I’ve always admired Betty Hutton as an actress and entertainer. The word that always comes to mind when her name is mentioned is “spunky”. She may not have been the sexiest blonde bombshell on the screen, but I always enjoy watching her performances. Whether musical, comedy, drama or even circus (hey, I like Cecil B DeMille’s “Greatest Show On Earth” - even if Charlton Heston gives one of the most wooden performances of his career!), I think she certainly gave audiences more than their money’s worth.

As filmography’s go, hers isn’t the biggest, most diverse or most impressive. But it does have a few bright moments that I would I really enjoy. And yes, her performance as Holly in “The Greatest Show On Earth” is one of them. Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, during their tribute to her, it is being shown at 4 pm. Also being shown are “The Stork Club” with Barry Fitzgerald (another favorite actor of mine) and “The Perils of Pauline”.

But I think the real treat of the evening is at 7 pm with TCM’s Private Screenings interview with her from 2000. As one of the last of the stars from Paramount (and MGM’s) musical days, it was a pleasure to hear what she had to say.

Especially difficult for any actor is being called upon to fill in a role after a production has started. Betty Hutton had the unenviable duty of doing just that when Judy Garland proved unable to handle the lead role in “Annie Get Your Gun”. By a number of accounts, she was treated badly by cast and crew, particularly her co-star Howard Keel. Yet her performance is as strong as any of her career and perhaps that animosity off screen may have helped with what we see on the screen. As Annie, she’s a feisty character, much as she was in real life at times.

As with many movie stars over the years, her real life wasn’t as secure as that seen on the screen. A series of divorces, poor business choices and finally a decision to leave Hollywood behind all took their toll. At her lowest, she found sanctuary, literally as a cook in a rectory. But a return to the spotlight came in 1980 as she revived her role as “Annie” on Broadway in “Annie Get Your Gun”. She later took on a new role as teacher at Salve Regina College in Rhode Island, sharing her film and television experiences with a new generation.

TCM has a line they use to promote some short subjects they show between films about various actors, actresses and other motion picture legends.

“Damn - good - actress.”

In my book, that’s Betty Hutton.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here’s the text of three of her obituaries:

Betty Hutton, energetic star of ’50s musicals, is dead at 86

By BOB THOMAS,Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty Hutton, the actress and singer who brought a brassy vitality to Hollywood musicals such as “Annie Get Your Gun,” has died in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 86.

The death was confirmed Monday by a friend of Hutton who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, citing Hutton’s wishes that her death be announced at a specified time by the executor of her estate, Carl Bruno. The friend refused to provide further details including the time and cause of death.

“I can neither confirm or deny” the report, Bruno told The Associated Press from Palm Springs. He said he’d talk about it Tuesday afternoon.

Hutton was at the top of the heap when she walked out of her Paramount contract in 1952, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her then-husband direct her films. She made only one movie after that but had a TV series for a year and worked occasionally on the stage and in nightclubs.

Unlike other actresses who have been called “blonde bombshells,” Hutton had a screen personality that had more to do with energy and humor than sex.

Time magazine wrote in 1950: “Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty, by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker.”

Hutton could be brash behind the camera, too, telling The AP in 1954: “When I’m working with jerks with no talent, I raise hell until I get what I want.”

Several of her films were biopics: “Incendiary Blonde,” about actress and nightclub queen Texas Guinan; “Perils of Pauline,” about silent-screen serial heroine Pearl White; and “Somebody Loves Me,” about singer Blossom Seeley.

“Annie Get Your Gun” (1950) was the Irving Berlin musical biography of Annie Oakley, with Hutton playing the part Ethel Merman had made famous on Broadway. Hutton got the movie role when Judy Garland dropped out of the production.

Another notable film was “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” the 1944 Preston Sturges satire that rattled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant after a spur-of-the-moment marriage and can’t quite remember who the father is.

Sturges called Hutton “a full-fledged actress with every talent the noun implies.”

She returned the compliment, saying in a 1971 interview that “I am not a great singer and I am not a great dancer but I am a great actress, and nobody ever let me act except Preston Sturges. He believed in me.”

She recalled years later how she got through one challenging scene — five minutes of rapid-fire dialogue — perfectly on the first try. “Preston was delighted, and he asked how I could do it. I said I memorized it like a song, learning the lines rhythmically.”

In 1954, she announced to a Las Vegas nightclub audience: ‘This is my last show and I’m retiring from show business.”

She backtracked the following year, saying, “I was wrong and I admit it.” She said her mother told her, “God gave you a gift and it’s not right to hide it from people.”

Her only movie after 1952 was “Spring Reunion” in 1957.

In 1959-60, she starred in the TV series “The Betty Hutton Show” (also called “Goldie”), about a brash manicurist who suddenly inherits the estate of a wealthy customer and becomes guardian to his three children.

But her personal life was rocky at times, including four failed marriages, financial problems and difficulties between her and her three daughters. In a 1980 AP interview, Hutton said she had kicked a 20-year addiction to pills. “Uppers, downers, inners, outers, I took everything I could get my hands on,” she said.

She credited a Rhode Island priest, the Rev. Peter Maguire, with befriending her and turning her life around. She converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1986, she earned a liberal arts degree from Salve Regina College, in Newport, R.I., commenting that she liked college because “the kids studying there accepted me as one of them.”

“Practically all the stars are in trouble,” she recalled telling the priests she met in Rhode Island. “You happen to see me talking honestly to you. It’s a nightmare out there! It hurts what we do in our private lives.”

When Maguire died in 1996, she said, “It was just so painful to me, I couldn’t handle it. My kids all live in California, so I decided to come back here.”

Coming out of her shell somewhat in recent years, she gave occasional performances and interviews, including an appearance in 2000 on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel.

But she told The AP in a 2000 interview that she didn’t like to see herself in her old movies.

“It isn’t the movie I’m looking at. Professionally, my career was great,” she said. “But never was the scene offstage great for me.”

She was born Betty June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Mich., in February 1921, and never knew her father. She began her career at age 5 singing with her sister, Marion, in their mother’s speakeasy.

“When I mentioned that I wanted to be a star, my mother thought I was nuts,” Hutton recalled. “I thought if I became a star and got us out of poverty, she would quit drinking. I didn’t know (alcoholism) was a disease; nobody did. There was no A.A. then.”

Her first real show business success was as a singer in Vincent Lopez’s band. It was he who gave her the name Hutton. (Her sister eventually adopted the surname Hutton, too, and was a vocalist for Glenn Miller.)

Her mugging and wild gestures, tackling the microphone got her dubbed “America’s No. 1 jitterbug.” (“As a matter of fact, I couldn’t jitterbug,” she said.)

Then came a Broadway revue, “Two for the Show,” and the stage version of “Panama Hattie” before getting her start in Hollywood. She became a protegee of Buddy De Sylva, famed songwriter then working for Paramount.

Her marriages to manufacturer Ted Briskin, dance director Charles O’Curran, recording company executive Alan Livingston and jazzman Pete Candoli ended in divorce.

BETTY HUTTON, SINGER AND ACTRESS, DIES AT 86

By RICHARD SEVERO, New York Times News Service

Betty Hutton, a singer and actress celebrated as a blonde bombshell of Hollywood musicals and comedies in the 1940s and 50s, died Sunday night at her home in Palm Springs, Calif., her executor announced Monday. She was 86.

The cause was complications of colon cancer, the executor, Carl Bruno, told The Associated Press. He said the announcement of her death had been withheld until after her funeral on Monday at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City, Calif.

Hutton, a brassy, energetic performer with a voice that could sound like a fire alarm, had the lead role in the 1950 film version of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” and a starring role in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 spectacular, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

She was known for her renditions of upbeat songs like “Murder, He Says,” a Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser number from the 1943 film “Happy Go Lucky,” and “His Rocking Horse Ran Away” from “And the Angels Sing” (1944).

Hutton’s electric presence in films like “The Fleet’s In” and Preston Sturges’ “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” masked emotional problems rooted in a poverty-stricken childhood. As a young girl, she sang for coins on street corners and in speakeasies to help support her alcoholic mother, who had been abandoned by Hutton’s father.

Years after her film career ended, those emotional problems still plagued her. “I tried to kill myself,” Hutton said in 1983, recalling her decline after she faded from public notice.

She re-emerged in the 1970s, when reporters learned she was working as a cook and housekeeper in the rectory of a Roman Catholic church in Portsmouth, R.I. Before being rescued and rehabilitated by a priest, she said, she had become addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol and had lost what she estimated to be a $10 million fortune.

Betty Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Mich., on Feb. 26, 1921, the daughter of Percy Thornburg, a brakeman, and Mabel Lum Thornburg. In the early 1920s, Thornburg left town with another woman, and his wife took her children to Lansing and finally to Detroit, where she got a job in the automobile industry for 22 cents an hour. To make ends meet, she sold homemade beer to Prohibition violators. Betty and her sister, Marion, sang for the customers.

Hutton quit school in the ninth grade and started earning money ironing shirts and doing housework. She also kept singing. When she was 15 and singing in a Detroit nightclub, the bandleader Vincent Lopez hired her and gave her the name Hutton. The band was also heard on radio. (Marion Thornburg later adopted the name Hutton, too, and became a vocalist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra; she died in 1987.)

Hutton left Lopez’s band after a couple of years and in 1940 appeared in the Broadway revue “Two for the Show.” Vogue magazine called her “the most supercharged” member of the cast. A year later, she went to Hollywood at the invitation of B.G. DeSylva, executive producer at Paramount. He gave her, at 21, a part in “The Fleet’s In.” Look magazine said it made her a star overnight.

Her film credits in the next 15 years included “Let’s Face It” (1943) and “Here Come the Waves” (1944). Sturges gave her more of a chance to act in “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” (1944), a screwball comedy about wartime morality that ruffled the censors with its story of a young woman who becomes pregnant after a spur-of-the-moment marriage and then can’t quite remember who the father is.

The next year she was back in a familiar role, as a hat-check girl, in “The Stork Club,” in which she memorably sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.”

Several of her films were biographies: “Incendiary Blonde,” about the actress and nightclub queen Texas Guinan; “The Perils of Pauline,” about the silent-screen heroine Pearl White; and “Somebody Loves Me,” about the singer Blossom Seeley.

In 1950, when Judy Garland was ill and unable to meet her commitments to star in the film version of “Annie Get Your Gun,” Hutton got the part, winning praise in a role that had been created on Broadway by Ethel Merman.

There were also Hutton movies that got bad reviews, most notably “Dream Girl” (1948). Hutton began to feel her career was headed downhill. To help her get the romantic heroine’s role in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” playing a trapeze artist, she sent DeMille a floral tribute 18 feet in diameter.

But her career was winding down, and after “Somebody Loves Me” (1952), she was all but finished. That year she married Charles O’Curran, a dance director, who wanted to direct her in a film. Paramount rejected the idea, and Hutton, in a fit of temper, walked out of her contract. Her final film, “Spring Reunion” (1957), received little notice.

Hutton soon turned to the new medium of television and was given a series, “The Betty Hutton Show,” but it lasted only for the 1959-60 season. In 1965, she appeared on Broadway in the musical “Fade Out, Fade In,” replacing Carol Burnett, but pills and alcohol were taking over her life.

At her lowest ebb, in 1974, Earl Wilson, the columnist, organized a benefit for her in New York. “I haven’t got a cent,” said Hutton, who had earned $150,000 a week in her good years.

But she found a way to cope with her problems in religion. She renewed her interest in Lutheranism, her original faith, then became a convert to Roman Catholicism. She regarded the Rev. Peter Maguire of St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Portsmouth as primarily responsible for saving her life. During one of her many hospital stays, he talked her into working for St. Anthony’s. “No one had ever talked to me before,” she said.

She later resumed work as an actress, appearing in nightclubs and, briefly in 1980, in the Broadway musical “Annie.” “It’s groovy being a star again,” she said. “But I know how fast it can be over.”

In the early 1980s, when she was in her 60s, Hutton, who had never gone beyond the ninth grade, enrolled at Salve Regina, a Catholic college for women in Newport, R.I. She earned a master’s degree in psychology; the college had decided that her life experience entitled her to a baccalaureate. By the late 1980s, she was teaching comedy and oral interpretation at Emerson College in Boston.

She made occasional broadcast appearances in her later years, notably an hourlong interview, first shown in 2000, with Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies.

She married four times, to O’Curran; Ted Briskin, a manufacturer; Alan Livingston, a recording company executive; and Pete Candoli, a jazz trumpet player. She had two daughters, Candy and Lindsay, with Briskin and another, Caroline, with Candoli. All her marriages ended in divorce.

“My husbands all fell in love with Betty Hutton,” Hutton once said. “None of them fell in love with me.”

Betty Hutton, star of ’50s musicals, is buried in California

CATHEDRAL CITY, Calif. (AP) — Betty Hutton, the brassy blonde star of “Annie Get Your Gun” who lost Hollywood but never her fans, was buried Tuesday with a handful of mourners in attendance. She was 86.

Hutton died in her Palm Springs apartment from complications of colon cancer Sunday night but the official announcement was withheld until after her funeral, said Carl Bruno, executor of her will and a longtime friend.

“She wanted anonymity as far as being buried. She didn’t want that to be turned into a circus,” he said.

She was buried in a gray-and-pink metal casket at Forest Lawn Cathedral City, where stars such as Frank Sinatra and Sonny Bono are interred.

A virtual recluse in her later years, Hutton’s mourners included three caregivers, Bruno and his partner, who were her landlords, Bruno said.

She was estranged from her three daughters and they did not ask to attend the service, he said.

The estrangement “caused her a lot of heartache,” Bruno said.

Hutton’s roles were characterized by brashness and ferocious energy.

She made about two dozen movies but was best known for the title role of Annie Oakley in the 1950 movie version of the musical “Annie Get Your Gun.” She got the role after Judy Garland dropped out of the production.

Longtime Paramount Pictures executive A.C. Lyles said Tuesday that Hutton was one of the studio’s “most valued personalities” and one of its highest-salaried actress of that time.

But mostly he recalled her fondly as a dear friend.

“I don’t know how a heart that big can be in one little body,” Lyles told The Associated Press.

She was at the top when she walked out of her Paramount movie contract in 1952, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her then-husband direct her films. She made only one movie after that but had a TV series, “The Betty Hutton Show,” from 1959-60 season in which she played a manicurist who inherits a wealthy customer’s estate.

She also worked occasionally on stage and in nightclubs.

She was born Betty June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Mich., in February 1921 and never knew her father. She began her career at age 5 singing with her sister, Marion, in their mother’s speakeasy.

“When I mentioned that I wanted to be a star, my mother thought I was nuts,” Hutton recalled. “I thought if I became a star and got us out of poverty, she would quit drinking. I didn’t know (alcoholism) was a disease; nobody did. There was no A.A. then.”

Her first real success was as a singer in Vincent Lopez’s band. It was he who gave her the name Hutton. (Her sister eventually adopted the surname Hutton, too, and was a vocalist for Glenn Miller.)

At 18, she was in a Broadway revue, “Two for the Show,” followed by the Broadway version of “Panama Hattie” before getting her start in Hollywood. She became a protegee of Buddy De Sylva, a famed songwriter then working for Paramount.

Hutton’s personal life was rocky at times, including four failed marriages and a 20-year addiction to pills.

She credited a Rhode Island priest, the Rev. Peter Maguire, with befriending her and turning her life around. She converted to Roman Catholicism.

In later years, she was a virtual recluse.

“She didn’t want to be seen,” Bruno said. “She always felt that people were expecting young, 20-year-old bouncing blonde and she didn’t want to disappoint them.”

Yet she continued to receive fan mail from around the world. They would send her roses and gifts, including teddy bears and embroidered towels.

“I have boxes of it,” Bruno said.

In addition to her daughters Candy, Lindsay, and Caroline, she is survived by several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Bruno said. He did not have other details.