--- title: When Betty Got Frank description: Nobody came on to the movie camera — wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission — like Betty Hutton. They called... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6908209/when-betty-got-frank/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2007-03-31T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:21:30.981Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: When Betty Got Frank og:description: Nobody came on to the movie camera — wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission — like Betty Hutton. They called... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6908209/when-betty-got-frank/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: When Betty Got Frank twitter:description: Nobody came on to the movie camera — wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission — like Betty Hutton. They called... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # When Betty Got Frank > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Mar 31, 2007 4:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Mar 31, 2007 4:00 AM UTC Nobody came on to the movie camera — wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission — like Betty Hutton. They called this 40s singer-actress “the Blitzkrieg blond” for an energy that would make Rachael Ray seem logy by comparison. Film critic James Agee, and other scribes at TIME, described her variously as “rubber-jointed,” “brass-lunged,” “super-dynamic,” “bouncing, bawling,” “raucous, rampageous.” To Bob Hope she was “a vitamin pill with legs.” She seemed to have swallowed a truckload full of them before every performance; she was indomitable, unstoppable, the Fuller Brush flack with a quick smile, a faster line of patter and her foot in your door. Hutton, who died this month at 86, was the reigning female star of the 40s at Paramount Pictures. She is remembered for three roles: as the somehow-impregnated bobbysoxer in Preston Sturges’ _The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek_, as Annie Oakley in the Irving Berlin musical _Annie Get Your Gun_ and as the lovelorn trapeze artist in Cecil B. DeMille’s _The Greatest Show on Earth_ — top-billed in the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1952\. And like Paramount’s male perennial, Bing Crosby, she often graced the pop charts: six songs in the top 10\. They were mostly novelty tunes: “His Rocking Horse Ran Away,” “Stuff Like That There” and the No. 1 “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.” But Hutton could also find the aching heart in plaintive ballads; her versions of “It Had to Be You” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” both made the top five. She would have had more hits, except that in 1942, just as she was becoming a break-out star, the musicians’ union imposed a two-year ban on recording. Her role in _Annie Get Your Gun_ landed Hutton on the Apr. 24, 1950, [cover of TIME.](/time/magazine/article/0,9171,812252,00.html) Back then she seemed on top of the world, and _The Greatest Show on Earth_ was still to come. But soon she hit the Down button, and her stock fell as fast as it rose. The DeMille circus spectacular was her last major movie. She took a rodeo to Broadway (for three weeks), headlined the first big original musical for television (some considered it a fiasco) and in 1959 fronted a one-season sitcom (where her domineering attitude had other actors referring to her as Nero). Still in her 30s, she was essentially kaput in show business. As exhausting offscreen as off, Hutton married four times: to Reeves camera scion Theodore Briskin; to choreographer Charles O’Curran, who went on to dream up dance routines for Martin and Lewis, Hope and Crosby and Elvis; to Alan Livingston, who created Bozo the Clown and, as head of Capitol Records, lured Sinatra, the Beatles and the Beach Boys to his label; and Big Band Hall of Fame jazz trumpeter Pete Candoli — the wedding of two brassy instruments. All these unions ended in divorce, and Betty would later say she was happy in none of them. She also became estranged from her three children. 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 _Duffy’s Tavern_: “I Have to Do It the Hard Way.” She made it tough on everyone: her audience, her colleagues, herself. **THE COMPOSER AND THE CUTIE** If 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_](http://www.loessermovie.org/). But in the ’40s he was under contract to Paramount, and there he wrote many of Hutton’s signature songs. They had a lot in common, these two brash kids who, early in life, felt unappreciated for the special talent they knew they had. Betty’s railroad brakeman father left their Battle Creek, Mich., home when she was two, and killed himself 14 years later, leaving $100 each to Betty and her elder sister Marion. “Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start,” Mrs. Thornburg told TIME in 1950\. “She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister.” Marion would become a band singer of moderate repute under the name Marion Hutton. She never achieved her sister’s volcanic success. Yet it was Betty whose career was one long, desperate plea for the love she felt she never got at home. As I wrote in a [1991 TIME tribute](/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973842,00.html), Loesser was born into an educated German-Jewish family that prized classical music; his father was a piano teacher, his brother Arthur a keyboard prodigy and later a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music. To the Loessers, popular music was _infra dig_, but Frank loved it. Like the cantor’s son in _The Jazz Singer_, or pert Owl Jolson in the Tex Avery cartoon _I Love to Sing-a_, he had to battle his family’s resistance to mainstream pop. Indeed, Loesser’s nearly operatic score for _The Most Happy Fella_ might have been his way of saying, Papa, can you hear it? Arthur, can you see it? I made real music! Not that Loesser was as needy as Hutton; nobody could be. A Runyonesque character like the ones he put into _Guy and Dolls_, he was the classic little guy buoyed by an irrepressible belief in himself. With oceans of vim and a tough demeanor, Loesser was known to insult co-writers and directors and blow his top at rehearsals. He once got so mad at the way Isabel Bigley, _Guys and Dolls_‘ original Sister Sara, was mangling one of his songs that he socked her. Yet under the Cagney bully-bravado shone a big heart and the impulse to help other young composers. Among Loesser’s proteges: Jerry Ross and Richard Adler, who did _The Pajama Game_ and _Damn Yankees_, Meredith Willson of _Music Man_ fame and _Hello, Dolly!_s Jerry Herman. You can hear all of Loesser’s smarts and sparks in _Guys and Dolls_ — fast and forceful, perennially revived and the one period musical that never loses its topicality. That show exemplifies the credo Loesser lived by: “LOUD is good.” Which echoes in a comment Hutton made in the TCM interview: “Oh, I couldn’t sing good, but boy, I sure sang _loud_!” Talk about true minds meeting: Loesser was just the fella to put funny words in her big mouth. **FUNNY FIRECRACKER** Preternaturally restless, Betty left home at 15 and came to Manhattan, hoping to be noticed by people who could get her into show business. By 17, she had hooked up with Vincent Lopez’ decidedly demure band, to which she immediately brought verve and volume. One night when impresario Billy Rose was in the audience, did her madcap routine, picking up the elfin Lopez and carrying him about. That stunt earned her roles in the Broadway musicals _Two for the Show_ and _Panama Hattie_, where, she later said, her one number was filched by star Ethel Merman on opening night. Betty’s revenge came eight years later, when she played a ole Merman had originated onstage: Annie Oakley. She 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 out of. As a new kid in movies, fresh from beltin’ ’em out on Broadway, Hutton seemed unaware the camera she was playing to wasn’t in the upper balcony, it was as close as a lover; or that movies had perfected a sound system that carried her voice into the theaters. So she sold every word, every note, every gesture, as if she were on a mountaintop and the audience down in the valley. “Watching her in action,” TIME wrote in the Hutton cover story, “has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker.” 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. It’s hard to find a 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 to hatch a new one: “cinemusicomedienne.” A true star is someone who can bring in the crowds no matter how flimsy the vehicle or anonymous the surrounding players. Most of Hutton’s movies, which typically cast her as the good-time gal whose bravado masks her innocence, were at best inconsequential; and her costars in these modest endeavors ranged from grouchy John Lund to the craggy leprechaun Barry Fitzgerald, from hysterical geek Eddie Bracken to bulky Sonny Tufts. (Sonny Tufts??) The paucity of registered masterpieces of complementary star power simply proved her appeal. Audiences paid to see her propriety-defying shenanigans, in the implicit belief that any Hutton performance — squeezing as it did every ounce of life from her slim, sturdy body — might be her last. That’s not an unwarranted exaggeration about a performer whose forte _was_ unwarranted exaggeration. She came out of the big band era but thrashed about like a rock star. What Elvis Presley did with his hips, Hutton did with her entire body. She didn’t stand behind the mike; she ran amok across the stage, once torpedoing off it and landing on the drummer in the orchestra pit. (Rim shot.) Life with Hutton was just as perilous in Hollywood. She cracked three ribs getting tossed about by acrobats in the movie _Incendiary Blonde_. Her exuberance often injured her co-stars; she knocked out one actor, made another faint away, separated Hope’s caps from his teeth. “When they work with me,” she told TIME, “they gotta get insurance policies.” Sturges got her to channel her hyperactivity in _The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek_, a 1944 comedy that transposes the Nativity story to an American town overrun with horny soldiers. Hutton’s Trudy Kockenlocker is a virginal party girl who gets drunk and pregnant on a toot with the boys in uniform. To save the family’s reputation, Trudy must convince Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the 4F loony who has loved her since childhood, to marry her while impersonating the soldier who knocked her up — whoever _he_ was. (Trudy thinks his name might have been Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki.) Addressing all kinds of subjects that were usually taboo in Hollywood, and then flipping the bird to them, Sturges somehow got his movie past the censors, leading Agee, in his parallel nation column, to infer that the Hays Office “has been raped in its sleep.” If you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading now and get a hold of it. It’s unique in many ways, not least as a Hutton vehicle. Sturges, a raffish character who was every bit as rumbustious as his star, nonetheless cast her as the recipient of most of the mayhem rather than the perp; and he didn’t give her any numbers to sing. The set pieces here are all conversations — between Trudy and Norval or Trudy and her savvy kid sister (Diana Lynn) — eight extended dialogues, from two to four mins. long, and most of them done without cutting away. That means the performers have to build the emotion, the tension, the comedy, on their own, relying on their timing to take each scene from zero to 60\. Hutton manages this beautifully. And since, for once, she’s not the prime lunatic — Bracken, perpetually hysterical, criminally inane, has that role — she’s the one who has to apply the brakes. She’s expert at that too. It’s a pity that Sturges and Hutton made only this film together. But her mentor, DeSylva, was Sturges’ tormentor (on TCM Hutton says that “Buddy didn’t like him because he didn’t hit schedules”) and soon hounded Paramount’s prize writer-director off the lot. Partly as a result of the Sturges exile, Hutton’s movies thereafter were mostly dreck, occasionally animated by her nutty novelties songs. The films are fairly summarized in these TIME reviews, most of them by Agee, wearing himself out to find new descriptions for Betty-mania: _Star Spangled Rhythm_: “Betty Hutton, during a wild, bruising ride in a jeep, sings a ditty known as I’m Doin’ It for Defense.” _Let’s Face It_: “Throaty Betty Hutton provides a diversion with a machine-gun-speed offering of Let’s Not Talk About Love.” _And the Angels Sing_: \[Hutton\] gets funnier with every picture. She is the most startling expression of natural force since the Johnstown Flood.” In _The Stork Club_, “Her songs are undistinguished but her uninhibited way of putting them over is an eclectic mixture of Harlem and Bali, with a shout from the heyday of Ethel Merman and a gesture from the childhood of Shirley Temple.” _Cross My Heart_ “might possibly have been saved if Miss Hutton had been allowed to tear a few more songs to shreds in her interestingly destructive style.” _The Perils of Pauline_: She “has a capacity for pathos which is rather crudely exploited in this film, and a capacity for comedy which is exploited just as crudely, but oftener and more successfully.” In _Red, Hot and Blue_, Hutton, “given a few comic situations and lively rhythms, appears to be a fissionable element exploding into energy and noise…. At her noisiest in her songs, she has the force of a pneumatic drill and the range of a fire siren.” **LOESSER GIVES HER MORE** Betty’s notion of acting while singing was to break each lyric into its components, mine each phrase for the mood or situation, then act that out to the hilt, however short the phrase. Given the Johnny Mercer–Victor Schertzinger ballad “Not Mine” in her debut feature _The Fleet’s In_, she dreamily croons the first line (“It’s somebody else’s moon above”), then immediately pulls a little girl’s mope face for the words “Not mine.” She took the same approach to acting, with multiple personalities flashing across her face with lightning speed and violence. Others might run screaming from this jackhammer assault; Loesser ran and embraced it. He didn’t want subtlety, he wanted salesmanship, and Betty has the pertest peddler around. He wrote more than a dozen songs for her, all to be found in [_The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser_ ](http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Lyrics-Frank-Loesser/dp/0679450599/ref=sr%5F1%5F1/104-1877000-8571107?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175376234&sr=8-1). They started with the 1943 “Murder, He Says,” about a girl’s jive-talking beau; during the number she jitterbugs, seesaws her shoulders, puts her hand to her tummy and sashays sexily — all stops out for Betty. Loesser kept feeding her novelty numbers to test her skills of pronunciation and breath control. Often the songs have her complaining, if not about a boyfriend, then about work. “The Sewing Machine” (from _The Perils of Pauline_): “I bobbin the bobbin and pedal the pedal / And wheel the wheel all day/ So by night I feel so weary / That I never get out to play.” And in another _Pauline_ song, the sublimely frantic “Rumble Rumble Rumble,” Betty practically falls off the piano top she’s perched on, so agitated is she singing about how she can’t get to sleep because the guy upstairs plays boogie-woogie all night: “He goes a-rumble, rumble, rumble on the bottom,/ He goes a-tinkle, tinkle, tinkle on the top./ Rumble, rumble, rumble, / Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, / Positively won’t stop!” (Get this on the CD [_Spotlight on Betty Hutton: Great Ladies of Song_).](http://www.answers.com/topic/spotlight-on-betty-hutton-great-ladies-of-song) Play is at the root of these songs, which often hinted that they were about something more ribald than their putative topic. “The Fuddy Duddy Watchmaker”: “Well I don’t know how he does it but he does it!”A song from _Red, Hot and Blue_, “I Wake up in the Morning Feeling Fine,” has Betty in a post-coital afterglow: “It must be cause you kiss me good ev’ry night.” (Yes… kiss.) They were the anthems of a good-time girl who cried out, in the words of “Poppa Don’t Preach to Me (_The Perils of Pauline_): “Let me fling till my fling is all flung.” Yet she could also give heart (and soul) to a torch song, like the _Pauline_ ballad “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” (“My love for you / Should have faded long ago”). Simple, sad and beautiful. Hutton and Loesser reconvened at MGM in 1950 for _Let’s Dance_. Theoretically it was a Fred Astaire musical, but Loesser didn’t go highbrow. He gave her a patter number with these lyrics — “I can’t stop talkinaboutim antalkinaboutim antalkinaboutim, I can’t stop talkinabout the man that I adore” — as Astaire stands by in understated disbelief. The singer and the songwriter never worked together again, which is a shame, since Hutton might have inspired a snazzy Broadway score from Loesser and kept her own career in flourish. In a way they did duet once more, once removed. Hutton’s last hit record was a cover of “A Bushel and a Peck” from _Guys and Dolls_. It went to #5\. **CLASSIC BETTY** And her last great performance — certainly her most startling and touching — was the Osborne interview for TCM. I’m told that the show, which lasts 56 mins. including clips, took four days to shoot because Betty’s anxieties kept getting in the way of her showmanship. But still she’s a wonder: her vitality undiminshed, she jumps up and down in her chair, rising with some memories, falling back crushed with others. At one point she gets up and hugs the genial Osborne in thanks for his kindness to her. She talks about her troubles with co-stars, saying that the Paramount contractees gave her a hard time because “they thought I was sleeping with Buddy De Sylva” and saying that the actors in _Annie Get Your Gun_, for which she recorded all her songs in one day, “were awful to me” because she had replaced the emotionally bereft Judy Garland. “_Annie Get Your Gun_ was the end of me, inside.” I’m guessing Howard Keel would have had a different take on that story. The thing about movie stars’ relation to the audience is: we don’t have to live with them; we just watch them do their best for us. “My private life has been hell, really hell,” Hutton told Osborne. “But my professional life was wonderful, because the audiences understood I was working for them with all my heart. … I just love ’em, Bob, and the only way I could show ’em is from a stage, I guess.” Hutton was 79 at this time, and she knew she was nearly spent. But she had that incorrigibly chipper spirit she’d broadcast so fortissimo in her films. “Finally you’re gonna die from something. I’ll die from stage fright, but it won’t be anything else.” Actually, it was colon cancer that took her. But Betty Hutton is still strutting — fearlessly — in the juke boxes and revival movie houses of her fans’ memories. And I guarantee: her admirers will be worn out before she is. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908209/when-betty-got-frank/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908209/when-betty-got-frank/"},"headline":"When Betty Got Frank","datePublished":"2007-03-31T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:21:30.981Z","description":"Nobody came on to the movie camera — wrapped it in a bear hug and wrestled it to submission — like Betty Hutton. 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