expressive when performing, who like most children loved animals, but never seemed to have enough time for play, who frequented a Second Avenue candy store, and who nursed a passion for spaghetti.  Fun facts they could never link together to quite make the picture of the demure-yet-sensual glamour girl who was sort of the girl-next-door, but not really.  Nobody wanted to live next door to Veda Pierce.

The image of shyness is what comes through from former teachers, baffled that the little girl should have become a Hollywood star.  An article in Motion Picture from 1952 interviewed personnel at the Children’s Professional School.  The school secretary recalled:

Her mother dressed her simply, but very tastefully, and always had Ann’s hair fixed beautifully—that wonderful mass of curls from the top of her head all the way down her back!  But Ann was the shyest thing.

A teacher remarked:

She was the nicest youngster, always quiet, simple, modest, the most beautiful manners, and very devout.  Having her turn out a sort of glamour girl utterly astonished me!

Photoplay in 1957 also interviewed school secretary Mabel Barnshaw:

We gradually came to know her as a shy, quiet and timid girl, pretty much absorbed in her work...when she wasn’t studying, her mother—a dear little woman with a lilting Irish brogue—would usually be at the school to take her to some audition or appointment.

Ann wrote in her article for the Your Lenten Guidepost newspaper series in 1954, later published in Faith Made Them Champions:

Sometimes it was a close shave when it came to scraping together the money for my singing, dancing and dramatic lessons, but [her mother] never told me of it.  Instead, she let me know constantly that Faith was the foundation for lasting joy, the chief cornerstone for building a whole life.

She dreamed dreams about my wonderful future as an actress and at eight, nine, and ten, I began getting radio and stage bits.  When I tried for something better and failed, she would smile her wonderful warm smile, put a pert new feather in my hat, and together we’d go to St. Boniface’s to pray.

Just have faith, my darling, she’d say cheerfully as we walked home in the fading light.  Something better will come.

She also, in a 1994 interview with Jessie Lilley for Scarlet Street, recalled with humor her mother’s steadfast support on the job hunt:

I remember, when I was very young, my mother would be asked certain things about me and what I’d be able to do, and she was quite feisty.  She was tiny, but she was mighty.  (Laughs)  And I think I garnered some of that from her.

One promising job that fell through was a regular role on a radio serial about two sisters, in which Ann was to play the younger.  Ann was ten years old, and it was her biggest part to come along, but the station decided to cancel the project.  She recalled for Photoplay in 1956 the disappointment of losing the job:

It was not only my best opportunity thus far—but in those days we needed the money and a part in a daytime radio serial meant steady money coming in.

From an interview with The New York Times in 1952:

Life was one big struggle then, but mother managed somehow to keep me in parochial school and later in professional school.  She provided me with singing and dramatic lessons besides.

Ann performed in a benefit show, in which The Billboard magazine singled her out in their review, quoted by Photoplay in January 1956:

She possesses remarkable assurance and a generous supply of talent.  She’s capable of furnishing Temple opposition for any outfit on the lookout for a natural child performer.

Her comparison to Shirley Temple is the first hint of a Hollywood future, but that was still far off.  Instead, there were minor children’s roles with The Children’s Opera Company of New York, with which she appeared in the ensemble with the San Carlo Opera Company, in Carmen, Pagliacci, and La Boheme, where she was introduced to the colorful and irresistibly larger-than-life storytelling world of opera.  She became a lifelong fan.  In a videotaped interview with Eddie Muller on stage at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre in 2006, she recalled:

"I used to be in Carmen—as a street urchin, and La Boheme—as a little urchin—and I actually got to sing.  There were a couple of lines that were for youngsters...I was so terrified of the conductor.  I could hardly speak for half of the day because I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to sing; but, of course, that’s where my love of opera began."

The conductor was Carlo Peroni, and Carmen was performed in September 1938.  The news of the day was full of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in talks with Hitler over the Sudetenland, but The New York Times found room for a small blurb about the twenty children from the Children’s Opera Company who participated under director Eva Leoni.  The group had done operettas previously, but this was the children’s first foray into grand opera, with seventeen performances.  A year later, when the news reported on the fall of Poland and the start of World War II, Carmen played again to a capacity house and as many standees as the fire authorities would allow.  Ann also went on a brief tour to Chicago in Carmen with the San Carlo Opera Company, the first great adventure in what would become a lifetime of travel.

The opera company performed during these years at the Gallo Opera House on West 54th Street.  (The opera house later became the site of the disco era’s Studio 54 nightclub.)  On the radio with the Children’s Opera Company of New York at WJZ, she sang a lead role in The Chimes of Normandy or Les cloches de Corneville, a very popular French comic operetta of the late nineteenth century.  She played the part of Germaine, the servant girl who is secretly a marchioness and after much travail, happily reclaims her royal title and marries her hero, the Marquis. 

Chimes of Normandy age 10 NYC Children's Opera Co..jpg

All the children, the cast of The Chimes of Normandy, in the photo are looking at the camera except Ann.  She remains in her reverie, in character.

These were bright spots in a slowly growing childhood career that instilled an early sense of self-discipline and provided an income, but most especially, from which Ann found fun and excitement.  That her mother, with no show business background, was able to shepherd her through the early hurdles of this strange but wonderful new world was something Ann always appreciated

The fact that my father left my mother with two daughters to raise is, of course, something many families and children have to face.  My mother faced it, as indeed anyone who knew her and loved her felt she would.  Being Irish and very spirited, she was not about to have this terrible blow get her down to the point where she couldn’t cope.  And she always saw to it that my sister and I had enough to eat, and clean, pretty clothes on our backs—but I know that it wasn’t easy for her.

Their world was on the precipice of astounding change.  Ann’s career was about to get launched into orbit.  The RCA building where she performed on radio was about six blocks from her apartment on East 49th Street.  Broadway was only a couple more blocks in the other direction, but might as well have been on the moon.

Ann was called to the principal’s office at the Children’s Professional School, usually a heart-stopping moment for any kid.  Her fate was behind the door, literally.

Herman Shumlin and Lillian Hellman were there, asking if she would read for a part in Miss Hellman’s new play.  Ann Blyth was twelve years old.

Chapter 2

Watch on the Rhine

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Herman Shumlin was then one of the most prolific, and most successful, producer-directors on Broadway.  His first play went up the year before Ann was born, and in early 1941, he was forty-two years old with a string of hits under his belt and a rewarding professional relationship (and short-lived affair) with Lillian Hellman, one of Broadway’s most successful playwrights. 

Hellman began as a reader of plays in his office.  She became a Broadway playwright herself when Shumlin directed and produced her The Children’s Hour in the autumn of 1934.  A critical and financial success, it ran for nearly two years, and accolades were repeated for her biting drama The Little Foxes, which opened in February 1939.  Shumlin had helmed many successful plays before and after these two ventures, but perhaps nobody understood Lillian Hellman’s work as well as he did, for when her script, which would eventually be called Watch on the Rhine (Shumlin gave the play its title at the eleventh hour when Hellman, having a hard time deciding on a title,  eventually suggested using the original German song title Die Wacht on Rhein), there was perhaps no one else as necessary to its interpretation for the public as this dynamic and intuitive director.

They were so well considered as a winning team that when talk of a new Hellman play was in the works and Herman Shumlin signed on to stage it, still without a title, the project received more attention in the press for their partnership than did the play’s theme.  An anti-fascist message was not unusual in the days when Europe was already at war; Broadway had visited the topic more than once.  It wasn’t until the first laudatory reviews came in that the theatre world discovered that Hellman and Shumlin had found a new way to talk about the talk of the day, and that was to bring it home to an unsuspecting American family, to turn ideals into home truths, literally.  In the final months of the run of the play, a real-life parallel would occur when war came to the United States.  Until then, the idea of fascism, and a play about it was just another parlor game.

The search for a cast for the play with no name began in February 1941, when Herman Shumlin headed for Hollywood.  He wanted a few very good stage actors, but in the years of the Great Depression, that’s where many stage actors had fled for the safety of a studio contract and a regular income.  The New York Daily News, sniffing a story because of Shumlin’s track record:

...with a pocket full of unsigned contracts for leading players in the new Lillian Hellman drama.  He wants two or more good male actors, one middle-aged, one a youngster.

One of the first signed, ten days later, was veteran Broadway and Hollywood dowager, Lucile Watson.  She had last performed on Broadway two years previously in Dear Octopus.  Shortly after the play opened, she praised Mr. Shumlin, proving herself as acerbic as the character of family matriarch that she played.

I detest being directed by an idiot, she says, And I have been directed by many idiots.  But right here I’d like to say that Herman Shumlin is a master.

Nathaniel Benchley in an article he wrote around the same time for the New York Herald Tribune also praised Shumlin in his manner of working with writers and actors:

He will seldom shout at you, but instead will be understanding and patient, and if a line or a scene is hopelessly out of kilter he will ask you down from the stage to get your ideas on how it should be fixed.  He will encourage you and talk the whole thing over...

Shumlin signed Paul Lukas while in Hollywood for the lead role as an underground fighter against fascism who brings his