Free American Blonde by Jennifer Niven

a sword—Daniel comes limping home to brave Mallory (as poor Anne watches on), carrying the battle-scarred flag, never imagining that the woman he loves has been at war herself.
    It was to be an epic picture, shot in Technicolor and featuring a cavalcade of Metro stars in cameos. It would be MGM’s tribute to our returning heroes and to our triumphant nation.
    In the opening scene, George Washington (Webster Hayes), George Ross (Edward Arnold), and Robert Morris (Frank Morgan) call on young widow Betsy Ross (Kit Rogers), who, cut off from her family and struggling during wartime while still mourning the death of her husband, has no choice but to earn money mending uniforms and making tents and blankets for the Continental Army. When George Washington and his committee show her a sketch of the design for a national flag, she suggests the stars and stripes.
    I was given seven scenes and three songs, one of them a kind of duet with Nigel Gray. The week before shooting my first scene, the two of us worked with Arthur Rosenstein in his studio. Rosie (as Nigel called him) was, with Sam Katz, in charge of the score. He was a large, white-haired bear of a man with glasses. After one time through the song, he pushed up his sleeves and announced, “Even though this isn’t a conventional duet, it’s still a duet, so we’re going to rehearse together until we get it right.”
    We worked for two hours. Nigel was charming and polite. He wasn’t a natural singer, but he knew something about how to breathe and drop his jaw and pronounce his vowels so they were clear and you understood every line. He knew how to interpret, how to pull back and give more where needed. We went over how to raise the soft palate and lower the back of the tongue to create a round space for a greater sound. We went over how to elongate our pronunciation and cap off the vowels.
    Rosie was tougher than Earl Brent and Bobby Tucker. Time and again, he stopped playing, swiveled around to face me, and said, “Singing involves the entire body. Your gestures, your movements. The way you raise an arm or close your hand, the expression on your face. All of these are every bit as important as your tone and phrasing. Again.” And he would swivel back to the piano keys and start playing.
    All my life, whenever I’d felt like singing, I sang. No thought. No worries. But now it wasn’t as simple as that. With each teacher—Rosie in particular—I was in the process of stripping away everything I thought I knew, and rebuilding as if I’d never sung before.
    When Rosie became frustrated and I became frustrated, Nigel said, “I’d like to try something else. Let’s see what happens if Kit and I move around a bit. See how we do when there’s more than one thing going on. Maybe it’ll help us to stop thinking it all to death.” He was doing this for me, I knew. Nigel Gray didn’t have to think things to death because he did everything easily. He took my hand and spun me as Rosie started to play. I spun out and then back into Nigel. Closer in, his eyes looked blue or maybe violet.
    My verse came first, so I started to sing. He twirled me and spun me. His turn to sing, as we fox-trotted and waltzed across the room. Our voices joined on the chorus. I focused on my breath, on my diaphragm, on my phrasing, on the meaning of the words—so much to remember. It was the same as counting while you danced: one-two-three-step, one-two-three-step. But then I wasn’t thinking it, I was feeling it, and all the one-two-three-steps went away, and I was Jane again, being swept under the moon into the arms of Nigel Gray.

    On January 22, I reported to the set, a jumble of wires and lights and people rushing this way and that. The most I’d had time to do was learn my lines and be fitted for my costume, a hand-me-down from Esther Williams, whose name was still stitched into the label. Mudge had promised to be there, but so far I hadn’t seen her.
    At nine thirty a.m., I rehearsed