Ann Sothern — “Don't Be Yourself” (1936) 🇺🇸
Back in the days when Clara Bow and the “It” girls were burning them up, the popular personality phrase of the hour was “Be Yourself!”
“Don't Be Yourself”, says Ann Sothern
by Caroline Somers Hoyt
This was, supposedly, the ultimate in feminine appeal. If you were best expressed as a cuddly-cutie with a long bob dangling between your shoulder blades, a paste-white face with a circle of lip rouge on every cigarette you flicked, and a vocabulary of Jimmy Durante exclamations, so much the better.
But the “It” girls are no longer the leading models of cinema allure. And with them have gone many of the charm ideas of their reign, because:
“To be natural is a charming thing, it is the most delightful quality in any woman’s appearance and personality, no matter how much artifice we have to use to achieve it!”
The blonde speaker of this contradictory remark chuckled as she spoke, which is to say that Ann Sothern gave that typical throaty little laugh of hers. And when Ann makes a remark like that it is well worth listening to, because no girl on the screen, with the possible exception of Joan Crawford, has evolved her appearance and personality through so many changes.
As the brunette Harriett Lake of five years ago, Ann stormed the studios without success. It was just a case of a local girl who didn’t make good in Hollywood; for while she was born in Valley City, North Dakota, between concert engagements of her mother’s, Ann had lived in California so long she considered herself, and was considered, a native daughter. The next transition was a loss of considerable weight and an entire redecoration scheme in coloring as she went violently blonde for two Broadway successes, Smiles and America’s Sweetheart.
But it wasn’t until a newly svelte and amber-blonde toured to the Coast in the Lois Moran role in “Of Thee I Sing” that the Hollywood producers, Mr. Harry Cohn of Columbia in particular, decided there was a potential star in the new streamlined personality of the girl Hollywood had ignored until she went to Broadway and showed them! The final alteration was made when Columbia retitled their new find Ann Sothern and the girl who was everything but herself was launched on her career!
“Unfortunately, and where a great many girls make their original mistake, ‘being natural’ does not necessarily mean, ‘being yourself.’ Feminine naturalness can and does change almost as definitely as skirt lengths or shoulder treatments. For instance, it might be quite natural for a certain girl to talk at the top of her lungs, and kick her heels around, but such conduct would seem unnatural and like an exaggerated act today because that kind of naturalness is not in style! So, the girl who is naturally boisterous must assume artifice and artificial manners and modes to achieve our present definition of what is ‘natural’ conduct in a charming person!”
We were lunching in the patio of Ann’s vivid Beverly Hills home. Through the screen door could be glimpsed the colorful red living room, a startling background for a blonde at any time. Outside, the deep blue napkins and doilies set gaily against the yellow umbrella table. Everywhere there was color, vivid, definite color, creating a startlingly unexpected effect.
But it isn’t necessary to know her long to realize that Ann is a totally unexpected person. Or if her background, her present personality, her entire aura are not unexpected, it is the most cleverly planned attack I’ve yet encountered. She just doesn’t conform.
Consider the colors of our present setting. Unsubdued red in the background; the true, and not pastel, versions of the yellow and blue luncheon service. Here are colors that experts have assured us for years belong only to brunettes. Yet there sat Ann, in greenish-blue pajamas, a satin bow in her blonde hair, as perfectly fitted in this color scheme as though a Spanish artist had painted her into it.
Her appearance is equally disconcerting. She is pretty in a puzzling way that keeps your eyes wandering back to her face repeatedly to see which of several effects is the true one. The first impression is that she is beautiful in an exaggerated magazine cover style. When you look again, you aren’t so sure. Is it beauty, or coloring, or expression? There are moments when she is not beautiful at all, but these are the moments when her face is the most interesting. In the short span of five seconds as many moods seem to play on her face, even to the extent of casting character shadows on its childish roundness.
In personality, the first impression is of a charming girl with a youthfully modulated voice, almost an ingenue in effect. The tone and pitch of her voice have as many plays as the expressions on her face. And they seem to match. She has the most beautiful enunciation I have heard off the screen, even from some of our best English performers.
No wonder a certain magazine editor recently threw up her hands over Ann’s latest photographic sitting and exclaimed: “But I can’t catalogue this girl! Last month she was captioned as a delightful ingenue, and she looked like one in her fluffy dress. The only face in our gallery more childishly round than Ann's last month was Shirley Temple’s. But look at these!”
And these turned out to be the most contradictory set of photographic likenesses possible. There were Ann, the childish; Ann, the drawing room sophisticate; Ann, the dreamy-eyed; Ann, the darling and exaggerated.
“Which is she, anyway?” puzzled the editor, “and what does she do to herself.”
When I repeated that query to Ann over our luncheon of cheese soufflé and tender green beans she didn’t seem in the least surprised because she, apparently, is conscious of this chameleon quality in herself as a perfectly natural thing.
“It is hard to say what I do to myself because I am continually experimenting in not only my appearance, but in my mental viewpoint and my personality as well.
“Let us say that we are all born with a spark of ‘differentness,’ some with more than others, but our ability to escape from the mob, or the group, or even the chorus is measured by just how much we develop and accentuate this differentness into true individuality!
“And believe me, it sometimes takes a great deal of experimenting from the skin in!
“Many women go to no end of trouble, and often pain, making physical experiments in themselves. And in spite of what we may have heard to the contrary it is sometimes right to make these changes even though it necessitates changing our very color types. And by the way, speaking of what we hear and read, it is too bad so many women take certain cosmetic and stylists hints as gospel when they are merely intended as generalizations.” Ann waved a slender hand in the direction of her living room. “For instance, red is not supposed to be the most flattering background for a blonde. Yet because I love the color I realized I must be harmonious in it, and to it. I couldn’t like it so well if it didn’t blend with me in some way. So I experimented until I found my color of red, and there it is!
“Of course, it can be argued that my affinity toward brunette colors is because I am naturally a brunette, and the same point might be carried further in explaining why the so-called ‘true’ colors, usually associated with darker types, are more becoming to me than the proverbial blonde pastels. But strange as it may seem, while I am not naturally a blonde, I am more natural as a blonde!
“I realized that a long time ago when I was first starting to get a foothold on the stage and in pictures. As a medium brunette I was not naturally a mousey little person with an inferiority complex. Yet I looked mousey and looked as though I might have an inferiority complex. So everyone, including several stage directors, fastened one onto me.
“I had it brought home to me through the strides — or lack of them — I was making in my career, that something was going to have to be done about my exterior, and like the average girl I started with my hair!
“Far from being an overnight success, I appeared to be worse off as a violent blonde than I had been as a titian-brunette. For again, like the average girl in her first experiments on herself, I went too far the other way. I was so blonde I looked brassy! Where I had appeared timid before, I suddenly acquired a look of boldness that was no more a true part of my personality than the artificial shyness had been!
“It wasn’t until I had gone through an almost grotesque series of experiments on arching and straightening my eyebrows, enlarging my mouth line, changing my hair from yellow-blonde to reddish-blonde to almost dark again that I realized the happy medium, “honey blonde,” was the correct color and line for me!
“And yet the amusing part of it is, I do not believe I would ever have achieved a completely natural effect without this system of trial and error, because, as I remarked before, I am not at my most natural with the face I was born with!
“I believe that all professional personalities are synthetic to a certain extent. I don’t think there is a single outstanding personality on the screen who could have walked into a studio as she was ten years ago and have interested anyone in giving her even background work. I might go so far as to say that all mature personalities are synthetic to a degree. It has to be that way. We grow into character and we learn from experience, and these tilings cannot be reflected in our make-up until they have actually happened.
“That is why physical changes, as important as they can be, are really of secondary importance in the scheme of remodeling ourselves. We may bleach or darken our hair overnight, but only time and experience will give us a broader, more tolerant outlook on life.
“Changing my type didn't really make me a different person. But the disappointments and heartaches and joys that I have experienced in the last five years, did! So few women realize the value of their thoughts and beliefs as beauty and character markings in their faces. The narrow-minded woman is often a narrow-lipped woman. Envy, jealousy, worry narrow, the eyes, unflatteringly. So it is effort totally wasted and the sheerest folly to attempt to change ourselves outwardly without developing and growing inwardly, as well. Women who don't don’t match! The effect is artificial and theatrical.
“Another point, so often neglected but so very important in experimenting toward ultimate complete expression of self, is the voice. Everything about it — the tone, quality, diction. Yet I have known women who go to no end of pains to improve themselves physically and mentally to carry through life the grating, slovenly or little-girl enunciation they began with.
“In the studios we have a term ‘Okay for sound’ which is called after every scene signifying that the voices came over the sound tract with the same perfection as the action was recorded in the camera. And if the scene isn’t ‘Okay for sound’ it has to be done and re-done until it is. That’s how important voices are in creating the perfect illusion in pictures. And that is how important voices are, off the screen, in creating the perfect illusion of the impression you want people to have of your own personality! Your dress and your mind may say; ‘See, I am this sort of person,’ but if your voice isn’t in tune with the idea, you'll have an awful time making anyone believe it!
“I really believe that experiment in type and mood is a very good thing for women. Because, somehow in some way we bring along the best of each transition with us. And that is a good thing because it makes for variety and mood in developing personality. Variety of mood is an essential thing to an actress. And all women should wear different moods becomingly just as they wear different colors and clothes.”
Ann tucked a sandaled foot under her and lighted her after-luncheon cigarette.
“After all, the great artist does not exhibit his masterpiece with the first paints and oils he mixed to achieve it, and I doubt if any great writer has ever given to the world his first draft of a story. We can't all be geniuses but we can all strive to develop and grow and bring out the best and most colorful sides of our true individuality.”
And if this is the answer to what Ann Sothern has done to herself, all I can add is that the result more than justifies the means.
If this smart RKO star gets tired of her personality, she builds a new one — changes her name, the color of her hair, her viewpoint. And, boy, how it works!
Rosita Moreno in “House of a Thousand Candles”, a Republic Picture
Collection: Movie Mirror Magazine, June 1936