Marjorie Main: "Good for a Lot of Laughs"
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By Sylvia Henricks
In a day when proper little girls were more seen than heard, Mary [Image]
Tomlinson mimicked others and recited in front of her family and
friends. In an era when young women were likely to be embroidering
pillowcases for their hope chests, she gave elocution lessons. When most
people believed young women should confine their career choices to teaching
or marriage, Tomlinson persuaded her father to let her join the Chautauqua
circuit.
Independent, ambitious, creative-she made her own decisions and followed her
chosen way through life. It was a path that stressed perseverance, hard
work, and a simple lifestyle. In Hollywood, where as Marjorie Main she
became a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star, she disdained the glamorous life, living
in a rented apartment, doing her own housework, laundry, and cooking, and
taking the bus to work at the studio. Although she eventually owned two
cars, she frequently rode her bicycle to the store. Later in life she owned
houses in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Idyllwild, California, but lived
simply, with only a gardener for help, often working alongside him. She
never drank or smoked.
Fans today may remember Tomlinson most for her breezy portrayal in nine
movies from 1949 to 1957 of raspy-voiced Ma Kettle, with her tumbledown
hairdo, flock of children, and indolent husband. But Marjorie Main
(Tomlinson's stage name) had a life before the Ma and Pa Kettle films. From
her early twenties she had a career in repertory theater, stock companies,
vaudeville, and on Broadway, where she played everything from bit parts to
leading lady. Appearing in her first movie in 1931, she went on to star in
eighty-five films. Along with supporting roles, she shared top billing with
Wallace Beery as a comedy team and with Percy Kilbride in the Ma and Pa
Kettle series.
A skilled actress who took her work seriously, Main gave every role she
played, large or small, her own interpretation. "Character actors are best,
I believe," Main said, "when they portray characters that give them a chance
to draw on their own experiences, backgrounds and observations. Imagine me
trying to play a 'society woman!'" She read the script, discussed her part
with the director, and obtained his permission to choose her own wardrobe,
often a simple housedress. When queried about her distinctive walk, Main
noted: "I got it from aggressive rural type women as a child in the Middle
West. My dramatics teacher trained it out of me in college, but I put it
right back when I got into pictures." Critics almost always praised her
work, and a producer described her as having "saved many a bad picture and
made the good ones better."
Tomlinson was born in 1890 on the south edge of Acton, Indiana, a small town
twelve miles southeast of Indianapolis, the second daughter of Samuel Joseph
and Jennie McGaughey Tomlinson, both native Hoosiers. The baby girl was
delivered by her maternal grandfather, Acton physician Samuel McGaughey.
Legend has it she was born in a house her grandfather owned, a handsome
two-story brick house on the east side of town. Tomlinson's birth
certificate, however, indicates she was born in her parents' modest frame
farmhouse (no longer standing) just over the county line in Clark Township,
Johnson County. Her father, a Disciples of Christ minister, founded the
Third Christian Church in Indianapolis before serving in a pastorate in
Wabash where his health failed. He moved his family to the farm where his
daughter was born. When Mary Tomlinson was three, the family moved back to
Indianapolis, and her father became pastor of the Hillside Christian Church.
Four years later her father was called to Goshen and then to Elkhart. In the
early 1900s he took a church in Shelby County, and the family settled near
Fairland, where Mary Tomlinson attended school.
Her father thoroughly disapproved of the acting profession, but his daughter
at a young age displayed dramatic skills in mimicry and recitations. She
once told an interviewer she discovered the value of her "odd voice" as a
schoolgirl. At her eighth-grade graduation, while reciting "The Light from
over the Range"-a "blood and thunder cowboy piece"-her voice, Tomlinson
said, "slipped up a couple of gears." The effect on the audience was so
satisfactory that she used the voice again to win an oratorical contest at
the Shelbyville Opera House. She continued to use the voice in her movie
comedy roles.
Tomlinson attended Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana, from 1905 to 1906.
A charter member of what became Delta Delta Delta sorority, she appeared in
at least one dramatic production. After her year at Franklin College,
Tomlinson-although her father still firmly opposed a career for her on the
stage-was allowed to attend the Hamilton School of Dramatic Expression in
Lexington, Kentucky. She completed the three-year course in 1909. The next
year she taught drama at Bourbon College in Paris, Kentucky. One account of
her life says she was fired at the end of the year after demanding a raise.
After leaving Kentucky, Tomlinson studied dramatic art in Chicago and New
York. Her first opportunity for professional acting came when she was hired
by a Shakespearean repertory company touring the Chautauqua circuit. She
made her first appearance in 1913 at Riverside Park in Indianapolis,
receiving eighteen dollars a week in pay, plus an extra two dollars for
singing. She adopted a stage name about that time to avoid embarrassing her
family. She chose Marjorie Main because it was "a name easy to remember."
Five months of work for Main with a stock company in Fargo, North Dakota,
was followed by a vaudeville circuit tour, a Broadway play starring John
Barrymore, another New York play in 1918, in which she had the lead, and in
the next few years several engagements at the Palace Theatre with comedian
W. C. Fields in a popular skit The Family Ford. Soon after, she met her
future husband, Dr. Stanley L. Krebs, a lecturer and psychologist. A widower
with a grown daughter, Krebs had taught at American University in
Washington, D.C. from 1907 to 1911. He and Main were married on 2 November
1921; she was thirty-one, he fifty-seven. For several years they traveled
the country. As he lectured, Main attended to the details and handled his
correspondence. She always considered these the happiest years of her life.
At the end of a lecture tour, the couple returned to New York, and Main
often found theater work. In the late 1920s the couple abandoned the lecture
circuit and moved back to New York, where Main returned to the stage full
time. In 1927 she played Mae West's mother in The Wicked Age, and in 1929
she traveled with a road show. Main made her film debut on 5 December 1931
in a movie titled A House Divided, which starred Walter Huston. She played a
local townswoman. In her second movie, released a year later, she played a
small-town gossip. Although these were small roles, they gave her an
introduction to the movie business.
Other roles followed, both on Broadway and in several films made in New
York. Fox signed Main to re-create her role as a servant for the movie
version of the popular play Music in the Air. The film opened at Radio City
Music Hall on 13 December 1934. The movie proved to be not as successful as
the Broadway play, and most of Main's role was cut. She returned to New York
in early 1935 to be with her husband, who was ill with cancer. He died two
years later. His death, she said, "was the low point of my life. I was
broken-hearted and desperately needed work as much to occupy my mind as to
make a living." She auditioned for and was given the role of Mrs. Martin, a
gangster's mother, in the Broadway play Dead End. In one scene she curses
her hoodlum son and strikes him in the face. "When he [Krebs] died," Main
said, "I used to pour my sorrow on the audience night after night as the
mother in Dead End." She played the role for 460 performances.
A role as a cynical Reno hotel keeper in The Women followed. "She made her
brief appearance in one act count," said Frank Parish in his book The
Slapstick Queens, "building her characterization with a loping gait,
strident voice, and a breezy stage comedy personality." MGM signed Main to
appear in the film version of Dead End, re-creating her role as the mother
of the gangster, Baby Face Martin, which was played by Humphrey Bogart. Once
again her performance, which she acted with "flat-voiced hate," received
critical praise.
For the next few years Main appeared in numerous films for different
studios. Among her roles were frequent appearances as the mother of one or
another of the Dead End Kids, a prison matron, a curious landlady, the aunt
in Romance of the Limberlost, an acid-voiced secretary, and a rental agent.
She played Walter Pidgeon's mother in Dark Command, a film about Civil War
bandit William Quantrill. In 1940 she was teamed with Wallace Beery, he as a
renegade, she as the town blacksmith. As always she garnered good notices
for her work. MGM believed that Main could take the place of Marie Dressler
as Beery's costar and signed the Indiana native to a seven-year contract. At
age fifty, rescued from freelancing, she felt she had finally arrived. In
1941 she appeared in six major films.
With her rising fame as a movie star, Main soon had many fan clubs, with
Indianapolis being home to the largest one. One of her fans was Roberta
Fraley, who as a student at Franklin Township High School in the late 1930s
had started keeping a scrapbook about her community. Fraley, who lived in
Acton, also saved everything she saw about Marjorie Main. She, as well as
everyone in Acton, was proud of the fact that a hometown girl had made it in
Hollywood. Fraley had another reason to be interested in Main: in the early
1900s her father, Ralph Crisler, studied elocution with Miss Tomlinson in
Shelbyville. Fraley became alarmed on 28 July 1941 when she read an
Indianapolis Star article about the actress, then appearing with Wallace
Beery in the film Barnacle Bill. The article carried the headline "Marjorie
Main, Fairland's Gift to Movies." Fraley wrote the actress a letter asking,
"Dear Miss Main . . . will you please let and [sic] Acton fan know whether
you are from Acton or not?" Shortly after came the response, in Main's
free-flowing longhand: "Your letter just received. Yes, I was born on a farm
near Acton, my grandfather, Dr. Samuel McGauhey [sic] brought me into the
world. He was a doctor who lived in Acton." The reassured Fraley continued
to fill her scrapbooks with movie ads and with clippings about Main's career
and visits back to Indiana to promote her movies, to sell bonds during World
War II, and to visit her mother who lived on North College Avenue in
Indianapolis.
The movie The Egg and I began a new role for Main, one that changed her life
and gave her more satisfaction than any other role she played. Her new
character also assured her a place in the memories of movie fans of all
ages. The 1947 movie was based on a popular novel by Betty MacDonald.
Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, playing newlyweds, buy a chicken farm
in the Pacific Northwest. The couple's neighbors happen to be the Kettles, a
poor family with a dilapidated farm and thirteen children. Main, as Ma
Kettle, with her raucous voice, bird's nest hairdo, and aggressive ways, is
as good-hearted as Pa Kettle (Percy Kilbride) is lazy. The movie became a
big hit, grossing $5.5 million, and Main received an Academy Award
nomination-the only one she ever received-for best supporting actress.
Main had just begun her second seven-year contract with MGM when the studio
loaned her to Universal to make The Egg and I. Realizing the appeal of the
Ma and Pa Kettle characters, Universal decided to do a series. At first Main
balked at the idea, but MGM, her contract holder, insisted. The success of
the Kettle films helped save Universal from bankruptcy. Each film, shot in
fewer than thirty days on Universal's back lot, cost less than $500,000. The
series earned for the studio more than $35 million. Although the films made
substantial profits, Main's MGM salary remained the same. At first she
resented that she was not sharing in the huge earnings, but she began to
enjoy doing the series, noting that Ma Kettle was her favorite character,
"good for a lot of laughs, and I would rather make people laugh than
anything else."
Main continued to make other films, along with one yearly Ma and Pa Kettle
film (Universal believed that one a year was all the market would bear). She
and Percy Kilbride had great respect for one another. "Marjorie's too busy
for temperament, her gusto and versatility are fascinating," Kilbride said
of his costar. Main responded in kind, noting that Kilbride was "the best
deadpan actor in the business, and a complete gentleman." One film
historian, however, noted that behind the scenes each actor envied the
other: "Marjorie was hurt that Kilbride's Universal contract gave him modest
luxuries denied her; and Kilbride wished he had not become so type-cast and
could get non-Kettle roles as Marjorie did," said Parish.
Kilbride grew tired of his role, and after the seventh film in the series,
Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955), he retired. Not even an offer to star in
a television version of the Kettles could sway him from his decision. Main
enjoyed making the movies and continued her Ma Kettle role in the series's
last two films The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956), filmed without a Pa Kettle,
and The Kettles on Old McDonald's Farm (1957), with Parker Fennelly in the
Pa Kettle role. By then the studio felt the series had run its course.
Retired from moviemaking, Main lived in relative seclusion. She always
dressed well, belonged to a lecture and luncheon club in Los Angeles, became
interested in spiritualism, and believed that the Moral Re-Armament Movement
was "the one hope for the world." Although she never returned to the Hoosier
State after her mother's death in 1943, Main retained her affection for
Indiana. Carlos Gray, a Shelby County businessman and farmer, visited her in
California in 1967, calling by phone to make an appointment. "I got in, not
because I was Carlos Gray, but because I was Mary Gray's grandson," he said.
His grandmother and Main had been close friends in high school. The retired
actress asked Gray many questions about the people she had known back in
Acton, Fairland, and Boggstown.
Main died at age eighty-five on 10 April 1975 and was buried at Forest Lawn
Cemetery in Hollywood Hills beside her husband. He had originally been
buried in Pennsylvania, but Main had his body moved to California so they
could at last be together. Through the years Main's movies have retained
their appeal for movie fans. Some of the earlier ones in which she appeared
have become classics: Dead End (1937), Dark Command (1940), Shepherd of the
Hills (1941), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). These and Friendly Persuasion
(1956), the story of a family of Quakers in Indiana in 1862 starring Gary
Cooper and Dorothy McGuire, often appear on television or are available on
video.
Her role as Ma Kettle, however, is far and away the favorite of film fans.
In trying to explain the continued appeal of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies,
one academic noted that the Kettle series provided more than just
entertainment. In response to current discourse on "family values," Don B.
Morlan, a University of Dayton professor of communications, used the series
in a study, "Family Values and a Bridge to the Past: Ma and Pa Kettle
Revisited," which he presented at a Popular Culture Association meeting in
San Antonio, Texas, in March 1997.
An admitted fan of the Ma and Pa Kettle movies, which he describes as "the
most successful comedy film series in cinema history," Morlan showed how the
Kettles met the criteria of a ten-point "Good Family" scale devised by
journalist Jane Howard in her 1978 book Families. The values included having
a "chief or heroine," and a "switchboard operator" (who keeps track of what
is going on in the family). These good families "prize their rituals," "have
a sense of place," and "find some way to connect with posterity." Good
families also "are much to all their members, but everything to none." They
are "hospitable," "affectionate," "honor their elders," and "deal squarely
with direness." Anyone who has seen the Ma and Pa Kettle movies knows that
Ma is the "heroine" and "switchboard operator." Mealtime is a Kettle
"ritual" with no one eating before Pa's brief blessing is finished by a tip
of his hat heavenward. The Kettle family has its "sense of place" in their
ramshackle old homestead, although Pa did win his brood a new modern home in
one film. The couple has an indisputable link to "posterity" with their
(depending on the movie) thirteen to sixteen children. Ma and Pa Kettle or
the older children can leave the family circle, return, and fit right in
again. They are hospitable and affectionate, and they respect one another.
Problems-at least those appropriate for a comedy series-are dealt with in a
direct manner. According to Morlan, the Kettles score high on all criteria
of Howard's "Good Family" scale.
In her later years Main regretted that she never had any children. But, she
added, "I had plenty of kids as Ma Kettle." Reminiscing about her role in
the films, Main said that to her the character was real, "the kind of woman
you feel you could go and visit in the country. And no hayseed. They tried
to get that in, but I'd always say no." She attributed the success of her Ma
Kettle character to the lessons learned from her Hoosier childhood: "I don't
think I could have ever played the part . . . if I hadn't lived on a farm in
Indiana."
Sylvia C. Henricks is a freelance writer living in Indianapolis. She is
interested in local history, antiques, and collectibles. Her article on Cobb
Shinn appeared in the winter 1997 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern
History.
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