Betty Hutton

Elizabeth June Thornburg (Betty Hutton), actress and singer: born Battle Creek, Michigan 26 February 1921; married 1945 Ted Briskin (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1950), 1952 Charles O'Curran (marriage dissolved 1955), 1955 Alan Livingston (marriage dissolved 1960), 1960 Pete Candoli (one daughter; marriage dissolved); died Palm Springs, California 11 March 2007.

"If they put a propeller on Hutton and sent her over Germany," quipped Bob Hope in 1943, "the war'd be over by Christmas." During the 1940s the super-energetic Betty Hutton was one of Paramount's top stars, earning $5,000 a week. She convulsed audiences with her rambunctious delivery of such tailor-made songs as "My Rocking Horse Ran Away", "Murder He Says" and "Poppa, Don't Preach to Me", and earned an estimated $10m.

Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Michigan, but, after her father deserted the family when she was two, she moved to Detroit with her mother and older sister Marion. These were Prohibition days, and Mrs Thornburg opened a small speakeasy, at which little Betty and Marion performed for the patrons. Betty started singing with local bands at 13, later forming a sister act with Marion and joining the Vincent Lopez Orchestra. In 1938 Marion left to join Glenn Miller's band, and Betty Hutton, as she had become, stayed on with Lopez, her frenzied singing style causing a Variety critic to write, "Miss Hutton employs a slightly wild, rowdy technique that really sells her."

That technique helped her to stop the show with a jitterbug number in the Broadway revue Two for the Show (1940). B.G. DeSylva, producer and co-librettist of the Cole Porter musical Panama Hattie (1940), gave her a role in the hit show, which starred Ethel Merman. Hutton had three songs and made a considerable impact.

DeSylva's relationship with Hutton was rumoured to be more than Platonic, and, when he became executive in charge of production at Paramount Studios in 1941, he was quick to sign her for the film musical The Fleet's In (1942). Hers was a standard friend-of-the-heroine part, but, with Johnny Mercer/Victor Schertzinger songs like "Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry" and "Build a Better Mousetrap", the boisterous newcomer could hardly fail to register strongly, and was voted a "Star of Tomorrow" by the Motion Picture Herald.

She more than fulfilled that prediction in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), the tortuous plot of which involved her helping to pass off the Paramount gateman (Victor Moore) as the studio's head of production, to the fury of the actual production head, "B.G. De Soto" (Walter Abel). As a frenetic Paramount telephonist, Hutton scored heavily with her singing and clowning, despite the formidable competition of nearly every other player on the lot.

Soon she was cast opposite both of the studio's top male stars - Bob Hope in Let's Face It (1943) and Bing Crosby in Here Come the Waves (1944). Ever since arriving in Hollywood, Hutton had pestered Paramount's brilliant producer-writer-director Preston Sturges to give her a non-musical part. Eventually he wrote her the leading role in the rip-roaring smash hit The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). As the pea-brained super-patriot Trudy Kockenlocker, who, after a farewell-to-the-army party, becomes pregnant but can't remember which of many soldiers is the father, she received rave notices. "Betty Hutton, who has been just a bumptious hoyden," wrote Alton Cook in the New York World-Telegram, "becomes a sweet and amusing little comedienne."

When DeSylva was released from Paramount, he set up as an independent producer and Hutton loyally took the lead in his first production, The Stork Club (1945). She belted out "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" and "A Square in the Social Circle", and helped the medium-budget film to her customary box-office success. She starred in two alleged biographies: as the Prohibition night-club queen Texas Guinan in Incendiary Blonde (1945) and as the silent film serial queen Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1947).

In the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), a down-at-heel screenwriter (William Holden) tries to sell a trite baseball story to a Paramount producer (Fred Clark) as a vehicle for Alan Ladd. The producer finds the idea wanting, and then has a desperate thought: "Of course, we're always looking for a Betty Hutton," he says. "Do you see it as a Betty Hutton?"

This dialogue by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jnr wickedly summed up the studio's problems with its incendiary blonde; vehicles for her were becoming increasingly difficult to find. Cross My Heart (1946), Dream Girl (1947) and Let's Dance (1950) had been embarrassing disappointments.

Suddenly, bad luck for Judy Garland was good luck for Hutton: MGM borrowed her to replace the ailing Garland as the western markswoman Annie Oakley in their prestigious film version of Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (1950). After this triumph, Hutton returned to Paramount to play the juicy role of a trapeze artist in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). The same year, she made yet another putative biography, Somebody Loves Me, in which she played the vaudeville headliner Blossom Seeley.

Hutton's nickname "The Blonde Bombshell" was becoming all too appropriate; she was constantly exploding over Paramount's choice of stories, leading men and directors. In 1951, when "In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening", a song written for her, was given to Bing Crosby for the film Here Comes the Groom (and proceeded to win an Academy Award), her rage was deafening. In 1952 she married Charles O'Curran, her Somebody Loves Me choreographer, and, when Paramount defied her ultimatum that he direct her next film, she made a career-destroying decision - she walked out on her contract.

With the gates of every Hollywood studio closed to her, she made her second successful appearance at the London Palladium in 1952 (she had first played there in 1948) and next broke Judy Garland's attendance record at the Palace, New York. Things started to go wrong when she starred in a lavish 90-minute television musical called Satin and Spurs (1954). She was clearly terrified and the reviews were poor.

In 1955 Hutton and O'Curran were divorced (perhaps sacking him as her Satin and Spurs choreographer during rehearsals had something to do with it) and she married again several months later. This marriage was as unsuccessful as the treacly Spring Reunion (1957), her attempt at a Hollywood comeback. She tried television again in the sitcom The Betty Hutton Show (1959), about which she had enthused, "It's so cotton-pickin' funny, you'll just die when you see it!" Sadly, it was the series that soon died. The decades that followed were studded with more setbacks: a brief, unrewarding return to Broadway. Another failed marriage. Bankruptcy.

Nineteen seventy-four saw the name Betty Hutton in the news again, but in sad reports that she was working as cook-housekeeper at a Rhode Island Catholic rectory. After losing custody of her youngest daughter, she had gone to a Boston hospital to conquer her addiction to prescription drugs and met the priest Fr Peter Maguire. While working at his rectory, she converted to Catholicism, and found the confidence to return to Broadway for a short engagement as Miss Hannigan in Annie (1980). In 1986 she began teaching drama after earning a university degree.

In 2000, she emerged from retirement to give her first major television interview in over 20 years.

Dick Vosburgh

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