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Actor

1921-02-26 · Battle Creek, Michigan, USA · Female

5 series in the catalog

Betty Hutton (born Elizabeth June Thornburg; February 26, 1921 – March 12, 2007)

was an American stage, film, and television actress, comedian, dancer, and singer. With a career spanning six decades, she rose to fame in the 1940s as a contract player for Paramount Pictures, appearing primarily in musicals and becoming one of the studio's most valuable stars. She was noted for her energetic performance style.

Raised in Detroit during the Great Depression by a single mother who worked as a bootlegger, Hutton began performing as a singer from a young age, entertaining patrons of her mother's speakeasy. While performing in local nightclubs, she was discovered by orchestra leader Vincent Lopez, who hired her as a singer in his band.

In 1940, Hutton was cast in the Broadway productions Two for the Show and Panama Hattie, and attracted notice for her raucous and animated live performances. She relocated to Los Angeles in 1941 after being signed by Paramount Pictures, and concurrently recorded numerous singles for Capitol Records. Her breakthrough role came in Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), and she went on to receive further notice for her lead role as Annie Oakley in the musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950), and for Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). She made her final feature film appearance in Spring Reunion (1956).

After leaving Paramount, Hutton starred in her own series, The Betty Hutton Show, from 1959 until 1960. She continued to perform in stage productions, though her career faltered following a series of personal struggles, including chronic depression, alcoholism, and prescription drug addiction. Hutton largely abandoned her performing career by the 1970s and found employment in a Rhode Island rectory after becoming nearly destitute. She returned to the stage temporarily, replacing Alice Ghostley in the original Broadway production of Annie in 1980.

In her later life, Hutton attended Salve Regina University, where she earned a master's degree in psychology in 1986. After working as an acting instructor at Emerson College, Hutton returned to California in 1999 and resided in Palm Springs, where she died in 2007 at 86.

Early life

Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg on February 26, 1921, in Battle Creek, Michigan, the youngest of two daughters of Percy Thornburg, a railroad brakeman, and Mabel Thornburg (née Lum). When she was two years old, her father abandoned the family. They did not hear of him again until they received a telegram years later, informing them of his suicide. Betty and her older sister, Marion, were raised by their single mother, who was an alcoholic.

Hutton's formative years during the Great Depression were marked by poverty, with Hutton's mother supporting herself and her two children by working as an automobile upholsterer and running an illegal speakeasy out of her home in Lansing, Michigan. There, Hutton and her sister regularly performed songs to entertain customers of the speakeasy.

Due to her mother's bootlegging of alcohol during prohibition, the family relocated frequently to evade police, eventually settling in Detroit when she was eight years old. Recalling her childhood, Hutton said: "Mom just ran a joint on a small scale. We'd operate until the cops got wise. Then they'd move in and close us down, and we'd move somewhere else. Marion and I would entertain the customers by dancing and singing. We really lived that way until we were 12 and 14 years old... Things were really tough. At one time we were down to one can of beans."

Hutton attended Foch Intermediate School in Detroit before dropping out in ninth grade. She sang in several local bands as a teenager and at 15 attempted to find stage work in New York City; her efforts proved unsuccessful, and she returned to Detroit.

Career

1938–1940: Music and Broadway

In 1938, Hutton was discovered by orchestra leader Vincent Lopez while she was performing as a singer in local Detroit nightclubs. Lopez recruited her as a member of his band, and she began touring with them as a singer, billed as Betty Jane. During her tenure with the band, Hutton established a distinctive "whoop and holler" vocal style. Lopez, an adherent of numerology, used his numerology practice to rebrand her with the stage name Betty Hutton: "I tried to get a vibration that would make her a lot of money. It was a five-eight vibration. After that she did fine." Through her work with Lopez, Hutton was hired to appear in several musical shorts for Warner Bros.: Queens of the Air (1938), Three Kings and a Queen (1939), Public Jitterbug No. 1 (1939), and One for the Book (1940).

In 1940, Hutton was cast in the Broadway production Two for the Show, which ran for 124 performances and received rave reviews. Hutton soon became known for her raucous performances onstage, summarized in a 1950 Time magazine article:

During the show's run, hardworking, hard-cussing actress Hutton spared her fellow performers no more than she spared herself. She thrashed about so violently that once she catapulted off the stage and onto a drummer in the orchestra pit. In a number that required her to maul Keenan Wynn, she once toed him into a dead faint, forced him to take to protective padding. Among her later victims: Bob Hope, whose teeth caps she sent scattering over a soundstage floor during a bit of jujitsu; Cinemactor Frank Faylen, whom she knocked out with a right to the jaw when the director demanded realism; Eddie Bracken, who, in a saloon scene, caught a Hutton slap on the back that looped him over the bar and into a heap on the other side. "When they work with me," crows Betty, "they gotta get insurance policies."

Two for the Show was produced by Buddy DeSylva, who then cast Hutton in Panama Hattie (1940–1942). This was a major hit, running for 501 performances. It starred Ethel Merman; despite rumors through the years that Merman demanded from envy that Hutton's musical numbers be reduced from the show, more careful reports demonstrate that producer DeSylva chose to cut just one song of three, "They Ain't Done Right by Our Nell", due to Hutton's "always in overdrive" performance style.

1941–1949: Paramount contract and breakthrough

When DeSylva became a producer at Paramount Pictures, he offered Hutton a contract with the studio, and she relocated to Los Angeles. She was first cast in a featured role in The Fleet's In (1942), starring Paramount's number-one female star Dorothy Lamour, alongside Eddie Bracken and William Holden. The film was popular and Hutton was an instant hit with the moviegoing public.

Hutton was one of the many Paramount contract artists who appeared in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). The same year, she was signed to Capitol Records and recorded several singles over the following years, marking one of the label's earliest recording artists. Meanwhile, Paramount did not immediately promote her to major stardom, but gave the second lead in a Mary Martin film musical, Happy Go Lucky (1943). The response was positive, and Hutton was given co-star billing with Bob Hope in Let's Face It (1943). During that year, she made $1250 per week.

In 1942, writer-director Preston Sturges cast Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek as a small-town girl who gives local troops a happy send-off and wakes up married and pregnant, but with no memory of who her husband is. The film was delayed by Hays Office objections and Sturges' prolific output, and was finally released early in 1944. The film made Hutton a major star; Sturges was nominated for a Best Writing Oscar, the film was named to the National Film Board's Top Ten films for the year, and the National Board of Review nominated the film for Best Picture of 1944, and awarded Betty Hutton the award for Best Acting for her performance. The New York Times named it as one of the 10 Best Films of 1942–1944.

Critic James Agee noted that "the Hays office must have been raped in its sleep" to allow the…