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Exuberant, firecracker, live wire—all of these describe the dynamo that was Betty Hutton, and yet none of them fully do her justice. In addition to her mile-a-minute screen persona, Hutton was a seasoned performer who could act and sing and put over a vehicle by the sheer force of her extremely vibrant personality. In the World War II years, her frenetic energy seemed to be a catalyst for the American people in their struggle against the Axis. She captivated wartime audiences by her looks and talents and, most of all, by her “blonde bombshell” rambunctious screen shenanigans.
Betty at four years old, in 1925, with her mother Mabel Lum Thornburg and sister Marion. |
Betty was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Michigan, on February 26, 1921. When she was two years old, her father, a railroad brakeman, abandoned his family, Betty’s mother Mabel Thornburg and an older sister Marion. After Percy Thornburg’s desertion, Mabel took her two young girls to Detroit, where she got a job in a car factory but made more money operating a bootleg liquor joint. Mrs. Thornburg could play the guitar, and she taught her daughters to sing and dance. Betty made her first public singing appearance in her mother’s cheap speakeasy at age three standing on a kitchen table. Betty recalled later: “We were so poor, we never had enough to eat. We lived three families in a flat. It was a nightmare.” When she was nine years old, Betty happened upon a church, where she became inspired by religion. It was then she decided to make something of her life. At age thirteen, she got a job as a singer in a Michigan summer resort and then worked with a local band of high school students.
When she was fifteen, Betty saved $200 and went to New York City hoping for a break in show business. However, the trip was a brief, unsuccessful one and she was told she'd never make it in show business. Back home, she and sister Marion scored a gig in a Detroit nightclub, where bandleader Vincent Lopez heard her and soon hired the teenager to be a vocalist with his band for $65 weekly. While touring with Lopez, Betty developed her exuberant singing style as well as using the name “Betty Darling.” However, in 1938, when sister Marion became a vocalist with Glenn Miller, the sisters both began using the surname Hutton after Lopez consulted a numerologist to conceive a solid-sounding surname.
In the autumn of 1938, Betty had her first big professional exposure with Lopez at Billy Rose’s Casa Manana Club in New York City. The next spring, she made her recording debut with the bandleader on RCA Victor’s Bluebird Records with vocals on “Igloo”, “The Jitterbug”, and a duet with Sonny Schuyler on “Concert in the Park”. She also made her screen debut in the 1938 Vitaphone short, Queens of the Air. The next year she made more Vitaphone short subjects, including Public Jitterbug Number One. Thanks to the success of this short and her Bluebird record, Betty was billed as “America’s Number One Jitterbug.” Said Betty about this title, “It was just an unfortunate label that was passed on. I was just a screwball. I sang crazy songs. I did just whatever came to my mind. They didn’t know what to call me, so they called me a jitterbug.” Also in 1939, she made her first Paramount picture, the short Three Kings and a Queen. Betty continued to tour with Lopez in vaudeville as well as singing on his NBC radio program. Her contract with the bandsman called for him to receive 20 percent of her income in current and all future ventures. It was a clause that was to give her legal headaches in the future.
A seventeen year old Betty poses in an early promotional shot during her days as a vocalist with the Vincent Lopez Orchestra. |
Early in 1940, Betty left Vincent Lopez’s band and sang and danced to good notice in the Broadway revue Two for the Show. During its run, she and Lopez terminated their contract with an out-of-court settlement. Later in the year, at $500 weekly, Betty was the comic lead in another Broadway musical, Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie. After her biggest musical number in the show was cut just before opening night by orders of star Ethel Merman, Hutton was understandably upset, but vowed to continue her run after the show’s producer, songwriter B.G. “Buddy” DeSylva, promised to hire her for $1,000 a week to appear in his Paramount film musical The Fleet’s In (1942). The movie teamed her with light-comic actor Eddie Bracken for the first time. In it, she played the part of Dorothy Lamour’s hyperactive roommate with the plot centering on sailor William Holden trying to get his way with club-singer Dorothy. Betty scored well in the film with the songs “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” and “If You Build a Better Mousetrap”. PM reported, “her facial grimaces, body twists and man pummeling gymnastics take wonderfully to the screen.”
Next, Betty was rematched with Eddie Bracken in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) as a Paramount Pictures telephone switchboard worker who loves sailor Bracken. The sailor’s father (Victor Moore) is, in actuality, a studio gateman, but has told his son he is a movie executive, which causes a series of screwball situations—all of which provide comedy relief between the star-filled specialty numbers. By the end of 1942, the Motion Picture Herald named Betty Hutton as Star of Tomorrow, and she negotiated a comedy and singing job on radio’s The Bob Hope Show.
Now under contract exclusively with Paramount, the “blitzkrieg bombshell” again appeared with Eddie Bracken in the comedy Happy Go Lucky (1943). In it, she was the hoydenish pal of a gold digger (Mary Martin). The latter is pursuing a rich man (Rudy Vallee) at a Caribbean resort, with the aid of her beachcomber boyfriend (Dick Powell). The picture gave Betty the energetic production number “Murder, He Says”, which was so popular it became a national catchphrase. Betty then teamed with Bob Hope for her first starring role in the screen version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical comedy Let’s Face It (1943), with Hutton running a fat farm and in love with crafty GI Hope. She sang “Let’s Not Talk About Love”. The performance solidified her position as one of Paramount’s top female box-office attractions.
For her first non-singing movie role, Hutton scored well in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), a comedy now regarded as a classic. She is the fickle girl who convinced her none-too-bright 4-F boyfriend (Eddie Bracken) to marry her so her pregnancy (from a brief one-night marriage when she was intoxicated) will be blessed with respectability. It proved to be one of screwball comedy writer/director Preston Sturges’s most satisfying zany screen works.
Betty, in 1945, in a publicity shot for The Stork Club. |
Concerning And the Angels Sing (1944), in which Betty was part of a sister quartet (along with Dorothy Lamour, Diana Lynn and Mimi Chandler) at odds with a crooked bandleader, The Nation magazine praised, “Betty Hutton is almost beyond good and evil, so far as I am concerned.” Hutton negotiated a new Paramount contract, which paid her $5,000 weekly. She went on a vaudeville tour and appeared on several radio shows, including The Chase and Sanborn Hour, Command Performance, and Mail Call. She closed out 1944 with dual roles as patriotic WAVE sisters in Here Come the Waves with Bing Crosby. Then, at year’s end, she embarked on a two-month South Pacific USO tour.
When Hutton returned to the sound stages, she was granted the dramatic role she long wanted, that of Roaring Twenties speakeasy star Texas Guinan in Incendiary Blonde (1945), a title that described the star even better than its subject. The film—thanks to lavish production values and the star’s verve—was a tremendous success and even broke box office records at the Paramount Theatre in New York. Betty then sang “Doin’ It The Hard Way” in Paramount’s all-star Duffy’s Tavern (1945), based on Ed Gardner’s popular radio program. The Stork Club (1945) followed, with Betty as a hatcheck girl who comes under the benevolent wing of millionaire Barry Fitzgerald after she saves his life, which complicates matters with her bandleader boyfriend (Don DeFore). She performed “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief”, which became a number one hit single for her on Capitol Records, “A Square In The Social Circle” and dueted with popular crooner Andy Russell on “If I Had A Dozen Hearts”.
By now Betty’s studio mentor, B.G. DeSylva, was no longer in charge, and Betty’s vehicles became more variable in quality and many critics began to note that Betty’s performances were much better than and often undeserving of the films themselves. Cross My Heart (1946) was a mild remake of a Carole Lombard 1930s comedy, with zany Betty confessing to a murder so her lawyer boyfriend (Sonny Tufts) will gain publicity by proving her innocent. Much better, though, was another biopic, The Perils of Pauline (1947), in which Betty played silent-screen serial star Peal White. Among her songs in this film were the jukebox hits “Poppa Don’t Preach to Me”, "Rumble, Rumble, Rumble” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So”, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a gold-certified top selling single for Betty.
By this point, Betty was enjoying a happy domestic life, having wed Ted Briskin, a camera manufacturer. They had two daughters together, Lindsay (born November 23, 1946) and Candy (born April 14, 1948). Betty’s return to motion pictures in 1948 was in the fantasy flick Dream Girl, which cast her as a self-centered rich girl who daydreams about happiness. She also had a most successful stand at the London Palladium, earning $17,500 per week.
Annie Get Your Gun was an instant hit for Betty, who portrayed legendary sharpshooter Annie Oakley. |
Back on the screen in 1949, Betty co-starred with Victor Mature in the pleasant farce Red, Hot and Blue, which cast her as a stage actress whom director (Mature) attempts to make a star, while the two become implicated in a murder. She repeated this role with John Lund on NBC’s Lux Radio Theater. However, plans to star her in a biography of Theda Bara fell through, as did subsequent projects in which she was to play Sophie Tucker, Clara Bow, and Mabel Normand. Having lost the lead in a loan out to Warner Bros. for Romance on the High Seas (1948) due to her second pregnancy, Betty was even more upset to lose the coveted role of Annie Oakley in MGM’s screen version of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950). The choice part went to Judy Garland, who, however, was forced to withdraw after recording the soundtrack and filming two musical numbers. Betty was rushed in to play opposite Howard Keel, who portrayed Frank Butler, the sharpshooter Annie loves. Hutton was a sensation as Annie, and the resultant film made a mint at the box office. Betty was featured on the cover of Time magazine and named the year’s most popular actress by Photoplay magazine.
The year 1950 proved to be a good one for the star. Following the success of Annie, she then teamed with Fred Astaire for Let’s Dance at Paramount, in which she is a singer whose husband dies in the war. She makes a show-business comeback and, meanwhile is attracted to a dancer (Astaire). On NBC radio’s Theater Guild on the Air, Betty starred in “Daisy Mayne” and “Page Miss Glory”, the latter with Ronald Reagan. She also signed with RCA Victor Records, recording the Let’s Dance song “Can’t Stop Talking” and having chart hits with “Orange Colored Sky” and “A Bushel and a Peck”, a top-five single duet with Perry Como.
In 1951, Hutton and Ted Briskin divorced, and for a time she dated actor Robert Sterling. The following year, she returned to the screen in Cecil B. DeMille’s circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth as a high-wire artist, and the movie made $14 million at the box-office. Her next success came with a solid vaudeville engagement, following Judy Garland into the Palace Theater in New York City. After this engagement, she underwent throat surgery, which also required her to retrain her voice. Thereafter, she starred in her third biopic for Paramount, as vaudevillian Blossom Seeley, in Somebody Loves Me (1952). It was a Technicolor story about the trial and tribulations of Seeley and her husband Benny Fields (Ralph Meeker). RCA Victor released the movie’s soundtrack, and Betty and Gene Barry reprised the leads on Lux Radio Theater.
On March 18, 1952, in Las Vegas, Betty married choreographer Charles O’Curran (her dance director on Somebody Loves Me). When Paramount balked at her insistence that O’Curran direct her next vehicle (Topsy and Eva with Ginger Rogers), she walked out on her studio contract, which was not scheduled to expire until the end of the year. Paramount announced it would star Rosemary Clooney in all their planned Hutton vehicles, but the only one that entered production was White Christmas. As suddenly as it had begun, Betty’s meteoric film career had been aborted.
Betty performs with the Skylarks during a concert rehearsal at the London Palladium. |
Betty returned to the London Palladium for a three-week stint in 1952, and the next year she was performing on the lucrative nightclub circuit. She was back at New York’s Palace Theater in late 1953 and, after turning down the role of Ado Annie in the film adaptation of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, began making plans for her television debut in the NBC-TV musical special Satins and Spurs. She returned to Capitol Records, which released a compilation album of her previous Capitol hit singles entitled A Square in the Social Circle and the Satins and Spurs soundtrack, which was issued prior to the show’s debut on September 12, 1954. The much-touted Max Liebman production cast Betty as a rodeo queen in the Annie Oakley tradition. Despite the entire hullabaloo, the program was not the success it was hoped to be. Betty was so distraught over its failure that, after a good run at the Las Vegas Desert Inn, she tearfully announced to the media and public a temporary break from show business.
Early in 1955, Betty and Charles O’Curran were divorced, and the next month she wed Capitol Records executive Alan W. Livingston. Vouching to continue her career despite previous setbacks, she reasoned, “I still have pride enough in myself as a performer not to simply drop out of the business, leaving people asking, ‘Say whatever became of Betty Hutton anyhow?’” By 1957, Betty was ready to return to the spotlight and did so with a number of exciting projects. She returned to films in United Artists’ Spring Reunion, a project once planned for Judy Garland. It was a low-key entry with lonely spinster Betty falling for Dana Andrews at a high school reunion. The next year, she signed a recording contract with Warner Bros Records and released Betty Hutton at the Saints and Sinners Ball, a concept album featuring a mix of faux-gospel numbers and racy blues tunes under the conduction of Jerry Fielding. She also began negotiations with CBS and Desilu Productions to star in her own television sitcom. After filming an unsold pilot entitled That's My Mom, the proposal finally came to fruition in 1959 as The Betty Hutton Show, in which Betty starred as Goldie Appleby, a talkative manicurist who inherits a legacy and the custody of three children from a rich customer. She show was carried into the 1960 season after running for thirty episodes.
Then came more television appearances, club work, a divorce (1960) from Alan Livingston, and her fourth marriage (on December 24, 1960) to trumpeter Peter Candoli. MGM producer Arthur Freed had hoped to re-team Betty with Howard Keel in Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962), but Betty wasn’t able to commit for personal reasons: her mother had recently died in a tragic house fire, and she was expecting her third daughter, Carolyn. By year’s end, Betty was starring in a touring production of the musical Gypsy as the infamous Madame Rose. (Bernadette Peters played the role of Dainty June in this production, and would go on to play Rose herself in the 2003 Broadway revival.) Later in the 1960s, Betty continued to tour in theatre productions and was a temporary replacement for Carol Burnett on Broadway in Fade Out-Fade In during the summer of 1964. She also did guest spots on TV series, such as The Greatest Show on Earth, Burke’s Law, and Gunsmoke. She and husband Candoli had much publicized marital problems, and were divorced in 1967. The same year, Betty filed bankruptcy. She bemoaned, “I’ve been crucified in this racket, crucified, when I only gave out love. I bought houses, Cadillacs, furs, you name it, for people—even churches for my maids. But when the money went, everybody split.” Her unbridled demeanor—considered unbecoming in the medium at the time—forced Betty off a daytime quiz show. In the same period, she was dropped from two Paramount Westerns because she could not handle the quick shooting schedules. She was replaced in Red Tomahawk (1967) and Buckskin (1968) by Joan Caulfield, another ex-Paramount star from the 1940s.
After that, Betty did not reappear before the public until later in 1971, when she rode in the Hollywood Santa Claus Lane Parade. That occasion brought work offers, including more theatre and concert appearances, but nothing truly worked out for the former star, who admitted she had made and spent over $9 million and was now broke. She mused, “I don’t know the ‘in’ crowd in Hollywood anymore. I don’t even have many friends anymore because I backed away from them; when things went wrong for me I didn’t want them to have any part of my troubles.” She had alienated herself from her two oldest daughters and her sister Marion. She had lost custody of her youngest daughter, and while on tour in New England in 1973, Betty suffered a nervous breakdown but was helped by a Portsmouth, Rhode Island priest, Reverend Peter Maguire. During this time she became extremely reclusive, and on and off for the next several years, she worked at Father Maguire’s rectory as a cook and housekeeper.
Betty earned her Masters Degree from Salve Regina University on May 18, 1986. |
In the later 1970s Betty had become a devoted follower of Catholicism, and with the help and encouragement of her priest, she found the courage to become socially active again. She was hired to perform at Jai-alai Grand in Newport, Rhode Island, and enrolled at Salve Regina University, where she earned a Masters degree in liberal studies. She also made a guest appearance on the ABC detective series Baretta and granted her first interview in over a decade to Mike Douglas for a segment on Good Morning America. A well-publicized “Love-In for Betty Hutton” held at New York’s Riverboat Restaurant and emceed by comedian Joey Adams gave Betty’s spirits a big boost, and in the fall of 1980, she returned to Broadway in the role of Miss Hannigan in Annie. Rex Reed enthused in the New York Daily News, “She is a seemingly endless fountain of comic exuberance, a one-woman fireworks display that lights up the stage at the Alvin and leaves the audience cheering.” She also made a guest appearance on the PBS-TV special Jukebox Saturday Night singing her old movie hits. She returned to Rhode Island, where she was made a member of Salve Regina’s faculty teaching motion picture and television classes. In 1989, a performance of Betty singing “Murder, He Says” was licensed for the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors, and she was supposed to attend the Academy Awards that year, where the film was nominated for three awards, but again illness and insecurities kept her away from the festivities.
After teaching theater arts at Emerson College in Boston in the 1990s, Betty relocated to the West Coast in 1996. Her good friend and benefactor, Reverend Maguire, had recently died, and said Hutton: “I figured there’s no reason for me to be here anymore, now that Father’s gone. I can be a good Catholic anywhere.” By this time, Betty’s music began to be reissued back into the mainstream. Aretha Franklin and k.d. lang had already recorded their own perspective versions of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” and in 1991, Bette Midler sang “Stuff Like That There” in a pivotal scene from For The Boys, a film about two singers who entertain American troops during World War II. 1991 also saw the release of Betty’s first greatest hits compilation on CD format—the AEI Records release, The Blonde Bombshell, which featured twelve live recordings of Betty’s brassiest hit songs.
The EMI release Spotlight On Betty Hutton followed in 1994 with sixteen of Betty’s Capitol hit singles re-mastered and newly mixed, and included a previously unreleased studio recording of “Love Is The Darndest Thing” from Betty’s film Cross My Heart. The Best Of The RCA Years was released in 1996 and also featured seventeen Betty songs—this time, however, from her stint on RCA Victor, including her early recordings made with Vincent Lopez and his orchestra. That same year, Icelandic singer Bjork shot to stardom with a remake of Betty’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”, which ignited a renewed interest in swing music that continued for several years.
In 1997, Betty’s voice came roaring through on the silver screen once again, as her recording of “Hit The Road To Dreamland” was featured on the soundtrack to the hugely successful film L.A. Confidential. During this time, a number of Betty’s films were also being released on VHS and DVD, and in 2000, a decades-long feud between the Irving Berlin Estate and MGM ended, allowing Annie Get Your Gun to finally be issued on home video. To celebrate the release, Betty, candid to a fault, turned up on cable TV on Turner Classic Movies’ Private Screenings interview program in which the former “bounding Betty” conversed with host Robert Osborne. During the hour-long chat, Betty garrulously discussed—among other things—her alcoholic mother, her four “disastrous” marriages and her estrangement from her children.
Betty’s films continued to be released into the 2000s with The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek, The Greatest Show On Earth, The Stork Club and The Perils Of Pauline also appearing on DVD. In addition, a volume of The Betty Hutton Show was released, and Betty’s songs continued to be remade for a new generation: Kelly Clarkson performed “Stuff Like That There” during Big Band Week on the first season of American Idol in 2002, a performance that many have credited to cementing her status in the program, and ultimately, her winning the show. In 2003, Tori Amos appeared in the film Mona Lisa Smile singing “Murder, He Says”, and Lucy Woodward recorded “It’s Oh So Quiet” in 2005 for Disney’s The Ice Princess.
Betty Hutton lived in Palm Springs, California until her death due to complications from colon cancer at 86 years of age. Carl Bruno, executor of her estate and long-time friend, told the Associated Press that she died on Monday, March 12, 2007. Hutton is buried at Desert Memorial Park in Palm Springs, California.
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