Background
Betty Hutton was born on 26 February 1921 in Battle Creek, Michigan, United States.
Betty Hutton was born on 26 February 1921 in Battle Creek, Michigan, United States.
Vanished father, alcoholic mother, singing anywhere and everywhere to help the family survive (her sister became the successful band singer Marion Hutton), vocalist with the Vincent Lopez band. Then Broadway—Two for the Show and Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie, from which she was plucked by Paramount and her first feature movie, The Fleet’s In (1942, Victor Schertzinger). (Dorothy Lamour got William Holden, Hutton got comic Eddie Bracken—but she also got Johnny Mercer’s “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry.”)
She was to appear opposite Bracken in her finest movie by far. Preston Sturges’s hilarious The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (44), as the ultimate ditzy blonde, Trudy Kockenlocker, who—apparently unmarried—gives birth to sextuplets. (This movie was considered too risqué for kids!) She and Bracken were also together as a kind of glue for the all-star Star-Spangled Rhythm (42, Marshall) and in Happy Go Lucky (43, Curtis Bernhardt), in which she steals the show—from Mary Martin and Dick Powell—with the Frank Loesser-Jimmv McHugh “Murder He Says. She played opposite Bob Hope in Let’s Face It (43, Sidney Lanfield), Bing Crosby in Here Come the Waves (44, Mark Sandrich), even Fred Astaire in Let’s Dance (50, Norman Z. McLeod)—less terrible than people claim). But her Big Two in terms of box office w'ere Annie Get Your Gun (50, George Sidney), in which she replaced the ailing Judy Garland for MGM and did a frenzied but more than acceptable job, and De Milles The Greatest Show on Earth, which won the Oscar as best picture of 1952. It’s pretty ghastly, but she’s okay as the trapeze artist, Holly. This movie earned more money than anything Paramount had released before.
You’d think Hutton was riding high, but there was only one more real vehicle, a biopic of Blossom Seeley, Somebody Loves Me (52, Irving Brecher). She had been getting more and more temperamental and confrontational, and walked out of Paramount in a contract dispute. There was to be a minor film in 1957, and then decades of trying to make it in theatre and TV, followed by breakdowns and recovery with the help of a Catholic priest. (She became a housekeeper in a Rhode Island rectory.) With the help of God and therapy, she’s apparently found her way to self-acceptance and a decent life, appearing in 2001 in a sympathetic documentary about her career and her travails. The career lasted a decade, but while it lasted she was at the top. And as she said, “Some kinds of fun last longer than others."
Films: The Fleet’s In (42, Victor Schertzinger/ Hal Walker); Star Spangled Rhythm (42, George Marshall); Happy Go Lucky (43, Curtis Bernhardt); Let’s Face It (43, Sidney Lanfield); And the Angels Sing (44, Marshall); The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (44, Sturges); Here Come the Waves (44, Mark Sandrieh); Incendiary Blonde (45, Marshall), as Texas Guinan; The Stork Club (45, Marshall), a mess, but it gave her a number-one hit, "Doctor, Lawyer, Inchan Chief"; Duffy’s Tavern (45, Walker), in a cameo as herself; Cross My Heart (46, John Berry), a remake of Lombard's True Confession and a big mistake; The Perils of Pauline (47, Marshall), as Pearl White, the Serial Queen; Dream Girl (48, Mitchell Leisen); Red, Hot and Blue (49, Robert Fellows)—not, alas, the Cole Porter musical; Annie Get Your Gun (50, George Sidney); Let’s Dance (50, Norman Z. McLeod), Hutton first-billed over Astaire!; The Greatest Show on Earth (52, De Mille); Somebody Loves Me (52, living Brecher); Spring Reunion (57, Robert Pirosh).
Any remaining doubters should be aware that Beth' Hutton was Ludwig Wittgensteins favorite actress.
1944: “Betty Hutton is almost beyond good and evil, so far as I am concerned . . .”
1945: “I may begin to tire of Beth’ Hutton’s \io- lenee some day, but I haven’t yet . . .”
1945: “Betty Hutton just about saves [Incendi¬ary Blonde], but no more, for those who like her, and I do.”
The uncharacteristically defensive note is Janies Agee’s about liking her. A lot of people couldn’t (and can’t) stand her, but for a decade she was a highly popular star, appearing in at least three central movies of the period. She belted, she hoofed, she grinned, she smirked, she goofed, she mugged—she was a bombshell, or at least a hand grenade. But the more you watch her, the more she appeals, with her naive belief that she can blast you into appreciation. And as the years, and films, go by, she actually starts to act. In The Perils of Pauline (47, George Marshall) she softens after the classically rambunctious sewing-machine number, and her singing of the lut ballad I Wish I Didn’t Love You So" is simple and affecting.
( Hutton is usually the girl pursuing rather than the girl pursued—in other words, she’s cast in the girl-comic tradition, like a Martha Raye or Cass Daley; but she’s pretty, too. so she can get the handsome guy at the end, even if he is a lox.)