Bob Sanders: What we saw wasn’t always what we got

Rita Hayworth was Fred Astaire’s new partner after Ginger Rogers, and she acquitted herself quite well, even though she didn’t have Roger’s legs (otherwise, ravishing). The name of the movie was “You Were Never Lovelier,” same as the featured Jerome Kern song. The plot was silly beyond description, as were the plots of most Astaire films, but you didn’t care; you came to watch him (and her) dance, and to hear his unique treatment of songs that would become all-time standards. He introduced so many of them.

This was also an example of something Hollywood did so flawlessly: dubbing in other people’s singing voices. In this case, it was Nan Wynn doing Hayworth’s singing. She also did it for one or two other Hayworth movies. That’s OK. It was well done, even if Wynn’s vibrato didn’t quite match Hayworth’s looks.

The best case of dubbing took place in one of my favorite movies ever, State Fair. I went along comfortably for years assuming that Jeanne Crain was singing there on the porch of her family’s Iowa farm home. I ached with her, wanted to ease the pain for her, as she poignantly sang “It Might as Well be Spring.” Oh, come here, Jeanne, let me comfort you. Strangely, when I discovered it was not her voice, but Louanne Hogan’s, that didn’t change my feelings at all. I don’t care whose voice it is; I’d still like to be there with Jeanne.

Hogan sang for Crain in Centennial Summer, and somebody else sang for Cornell Wilde and Linda Darnell. You’d think they would have just hired singing actors for the parts. Nobody had to sing for Dick Haymes in State Fair or Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. He was one of the great popular singers. He followed Frank Sinatra into the Harry James band, then into the Tommy Dorsey band, where, in both cases, he performed at least as well as Sinatra. There exists an air check recording of the moment when Sinatra is leaving TD and is welcoming his replacement, Haymes. That was in 1942. Haymes obviously didn’t stay with Dorsey long, because by 1943, he was starring in some big budget movies for 20th Century Fox.

Speaking of dubbing voices, it’s amazing how often that happened. I have two pages of such cases that I picked up here and there, some of them surprising, like MGM wouldn’t let Ava Gardner do her own singing in Show Boat, even though she was a pretty good singer, as a few records show. So many. Louanne Hogan (again) for Joan Leslie in Rhapsody in Blue, Trudy Erwin for Lucille Ball and Kim Novak, etc., etc. But that is not Andy Williams singing for Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, although that myth has been widely circulated. What we saw was not always what we got, but there in the Lamar Theater, I loved them, anyway.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.