Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter (Preview)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney
Golden Age Hollywood screenwriter and labor leader Mary McCall Jr. seems to have been blessed with great fortune—as well as an exceptional facility with words, an indefatigable work ethic, and a relatively auspicious sociopolitical environment—in the first four decades of her life, corresponding roughly with the first four decades of the twentieth century. After WWII, however, and despite her penchant for finding actual four-leaf clovers in Beverly Hills, McCall’s luck soured—as a regressive sociopolitical climate for organized labor as well as professional women, a bad second marriage, and then (male) historians’ neglect converged against her. McCall’s luck ran out, that is, until she had the good fortune, albeit posthumously, to attract the attention of Professor J. E. Smyth, historian, film critic, and regular contributor to the pages of this magazine.
In her previous book, Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2018), Smyth laid out the stakes of her feminist historiographic intervention: to reassert not just the numbers of women who worked during the studio era (comprising up to forty percent of the film industry’s employees in the 1930s), but also their power—as producers, department heads, union leaders, and more. Though McCall warranted a chapter (and dedication) therein, Smyth wasn’t yet done restoring her to her rightful place at the center of mid-century Hollywood’s professional, political, and social scene. Note well the absence of the qualifier “female” in the title of Smyth’s biography, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter.
In the introduction, Smyth introduces us to McCall at her personal and professional peak, hobnobbing at the 1943 Academy Awards. She was then one of the studio system’s highest-paid screenwriters ($3,000 a week, the equivalent of nearly $55,000 today!), serving her first term (of three) as president of the Screen Writers Guild, then in its tenth year defending the interests of Hollywood’s scenarists. As such, McCall was invited to present the screenwriting awards, and her opening line cheekily borrowed from the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word.” Using Oscars Night 1943 as its focal point, this intro contains a wealth of texture and color as Smyth places this remarkable individual in her historical context. McCall wore plain black velvet in compliance with Hollywood’s wartime humility, successfully forced upon the fancy-pants studio bosses by McCall’s dear friend Bette Davis and the “female press corps.” Thus clad, McCall handed Oscars to friends Ring Lardner Jr. (later of Hollywood Ten fame) for Woman of the Year and Claudine West for Mrs. Miniver, both titles that themselves suggest the centrality of women (and mid-century feminism) in the making and consuming of Golden Age Hollywood.
From here, Smyth rewinds back to little Mary Jr.’s birth, in 1904, into a wealthy and well-connected Irish Catholic family in New York City, given the unusual-for-a-girl “Junior” by her progressive-minded mother. Determined to be a writer at an early age, McCall matriculated to the all-women’s Vassar College in 1921, just as America’s suffragists were celebrating their hard-fought right to vote. After graduating, she sent story after story to the era’s many middlebrow magazines, bobbed her hair, and met her first husband, Dwight Franklin, who happened to have a job as a technical advisor in Hollywood, with special expertise in pirates! Franklin also had an unconventional enough bent to encourage McCall’s professional ambitions, even with the arrival of children starting in 1930. He also encouraged an open marriage, which ultimately allowed for Mary’s affairs with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Leslie Howard; and (maybe) James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. According to family lore shared with Smyth in interviews, Bogie later introduced Mary to his fourth wife as follows: “McCall…Bacall.”…
To read the complete article, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Winter 2024 issue, or order a copy of this issue.
Megan Feeney has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and is author of Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959.
Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.
Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1