Count Your Blessings—Ann Blyth

Last March Ann Blyth McNulty sane My Semi Love at the Academy Awards show. When Ann was finished, Donald O’Connor, the master of ceremonies and one of her dearest friends, turned to the audience and said, “That number was sung by Ann Blyth and family.”

Ann smiled happily at the applause, and some twenty-seven million television viewers learned that Ann Blyth was pregnant.

“A few days later,” Ann recalls, “the gifts started coming in. The wonderful fans I have sent rompers and baby shoes and blankets. And—well, it was surprising, and I’m very grateful to everyone.”

The interest in Ann’s pregnancy was overwhelming.

“It’s very simple,” explains Mario Lanza, who played opposite Ann in The Great Caruso; “this girl has proven to the public that a Hollywood star can have the same desire for a happy home and a happy family life as any other typical, wholesome girl. She’s charming and gracious and helpful, and people love her the same way they used to love Shirley Temple. Tha’s why they’re interested in everything about her.”

Ann, since her marriage to Dr. Jim McNulty, has been called “The Doctor’s Wife” in the movie colony, and as such she’s been the beneficiary of the best available medical advice.

Ann opened her nightclub act at Topps, a dinner club in San Diego. “I’ll never give up entertaining,” she said there. “l’ve worked so long and I love it so much. Jim understands.”

Most girls are fairly squeamish during their first pregnancy, but not Ann. She worked in Rose Marie, she rehearsed her nightclub act, she flew to Las Vegas to catch her brother-in-law’s show (The Dennis Day Program) and in general she was so active that people began to worry.

“Her husband is a top obstetrician,” one friend said. “How come he lets her do all these things? I thought pregnant women weren’t allowed to fly or even to drive.”

Ann’s answer is, “I had the most wonderful pregnancy. Jim urged me to keep active as long as I felt well. And I felt perfect right down to the end. Having him near me so much of the time gave me a great sense of security, so that I was never worried and could go on with my work. And Jim taught me to look upon childbirth as something natural and easy.”

Ann had a fairly easy time with Timothy Patrick McNulty, who arrived weighing seven pounds, one and a half ounces.

With his blue eyes and dark hair, Tim, according to Ann’s Uncle Dan, “is the spittin’ Irish image of his father.”

Ann, who wears a size seven dress, gained only fifteen pounds during her pregnancy—“because Jim kept me active and I didn’t sit around adding weight”—and after Timmy was born, she snapped right back to size seven again, a vivid contrast to Elizabeth Taylor, who gained thirty-five pounds during her pregnancy and then had trouble slimming down.

Ann nursed Timmy for six weeks. At the end of his third month he weighed fourteen pounds.

“How do I look?” she asked friends before she went on. “Like an angel,” they said. Her fragile appearance is one of Ann’s trademarks, but Dr. Jim says, “She’s stronger than she looks!”

“Timmy,” his mother says, “is really the kindest, best-natured baby. I sing to him and when I hit a high note, he turns his head and looks at me in amazement.

“He’s a darling and so easy to take care of. I’d heard so much about those 2:00 AM. feedings and parents not being able to get any sleep. Well, I give Tim a bottle at about 10:30 p.m. and he sleeps through to 6:00 a.m. Elsa Kelly, the girl who helps me with Timmy, agrees that he’s a darling.”

AUNT CIS, who is Ann’s guardian, says, “I don’t know of any parents who get more fun out of a baby than Ann and Jim. They take little Timmy and put him on a towel. And he just laughs and laughs, and you can see Ann bursting with joy. She can’t pull herself away from him.

“The baby hasn’t been sick a single day since he was born. Just give him enough to eat, and he’s content. A regular Irishman, that one.”

Ann, of course, finds motherhood so delightful that she’s determined to have “lots and lots of children. We’ve even picked out the name for a daughter,” she adds. “Maureen Alanna. Jim comes from a large family, and we want one, too.”

Although pregnancy didn’t interfere with Ann’s career, one might expect that motherhood would. But here again Ann has shown her reasonable sense of values.

“I’ve worked so hard and so long,” she says, “and I love acting and entertaining so much that I just couldn’t stop after marriage or childbirth. Jim understands that. He knows how much acting means to me, and that’s why he wants me to continue just so long as ’m happy.”

A sophisticated angel in second costume, black. Ann stayed several days, drove home before filling her next engagement. “It’s the times with your family that count most,” she explained.

Shortly after Ann gave birth to Timmy, her agent reported that she was in great demand throughout the country.

“A series of personal appearances,” he confided to a reporter, “could bring her in a quarter of a million bucks.”

Because she didn’t want to be very far from her infant son, Ann agreed to open her nightclub act at Topps, a dinner club in San Diego. She sang there a few nights, wowed the customers, then drove back to Jim and Tim.

A week later she agreed to sing at the Sacramento Fair. “But only for one weekend,” she said. “September 10 to 12.”

With Aunt Cis and Mac Newman, her musical arranger, beside her, Ann boarded a plane and flew up to Sacramento. She checked in at the El Rancho Hotel, then drove to the Fair Grounds. On three successive nights she broke all the existing records. And on each of these nights, of course, she phoned home to talk to her doctor and find out how little Timmy was.

Following her Sacramento appearance, Ann flew to Las Vegas where she sang for almost a month at $10,000 a week.

As Tommy crows, Ann expects to spend more and more time with him and the other children to come. Eventually she will make only one or two pictures a year.

Trip squeezed in visit to vets at San Diego Naval Hospital.

“Before I opened my nightclub act,” Ann recalls, “Jim and I and Timmy all spent a little time at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. We just romped around on the beach. Those wonderful times when you’re together with your family really count. They mean so much. And we hope to have lots of them. But still, ’m not giving up my work.”

It was Bing Crosby who first spotted the will of iron in Ann. “She looks so small and fragile,” Crosby said, almost seven years ago, when he made Top O’ The Morning with her, “but she’s got an awful lot of drive. There’s nothing in Hollywood that’s going to stop this kid. One day she’ll be able to handle the best musicals in the business.”

ANN WAS BORN on August 16th, 1928 in Mt. Kilso, N. Y., and christened Ann Marie Kathleen Assumpta Blyth. When she was four her father died. A year later her mother took her on a tour of the various radio stations in New York, and the child got singing jobs on stations WJZ and WOR. At the age of five, she was earning money.

She was a tiny, cheerful child with long hair in ringlets down the back of her neck. Because her family was devoutly Catholic, religion assumed importance early for Ann. She was confirmed at the age of nine at St. Stephen’s School.

During that same year her mother enrolled her in Ned Wayburn’s dramatics school.

Ann can remember only one year when she wasn’t working in show business. That was the year following her sensational dramatic job in Mildred Pierce, a role for which she won an Academy Award nomination. It was in 1946. She was sixteen.

That winter, tragedy struck. Ann went to Sun Valley for a vacation, and while she was tobogganing, the sled overturned. Her back broken, she. stumbled to an automobile and was raced to the hospital.

Bed-ridden, in a cast for seven months, Ann “prayed” her way to health. For another six months she wore a tight-fitting steel brace.

Other than during this period of convalescence, Ann has always been occupied with show business. In the words of her uncle Dan, “That girl is a trouper from away back. Ann has known very little else.”

HER BIG BREAK came when she was thirteen. She played a role in Watch On The Rhine, which ran on Broadway for eleven months and on the road for nine. When the play reached Los Angeles, Ann was given a contract by Universal. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she said.

She attended the studio school three hours a day, and everyone on the lot regarded her as a wholesome, religious, daintily attractive girl. But she showed little sex appeal potential, and few imagined that she would reach stardom.

Donald O’Connor, who acted opposite Ann when she made her film debut in Chip Off The Old Block, remembers that “Ann was a nice, sweet kid.” And Ann, in turn, remembers that “Donald went out of his way to be helpful to me.”

The following year Ann was loaned out to Warner Brothers for Mildred Pierce. Then came the toboggan accident.

When she recovered, Dick Long, now married to Suzan Ball, took her out to a preview—he was one of her first dates—and Ann was ecstatically happy. Then her mother died.

ANN WAS EIGHTEEN. Over the years her mother had been more than a mother. She’d been friend, manager, playmate—Ann’s whole world.

With her gone, Ann felt terribly alone. Her Aunt Cis and Uncle Dan Tobin came out to Hollywood and rented an apartment, and their niece moved in with them. But Ann was inconsolable. She just could not understand why God should have taken her mother. For a while she knew nothing but bitterness.

Then she found the cure for this sorrow, too, in prayer, religion and work. Ann was cast in Mr. Peabody And The Mermaid. Aunt Cis and Uncle Dan rented an eight-room house and, for the first time in her life, Ann had a bedroom of her own. She decorated it with miniature dolls, hung a crucifix over the bed.

In the five years from 1946 to 1951 Ann acted opposite Charles Boyer, Bing Crosby, Bill Powell, Mario Lanza and Tyrone Power.

A perceptive and discerning girl, she learned much from each of these. Of this period in her life a friend says, “Her work meant everything to her. Whether this was of her own choice, no one knows. But somehow love and romance seemed to be escaping her. She went out on dates with Lon McAllister and Roddy McDowall and Dick Clayton and Dick Contino. But somehow it never amounted to anything.

“Whether Ann was inhibited or whether the boys liked her as they might like a sister, I’ve yet to find out. But I do know that Ann was never in love until she fell for Dr. Jim McNulty. By then she was twenty-five.”

ANN MET DR. JIM through his brother, Dennis Day. She was scheduled to dine with Dennis and his wife, and Dennis brought Dr. Jim along as the fourth.

After the first dinner date, Dr. McNulty phoned for a second and then a third. And in Ann’s words, “We went together for about six months before Jim could get up enough courage to propose. When he finally did, I got so weak and fluttery I almost fainted. Honestly, I had to lie down.”

In subsequent conversations Ann made it clear to her fiancé that she could never give up her career.

“I wouldn’t want you to,’ Dr. Jim said. “Not after all your years of work and struggle. I’m sure you’ll be able to work things out.”

Ann’s marriage last year was one of the most fashionable in Hollywood history. More than 2,000 fans gathered outside St. Charles Church in North Hollywood. Inside, before some 500 guests, Cardinal McIntyre performed the ceremony, announcing a special blessing from Pope Pius XII.

Following their Lake Tahoe honeymoon, the McNultys returned to the two-story farmhouse they’d bought in North Hollywood, not too far from Uncle Dan and Aunt Cis.

Ann was committed to make Student Prince at MGM. Many evenings after the day’s last “take,” she would race home in her Cadillac and fix dinner for Jim, only to get a last-minute phone call from the hospital. “Dr. McNulty has gone into the delivery room. He said not to hold dinner.”

“Being a doctor’s wife,” Ann says, “I’ve learned a lot, especially about the unpredictable routines of obstetricians. Whenever Jim and I go anywhere he’s got to check in with his office. The stork waits for no man. And I never know next when he’ll be gone on a phone call’s notice.”

ANN IS MORE IN LOVE with Jim now than she’s ever been, but she is a realist who knows that being a doctor’s wife entails responsibilities and sacrifices. She realizes that she must share her Jim with the entire community and that in a doctor’s life, his patients come first.

Ann knows, too, that doctors are circumspect, that their code of ethics is in many ways in opposition to show business. Just before she left for her Las Vegas nightclub debut, Ann attended the opening of the Ice Follies in Los Angeles. Jim was with her, but when it came time for the television interview, he declined to get within camera range. Ann was interviewed alone.

She understood. Doctors are extremely careful to avoid anything that smacks of advertising or personal publicity.

Ann also realizes that she is destined to attend many previews and premiéres alone because her husband is on call twenty-four hours a day.

As for Dr. McNulty, his wife’s senior, he has limitless faith in her judgment and sense of organization. Ann is a self-reliant young woman of quiet competence, and the doctor knows she does not undertake more than she feels capable of handling well.

Even so, both her career and family cannot expand indefinitely. As Mrs. McNulty becomes blessed with more and more children, she is going to have correspondingly less time for screen work and personal appearances on TV and in nightclubs. When that time comes, no one doubts that Ann Blyth’s good sense will again guide her to the right solution—and to the greatest possible happiness.

THE END

—BY WILLIAM BARBOUR

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1954