T
he hottest box-office couple in Hollywood today are no enraptured celluloid lovebirds, but a thin, tattered little man who looks like a fugitive from a corn patch, and a broad-beamed, stringy-haired woman with the voice of an Iowa hog caller. Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main have never evoked bobby-soxers' squeals or spinsters' sighs, and in any compilation of famous screen lovers it is doubtful that they would receive even honorable mention. Still, as Ma and Pa Kettle, the harum-scarum hero and heroine of a continuing series of low-budget comedies, they have brought into the theaters an audience that Hollywood thought it had lost long ago.
Although returns have not been tabulated on their fourth adventure, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair, the executives of Universal-International are blandly confident that it will be a money-maker: the other three Kettle pictures, made at a cost of $400,000 each, have already brought in a total of more than $8,000,000. The first of the series, Ma and Pa Kettle, was listed by exhibitors as on of the 10 most profitable pictures of 1949, while Main and Kilbride were named as the character actress and actor with the greatest box-office take, it topped most of the year's star-studded masterpieces.
This is the kind of conundrum that causes the average producer to chew his cigar and reach for the aspirin. In an industry where the clean-cut profile is a major stock in trade and a lady with a well-turned bosom is considered collateral at the bank, why should the fickle public clasp to its heart a hayseed pair like the Kettles? As a hero, Pa is a pint-sized Don Quixote, the sort of vacant-minded dreamer who has trouble matching the buttons and holes on his vest.
Ma, on the contrary, is the kind of woman who would send most males scuttling for tall timber. She rights wrongs with a whoop and a holler, rushes at villainy with flailing elbows, and resembles a one-woman cyclone, with Pa flying in her wake. Although the Kettles have 15 children, connubial bliss is indicated by no more than an occasional random peck. The Kettles, in short, are about as romantic as clabber milk.
In the light of all this, various explanations for their success have been attempted. Leonard Goldstein, the young producer of the films, believes the secret lies in "audience identification" --in the fact that almost anybody, seeing the Kettles, can recognize in them real people they know. Hollywood producer Jerry Wald thinks it's that the films are "warm, human and humorous, like the early Will Rogers pictures." Percy Kilbride himself believes the public loves the characters because "anybody, even the lowliest bum, can feel superior to the Kettles."
An Oklahoma exhibitor put it most succinctly: "The public," he said, "likes corn."
A study of the situation reveals that his point is well taken. The Kettle pictures are, candidly and shamelessly, as full of corn as a grist mill. Every trick in the old maize bag is used; for instance: Percy Kilbride milking a cow to the strains of The Blue Danube; Marjorie Main battling to subdue pancakes in which Pa has carelessly and appropriately spilled a box of unpopped corn; Percy caught in the revolving doors of a New York hotel; Marjorie making bread for the county fair with Pa's cement mixer.
Crammed with prat falls, breakaway furniture, frantic domestic animals and hilarious chase scenes, the films might be a throwback to the days of the famous Mack Sennett slapstick comedies, except that the Kettle movies are longer ad technically superior.
The men who have shared the directing of the pictures, Charles Lamont, Edward Sedgwick and Charles Barton are, in fact, old-timers belonging to the Sennett era. But the real kingpin of the series is producer Goldstein, who served as associate producer on the film version of the Betty MacDonald book, The Egg and I, in which the Kettles were born. In that picture Marjorie and Percy, playing Ma and Pa , were only incidental characters who supported Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray in the starring roles.
"But," says Goldstein, "I noticed something at the perviews of The Egg and I. Every time the Kettles appeared on the screen, the audiences would perk up and lean forward. Main and Kilbride were stealing the pictures. One night it suddenly occurred to me: Why not a low-budget series based on the Kettles?"
At the time, Universal-International was suffering a financial hang-over from a cultural binge. The studio had bought a slew of Broadway plays, most of them heavily laced with messages; imported a number of New York directors; and stacked the payroll with "name" writers. Pictures produced under this policy, though often beamed on by critics, simply were not favorites with the movie-going public. With exhibitors screaming, the studio knew there had to be some changes made.
It was at this time that Goldstein was elevated to full producer and given the green light on the Kettles. They've been his babies ever since. The studio secured the film rights on the series from Betty MacDonald for $10,000 per picture. Ma and Pa Kettle were on their way.
The series found its greatest popularity in the Midwest, especially in small-town, neighborhood and drive-in theaters. But they clicked in other parts of the country, too--and, to Hollywood's utter bewilderment, they are becoming increasingly popular abroad, especially in England, South America and Australia.
Exhibitors cry for more Kettle films. But Universal-International, afraid of glutting the market, is limiting their release to one a year. A picture in which the Kettles tour Europe is now in production; it may be followed by Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki. Goldstein thinks the series can continue successfully just as long as Main and Kilbride are on hand to do the title roles (Marjorie is under contract to Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer, on loan to Universal-International for the Kettle pictures).
The Kettle characters are not precisely those conceived by Betty MacDonald. They've been toned down a little for films; Ma, particularly, has lost some fo the lusty earthiness of the original character. The reason for this is twofold; the pictures had to be made acceptable to the family trade, and they had to be made acceptable to Marjorie. A woman with extremely high moral standards, she keeps a sharp eye on the Kettle scripts.
One sequence in Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm had a billy goat chasing a nanny over a hill in a manner that unmistakably indicated romance was a-brewing. Marjorie raised such a howl that the scene was eliminated. In Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, the writers wrote in ascene that called for Miss Main to be slightly, and very innocently, tipsy. Marjorie roared. "No drunk scenes in any of my pictures!" she said. That scene, also, was dropped.
"My grandmother," she explained later, "was one of the founders of the W.C.T.U., and I guess I'm a throwback to her."
The actress also has other idiosyncrasies. For one thing, she cooks on the sets, cheerfully borrowing utensils from the prop department. Sometimes work waits until she has finished frying her bacon and eggs. Her dressing room, unique on the lot, is equipped with a hot plate, a commode, a couch, and numerous sprays to ward off the germs with which she imagines the sound stage to be teeming. Arriving on the set, she booms, "Open all the doors and let the bugs out!" And she sees that it's done.
Goldstein, whose shooting schedule is usually limited to 30 days, is faced with an assortment of other problems. In Ma and Pa Kettle, the first of the series, mild-mannered Percy balked at a sequence in which Marjorie was supposed to carry him over the threshold of a new home he had won in a slogan contest. Kilbride maintained that is was the man's job to do the carrying. Director Lamont. looking over frail, 125-pound Percy, and robust, stocky, five-foot-five Marjorie decided: "Impossible." Considerable persuasion was necessary to get Kilbride to submit to the indignity of being carried by a woman.
As Pa Kettle, Percy is supposedly an experienced farmer; in reality, he is citybred and mortally afraid of the domestic animals with which he has to work in pictures. For the milking scene in Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, he requested that the cow's feet and tail be tied. Then, since he was unable to draw forth any milk, a double's hand had to be used for the close-up.
On one personal appearance tour, Percy and Marjorie were interviwed over the radio before an audience of Four-H club members in Wichita, Kansas. A question involving soil cultivation was tossed at Percy, leaving him dumfounded. Marjorie had no answer either, but rushing into the breach, she said to the interviewer, "First, I would like to know something. As a farm child, I was told that more chicks were produced from brown eggs than white ones. Is that true?"
The flabbergasted interviewer allowed that Marjorie's obervation was extremely interesting, and ended by promising to start a research project on the matter. By that time, the original question had been forgotten. Marjorie and Percy were still good farmers to the Four-H club members.
As a matter of fact, neither Marjorie nor Percy knows why they were picked to play Ma and Pa Kettle in the first place. Marjorie believes that the rowdyish comedies she made with the late Wallace Beery were responsible for her being cast as Ma. Says Percy wryly, "In the book, Pa is described as being shiftless. I suppose Goldstein said, 'That's Kilbride, all right.'"
Goldstein has his own explanation: "I chose them because nobody else could do the parts. They were just right."
Although they're personally modest, Marjorie and Percy have nothing but kind words for each other. "Marjorie's too busy for temperament," says Percy approvingly; "her gusto and versatility are fascinating."
"I consider Percy the best dead-pan actor in the business," says Marjorie. "And a complete gentleman."
Percy's gentility is, indeed, strictly of the old school. He bows gravely to children and tips his gray felt hat to ladies. His clothes are conservative, and, unlike Pa Kettle, he is always impeccably dressed. Modest, diffident, shy, he presents a perfect picture of meekness. He even acts embarrassed at his own fame.
On the set, he is as retiring as he is in private life. While the exuberant Marjorie storms all over the place, and his screen children, with their 15 mothers, scream and clamor, Percy retreats to his dressing room and quietly rehearses his lines.
Extremely co-operative, the actor is a great favorite with all of his fellow employees--including those who keep watch over the Universal-International finances. After one personal appearance with a Kettle picture, Kilbride handed in an expense account for $3.10. The 10 cents, he carefully explained, was for a soft drink.
Percy perfers soft drinks to hard ones, and he has only a mild interest in food. He used to cook some of his meals in the small, immaculate apartment he maintains just off Hollywood Boulevard, but he gave up his kitchen activity as a needless complication of his life. To duck the crowds, he usually eats dinner nowadays at 5:00 P.M. in such places as the Tick Tock Tea Room.
His favorite diversion is walking, and he is a familiar sight to shopkeepers along Hollywood Boulevard. Many of them call out greetings to him as he strolls by, serenely puffing on one of the five cigars he allows himself daily. Percy has never owned an automobile. "When I was young I couldn't afford one," he says, "and now I wouldn't increase the hazard of Hollywood traffic by attempting to drive one." Several months ago, as if to illustrate his point, he has knocked down by an automobile while crossing a street.
Kilbride has few intimates in the film capital; the occasional visitor who appears at his apartment is usually a man he knew in the old days, toward the start of his 46-year-career in show business. "Life in Hollywood is a bit on the lonely side for a man like me," he says.
Now sixty-three, Percy has never married. "I've been mighty close to getting hitched," he recalls, "and sometimes I'm heartsick at the thought that I never went through with it. The responsibility of a family might have given me the push that would have made a big star of me." He has received a number of marriage proposals by mail, which he has studiously ignored. In 1949, he was named "Hollywood's Most Eligible Bachelor" by the Midwestern Practical Nurses Association. He still shakes his head in wonder at that. "What woman," he asks, "would want to marry Pa Kettle?"
Actually, Kilbride and Kettle have little in common. But Percy has become so closely identified with the character of Pa that producers think he can play nothing else. He was considered for the part of the old counterfeiter in Mister 880, but it went to Edmund Gwenn (and brought him an Academy Award nomination). More recently, Kilbride was in the running for the part of the father in Bing Crosby's Here Comes the Groom, but that went to James Barton. "The trouble with Percy is that he plays Pa too well," says Marjorie sympathetically.
Last year a confused radio announcer introduced him over the air as Percy Kettle. It depressed him no end. After all, the role of the absent-minded farmer has been his for only a few years; he has been in show business constantly since 1904, except for a spell in the Army in World War I.
Although people are always mistaking him for a New Englander because of the way he speaks, Percy was born in San Francisco on July 16, 1888. He started his career in show business there as an usher in the Central Theater, graduated from that to a job as a callboy backstage, and then went on to acting: his first part was that of a fop in a production of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. After five years with the San Francisco theater, he joined a road company of The Manxman, touring the West Coast and getting as far as Chicago.
His great ambition, like that of most actors, was to play Broadway. "But I never had enough money to hang around New York and wait for a good part," he explains. "In order to keep working I had to hit the road." During his long acting career he estimates that he has played between 800 and 900 roles, varying from romance to villainy. But with his dead-pan face and droll voice, it was inevitable that he would be typed for comedy.
Not until 1938 did the dream of his life come true, with a part in the Broadway hit Those We Love. That play was followed by another fair success, Post Road. And finally came his big chance, as the eccentric caretaker in George Washington Slept Here. The play was a smash hit, and Percy scored a great personal triumph in his supporting role. When Warner Brothers turned the play into a picture in 1941, Percy was imported to repeat his stage characterization. Ever since, except for one fling in a unsuccessful play, he has stuck to movies.
Marjorie first saw him in one of his Broadway plays. "I told myself," she says, "that there was a man with whom I'd like to work someday." Her chance came when shooting started on The Egg and I, and she has worked with him constantly ever since.
Despite their close association before the camera, Percy and Marjorie never see each other socially. "I've been intending to ask Percy out for a visit for a long, long time," said Marjorie recently."
But somehow or other I just can't get my house straightened up. Percy's so neat."
Neatness is not Marjorie's strong point. Like Ma Kettle, she finds it impossible to keep a house tidy. This is partly a hang-over from the theater years when she lived in hotel rooms, partly the result of her sheer inability to keep her mind focused on a chore long enough to complete it. A few years ago, she bought a modest bungalow near the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. A widow, she lives there alone, surrounded by a clutter of objects, useful and otherwise.
Her dining-room table is used as a catch-all filing cabinet (it's rarely used for eating, since she almost never entertains). In the heaps of material stacked on it may be found anything from garden seeds to valuable personal papers; when Marjorie wants to show a visitor something in the pile she usually makes a determined pass at it, then gives up with a helpless gesture. The odds are just too great.
Marjorie purchased her house with the assistance of a white-bearded individual named Peter the Hermit, who wanders around Hollywod looking like a Biblical character. They visited a number of places before they settled on the one she now lives in. "There was another one I liked," she says, "but Peter went sniffing around the place and said, 'No, there's death in this house.' Found out later an undertaker had lived there."
A picture of Peter hangs on Marjorie's wall, and she pointed it out to a reporter who visited her recently. "He's a great friend of mine," she said. "Want to meet him?" Without further ado, she grabbed the reporter's hand and sallied forth into the night. By the time they reached Hollywood Boulevard, Marjorie, heedless of amazed onlookers, was running full tilt down the sidewalk, with the reporter panting behind her.
The search for Peter proving unsuccessful, Marjorie offered to take the reporter for a ride in her new convertible. It was the first car she had ever owned, and she had splurged and got all the trimmings. Noting the array of instruments on the dashboard, the man asked their functions. "Oh, I don't know," said Marjorie indifferently, "I just play them, kind of like an organ." With that she gave a demonstration. Horns blew, the top folded back, the engine hood raised, the radio blared. Later, after the car got rolling, it developed that the one button Miss Main had failed to push was the headlight switch.
Recently, to save gasoline, she also acquired a small British car; Marjorie diving in and out of traffic in the little vehicle is something to behold. But the people in her neighborhood are used to being startled at the sight of Miss Main--as, for example, when she comes pedaling home from the grocery store on her bike, wearing shorts and halter.
"Why wear a mink coat to buy a pork chop?" she asks. "A barrier is immediately raised. And so is the price."
Price is important to Marjorie. Although extremely well off financially, she does all her own domestic chores, and she raises some of her own vegetables. "The one consolation I got from the last war," she says, "is that I could do all my own gardening and wear old clothes. People attributed it to patriotism." At home, her favorite costume is a blue cotton dress, cotton stockings and battered low-heel shoes.
Miss Main has never owned a formal evening dress. For real swank occasions, which are few in her life, she borrows a gown from the Metro wardrobe department. Not long ago, she was guest of honor at a reunion of the sorority she joined while attending Hamilton College, Delta Delta Delta, As she entered the banquet hall, there was a clearly audible clinking and clanking; when she got home she discovered that she had neglected to remove the weights inserted by the wardrobe department to hold the gown straight in storage.
In conversation, as when she tells stories like this on herself, Marjorie is always in motion. She is a very nervous person; as she talks, she leaps up frequently to attend to some small, forgotten business; seated again, she squints and frequently brushes her hand across her pale-blue eyes (she's shortsighted, but hates glasses); occasionally she pushes up her graying hair, which slips down continually, much in the manner of Ma Kettle's. A reporter who interviewed her in her back yard not long ago had to shoot his questions between rounds of a three-cornered fight involving a belligerent mockingbird, a cat with murder in his eye, and Marjorie, bent on preserving the peace.
Miss Main's voice in conversation is quiet and pleasant. Her screen voice, as thousands of movie-goers know, is something else again. Writers have vainly sought adjectives and similes to describe it. It has been called strident, grit-packed, galvanized, cinder-throated; it has been likened to shifting gears, a stone crusher, a coffee grinder, a file, and rusty nails.
The only time the Main movie voice is given full vent off screen is when she thinks the studios are not doing right by her as an actress, or by her pictures as a product. Then she squawks like a yardful of peacocks. Universal-International has shown some reluctance to publicize its profits on the Kettle series, and the studio executives indicate that one big reason is the fear that Marjorie will put up a holler for a bonus. She believes in sharing the wealth when she's had anything to do with earning it.
Her forthrightness in protecting her own interests has given her the reputation around Hollywood of being somewhat difficult. Her nervous search for peace and quiet has added to this. Marjorie simply cannot stand noise.
While making one Kettle picture in New York, she was given a room on the twentieth floor of a hotel. Trying to escape the street sounds, she moved three times, going higher and higher. The management finally put her in an elaborate suite on the top floor. From there she telephoned Leonard Goldstein that she could still hear the rumble of the elevated trains a block away. "I can't believe that." said the harassed producer, "and I am coming up to investigate for myself." He did, and found to his astonishment that Marjorie was right. She was moved to a hotel near Central Park.
Such incidents are sometimes misinterpreted as a highhanded attitude on Marjorie's part. But the truth is that she simply cannot work without proper rest. Her health, despite her vast energy, is not very good. She suffers from a chronic sinus condition, and recently bought a small house in Palm Springs, the desert air being more pleasing to her irritated sinuses than Los Angeles' smoke and fog.
Her fellow workers at the studios think Marjorie is a hypochondriac. It is true that she is a fanatic on diets and new medical fads, and has an absolute phobia about disease. When a director on one of her pictures caught cold she asked him to wear a surgical mask. He did. So did Marjorie--between scenes, of course--saying, "There are 15 kids working in this picture. It's a cinch a couple of them have sniffles." She washes her fruits and vegetables, even stawberries, with soap when perparing them for the table. Her favorite eating places are cafeterias, where she often wears long white cotton gloves while dining.
Marjorie Main was born, appropriately enough, in the middle of a cornfield near Acton, Indiana, on February 24, 1890. Her real name is Mary Tomlinson. She and her late husband, Dr. Stanley Krebbs, chose Main as the last part of her professional name because of its common usage. "There's main street, main entrance, main event, main everything," says the actress. Dr. Krebbs added Marjorie for euphony.
Since then, Marjorie has come to detest the name. And there are others who like it no better. "I like everything about you except your name," Louis B. Mayer told her when he signed her to a long-term contract.
"We huddled," said Marjorie, "but we both agreed it was too late to do anything about it."
The late Damon Runyon once wrote in his column: "It is difficult for me to reconcile the name Marjorie with Miss Main's appearance, and her manner. She has a dead pan, square shoulders, a stocky build, a voice like a file, and an uncurried aspect. She has a stride like a section boss. She has bright, squinty eyes. She generally starts off looking as if she never smiled in her life, then suddenly she smiles from her eyes out."
Marjorie's father was a minister, to whom the theater was synonymous with brimstone. She says now: "I got my first dramatic training under the guise of elocution, a term which covered a multitude of so-called sinful things in my youth."
The truth is, the Reverend Tomlinson was something of an actor himself. He frequently sat under a shade tree and read the works of Dickens aloud to his wife and children, with appropriate intonations and gestures. "I hope some of Mr. Dickens' characters are in heaven," his wife once remarked. "Else Father will never be happy there."
It was her father's reading voice that first inspired Marjorie's interest in the theater, and interest that was aided and abetted by the family maid, who took the youngster to a Negro jubilee at which dramatic skits were performed. The little girl began to prepare herself for a dramatic career.
At fourteen she won a gold watch as first prize in a county-fair speaking contest. Characteristically, she tried to sell it to the little boy who had won the second prize--a five-dollar bill.
After leaving high school, Marjorie talked her father into letting her study dramatics at Hamilton College by insisting she wished to teach the subject. For a while she did teach expression at a private school in Paris, Kentucky, but she lost the position after holding out too long for a raise in salary.
Her father finally permitted her to go on tour with a Chautauqua--one of those educational tent shows so popular in the days before the movies--after she promised she'd stick strictly to Shakespeare. As Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, she earned $8 a week. Ever on the alert for an extra dollar, she picked up another couple of bucks by singing between acts.
While touring with the Chautauqua, Marjorie met the one love of her life: Dr. Krebbs, an ex-minister who had turned writer and lecturer on psychological topics. Though he died 17 years ago, Marjorie still grieves for him. At the time of his death he was preparing to write a book on the psychology of sex, and had collected a number of reference books on the subject. Marjorie, strictly a puritan at heart, still keeps those books on her living-room shelf, though she blushes furiously when some curious vistor spots them.
Encouraged by her husband, Marjorie graduated from the Chautauqua into straight drama, serving her apprenticeship on the road. Eventually hitting Broadway, she achieved notable success in the plays Dead End and The Women. She was brought to Hollywood to do the film versions of both plays.
Marjorie gave fine performances, but it failed to sell her to Hollywood, which, in 1937, wasn't in the market for tragediennes. Two years later The Women did the trick. In that film, she played a blowzy, rowdy role, and that typed her for pictures. Metro, on the lookout for another Marie Dressler, latched on to her, and had never let her go except, as in the case of the Kettle pictures, on loan. Marjorie averages three pictures a year for M-G-M.
Meanwhile, the Kettles keep rolling along. The announcement that production was starting on their latest film, in which they cross the Atlantic, caused smiles on the faces of prop men, secretaries, publicists, electricians. They know that with Marjorie and Percy grinding out that golden corn, there will be no wage cuts or firing. "As long as Ma and Pa Kettle keep working," said a studio prop man, "so will we. It's the best job insurance a person can have."
Marjorie has her special problems with this new picture, tentatively called Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Paris. Set somewhat on edge by the working title, she is keeping an eagle eye on the script and direction.
"After all," she says. "Ma and Pa in Paris..."
THE END
