Alice Faye — Hollywood Can't Change Me! (1935) 🇺🇸
"What's Hollywood taught me?" Alice Faye lifted a quizzical eyebrow, smiled a half smile and said with the husky voice that does torch songs so well, "First of all, you're a sucker if you let it change you! You notice the build-up on every new player: 'In all the world, never has there been a sensation like this!' Or 'A new, dynamic and different personality.' Sure — but just try and be different in in Hollywood!
"They sign you up because you're a new type of screen personality. You get one picture released and then the remodeling starts. The tearer-downers come in. Then the builder-uppers. They'll remodel you from toe nails to your teeth while you're supposed to grin and bear it."
Hollywood prides itself on being able to change a gal's coiffure, character and disposition with all the ease of the guy on the flying trapeze. Publicity men gayly will furnish you with an exotic past, two clinging to the rail of the Mayflower and a background that makes O. Henry seem tame. But Alice Faye's been doin' Hollywood wrong! She ain't changed a bit. I know what I'm talking about, too.
I met her through Rudy Vallée the day she stepped into her first leading role, her first day's work in pictures. Lilian Harvey had stepped out of the first "George White's Scandals" the day before and executives had chosen Alice for the role without even the formality of a screen test. One peek at her beauty, another peek at her in an abbreviated chorus costume, a second spent listen to her husky recording of "Oh, You Nasty Man!" and Alice was on her way. But she'd rather have been on her way back to New York and she still feels that way! Just listen to this:
"I think it's all rather silly myself! They tell you to be yourself, to sell your own personality on the screen, not to be an imitator. Then they'll turn around and explain that you ought to quit doing this and start doing that. That your coiffure is perfectly ducky, darling, but let's try it this way. They get in your hair in more ways than one! They'll even want. to change your voice, so help me!"
Alice was getting up steam. She shook a Faye finger under the English schnozzle. "You've known me longer than any other writer, haven't you, Dick? You remember how I wanted to go back to New York after my first picture, George White's Scandals? That was a little over a year I'm just finishing my fifth picture now, the second George White's Scandals. I've had a year to think it over. And I still think I'd have been smarter to have gone back to Broadway after that first one."
She curled her legs under her on the huge divan and waved a pillow at me, menacingly. I was fiddling with the olive in my martini.
"Want another?" Alice inquired. I shook my head dutifully. "This is business. I'm here to do a story on you, Miss Faye!" Alice took careful aim with the pillow.
"English, will you quit being dignified?" she demanded. I compromised by following her suggestion. I haven't won an argument with her yet!
Peace restored, Alice went on with the conversation. "Maybe it's just me that doesn't fit. I don't know. But the best times I ever had in my life were when I was in the chorus. I used to go window shopping between shows and I got more kick out of that than I do out of being able to buy things now. You hear a lot of gags about people being tired of it all. You know in my case that I'm telling the truth when I say I happen to prefer New York to Hollywood. Nothing personal, understand. That's just the way I feel. Broadway's my home. I belong there, I don't here.
"What I can't understand, Dick, is much of the hullabaloo about being a picture actress. I've worked on the radio, I've worked in night clubs, done personal appearances. You can be yourself — you go out, do your job and the rest of the time is yours. But here I feel like part of a parade twenty-four hours a day. They worry too much. 'Where're you going?' 'What'll you wear?' 'What'll people say?' They never miss on that last one! If you've got nothing on your conscience why should you have to worry about what people say or think?
"The happiest two weeks I've had since I've been in pictures were spent two thousand miles from here. I did two weeks of personal appearances in Chicago and it was swell. Everybody was swell. I'm old Grandma herself when it comes to those stage jitters but just the same I enjoyed it. Of course, you have to remember that if it weren't for pictures there would be no personal appearances. But even if I do get so scared by an audience that I have to lean on a piano for a prop, I like it. You've an audience to work with and not a big bunch of lights that say, 'So this is Faye, huh? Well, make me laugh!'
"I only wish I had Rudy's assurance on the stage. He walks out and wows them five shows a day, week in and week out, and nothing upsets him. That's why he's on the top where he belongs. But me! I'll see some guy in the fifty-ninth row looking for his hat and I'll say, 'There you go, Faye, driving them out of the theatre already!' My knees begin to rattle and it's all I can do to stop from going into an 'off to Buffalo' right off the stage and into the street!"
I glanced around Alice's apartment. From her porch you can see the ocean. One of the finest suites in the most exclusive apartment house in Hollywood. Beautiful furnishings, an expensive radio, her mink coat thrown over a chair. "How about these?" I inquired, nodding at the various accoutrements of her success.
Alice ran her fingers through her blonde hair, put her hanky back into the pocket of her deep blue lounging pajamas. "I'm plenty grateful to Hollywood for what it's given me. No matter how hard you work to have to remember that it's certainly Hollywood and the studios that combine to put you over. I got my chance here and I'm not forgettin' it. My mother, cousin and two brothers live out here with me. That's swell! You know how I feel about my folks."
"Another thing I've learned here is that if I should ever get married, I'd certainly marry an actor! You have to, in self-protection. You have to marry someone that talks your language, that knows what you're up against. So many marriages have two strikes on them to begin with that if you're smart you'll fall in love with someone in your own profession. Movies and outsiders don't seem to click so well. Nor with society people for that matter." She grinned. "Not that Faye would be knowing society people! But if you have a common background and about the same type of interests it'd seem to me that there's a better chance of making the grade together. You mightn't believe it, but I'm nigh on to twenty-two and I've never had a proposal in my life! So I guess Faye doesn't need to be getting wrinkles on that score."
As you see, Alice doesn't pretend to know all the answers. She doesn't mingle with the local intelligentsia, if any. Her pals are people who knew her in New York. But she does know all the answers about little Miss Faye who sings for her supper and her family's.
You can't kid her and she won't kid herself. I remember when the studio thought that she should take voice lessons to improve her diction. Alice went to the high mogul of the studio and said simply, "Listen, do you think people are going to go to pictures to see my idea of how to speak like a professor in five easy lessons? You told me to be myself. I'm trying to stay that way. Do you want me to sing songs like, 'Oh, You Nasty Man!' with a broad A? It's silly. I'm not going to do it." That was that. She didn't. Three pictures ago, as Hollywood reckons time, that was. And she's been made a star in her latest one.
Alice looked out of the window at the traffic streaming along Sunset. Half aloud she said wistfully, "I'll be going East in a week and, gee, will I be glad to be back home!" Looking at her I felt that I knew just how she meant it. Life hasn't been any bed of roses for Alice. She started her picture career under the handicap of unpleasant publicity. She sold herself when the picture was released, simply because Alice Faye didn't fit in with the situation that had been foisted upon her. She doesn't tell you that she had to go to work at fifteen. About her long rehearsals and shows as a Chester Hale chorine. She knows what it means to ride home to Brooklyn on the subway at three in the morning after working all evening in a night club.
The best thing about her, from Hollywood's point of view, is her lack of pretense. That alone sets her aside. She won't pretend to be a lady of elegance or of blue-blooded ancestry. No smart quips fall from her lips but plenty of horse-sense does.
Alice was saying, "Sometimes things just don't mesh, I guess. This is one of those times. If I changed, I wouldn't be Alice Faye so all I can do is try to get along by being myself. Maybe I'd been more adaptable if I came from the legitimate stage. But as it is, I'm embarrassed working in front of a chorus — I'd feel more at home in it and I'm not kidding!"
Success can't daunt her, I guess. That it's made her wiser, made her less carefree, I know. But neither Hollywood nor any other town could change this kid who stepped into a leading role her first day in the celluloid city. Who said Hollywood couldn't take it? It's made Alice Faye a star for staying herself!
Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, July 1935