Lounge of Tomorrow - Thoughts about Betty Hutton

This was a lot more than I knew about her.

NY Times

March 13, 2007
Betty Hutton, Film Star of '40s and '50s, Dies at 86
By RICHARD SEVERO

Betty Hutton, a singer and actress celebrated as a blond bombshell of
Hollywood musicals and comedies in the 1940s and 50s, died Sunday night
at her home in Palm Springs, Calif., her executor announced today. She
was 86.

The cause was complications of colon cancer, the executor, Carl Bruno,
told The Associated Press. He said the announcement of her death had
been withheld until after her funeral today, at the Forest Lawn Cemetery
in Cathedral City, Calif.

Ms. Hutton, a brassy, energetic performer with a voice that could sound
like a fire alarm, had the lead role in the 1950 film version of Irving
Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun" and a starring role in Cecil B. DeMille's
1952 spectacular, "The Greatest Show on Earth."

She was known for her renditions of upbeat songs like "Murder, He Says,"
a Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser number from the 1943 film "Happy Go
Lucky," and "His Rocking Horse Ran Away" from "And the Angels Sing" (1944).

Ms. Hutton's electric presence in films like "The Fleet's In" and
Preston Sturges's "Miracle of Morgan's Creek," masked emotional problems
rooted in a poverty-stricken childhood. As a young girl, she sang for
coins on street corners and in speakeasies to help support her alcoholic
mother, who had been abandoned by Ms. Hutton's father.

Years after her film career ended, those emotional problems still
plagued her. "I tried to kill myself," Ms. Hutton said in 1983,
recalling her decline after she faded from public notice.

She re-emerged in the 1970s, when reporters learned she was working as a
cook and housekeeper in the rectory of a Roman Catholic church in
Portsmouth, R.I. Before being rescued and rehabilitated by a priest, she
said, she had become addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol and had lost
what she estimated to be a $10 million fortune.

Betty Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Mich.,
on Feb. 26, 1921, the daughter of Percy Thornburg, a railroad brakeman,
and Mabel Lum Thornburg. In the early 1920s, Mr. Thornburg left town
with another woman, and Mrs. Thornburg took her children to Lansing and
finally to Detroit, where she got a job in the automobile industry for
22 cents an hour. To make ends meet, she sold homemade beer to
Prohibition violators. Betty and her sister, Marion, sang for the customers.

Ms. Hutton quit school in the ninth grade and started earning money
ironing shirts and doing housework. She also kept singing. When she was
15 and singing in a Detroit nightclub, the bandleader Vincent Lopez
hired her and gave her the name Hutton. The band was also heard on
radio. (Marion Thornburg later adopted the name Hutton, too, and became
a vocalist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra; she died in 1987.)

Ms. Hutton left Mr. Lopez's band after a couple of years and in 1940
appeared in the Broadway revue "Two for the Show." Vogue magazine called
her "the most supercharged" member of the cast. A year later she went to
Hollywood at the invitation of B. G. DeSylva, executive producer at
Paramount. He gave her, at 21, a part in "The Fleet's In." Look magazine
said it made her a star overnight.

Her film credits in the next 15 years included "Let's Face It" (1943)
and "Here Come the Waves" (1944). Sturges gave her more of a chance to
act in "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" (1944), a screwball comedy about
wartime morality that ruffled censors with its story of a young woman
who becomes pregnant after a spur-of-the- moment marriage and then can't
quite remember who the father is.

The next year she was back in a familiar role, as a hat-check girl, in
"The Stork Club," in which she memorably sang Hoagy Carmichael's
"Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief."

Several of her films were biographies: "Incendiary Blonde," about the
actress and nightclub queen Texas Guinan; "The Perils of Pauline," about
the silent-screen heroine Pearl White; and "Somebody Loves Me," about
the singer Blossom Seeley.

In 1950, when Judy Garland was ill and unable to meet her commitments to
star in the film version of "Annie Get Your Gun," Ms. Hutton got the
part, winning praise in a role that had been created on Broadway by
Ethel Merman.

There were also Hutton movies that got bad reviews, most notably "Dream
Girl" (1948). Ms. Hutton began to feel her career was headed downhill.
To help her get the romantic heroine's role in "The Greatest Show on
Earth," playing a trapeze artist, she sent DeMille a floral tribute 18
feet in diameter.

But her career was winding down, and after "Somebody Loves Me" (1952),
she was all but finished. That year she married Charles O'Curran, a
dance director, who wanted to direct her in a film. Paramount rejected
the idea, and Ms. Hutton, in a fit of temper, walked out of her
contract. Her final film, "Spring Reunion" (1957), received little notice.

Ms. Hutton soon turned to the new medium of television and was given a
series, "The Betty Hutton Show," but it lasted only for the 1959-60
season. In 1965 she appeared on Broadway in the musical "Fade Out, Fade
In," replacing Carol Burnett, but pills and alcohol were taking over her
life.

At her lowest ebb, in 1974, Earl Wilson, an entertainment columnist for
The New York Post, organized a benefit for her in New York. "I haven't
got a cent," said Ms. Hutton, who had earned $150,000 a week in her good
years.

She found a way to cope with her problems in religion. She renewed her
interest in Lutheranism, her original faith, then became a convert to
Roman Catholicism. She regarded the Rev. Peter Maguire of St. Anthony's
Roman Catholic Church in Portsmouth as primarily responsible for saving
her life. During one of her many hospital stays, he talked her into
working for St. Anthony's. "No one had ever talked to me before," she said.

She later resumed work as an actress, appearing in nightclubs and,
briefly in 1980, in the Broadway musical "Annie." "It's groovy being a
star again," she said. "But I know how fast it can be over."

In the early 1980s, Ms. Hutton, who had never gone beyond the ninth
grade, enrolled at Salve Regina, a Catholic college for women in
Newport, R.I. She earned a master's degree in psychology; the college
had decided that her life experience entitled her to a baccalaureate. By
the late 1980s, she was teaching comedy and oral interpretation at
Emerson College in Boston.

She made occasional broadcast appearances in her later years, notably an
hourlong interview, first shown in 2000, with Robert Osborne of Turner
Classic Movies.

She married four times, to Mr. O'Curran; Ted Briskin, a manufacturer;
Alan Livingston, a recording company executive; and Pete Candoli, a jazz
trumpet player. She had two daughters, Candy and Lindsay, with Mr.
Briskin and another, Caroline, with Mr. Candoli. All her marriages ended
in divorce.

"My husbands all fell in love with Betty Hutton," Ms. Hutton once said.
"None of them fell in love with me."