Miss Elizabeth June Thornburg

For the first time, I viewed the other evening in its entirety, the film "Annie Get Your Gun." Released the year that I was born, am proud to share the same birth year, in a manner of speaking, with this great American mid-century musical that exuberantly, sentimentally and spectacularly tells the tale of Annie Oakley through the unmatched talents of both Howard Kheel and the exquisitely generous Betty Hutton, one of our National Treasures, who, had she lived to 110 would have left us too soon. Atomic energy had nothing on Betty and she gave ecstatically and deliriously as well as unstintingly. Her psyche's transmission had but one gear: 7th (as in, audiences were in seventh heaven when she performed) and it was in "drive" and forward, all the way and all the time when she was behind the wheel. Somehow she never seemed manic, just a cut above even the best of us who only imagine that we have cornered the market on enthusiasm and a zest for living; her vitality and comedic genius was infectious and irresistible and her unabashed plea to be loved that came through so unmistakably with each loving effort, could have failed to touch only the coldest of hearts, given her awesome display of both theatrical majesty and human vulnerability. Like Garland and Monroe or Holiday or Seberg, the sorrows of life were perhaps the joys of art for Miss Hutton, nee Elizabeth June Thornburg. She, her mother and her sister were abandoned by her father when she was a small child. He entered their lives again only when news of his suicide reached them when she was eighteen. Struggling during the Great Depression, the three of them worked in a speakeasy that her mother owned and run-ins with the police were frequent as were encounters with unsavory characters who patronized the illicit tavern. No doubt these formative years of a hardscrabble, knockabout existence toughened Betty's exterior and her ambition and talent were surely whetted and honed, respectively, by adversity as she successfully met and eventually conquered the challenges that lay ahead.

She freely confessed in interviews in later years that her marriage to her career as a genuine "triple threat" performer inevitably was destructive of many of her personal relationships. Four marriages, all ending in divorce, depression, estrangement from her children, a nervous breakdown in 1967 after the death, in a house fire, of her alcoholic mother, her own substance abuse, a suicide attempt, and various stops and starts to her faltering career in the 1960s: all were part of a pattern that was somehow slowly and torturously reversed and which led to a new and radically different path for Betty. Rehabilitation included the ministrations of a Fr. Maguire whom she credited with saving her life. Her conversion to Catholicism occurred also in this period. She worked as a cook in a parish rectory's kitchen then and several years later was reported to be happily serving as a hostess in a jai alai arena. She eventually returned to show business on a limited basis and granted a very few interviews in the last thirty years of her life, the last recorded one with Robert Osbourne of the Turner Classic Movies network in 2000. It was rebroadcast at about the time of her death in 2007 and I watched it then. When I recently viewed her in an old episode of the television program "What's My Line?" of easily over fifty years ago, I was struck by the similarity of her behavior on each occasion. In the Osbourne interview Betty often repeated, with almost child-like intensity that her interviewer was a wonderful man, one of the kindest persons she had ever met and that she loved him very much. Also shared was the fact that she was nearly paralyzed by fear and seriously considered canceling the interview. Finally coaxed and reassured, she appeared and, as mentioned, expressed her love for him several times and throughout the proceeding. During the circa 1956 program in which she was the celebrity mystery guest, it was revealed (besides her identity, which was correctly and fairly quickly guessed by panelist Fred Allen) by the show's host John Daly, with as much "show" as "tell", that Betty's anxiety was such that she had implored him, successfully, to hold both of her hands in his until her identity was revealed to the panelists. Daly held up their entwined fingers from behind his desk to a delighted audience with a charming assurance to his wife: "Mrs. Daly, don't you mind now" (a bonus delight for me to be reminded of a time when fidelity was valued so highly that even theatrical affection could come with a disclaimer). After nearly half a century, Betty, unlike most of us, had never stopped openly asking the question that most of us silently pose every day of our lives to someone (even to someone who isn't there): "please love me."

Finally, in "Annie Get Your Gun" it was decided that the character of Miss Oakley would be an outgoing, naive kind of bumpkin (likely unlike the reserved real life sharpshooter) particularly in affairs of the heart. Comical, over-the-top, broad and wonderful, Betty's acting talents, and again, her likability, sincerity and softness precluded any chance of a cartoonish performance that any lesser star would have had great difficulty avoiding. When she guilelessly eyeballs Frank Butler (Kheel) and is struck by the thunderbolt of a crushing crush on him, the hilarity of her "goo-goo" eyes and sighs is immeasurably heightened by the truth she expresses: of youthful adoration conjoined with a healthy libido. Betty Hutton, we miss you and love you forever. And we'll hold your hands, God willing, one day for as long as you wish or until the end of time. Thanks for being our angel then, now and always.