20 Disturbing Ways Old Hollywood Studios Controlled Their Stars

In 1955, Henry Willson, talent agent to Universal Pictures’ biggest star in the 1950s, Rock Hudson, learned that Confidential magazine planned to expose that his client was gay. That behavior could get Hudson in hot water with his studio contract’s morality clause, which barred activities that might embarrass Universal Pictures. Willson and the studio quickly arranged for Hudson to marry Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates. The two even posed for sweet fan magazine photos as a newlywed couple. Three years later, the marriage was over.

Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, was a contract player and Latin dancer at Columbia Pictures. Studio chief Harry Cohn decided Cansino’s Hispanic look and low hairline precluded her from becoming a major star. Cohn subjected Cansino to a painful electrolysis treatment, lasting about two years, to raise her hairline, dyed her hair red, and renamed her Rita Hayworth. The gamble paid off. Hayworth became one of the most popular stars of her day.

Judy Garland, a teenage contract player at MGM in the late 1930s, worked alongside child star Mickey Rooney under similar conditions. MGM’s doctors provided both young actors with “vitamin shots,” actually amphetamine prescriptions, to get them through 16-hour shooting days, followed by barbiturates at night to put them to sleep. The regimen left Garland with a lifelong struggle with substance dependence that began on the studio’s orders.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Hollywood’s biggest silent-film comedian, was arrested in September 1921 for the death of a woman at a party. He was eventually acquitted after three trials, but studios across town worried the headlines alone could hurt business. Universal Film Manufacturing’s lawyers drafted the first-ever contractual “morality clause,” allowing a studio to terminate or fine an actor for any behavior that embarrassed the studio. Other studios adopted the language within a year, turning image control into a legal right.

In 1935, Loretta Young was impregnated by her married co-star Clark Gable. Young gave birth in secret after traveling to Europe and Venice, California, and placed the baby girl in an orphanage for 19 months. In 1937, she announced to columnist Louella Parsons that she’d adopted an abandoned baby girl named Judy. Young never revealed the truth about her daughter, who wasn’t adopted, but was actually her birth daughter. Young’s daughter, Judy Lewis, revealed the story in a 1994 memoir.

MGM’s general manager Eddie Mannix and its publicity director Howard Strickling ran the studio’s most secret division, protecting its stars and its money through close ties with the Los Angeles Police Department. They bribed accident victims, falsified arrest logs, and removed evidence in cases where contract stars got into fights, were involved in hit-and-runs, or were otherwise arrested. They wanted those stories out of the papers, even if they had to erase them from the cops’ own files.

Joan Crawford was originally named Lucille Fay LeSueur, but MGM’s head, Louis B. Mayer, didn’t like the sound of it. Mayer put up $1,000 in a contest in a movie magazine for a better one, and the winning name was Joan Crawford. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. In 1913, Emanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson. The studios were afraid that ethnic-sounding names would affect ticket sales.

Studio “fixers” such as Eddie Mannix of MGM also coerced contract actresses who were not married, among them Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Jean Harlow, to have an abortion if a pregnancy would disrupt filming or if they’d broken a morality clause in their contracts. Because abortion was illegal in California, hospital records coded these procedures under a number of euphemisms, like ear infections or rest cures. Pregnancy itself was treated as a threat to the studio’s investment in a star’s image.

Under the standard studio contract of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studio, not the actor, had the exclusive right to renew or drop a contract every six months for up to seven years. An actor could never move on to another studio for a higher salary or more interesting roles, and the studio owed him or her nothing in return. This one-sided leverage was what allowed studios to dictate everything else on this list, from what stars ate to how they conducted their love lives.

By the time Judy Garland was a teenager, she was working as a contract player for MGM. There, studio head Louis B. Mayer called her “little hunchback” because she was overweight. Studio female stars were required to be weighed often, and Judy’s weight was kept down by a regimen of clear soup, black coffee, and cottage cheese to ensure that she remained “camera ready.” And all this time, the studio doctors were already giving her stimulants and sedatives.

Jack Warner was in charge of production at Warner Bros., and if a contract player turned down a movie part, he and the other studio heads simply suspended them without pay, and that suspension time was added to the end of their contracts. In other words, you could say no to one bad script, but you might end up trapped in extra years of service. Studios did this all the time, until the courts forced them to stop in the 1940s.

In 1927, talkies came to Hollywood. The acting departments at the big studios had their contracted actors speak in a fake “Mid-Atlantic” or “Transatlantic” accent, one that wasn’t a real way of speaking anywhere on Earth, by concocting a blend of American English and British English. They wanted to eradicate any particular regional and ethnic accent that an actor might bring from his background and have them all sound like they were using the same studio-approved pronunciation.

During the 1930s and 1940s, George Hurrell was one of Hollywood’s premier studio portrait photographers, but shooting was just the beginning. Hurrell, along with other prominent photographers of the day, used pencils and etching knives to hand-retouch the glass plates on which they photographed. They smoothed over skin, re-sculpted features, and erased blemishes before a single image could make its way to fan magazines and newspapers. Digital photo editing was yet decades away, but studios were already doing it by hand.

Stars had to walk and talk the part off camera as well as on. That’s why MGM sent its contract players to Lillian Burns’ “charm school.” Burns, a drama coach, taught MGM’s usually working-class contract players how to speak in a refined manner, how to carry themselves in public and at social gatherings, sit up straight, and how to be sophisticated stars in general, all in keeping with MGM’s chosen image for itself.

Standard studio contracts prohibited contract players from flying planes or driving race cars, and in general, from doing anything that might lead to their being injured or even killed. A stunt such as this could halt a film’s production, and the studio certainly didn’t want a star’s name to become synonymous with a bad accident or tragic death. As a result, a studio owned you on weekends, too.

Mailrooms in the studios were part of the publicity apparatus, and not all the stuff they churned out came from real fans. Fan letters for studio contract players were fabricated by clerks in order to boost the figures that studios relied on to support their casting choices, publicity spend, and billing. Proof of a star’s popularity could be created within the studio system itself.

Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were the two most influential gossip columnists of the time, their articles were syndicated in newspapers around the country. Studio publicity departments sourced their stories, feeding them pre-approved, exclusive stories, like the Loretta Young adoption story, in exchange for positive coverage and occasional protection from scandalous rumors that might be harmful to their stars. The stories readers thought were gossip were often just studio press releases dressed up as gossip.

MGM loaned its No. 1 contracted actor at the time, Clark Gable, to Columbia under studio chief Harry Cohn for It Happened One Night in 1934, but that wasn’t the punishment Frank Capra makes it out to be in his film memoir. MGM’s books show that they received around $500 a week from the deal. It was business-as-usual and an illustration of just how much power studio bosses had to control and trade careers.

The studios required their stars to participate in publicity tours and government war bond drives during the World War II years. The public received the ideal, patriotic, wholesome face of Hollywood in return. While it may appear as though this was a voluntary act, performed out of civic duty, the stars’ appearances were also required by the studios. Their images during the war were just as manufactured as their images before the war.

Warner Bros. contract star Olivia de Havilland had already been suspended without pay yet again for refusing a role the studio had given her, and once again the suspension would be tacked on to the end of her contract. De Havilland sued the studio in 1943, and in 1944 the California Supreme Court ruled in her favor, limiting personal service contracts to seven years, including suspensions. The decision freed de Havilland and removed from the studio system one of its most powerful enforcement mechanisms.

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