The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger

Author:Jeanine Basinger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307491282
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2007-06-19T23:00:00+00:00

Durbin posed in her own home with her real-life parents for their Christmas card.

Deanna Durbin was quickly put into two new films to be made and released in 1938: the aforementioned Mad About Music, co-starring her with Gail Patrick and Herbert Marshall, and That Certain Age, with Jackie Cooper. From 1938 on, Universal put her on a regular schedule of two films a year until 1942, when she was offscreen for the calendar year. Everywhere she went in public she drew huge crowds. She could no longer comfortably attend public school, so an on-set tutor was assigned to her. Radio Guide magazine listed her as one of the best network stars of 1937 (she had continued singing on the radio), and her contract was rewritten. Her newly wealthy family moved from a cheap bungalow on Eighty-fifth Street to a beautiful $50,000 mansion in the exclusive Los Feliz neighborhood. They acquired a grand piano, a swimming pool, two cars, and a staff. During production on Mad About Music, Durbin celebrated her sixteenth birthday, and the studio provided her with all the things movie stars always get on their birthdays: a big cake with her name on it and the chance to be photographed extensively cutting the cake while giving out interviews for the press. Durbin, according to newspapers and magazines, said officially: “I love being a movie star, and I love to sing. I’m very grateful to everyone who helped make it happen.” This was the appropriate statement for fans and friends and employers: I’m happy. I’m humble. I’m grateful, and incidentally, I’m going to be obedient. It was what her studio wanted to hear.

Mad About Music was an unqualified hit, her third in a row. She was officially a star. Joe Pasternak had once again shaped Durbin’s vehicle to reflect his particular combination of music, humor, and sentiment. It’s a story designed to tug at the heartstrings. Deanna’s been packed off to a boarding school in Switzerland by her glamorous mother (Gail Patrick), where she sings, feels lonely, and pumps up her bicycle tires. All ends well, with Durbin lying, maneuvering, and faking her way through the plot. The main thing was, of course, the music of the title. Durbin enjoyed making this film, finding friends in many who worked on the picture behind the scenes, among them a young assistant named Vaughn Paul.

As That Certain Age began shooting in early ’38, Pasternak and Universal were acutely aware that in December Durbin would turn seventeen. And worse, she would then turn eighteen, nineteen, and onward toward a possible oblivion. Not being stupid, they realized that their only chance of preserving their box office bonanza was to get her public to accept the inevitable. For That Certain Age, they flirted with her oncoming maturity by creating a plot that allowed them to have it both ways. The advertising trailers openly announced that Durbin would have a boyfriend of her own age (played by the popular Jackie Cooper) as well as an “older man” crush (the debonair Melvyn Douglas).

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