Gloria Jean

Gloria Jean was being trained as a coloratura soprano when her voice teacher, Leah Russel, took her to an audition held by Universal Pictures movie producer Joe Pasternak in 1938. Pasternak had guided Deanna Durbin to stardom, and with Durbin advancing to ingénue roles, Pasternak wanted a younger singer to make the same kind of musicals. He held auditions for a film called The Under-Pup.[5]

"There were hundreds of beautiful little girls there," Jean recalled. "I had been grabbed out of the sandbox, and I didn't look so nice. I had pigtails and my teeth were a little crooked. But that's what Joe liked."[5]

She told Pasternak she could not sing as the piano was out of tune. "My mother almost shot me. Joe said, `I like this kid. Let's get the piano tuned and bring her back tomorrow.' I got all kinds of lectures on the way home about being a little more subdued. When I sang the next day, I knew it went very well".[5] Up against all the others, Gloria Jean won the audition.[6]

Jean in 1940

Under contract to Universal, she was given the leading role in the feature The Under-Pup (1939), which starred Robert Cummings and Nan Grey who had been in Three Smart Girls Grow Up with Durbin.[4] The film did well and Gloria Jean became instantly popular with moviegoers.[7] Universal's publicity department initially claimed the singer was 11 years old instead of 13; her actual age was not well known for many decades.

She co-starred with Bing Crosby in If I Had My Way (1940) which was written, produced and directed by David Butler. She then starred in the well-received A Little Bit of Heaven (1940), which reunited her with many from the Under-Pup cast, including Nan Grey; the male lead was Robert Stack who appeared opposite Durbin several times. Her rise to stardom caused some problems: in December 1940 she was sued by William Lustig, a Pennsylvania bandleader who had appeared with her during her local radio years; Lustig claimed to be her former agent.[8]

Her fourth picture became her best known: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), in which she co-starred with W.C. Fields. "He had a reputation, I know, for not liking children, but he was very kind and considerate to me," said Gloria later. "I used to wonder, though, why he didn't eat on the set. When we broke for a meal he'd say, 'Get that kid off to school.' Of course, I know now, it was because he wanted to drink."[9]

Universal recognized the need for musical entertainment during wartime, and Gloria Jean became one of the studio's most prolific performers; during the war years she made 14 feature films. Most were "hepcat" musicals geared to the teenagers of the day, and Universal used them to introduce new young talent, including Donald O'Connor, Peggy Ryan, Mel Tormé, and Marshall Thompson.[10] She supported The Andrews Sisters in What's Cookin' (1942) then appeared with Donald O'Connor, Jane Frazee, Robert Paige and Peggy Ryan in Get Hep to Love (1942). It was directed by Charles Lamont as was When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1942) with O'Connor, Ryan, Frazee, and Allan Jones. She and O'Connor were top-billed in It Comes Up Love (released 1943).

In 1942 she was cast, in her first dramatic performance, as a blind girl in one of four vignettes for Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy (1943). The studio started admitting her real age.[11] Her performance won raves at the film's advance preview, and her segment was the best-received of the four. However, Universal removed the half-hour sequence and shelved it, at the insistence of a major stockholder who exerted a great deal of control at the studio.[6] Columnist Edwin Schallert commented at the time: "For Gloria the fact that she did not appear in Flesh and Fantasy was a heartbreak, and she declares she's had a number of them even thus far in her experience. She also expects to have more. She's philosophical about that. 'But I've liked every bit of my experiences during those five years, even the heartbreaks,' she said. 'The Flesh and Fantasy was the worst, because the part I played in that really meant a lot to me. It was the first I'd ever done with real drama. But now they plan to develop that sequence into a full-length picture so that probably proves, as I've learned, that things generally work out for the best.'"[12]

In the wake of Flesh and Fantasy, Universal tried to give Gloria Jean a smooth transition from adolescent roles to leading-lady status. She was outgrowing juvenile roles but was not yet mature enough for adult leads. In December 1942 she was tested for the female lead in Phantom of the Opera,[13] but was considered too young. She was then considered as the singing ingenue in a concurrent Abbott and Costello comedy, It Ain't Hay (released 1943) but was considered too old.

Universal returned her to the budget-musical ranks. She and Peggy Ryan co-starred in Mister Big (1943), a vehicle for Donald O'Connor. Gloria Jean's next starring film was Moonlight in Vermont (1943) with Ray Malone and Betty McCabe, a one-shot attempt to create a new O'Connor-Ryan song-and-dance team.

In January 1944 Universal announced they wanted to launch Gloria Jean as a more adult star. She co-starred with Olsen and Johnson in the big-budget Ghost Catchers (1944), which featured singer-actor Kirby Grant. The two vocalists worked so well together that Universal teamed them for two more features.[6] She starred in Pardon My Rhythm (1944) opposite Mel Torme, Reckless Age (1944) and I'll Remember April (1945) with Kirby Grant.[14] In April 1944 she turned eighteen.[15]

When Gloria Jean's Universal contract expired at the end of 1944, her agent Eddie Sherman (who was also Abbott and Costello's manager) persuaded her against renewing it,[6] citing the need for "a transition period to make the change from child to adult roles."[16] This left Universal in a bind; the studio had already promised exhibitors three Gloria Jean pictures for the 1945 season. Universal solved the problem by rushing Gloria Jean through three final productions that had already been partially completed. The half-hour sequence from Flesh and Fantasy was finally expanded into a feature-length melodrama, Destiny (1944); and scripts had already been prepared for Fairy Tale Murder (1945) (released in the United States as River Gang) and Easy to Look At (1945) (co-starring Kirby Grant).[6]

After leaving Universal, Gloria Jean made personal appearances across America; the successful tour prompted a new tour of Europe. In England, her rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" (and the lyric "forgive us our debts") was taken by some critics as a pointed comment about America's lend-lease policy.[6] "It was all over the newspapers the next day, the story that I had come to London to insult Britons," said Gloria. "I was devastated."[9] Thus the European tour ended abruptly and Gloria Jean returned to Hollywood.[17]

Her family lawyer had vanished with her earnings and she was heavily in debt to the US tax authorities. To make matters worse, no directors wanted the former child star. "It was a mistake for me to stay away from Hollywood that long," she admitted in 1960. "You can easily be forgotten."[7]

She resumed her movie career as a freelance performer appearing in United Artists, Columbia Pictures, and Allied Artists productions, including Copacabana (1947) with Groucho Marx. Four of her later films were directed by Arthur Dreifuss: I Surrender Dear (1948) and Manhattan Angel (1949) for Sam Katzman.[18] then the Dreifuss-produced An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949) for Eagle Lion and There's a Girl in My Heart (1949) for Allied Artists.[19]

Gloria Jean began appearing on TV shows like Hollywood Theatre Time, Rebound, Death Valley Days, Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Colgate Comedy Hour, Your Favorite Story, Annie Oakley, and Lux Video Theatre. Her best-known performances of the early 1950s were six Snader Telescriptions (three-minute musicals syndicated for television), later compiled into the TV series Showtime.

She continued to appear sporadically in feature films, albeit low-budget ones. Wonder Valley (1952), produced on location in Arkansas, was Gloria Jean's first color movie but was later lost.[6] Her next feature was Air Strike (1955), a minor military drama.

After Air Strike Gloria Jean was hired by the owner of the Tahitian restaurant in Studio City, California, as a hostess,[20] greeting and seating dinner guests. She enjoyed the experience and occasionally ran the restaurant in her employer's absence. Show-business patrons were surprised that a film star had resorted to restaurant work, resulting in sympathetic feature stories in the national press.

Veteran Hollywood producer Edward Finney, himself a Gloria Jean fan, saw one of these reports and hired her to star in the lightweight comedy Laffing Time (filmed in 1959, re-released as The Madcaps in 1964).[6] Jerry Lewis also read that Gloria Jean was working in a restaurant, and signed her for a singing role in his latest production, The Ladies Man (1961).[21] Lewis removed almost all of her footage from the finished film; she appears only as an extra and has no dialogue. It was her last theatrical motion picture.

Her final appearances were in The Dick Powell Theatre, Lockup, and Saints and Sinners.