Unpacking Van Johnson

Almost everything about the real Van Johnson (Charles Van Dell Johnson, 1911-2008) is more interesting than his movie career.

I’ve long wanted to give Van Johnson a nod here because he was a native Rhode Islander — and there are so few of us! Never a superlative actor, he was always supremely likeable in pictures, but it’s that home state accent that especially grabs me. His Little Rhody origins, and the fact that he played John Alden in the soporific pseudo-classic Plymouth Adventure (1952) got me curious as to whether I was related to him, perhaps with some Colonial ancestors in common. But no, he was the son of a Swedish immigrant father and a Pennsylvania Dutch mother. And all you have to do is look at any picture of him to go “Of course!” The matinee idol sandy hair, the healthy physique, the sun-spawned explosion of freckles, the good-natured grin. Did he ever play a Swede, I wonder? How curious, if he didn’t.

Johnson’s journey into motion pictures occurred on a path which many women took, but few men. After being in shows at social clubs as a teenager, he broke into show business as a chorus boy in musicals and revues, at resort hotels, and the like. Vaudeville was gone by the ’30s when he started out, but his good looks and his talent got him work anyway. Starting out in New England, he was in NYC by 1935, when he appeared in the Off-Broadway revue Entre Nous. This got him cast in New Faces of 1936 on Broadway with Imogene Coca the following year. This was followed by chorus parts in the musicals Too Many Girls (1939-40), and Pal Joey (1940-41). The screen version of Too Many Girls (1940) was his first movie.

Lucille Ball is said to have been the person who brough Johnson to the attention of studio scouts. This was years before her television stardom; she was but a fairly minor player herself at the time, but apparently she had surplus hustle, enough to find work for others as well as herself. Later, Johnson would do guest shots on I Love Lucy and Here’s Lucy to show his gratitude.

Another close friend of Johnson’s early Hollywood years was Keenan Wynn — and his wife Evie. In 1947 Eve Wynn switched horses in midstream: divorced Keenan and married Johnson the very next day! This is all covered in entertaining detail in Ned Wynn’s book We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills: Growing Up Crazy in Hollywood (1992). Eve Wynn later confirmed in writing what had been a rumor for years: that Johnson was gay and Eve was tapped by Louis B. Mayer to be his beard. Why did it have to be her? one wonders. She had a family, she was married, surely that was a bad choice from a p.r. perspective? It certainly wasn’t any more wholesome than Elizabeth Taylor stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds. But apparently, Johnson’s attitude was that Eve Wynn was the only woman he was interested in tying the knot with, since they were already close friends. So they all made this rather coldblooded adjustment to their lives. 20 years later, Johnson is said to have left Eve for her (male) tennis instructor.

This wasn’t all the the studios had to cover up. Just as he was about to begin his career in 1942, Johnson was in a bad car accident that mangled his face and necessitated the placing of a metal plate into his head. So whenever you see Van Johnson on the screen, it’s under tons of make-up, covering his scars, his freckles, the dent in his head. It becomes much more noticeable in later years, when color and video came in, and he was older. He was also fond of eyeliner. The effect is not subtle.

One wonders, with all the logistical challenges, why the studios made so much effort on Johnson’s behalf. Seems expensive to go to all of these lengths. But the instinct to do so proved a right one. Johnson became one of the top Hollywood stars of the WWII era. Most of those early films are highly forgettable routine programmers, disposable musicals, and topical war dramas with no shelf life. But after the war, he had something of a stretch where he lucked into roles in some movies that have more or less stood the test of time: Frank Capra’s State of the Union (1948), In the Good Old Summertime (1949), It’s a Big Country (1951), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Brigadoon (1954), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), and The End of the Affair (1955). In 1957 he starred in a tv musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin that was an annual classic for a number of years. There were other films after this, but most of them have fallen by the wayside.

In the new decade, as work in films became more sporadic, Johnson worked more in television and in live theatre. Later movies included Divorce American Style (1967), Where Angels Go Trouble Follows (1968), Yours Mine and Ours (1968, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda), The Concorde Affair (1979), and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). On TV he played the villain The Minstrel on Batman, and also appeared on Maude, McCloud, McMillan & Wife, Quincy, The Love Boat,Murder She Wrote etc. Though he was never nominated for an Oscar, he was indeed Emmy-nominated for his performance in the 1976 mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. He retired from acting in 1992, although he continued to be a talking head in Hollywood documentaries for years after that.