Word: hollywoodized
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...That S.O.P. in Hollywood, where stars are endlessly creative in finding ways to hit bottom. But even under that low bar, Hutton could do the limbo. In the late '70s she was discovered working as a cook and housekeeper in a Rhode Island rectory. There, she told Robert Osborne in a 2000 Turner Classic Movies interview, she found salvation under the gentle care of Father Peter McGuire. Hutton earned a cum laude degree from Salve Regina College, then taught drama and music. Her motto might have been the Johnny Burke-Jimmy Van Heusen novelty number she sang in the movie...
...there was one Hollywood figure who appreciated Hutton's talents, and who matched her drive with his, that would be Frank Loesser. As lyricist or total songwriter he authored dozens of movie hits before graduating to Broadway and composing the scores for Guys and Dolls, A Most Happy Fella and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He's also the subject of a toe-tappingly terrific new bio-doc, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser. But in the '40s he was under contract to Paramount, and there he wrote many of Hutton's signature songs...
...found a valuable patron in the Broadway songwriter B.G. (Buddy) De Sylva. When he was named Paramount's production chief, he took Hutton to Hollywood and made her a star. Rather, she did it herself. He just turned the cameras on her. Which was easier said than done. Directors complained that she was too peripatetic to keep in view. According to the TIME cover: "De Sylva had a camera dolly rigged up and told the director to follow her all over the set if necessary." The film frame was a cage she was bound to burst...
...This extreme-rendition style went against the grain of the Hollywood '40s, when actors tended to whisper their threats and endearments, and the film noir aesthetic insured that movie sets had no more lighting than today's Baghdad after curfew. Not Hutton: she stuck her face into the nearest klieg light and shouted her lines and lyrics, cascaded all that talent and adrenaline...
...Hutton equivalent among her contemporaries, let alone now. Danny Kaye poured comic pizzazz into his tongue-twisting tunes, but had a hard time with ballads. Martha Raye did a lot of broad comedy, but without Betty's fresh-scrubbed glamour. Doris Day was another band-singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. Only Betty had the whole package. She was vivacious, pretty, a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau mot juste, was obliged...