What we can learn from Deanna Durbin

It was a new-fangled, old-fashioned afternoon. The children were learning how to do cat’s cradle from an instructional film on YouTube, and I was watching a Deanna Durbin film, working my way through a pink satin, heart-shaped box of chocolates. The film, His Butler’s Sister (1943), was in my Christmas stocking, sandwiched between some Wolford Synergy 40 tights and a pair of bottle green pinking shears.

In the film, composer Charles Gerard (played by Franchot Tone) goes to great lengths to avoid the glut of pesky chorus girls and other female singing sensations who blight his life by continually throwing themselves in his path and persisting on bursting into song. (Personally I cannot think of anything nicer than being plagued in this way but for our hero this side of his life is a living hell.)

In a train, on one occasion, two underachieving crooning hoofers even stage an impromptu audition for him in the corridor outside his carriage door, with the dim hope of landing a part in his new show. He is under-impressed to the point of intoxication. Their every note and every shuffle-hop-step threatens to undo the man. In fact, so reluctant is Gerard to have this experience repeated that he asks the steward to divert any other travelling performers who are after him to Drawing Room A, where an innocent girdle salesman is residing. It is this man who is soon regaled by our wildly talented heroine Ann Carter (Durbin), who has heard Gerard is on the train. She performs to him a love song at full throttle, a hopeless gesture, for the only way the salesman can express his pleasure and, frankly, his downright astonishment, is the offer of a free corset, not the sort of boost she had in mind at all.

It struck me, watching Deanna Durbin trying and failing to sing before the man who has the power to launch her on the stage (the man for whom her long lost brother, it transpires, also works as a butler), quite how much delicate handling the people I know who are high up in their careers require. Friends who are literary agents would think nothing of being asked to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an injured stranger. They would lend a hand in assembling the kitchen table from a flatpack before the meal was served if they were asked. They would be content to chat to a fashion person about the significance of beltloops for hours or even to play hunt the thimble with a little child on all fours, but their hearts sink in great thumping lurches when the person they are sitting next to says, “You know, I have written a book”. They cannot bear it. They feel buffeted and abused. Their good nature flies out of the window. The drawbridge comes down and a moat is erected. Stony silences ensue.

And if this kind of approach takes place under your roof, you feel at fault. It’s almost as bad as when people collide under your mistletoe, take a shine to each other, then proceed to marry and divorce before the year is out.

. . .

Similarly, I have friends who are academics who are interested in everything from beard lengths through the ages down to how not to over-egg the batter in a simple clafoutis. Yet when they meet a student, even if that student is studying for a PhD in something terribly complex, they lose the will to live. In seconds, the interesting stranger who was throbbing with potential has no status whatsoever any more. Something has been contravened. When they thought he was a milkman or an acrobat, they were in raptures, but suddenly it’s no dice. The private and the public are in conflict. The previously promising individual is seen as that dreadful human specimen: a person in need. There is gloom and there’s despondency. The student may find himself chatting to the radiator until a new conversation can be secured. (And if the house has underfloor heating, all is truly sunk.)

Yet how to travel beyond this stale-mate, where the genuinely talented may be cowed and ignored or rejected because the gatekeepers have a horror of the new? It can’t be right that disgrace is routinely meted out in this way?

What did Deanna do?

As agony aunts down the ages have counselled, Durbin reinvents herself in a new setting, giving herself and her hero a chance to become reacquainted on a different footing.

Indeed, Durbin watches amazed as Charles Gerard gatecrashes the Butler’s Ball that her brother has organised, where she just happens to be singing an aria from Turandot as the highlight of the evening’s entertainment. Gerard listens transfixed, not just with love but with professional admiration. He has come to see her sing, she has not gone to him. She brings down the house. Love and Art are as one. He wraps her in his arms.

It could happen.

susie.boyt@ft.com

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