|
|
 |
|
IRENE MANNING |
 Irene Manning with Humphrey Bogart in 'The Big Shot' (1942) |
Singer-actress starred
with Bogart & Cagney
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
If the wheel of fortune turns a certain way, you can be a famous movie star one day and not so many years later you're a regular person again, wondering why nobody remembers your name.
But how can that happen to somebody who once co-starred with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Gene Autry? These are Hollywood icons. Could their one-time leading lady end up as a suburban housewife, known to her neighbors only as Mrs. Somebody?
Well, even today I guess I'd think it highly unlikely in such a celebrity-conscious society as 2004 America--if I didn't know better. And I know better because I came to know just such a person: Irene Manning.
And right now you're thinking: "Who's he talking about?" I don't blame you. And I suspect that Irene Manning, who died this weekend at age 91, wouldn't blame you either. Not exactly a household name, right?
"Every now and then somebody finds out I used to be a movie star," she once told me during an interview in her suburban home in San Carlos, Calif. "The reactions can get embarrassing. I just think of myself as a person--and if someone didn't mention it, I'd never give the movie star thing a thought."
To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I believed everything she said. Though she was then the wife of Lockheed aerospace executive Maxwell Hunter and living the comfortable life of a well-to-do society matron, she looked a little too glamorous for the rest of the ladies in that crowd. And then there was that booming light opera voice of hers. While I was with her, she stepped out on the patio to call her cat. That big, musical voice of hers echoed out over the canyons and I was amazed she didn't attract not only all the cats in San Mateo County, but maybe even a few Valkyries on their way to Valhalla.
Yet Irene swore she passed for regular in her circle of friends, so who was I to argue with her.
Under the name Hope Manning, she broke into movies in the 1930s, co-starring with singing cowboy Gene Autry in "The Old Corral" and two other westerns. Then a handsome blonde with a magnificent singing voice, she didn't seem exactly well-suited to horse operas. Though both Rita Hayworth and Jennifer Jones played in westerns when they broke into pictures--Hayworth as Rita Cansino, Jones as Phyllis Isley--and eventually worked their way up to leads in "A" pictures, Irene Manning got there by concentrating on her singing in Los Angeles area live productions. Warner Bros. signed her to sing the lead in the second movie version of Sigmund Romberg's "The Desert Song" opposite Dennis Morgan.
But that film didn't go on the schedule until 1944, so the studio put her to work in other things. In 1942, for instance, she was cast as Broadway singing star Fay Templeton in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," the big musical biography of George M. Cohan, and was featured in an elaborate musical number involving a railroad train. This was a huge bonus for her--being billed fourth in the immortal film that won James Cagney his only Academy award--and getting a spectacular musical number to showcase her talent.
They still weren't ready to film "The Desert Song," so she next played the lead opposite Humphrey Bogart in "The Big Shot," a "B" gangster picture.
"Bogie wasn't a legend in those days," she told me. "Oh, he was a big star. He had already done 'The Maltese Falcon,' but he had to do whatever Warners wanted, just like the rest of us in the stock company."
In the film, Manning played ex-con Bogart's former girl friend, now married to the "boss" of the criminal gang. Director Lewis Seiler wasn't happy to have "an opera singer" with minimal acting experience as Bogart's leading lady--and Manning was nervous about it, too.
"I was going to acting classes at the studio, but I was still nervous about doing a straight role," she said. "I was supposed to do one song in the picture, but they decided my voice was too well-trained for such a sleazy character and they cut the number."
But she found Bogart to be an incredibly generous leading man, who helped her along with little tips before every scene they played together.
"Bogart had a reputation as a character," she told me. "But he was every bit the professional. I was a square and Bogie shocked me at first. He was a real four-letter man--and I don't mean on the football field."
Though "Desert Song" was a success, it didn't lead to much else for Manning at the studio. Today the film is nearly forgotten because it was remade in color by MGM in 1953 with Kathryn Grayson and Gordon McRae. That version obscures the earlier 1929 and 1944 versions.
Manning made "The Doughgirls" and "Shine On, Harvest Moon," both in 1944, but she was slipping down the stardom scale and wasn't prominently featured. She made some other non-musicals, like "Escape in the Desert" (1945), a remake of "The Petrified Forest," but the studio let her go shortly after World War II ended and, despite a few other pictures elsewhere, she realized her career was over.
"When you stop being a career girl and you're suddenly home alone all day, it can be quite a shock," she said.
But she had long since made her adjustment to being a non-star by the time I made her acquaintance in the late 1960s and told me she liked her new life a whole lot better.
"Even when I was in movies, I didn't have much to do with other actors," she said. "My friends were writers and the technical people."
Maybe the publicity I helped generate sort of jerked the cloak of anonymity off Mrs. Maxwell Hunter. She sort of reactivated her career in the 1970s, at least enough to start doing some musical stage work again. The last time I saw her, she even confessed something I seldom heard from your standard issue suburban housewife.
"I'd love to do a movie," she told me. "I'll play anything from a nun to the madam of a whorehouse."
I don't think it ever happened, but hearing her wish for it out loud did prove something I'd always suspected: The urge for movie stardom dies hard, even in someone lost in suburbia.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The photo is courtesy of Warner Bros.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email,
click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |