|
Jeanette MacDonald (June 18, 1903 – January 14, 1965) was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier (Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow) and Nelson Eddy (Naughty Marietta, Rose Marie, and Maytime). During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars ("The Love Parade", "One Hour With You", "Naughty Marietta" and "San Francisco"), and recorded extensively, earning three Gold Records. She later appeared in grand opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of most influential sopranos of the 20th century, introducing grand opera to movie-going audiences and inspiring a generation of singers.
Jeanette Anna MacDonald was born June 18, 1903 at her family's Philadelphia home at 5123 Arch Street. She was the youngest of the three daughters of Daniel and Anna Wright MacDonald. At an early age, the fledgling prima donna graduated from tap dancing in front of the mirror to dancing lessons with Al White, and from imitating her mother's opera records to singing lessons with Wassil Leps. She eagerly performed at church and school functions, and began touring in kiddie shows.
In November of 1919, MacDonald joined her older sister, Blossom, in New York and landed a job in the chorus of Ned Wayburn's The Demi-Tasse Revue, a musical entertainment presented between films at the Capital Theatre on Broadway. (This revue introduced George Gershwin's song "Swanee.") In 1920 she appeared in two musicals, Jerome Kern's Night Boat, as a chorus replacement, and Irene, on the road, as the second female lead. (Future film star Irene Dunne played the title role during part of the tour.) In 1921, MacDonald played in Tangerine, as one of the "Six Wives." In 1922, MacDonald was a featured singer in a Greenwich Village revue, Fantastic Fricassee. Good press notices brought her a role in The Magic Ring (1923). MacDonald played the second female lead in this long-running musical which starred the famous Mitzi Hajos. In 1925, MacDonald again had the second female lead opposite Queenie Smith in Tip Toes, a George Gershwin hit show. The following year found her still in a second female lead in Bubblin' Over (1926), a musical version of Brewster's Millions. MacDonald finally landed the starring role in Yes, Yes, Yvette (1927). Planned as a sequel to producer H.H. Frazee's No, No, Nanette, the show toured extensively but failed to please the critics when it arrived on Broadway. MacDonald also played the lead in her next two plays: Sunny Days (1928), her first show for producers Lee and J.J. Shubert, for which she received rave reviews, and Angela (1928), which the critics panned. Her last play was Boom Boom (1929), with her name above the title. (The cast included young Archie Leach, who later changed his name to Cary Grant.)
While MacDonald was appearing in Angela, film star Richard Dix spotted her and had her screen-tested for his film Nothing but the Truth. But the Shuberts wouldn’t let her out of her contract to appear in the film, which starred Dix and Helen Kane, the “Boop-boop-a-doop girl.” In 1929, famed film director Ernst Lubitsch was looking through old screen tests of Broadway performers and spotted MacDonald. He cast her as the leading lady in his first sound film, The Love Parade, which starred the continental sensation Maurice Chevalier. Fortunately, both she and this first of her 29 feature films were enormous hits.
In the first rush of sound films, 1929-30, MacDonald starred in 6 films, the first 4 for Paramount Studios. Her first was The Love Parade (1929), directed by Lubitsch and co-starring Chevalier, a landmark of early sound films. The film received a Best Picture nomination. MacDonald's first recordings were two hits from the score: “Dream Lover” and “March of the Grenadiers.” The Vagabond King (1930), was a lavish 2-strip Technicolor film version of Rudolf Friml’s hit 1925 operetta. Broadway star Dennis King reprised his role as 15th-century French poet François Villon and MacDonald was Princess Katherine. She sang “Some Day” and “Only a Rose.” U.C.L.A. owns the only known color print of this production. Paramount on Parade (1930) was a Paramount all-star revue. All studios issued similar mammoth sound revues to introduce their formerly silent stars, now talking and singing, to the public. MacDonald’s footage singing a duet of “Come Back to Sorrento” with Nino Martini was cut from the release print. Let’s Go Native (1930), was a desert island comedy directed by Leo McCarey, co-starring Jack Oakie and Kay Francis. Monte Carlo (1930) was another highly regarded Lubitsch classic, with British musical star Jack Buchanan as a count who disguises himself as a hairdresser to woo a scatterbrained countess (Macdonald). MacDonald introduced “Beyond the Blue Horizon” which she recorded three times during her career.
In hopes of producing her own films, MacDonald went to United Artists to make The Lottery Bride (1930). Despite music by Rudolf Friml, it was one of the glut of really bad musicals that turned the public against the genre. MacDonald next signed a 3-picture deal with Fox. Oh, for a Man! (1930) was more successful; MacDonald portrays a temperamental opera singer who sings Wagner's "Liebestod" and falls for an Irish burglar played by Reginald Denny. Don’t Bet on Women (1931) is a non-musical drawing room comedy in which playboy Edmund Lowe bets his happily married friend Roland Young that he can seduce Young’s wife (MacDonald). Annabelle’s Affairs (1931), was a delightful farce with MacDonald as a sophisticated New York playgirl who doesn’t recognize her own miner husband, played by Victor MacLaglen, when he turns up 5 years later. Highly praised by reviewers at the time, only one reel survives of this film.
MacDonald took a break from Hollywood in 1931 to embark on a European concert tour. She returned to Paramount the following year for two films with Maurice Chevalier: One Hour with You (1932), directed by both George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch. This film was simultaneously filmed in French with the same stars but a French supporting cast. Currently, there is no known surviving print of Une Heure près de toi ("One Hour Near You"). Rouben Mamoulian directed Love Me Tonight (1932), considered by many film critics and writers to be the ultimate film musical. Co-starring Chevalier as a humble tailor in love with Princess Jeanette, much of the story is told in sung dialogue. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the original score, which included the standards “Mimi,” “Lover,” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”
In 1933, MacDonald left again for Europe and while there, signed with MGM. Studio head Louis B. Mayer lured MacDonald to MGM where her first film was The Cat and the Fiddle (1933), a Jerome Kern Broadway hit. Her co-star was Ramon Novarro (Ben Hur), who was being eased out of the system by Mayer due to personal scandals. The plot about unmarried lovers shacking up just barely slipped through the new censorship guidelines; despite a Technicolor finale the film was not a huge success. In The Merry Widow (1934), director Ernst Lubitsch reunited Maurice Chevalier and MacDonald in a lavish and superb version of the classic 1905 Franz Lehár operetta. The film was highly regarded by critics and operetta lovers in major U.S. cities and Europe, but failed to generate much income outside urban areas. It had a huge budget, partially because it was filmed simultaneously in French, with a French supporting cast and some minor plot changes. (The French version is less politically satirical.) Identical sets and costumes were used for La Veuve Joyeuse, with each scene filmed twice, first in one language, then the other.
Naughty Marietta (1935), directed by W.S. Van Dyke, was MacDonald’s first film in which she teamed with newcomer baritone Nelson Eddy. It was a huge hit. Victor Herbert’s 1910 score, with songs like “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” “I’m Falling in Love with Someone,” “’Neath the Southern Moon,” “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” and “Italian Street Song,” enjoyed renewed popularity. The film won an Oscar for sound recording and received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It was voted one of the Ten Best Pictures of 1935 by the New York film critics, was awarded the Photoplay Gold Medal Award as Best Picture of 1935 (beating out Mutiny on the Bounty, which won the Oscar), and, in 2004, was selected to the National Registry of Films. MacDonald earned Gold Records for “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” and “Italian Street Song.”
The following year, MacDonald starred in two of the highest-grossing films of that year. In Rose Marie|Rose Marie (1936), she and Nelson Eddy sang Rudolf Friml’s “Indian Love Call” to each other in the Canadian wilderness (actually filmed at Lake Tahoe). Eddy’s definitive portrayal of the steadfast Mountie became a popular icon. When the Canadian Mounties temporarily retired their distinctive hat in 1970, photos of Eddy in his Rose Marie uniform appeared in thousands of U.S. newspapers. MacDonald plays a haughty opera diva who learns her kid brother (James Stewart) has killed a Mountie and is hiding in the northern woods; Eddy is the Mountie sent to capture him. San Francisco (1936), was also directed by W.S. Van Dyke. In this tale of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, MacDonald played a hopeful opera singer opposite Clark Gable as the he-man proprietor of a Barbary Coast gambling joint, and Spencer Tracy as his boyhood chum who gives the moral messages. The earthquake footage is considered exemplary even today. The title song by Bronislau Kaper and Gus Kahn remains popular today and is the official song of the city. Oscar nominations included Best Picture, Best Actor (Spencer Tracy), Best Director, Best Original Story (Robert Hopkins), Best Assistant Director (Joseph Newman). On the “Ten Best” lists of the New York Film Critics and Film Daily. Winner of Photoplay's Gold Medal Award, 1936.
In the summer of 1936, filming began on Maytime, co-starring Nelson Eddy, Frank Morgan and Paul Lukas, produced by Irving Thalberg. After Thalberg's untimely death in September, the production was shut down and the half-finished film was scrapped. A new script was filmed with a different storyline and supporting actors (including John Barrymore). The 'second' Maytime (1937), was the top-grossing film worldwide of the year and is regarded as one of the best film musicals of the 1930s. “Will You Remember” by Sigmund Romberg brought MacDonald another Gold Record. Maytime's powerful climactic scene still draws gasps of horror when the film plays in theaters today.
The Firefly (1937), was MacDonald’s first solo-starring film at MGM with her name alone above the title. With real-life Americans rushing to fight in the ongoing revolution in Spain, this historical vehicle was constructed around a previous revolution in Napoleanic times. Rudolf Friml’s 1912 stage score was borrowed and a new song, “The Donkey Serenade,” added. MacDonald's co-star was Allan Jones. The MacDonald-Eddy team had split after MacDonald's engagement and marriage to Gene Raymond, but neither of their solo films grossed as much as the team films and by the fall of 1937, MGM was barraged with outraged fan mail. The Girl of the Golden West (1938) was the result, but the two stars had little screen time together and the main song, "Obey Your Heart," was never sung as a duet. The film had an original score by Sigmund Romberg and reused the popular David Belasco stage plot (also employed by opera composer Giacomo Puccini for La Fanciulla del West.
Mayer had promised MacDonald the studio's first Technicolor feature and he delivered with Sweethearts (1938), co-starring Eddy. In contrast to the previous film, the co-stars were relaxed onscreen and singing frequently together. This box office smash hit integrated Victor Herbert’s 1913 stage score into a modern backstage story scripted by Dorothy Parker. MacDonald and Eddy played a husband and wife Broadway musical comedy team who are offered a Hollywood contract. Sweethearts won the Photoplay Gold Medal Award as Best Picture of the Year.
After MacDonald suffered a miscarriage (allegedly Eddy's child)during the filming of Sweethearts (according to the book Sweethearts by Sharon Rich, page 237), Mayer dropped plans for the team to co-star in Let Freedom Ring, a vehicle first announced for them in 1935. Eddy made that film solo while MacDonald and Lew Ayres (Young Dr. Kildare) co-starred in Broadway Serenade (1939). They played a contemporary musical couple who clash when her career flourishes while his flounders. MacDonald's performance was subdued (Eddy married Ann Franklin during the filming) and choreographer Busby Berkeley, just hired away from Warner Bros., was called upon to tack on a bizarre, over-the-top finale in a vain effort to improve the film.
Following Broadway Serenade, MacDonald left Hollywood on a concert tour and refused to re-sign her MGM contract. Eddy starred in a second solo film, Balalaika while MacDonald's manager was summoned from London to help her renogotiate. After initially insisting she film Smilin' Through with James Stewart and Robert Taylor, MacDonald finally relented and agreed to film The New Moon (1940) with Eddy. New Moon proved one of MacDonald’s most popular films. Composer Sigmund Romberg’s 1927 Broadway hit provided the plot and the songs: “Lover, Come Back to Me,” “One Kiss,” and “Wanting You,” plus Eddy’s rousing “Stout Hearted Men.” This was followed by Bitter Sweet (1940), a Technicolor film version of Noël Coward’s 1929 stage operetta.
Smilin’ Through (1941) was MacDonald's next Technicolor project. This 1919 stage play had been filmed a number of times. Its theme of reunion with deceased loved ones was enormously popular after the devastation of World War I, and MGM reasoned that it should resonate with filmgoers during World War II. MacDonald played a dual role—Moonyean, a Victorian girl accidentally murdered by a jealous lover, and Kathleen, her niece, who falls in love with the son of the murderer. The original co-stars, James Stewart and Robert Taylor, dropped out to help in the military effort and were replaced by Brian Aherne and Gene Raymond. Public domain music was used.
I Married an Angel (1942), was adapted from the sophisticated Rodgers & Hart stage musical about an angel who loses her wings on her wedding night. The script by Anita Loos suffered serious censorship cuts during filming that made the result less successful. MacDonald sang “Spring Is Here” and the title song. It was the final film made by the team of MacDonald and Eddy. After a falling-out with Mayer, Eddy bought out his MGM contract (with one film left to make) and went to Universal, where he signed a million-dollar, two-picture deal. MacDonald remained for one last film, Cairo (1942), a cheaply-budgeted spy comedy co-starring Robert Young (Father Knows Best) and Ethel Waters, who played MacDonald's singing maid.
MacDonald followed Eddy to Universal, where they were scheduled to make one film together after he finished Phantom of the Opera (1943). MacDonald marked time by appearing as herself in Follow the Boys (1944), an all-star extravaganza about Hollywood stars entertaining the troops. The more than 40 guest stars included Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields, Sophie Tucker and Orson Welles. MacDonald is shown during an actual concert singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and in a studio-filmed sequence singing “I’ll See You in My Dreams” to a blinded soldier.
After MacDonald and Eddy left MGM in 1942, they appeared frequently on radio together while planning several unrealized films that would have reunited them onscreen. Eddy was upset at how his first film turned out at Universal so their joint project at that studio fell through. They next sought independent financing for team projects like East Wind and Crescent Carnival, a book optioned by MacDonald. Other thwarted projects were The Rosary, a 1910 best seller (which Nelson Eddy pitched for a team comeback at MGM), The Desert Song and a remake of The Vagabond King, plus two movie treatments written by Eddy, "Timothy Waits for Love" and "All Stars Don't Spangle." In 1954 Eddy pulled out of yet another proposed team film to be made in England when he learned MacDonald was investing her own funds. He had invested in 1944's Knickerbocker Holiday, and had lost money.
MacDonald returned solo to MGM after 5 years off the screen for two films. Three Daring Daughters (1948), co-starred José Iturbi as her love interest. Jeanette plays a divorcée whose lively daughters (Jane Powell, Ann E. Todd, and Elinor Donahue) keep trying to get her back with her ex, while she has secretly remarried. “The Dickey Bird” song made the Hit Parade. The Sun Comes Up (1949), teamed two of MGM's most successful female stars, Jeanette MacDonald and Lassie, in a melodramatic enlargement of a touching short story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. MacDonald played a widow who has also lost her son, but warms to orphan Claude Jarman Jr. (of The Yearling fame). It was her final film.
Offered continued to come in and in 1962 Producer Ross Hunter proposed teaming MacDonald and Eddy for featured roles in his 1963 comedy smash, "The Thrill of It All". They declined and the roles were eventually played by Arlene Francis and Edward Andrews. 20th Century Fox also toyed with the idea of MacDonald (Irene Dunne was also briefly considered) for the part of the Mother Abbess in the film version of "The Sound of Music". It never moved beyond the discussion stages partly because of MacDonald's failing health.
An annual poll of film exhibitors listed Jeanette MacDonald as one of the ten top box-office draws of 1936, and many of her films were among the top 20 moneymakers of the years they were released. In addition, MacDonald was one of the top-ten box-office attractions in Great Britain from 1937 - 1942 inclusive. During her 39-year career, Jeanette MacDonald earned two stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame (for films and recordings) and planted her diminutive feet in the wet cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.
Starting in 1931 and continuing through the 1950s, MacDonald did regular concert tours between films. Her first European tour was in 1931, where she sang in both France and England. Her first American concert tour was in 1939, immediately after the completion of Broadway Serenade and Nelson Eddy's marriage. After that she, like him, did frequent U.S. tours between films. She sang several times at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.
When America joined World War II in 1942, MacDonald was one of the founders of the Army Emergency Relief and raised funds on concert tours. She auctioned off encores for donations and raised over $100,000 for the troops. President Roosevelt, who considered MacDonald and Eddy two of his favorite film stars, awarded her a medal. She also did command performances at the White House for both Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
In early 1960, The Hollywood Bowl announced that MacDonald and Howard Keel would be the guests soloists at the annual Easter Sunrise Service. However, health problems forced Miss MacDonald to cancel her appearance. By the summer of 1960, MacDonald was seriously ill and her autobiography collaborator, Fredda Dudley Balling, wrote that it was uncertain whether she would live long enough to finish the book. (Jeanette MacDonald Autobiography: The Lost Manuscript, page 17) Besides her heart problems, MacDonald suffered from a benign, non-operable brain tumor.
MacDonald recorded more than 90 songs during her career, working exclusively for RCA-Victor in the United States. She also did some early recordings for HMV in England and France while she was there on a concert tour in 1931. She earned three Gold Records, one for an LP album that she did with Nelson Eddy in 1957.
Critic J. Peter Bergman writes of her work: “Whether singing the sophisticated, brittle, and edgy songs from her Paramount films with Chevalier or the romantic exercises from her MGM operettas, Jeanette could always be relied upon to provide a mini-masterpiece. There was no need to see her to be aware of her facial expressions. They were present in her voice. You can still see them now, listening to her recordings. Even if you’ve never seen a filmed moment, her smile can be heard. Likewise her frown. When she rolls her eyes, it is there in her voice. Her expressive vocal gestures are far more French and much more seductive than her Philadelphia upbringing would lead us to expect.
After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, MacDonald continued to sing in concerts and on radio, and much of her time was devoted to war work. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Voluntary Services and was active with the Army Emergency Relief. She raised over $100,000 for them with benefit concerts throughout the country in the fall of 1943, for which FDR awarded her a medal. She did extensive free concerts for the military through the U.S.O, and after each of her regular “civilian” concert, she would auction off encores and donated the money to wartime charities. She was surprised to find that the song she was most often asked to sing was “Ave Maria.” When she was home in Hollywood, she held open house at her home, Twin Gables, on Sunday afternoons for G.I.s. On one occasion, at the request of Lt. Ronald Reagan, she was singing for a large group of men in San Francisco who were due to ship out to the fierce fighting in the South Pacific. She closed with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and 20,000 voices spontaneously joined in.
MacDonald suffered in her later years with heart trouble. She worsened in 1963 and underwent an arterial transplant at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. Nelson Eddy, in Australia on a nightclub tour, pleaded illness and returned to the States at word of MacDonald's surgery. After the operation she developed pleurisy and was hospitalized for two-and-a-half months. Her friends kept the news from the press until just before her release. Her large home was sold and she moved into a Los Angeles apartment that would not require so much of her energies. They renovated an adjoining apartment to create a larger living space for the couple. She was again stricken in 1964. Nelson Eddy was with her when she was admitted to UCLA Medical Center, where on Christmas Eve she was operated on for abdominal adhesions. She was able to go home for New Year’s, but in mid-January husband Raymond flew her back to Houston. It was hoped that pioneer heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey, who had recently operated successfully on the Duke of Windsor, could perform the same miracle for her. She checked in on January 12, and a program of intravenous feedings was begun to build her up for possible surgery. MacDonald died two days later on January 14, at 4:32 pm, with her husband at her bedside. MacDonald's last words to Raymond while he massaged her feet were "I love you". He replied "I love you, too". According to the press reports, she smiled and succumbed.
Jeanette Anna MacDonald was interred on January 18 1965 in a crypt at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California which reads Jeanette MacDonald Raymond. Nelson Eddy, who told Jack Parr on "The Tonight Show" that "I love her," broke down when interviewed by the press the evening of her death. He survived MacDonald by two years.
A decade after MacDonald's death in 1965, Gene Raymond remarried. His second wife, a Canadian heiress, was the former Mrs. Bentley Hees. Her first name was, coincidentally, Nelson. "Nels," as she was called, died in 1995. Gene followed her on May 3 1998 and was laid to rest next to Jeanette MacDonald at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California.
|
