Tag Archives: 1930s

“In Righte Gude Fellowshipe . . .”

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Once her brother Dick took off for his freshman year at the University of Virginia, Jane and her aunt and uncle returned to Manhattan where their new apartment at 1100 Park Avenue waited for its first occupants. At the beginning of October she put on a blue or grey shirtwaist dress and headed just four blocks away to The Nightingale-Bamford School. Jane joined a class of 15 other young ladies from similar backgrounds in a much smaller setting than she had known at Redondo Union High School. In 1930, in this narrow world, the girls were quite sheltered from the problems faced by the city’s public schools where 1,250,000 students had begun their academic year on September 8.

The Nightingale-Bamford School Today

A year earlier the school had opened at 20 East 92nd Street in its brand-new six-story neo-Federal style red-brick building designed by Delano and Aldrich, one of the city’s foremost architectural firms. Frances Nicolau Nightingale and Maya Stevens Bamford had worked tirelessly to build a school that emphasized truth, friendship and loyalty (Veritas Amicitia Fides remains the motto), as well as academic excellence, the arts, and physical education (including good posture).

They put education first; the parent-driven social life of their pupils was something they lived with reluctantly. Between Monday and Thursday the girls were not allowed “to give a party, go to a party, or to the theater or moving pictures” after school. For in 1932, despite the worsening economy, more Nightingale graduates would be presented to Society than went to college—hopefully as debutantes they would meet young men from prominent families with promising futures. At least that’s what their parents had in mind.

Though the formal program ended at 1:15, art classes, dramatics, glee club, supervised study hours and athletics – silver and blue teams competed in basketball, fencing and tennis— filled the afternoons. On four days of the week students could buy a hot lunch for $.75. Opposite the day school was a house used as a “very small Boarding Department” for up to ten young women who needed a place to stay during the week but lived near enough to Manhattan to return home on the weekends.

Jane plunged right into activities at which she excelled – her talent as an amateur artist and wordsmith attracted notice right away. She became assistant editor of Chirps, a literary magazine, and was art editor of the 1932 Year Book. (Two of her poems and her art work came out in Chirps.) The seniors in the Class of ‘31 named Jane the “friendliest” girl in the school; tall, poised Jane (“Jamie”) Voorhees gladly bequeathed her “a few inches from her height” in the annual tongue-in-cheek Senior Will. Jane’s performance in A. A. Milne’s “The Ivory Door” and her role as the lamp in “And the Lamp Went Out, a Pantomime in One Act” inspired her fellow juniors to predict she would be another Lynn Fontanne, the celebrated stage and screen actress who often worked with her husband Alfred Lunt.

But the challenge of being a writer would now be more difficult. Just before leaving California for New York, Jane had bought Where and How to Sell Manuscripts – a Directory for Writers by William B. McCourtie. It was full of practical advice and an annotated list of periodicals in every conceivable category. Carefully, she checked off the names of magazines that might accept what she wrote and penciled in a list of her submissions at the back of the book. During the summer of 1931—one of a half-dozen she would spend at Poplar Springs– sixteen-year-old Jane mailed her poems, stories, articles and humor from the tiny Casanova post office to several of these magazines. This time her efforts did not make it into print. As she competed in this new adult literary world, accolades from her teachers and her friends became vital to her fluctuating morale.

Jane Hall’s 1932 Year Book Photo

So Jane must have been pleased when four samples of her work appeared in the 1932 Nightingale Year Book.  There was also a page for each of the 16 graduating seniors. Quotations in italics under their profiles drew attention to the girls’ personalities. “In righte gude fellowshipe could she laughe and carpe all day,” read Jane’s, source unknown. The rest of her page sums up her two years:

“Jane blew in from California last year, late as usual. However, on account of her numerous talents, this lapse of temperament can and must be overlooked. Jane draws and writes amazingly well, but sometimes throws us all . . .into fits of extreme melancholy, by means of her distressing talent for puns. Yet Jane and her artistic ability have saved the Year Book more than once this year from utter destruction. And what a sense of humor girl possesses.”

And now she would be off to The Womans’ Art School at Cooper Union on Manhattan’s Lower East Side–what a change that would be.

 

From Tomboy to Glamour Girl

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Cosmopolitan Oct 1939

Jane Hall and Kate as pictured in “Beauties” by Bradshaw Crandell. Cosmopolitan Magazine, October 1939 (Copr. Hearst Publications)

WATCH FOR “NANCY GOES TO RIO” ON TCM . The film is a remake of ”It’s A Date” which Jane worked on in 1939. She kept her story and screen credit.

Here’s a bit of background for the posts and images in the  Salome to Hollywood Blog and Gallery. (Posts began on 11/16/2011.)  Who was Jane Hall and why is her journey of interest today?

“I was a candle on the President’s birthday cake!” On January 30, 1934, Jane Hall was exuberant as she whirled around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at a pageant in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. For nineteen-year-old Jane, this ball and other glamorous evenings like it were not just fun, they were research. Jane’s roots in Arizona and California had not prepared her for this world of eastern glitter. Just four years earlier she had been an orphan who knew what it meant to be heartbroken and hard up. But once she arrived in the nation’s cultural capital to live with her aunt and uncle, her life was transformed.

Like an undercover agent, she brought keen eyes and ears from the wide-open West into what appeared to be (but of course was not) a dream world. In his definitive history of Depression – era culture, Morris Dickstein refers to the “split personality” of the 1930s as Americans confronted disaster and sought to “create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble. . .”* Jane Hall did just that in her stories, essays and screenplays as she came to terms with the tragedies in her life.

Named a “literary prodigy” by at least two papers by the time she was fifteen, Jane’s work frequently appeared in print between 1925 and 1942. Her sharp wit and superb ear for authentic dialogue soon caught the notice of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In October 1937 Metro offered her a contract as a scenarist, and over the next five years she worked on several films. In August 1939,  “These Glamour Girls,” which had already been published as a novel in Cosmopolitan, opened in New York City. It was “the best social comedy of the year” according to the New York Times. And the film gave Lana Turner her first starring role. That same month, Jane’s feature-length article about her visit to the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” received high praise from the editor of Good Housekeeping. It seemed she was on her way.

Jane’s journey from a desert hamlet in Arizona to Manhattan’s Café Society and then to Hollywood is a story of resilience that is often exhilarating and always captivating. Her father, Dick Wick Hall, Arizona’s best-loved humorist in the mid 1920s, was the dominant influence on her until an unexpected illness cut his life short in April 1926. By then, “Little Jane” had already decided she would be a writer; her work first appeared in the Los Angeles Times when she was ten.

As she reached twenty, literary magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, and especially Cosmopolitan began buying her stories on a regular basis. In the middle of the Depression, Jane  wrote fiction with a twist of satire about the romantic predicaments of her socialite contemporaries. As editors soon learned, she was as much fun as the characters in her stories. But she had agonizing choices to make and kept a unique record of her professional and emotional journey. Drawing on her diaries, sketches, photographs, telegrams, and hundreds of letters, we will travel across America with this articulate young woman, who was also my mother, as her small-town values were tested, and she made decisions that would affect her for the rest of her life.

Return Address– A Letter from MGM

A critical turning point for Jane came between 1938 and 1940 when her life “belonged only to Louis B. Mayer.” She worked long hours, often six days a week, in the Thalberg Building at Metro – for much of the time in an office next to F Scott Fitzgerald’s – (see Gallery). But she still managed to dance with the stars at night. Her voice from Culver City is candid, refreshing and, at times, disturbing as she describes her response to Hollywood and the creative process at MGM during its Golden Age. (She also did some contract work for Universal Pictures and RKO. )

In posts (that began on November 16, 2011), you can follow this self-conscious, sturdy tomboy as she matured into a sophisticated, glamorous young woman and in October 1939* became one of Cosmopolitan’s iconic cover girls.  In this image, her complexion is flawless, her features perfect, but the expression in Jane’s green eyes is wistful.  Always unsure of her looks as a young girl, by 1939 her sense of who she should be had been redefined by Hollywood and by cover artist Bradshaw Crandell. The image is symbolic; the world of glamour was seductive but it came at a cost.  Her aunt and uncle — her guardians–had been hard-hit by the Depression and felt enormous relief when, in September 1940, Jane became engaged to Robert Frye Cutler, a handsome businessman and theatrical producer, who could provide some assurance of financial security. Unforeseen complications that followed her marriage kept Jane from being the writer she had hoped to be. But she left a priceless record of the years between 1925 and 1942, when she helped create and assess the vibrant culture of a tumultuous era.

These posts are just an introduction to Jane’s story. A forthcoming book will tell the full story – much of it in Jane’s own voice. For photos check out the  Salome to Hollywood gallery and the individual posts.

PLEASE USE THE CONTACT TAB AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE FOR ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS.

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