Flashback, November 1960: ‘BUtterfield 8,’ The Film Hated by Its Stars and Author, Opens

 A common adage holds that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Today’s case in point: BUtterfield 8, which MGM released 65 years ago this month.

It’s hard to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out, critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie felt just as strongly about the movie:

*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.

*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit) only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive that he was best suited for his normal profession;

*Author John O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.  Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)

With all the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield 8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately $2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year, Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion picture that was little short of pornography.

The Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.

There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings. 

But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many that she was paid for her services.

(By the way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in “BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)

Conventional wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).

The opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.

Taylor reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that, when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded, “But what do I do with them?”)

Nevertheless, I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career triumph in BUtterfield 8.

This Day in Literary History (Party Girl Mystery Leads to O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8”)

May 29, 1931—Starr Faithfull had a name practically made for the tabloids, and what happened to her in the hours following this date—the last one on which she was seen alive—assured that she would remain there for weeks.

The 25-year-old beauty, who lived with her family in New York’s Greenwich Village, now went missing from an ocean liner off Long Beach, Long Island, only to turn up just after dawn on June 8—fingernails painted bright red, wearing an expensive fitted black-and-white dress, but face down, seaweed tangled in her hair, dead.

The condition of the body—badly bruised—would, by itself, have been enough to guarantee the interest of law enforcement. But it also turned out that Starr’s liver was found to contain the barbiturate veronal, and that she had kept a diary in which her sexual history—including flings with numerous men—was exhaustively detailed.

With her bobbed hair, taste for liquor and disregard for sexual mores, she seemed to embody an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper. But just a bit of probing showed that, in one crucial respect, she resembled less one of those "flaming youth" than Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night: both were victims of child molestation.

These facts, coupled with a slow news cycle, guaranteed that the Starr Faithfull case would hit not only the tabloids during the first half of the summer of 1931, but also even the pages of the good, gray New York Times. Four years later, John O’Hara would transform her life and sad end into a bitter dissection of sex and class in Prohibition-era Gotham, Butterfield 8. If the latter title rings a vague bell, it might be from the obituaries several weeks ago for Elizabeth Taylor, recounting that her first Oscar came for her performance in the 1960 adaptation of the O’Hara novel.

Gloria Wandrous, the protagonist of O’Hara’s only roman a clef, or tale based closely on a real-life incident (he normally used the general details of a person’s life while transforming the externals), is seduced as a child first by a friend of an uncle, then by a heavyset school principal.

The facts in the Starr Faithfull case were even more sensational. When reporters burst into the apartment Starr shared with her family on St. Luke’s Place, a few doors down from New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, they discovered in her diaries a reference to a cousin of her mother’s--identified as AJP—who had molested her with the aid of ether while she was a child.

“AJP” turned out to be Andrew J. Peters, who had quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to run for Mayor of Boston. Little could anyone have imagined that this successful “reform” candidate, who won City Hall back from the clutches of Irish-American boss James Michael Curley, was, in his personal life, far more vile than his opponent--a cold man who paid off Gloria’s parents--downwardly mobile relations of his--to hush up the explosive scandal.

Part of the money was used to send the young girl on transatlantic voyages, where she developed a taste for high living. None of it, however, managed to still her mounting desperation. "I am playing a dangerous game," Starr wrote a friend shortly before she disappeared. "There is no telling where I'll land."

Just how she landed on Long Beach became the concern of Nassau County's District Attorney Elvin Newton Edwards. Over the next few weeks, the D.A.'s explanations for the event shifted like the sands on which the tragic young woman was found.

First he announced that she had been killed on the liner by two men (one a prominent politician), then taken out in a boat and tossed overboard; then that she was knocked unconscious aboard a boat, then thrown into the water. Then, Edwards announced, the politician was “practically eliminated” from consideration as a suspect. Later, his office turned their attention to "Chicago gangsters" and even questioned publisher Bennett Cerf. Finally, Edwards focused on suicide as the probable cause of death.

Many people, Edwards announced at one point in the investigation, were glad that Starr was dead. In any event, the police ended up destroying her potentially explosive diaries, and nobody was ever charged in the case. The case of Starr Faithfull remains unresolved to this day.

Surprisingly, outside of O'Hara, few writers have treated what was once one of New York's most sensational cases. Gloria Vanderbilt (who, as a child, would have known many of the adult high-society types who would have crossed paths with Starr) imagined what her missing diaries were like in the fictional The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull (1994). The one extensive nonfiction treatment of the case appears to be Jonathan Goldman's The Passing of Starr Faithfull.