Polio Wars (69 page)

On Crosby, movies and anti-Catholicism see Paul Blanshard
American Freedom and Catholic Power
(Boston: Beacon Press, [1949] 1958); Bing Crosby as told to Pete Martin
Call Me Lucky
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953); Jib Fowles
Starstruck: Celebrity Performers and the American Public
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Philip Jenkins
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Les Keyser and Barbara Keyser
Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Images of Roman Catholicism in American Movies
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984); Ruth Prigozy and Walter Raubicheck eds.
Going My Way: Bing Crosby and America Culture
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007); Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer
Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); Charles Thompson
Bing: The Authorized Biography
(New York: David McKay Company Inc., 1975); Frank Walsh
Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

ALL HER LIFE
, Kenny loved movies. While running her clinic in Brisbane in the 1930s she had regularly “popped out” for an afternoon show at the local Regents Theater, and in Minneapolis she sought escape from the tensions of her work in the cinema's fantasy and anonymity.
¹
But she also saw film as a valuable means of persuasion. When she first came to the United States she brought with her a silent film showing the transformation in her Australian patients, some of whom had been profoundly disabled for many years.
²
After only a year in Minnesota she produced another silent film about “the treatment carried out at Minneapolis and its results” and warned Basil O'Connor that if he refused to see it “I will understand the Foundation is not interested in my work and I am wasting my time in [the] U.S.A.”
³
Her early films were of poor quality, jerky, and hard to see, and despite her warning to O'Connor she wanted to remain in Minneapolis and improve them. She began to discuss making a sound film with National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) secretary Peter Cusack, editor of the
National Foundation News
, although they both agreed that for “satisfactory” accuracy they needed to wait until the next polio epidemic.
⁴
In 1942 she showed her “moving pictures” at the American Physiotherapy Association's annual meeting in June, the biennial nursing conference in July, and during the visit of the American Medical Association (AMA) orthopedic committee in November.
⁵

While these short films were clearly intended to demonstrate the efficacy of her methods to medical professionals, Kenny considered them accessible to lay audiences as well. In 1943, after she had been awarded the 1942 Humanitarian Award by the Variety Clubs, she noticed that other recipients of the award had a film showing their work. She therefore offered Variety officials one of her short silent films, and was gratified when a senior Variety official screened the picture and reported that “it is very good.”
⁶
Members of the women's auxiliary of the Los Angeles Children's Hospital heard Kenny had a film “showing you treating children afflicted with Infantile Paralysis” and asked for a copy to show
their volunteers.
⁷
Michigan physician Ethel Calhoun asked for a loan of one of her films to help her “spread the ‘gospel' in Michigan,” suggesting the film would convert viewers into Kenny supporters.
⁸

By the 1940s, medical films played a critical role in American medicine. They were regularly screened at medical societies and health department meetings, and functioned as entertainment, pedagogy, and on occasion as research. Philanthropies such as the National Tuberculosis Association and the American Social Hygiene Association used films as educational and fundraising tools. Even before the NFIP was established, polio films were widely used, including ones on treatment during acute, paralytic, and postparalytic phases, orthopedic operations, a virological study of the “experimental production of infantile paralysis,” and a study of polio's epidemiology.
⁹
The NFIP made short films a prominent part of its March of Dimes campaigns and as early as 1938 the head of the NFIP's committee on the treatment of after-effects proposed buying films to be part of a polio library to be housed in either the Surgeon General's Library or the library of the New York Academy of Medicine.
¹⁰

In the 1910s and 1920s many physicians had seen medical films as “undignified and even unethical.”
¹¹
Many early films, one commentator recalled, “were made as hobbies to show a particular method of operation” and were not of good quality. Indeed surgeons often had to leave the making of the film to a cameraman who knew little or nothing about what he was filming.
¹²
Films also contradicted the pedagogic philosophy at the heart of professional medical training: that clinical skills should be gained on the job through seeing and touching individual patients.

Still, teachers sought out films to show medical students. Especially popular were those produced by Brooklyn surgeon Jacob Sarnoff, whose films included dissections, medical anomalies, general and plastic surgery, rehabilitation, and anatomy.
¹³
By the 1930s films were used in most medical schools and projection equipment became a crucial part of medical education. The AMA reviewed these films and set up a film loan library.
¹⁴
During the war the Army and Navy used films to teach surgery and other medical procedures. This experience created great enthusiasm for, as one physician later noted, “what soldier has not been taught complicated techniques by film and don't they know it.”
¹⁵

In fields like pediatrics and physical medicine, where diagnosis and therapy involved the visible physical manipulation of the body, films were particularly successful. During the 1930s the AMA's Council on Physical Therapy (a group of physician specialists) developed a series of films to remind hospital administrators and medical staff of “the importance of physical therapy as an adjunct to the practice of medicine and surgery.”
¹⁶
At the 1937 AMA annual meeting an exhibit by the American Physiotherapy Association on physical therapy and polio home care included the Kendalls' 1 hour, 5-reel film on the “Examination, Protection, and Treatment of Convalescent Poliomyelitis Cases.”
¹⁷

At the annual meetings of medical societies screenings of technical films, usually announcing a new technique and demonstrating its validity and utility, were so popular that they were “clogging the aisles with visitors and interfering with the demonstration of exhibits.” In response the AMA arranged for several cinemas to be set up next to the
scientific exhibits.
¹⁸
At the AMA's annual meeting in 1942 there were 4 theaters adjacent to the exhibits where technical films were shown continuously.
¹⁹
The widespread use of commercial medical films designed by pharmaceutical companies, food producers, and other manufacturers led some professional societies to try to ensure that films shown in their scientific exhibits were serious contributions to medical science and not propaganda or advertisement. In January 1943, for example, the New Orleans Graduate Medical Assembly sent participants a printed form that had to be filled out if they were planning to show a film. Speakers were warned that “all movie films, except those previously approved by organized medical societies, must be previewed and approved by the Scientific Exhibits Committee before being shown … No exhibits will be accepted which are in any way commercialized.”
²⁰

For Kenny film was a powerful and transformative medium, opening eyes and changing minds. Not only could it demonstrate the achievements of her method, but, in her eyes, a technical film was a form of scientific proof, a kind of virtual witnessing equivalent to the experiential persuasion conveyed by in-person demonstrations. In her 1943 autobiography she described an incident in Australia in which she had confronted the physical therapist and doctor who were in charge of a child she had been treating. The doctor was impressed with the “satisfactory” changes in his patient, but the physical therapist was more skeptical. Kenny invited her “to see a moving picture which would give her a complete history of the case. She refused to see the picture, began to weep bitterly, and left the clinic.”
²¹
Here, Kenny felt, was an example of the power of film as clinical evidence, so overwhelming that, without even having been seen, it had stripped a professional of her rational equilibrium.

Film could also bear witness to the damage done by orthodox treatment. John Pohl had shown her a technical film showing patients he had treated during his postgraduate orthopedic training in England and Germany in the 1930s. After he had worked with Kenny and changed his view of polio's therapy and prognosis, Pohl sometimes showed these films as examples “of the unhappy results that had followed the neglect of these symptoms” that Kenny had pointed out to him.
²²
It was the same film but presented from a very different point of view.

With her love of films, it is hardly surprising that Kenny was more than receptive to suggestions that her life story might have wider cinematic possibilities. From the time she had arrived in America she had crafted her life's story: a courageous nurse healing children and battling resistant doctors. Versions of this story were retold on radio shows and in magazines, beginning with the 1941
Reader's Digest
article. Public response hinted at its cinematic potential, and Kenny, who was finishing her first autobiography, was certainly open to the idea.

Kenny's direct connection with Hollywood began when Mary Eunice McCarthy, a B-movie screenwriter, read “Sister Kenny vs. Infantile Paralysis” in
Reader's Digest
. McCarthy
had worked on comedies such as
Slightly Married
(1932),
Woman Unafraid
(1934), and
Theodora Goes Wild
(1936). She had also been one of the script writers for the controversial medical horror film
Life Returns
(1935). With an eye for a good story, McCarthy took the train from Los Angeles to Minneapolis in early 1942 and sought out Kenny. The 2 women delighted in their shared Irish Catholic background. But it was the possibility that Kenny's story could rival those of other Hollywood scientist-heroes seen in films such as
The Story of Louis Pasteur
(1936) and
Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet
(1940) that most excited both of them. “One can say, without fear of contradiction,” McCarthy declared in the screen proposal she sent to studio executives a few months later, “that the persecution [Kenny] endured makes the lives of Pasteur and Dr. E[h]rlich sound like Sunday School picnics.”
²³

Although McCarthy depicted Kenny as a reluctant subject who forced McCarthy to “pry the dramatic story of her life out of her,” Kenny was neither reluctant nor naïve.
²⁴
By August 1942 Kenny, worried that “a motion picture could be made without my consent,” was careful to make sure that the material in her almost completed autobiography would be protected for “I will hold the copyright.”
²⁵
Some years later Martha Ostenso discovered that even before she began working with Kenny as coauthor on the autobiography, Kenny had sold the film rights for her manuscript for $50,000.
²⁶
It was clear that Kenny intended to be in charge of the making of her story. She confidently told a friend in Brisbane that “the film story of my life is now in process of preparation,” and assured an Australian reporter that Hollywood would film her story.
²⁷
But she eventually found that although she retained the rights to the film's technical aspects she was unable to control the movie's scripts or its presentation of herself and her life.

McCarthy quickly claimed Kenny as an intimate friend, calling her “my beloved Elizabeth,” and telling her about her love life.
²⁸
McCarthy understood how Hollywood worked and recognized her own limited power: to make a movie she had to gain the interest of a studio and a star.
²⁹
Her film proposal interested United Artists and then RKO, and she was able to present both the proposal and Kenny herself to Rosalind Russell, a movie star who had raised money for the League of Crippled Children.
³⁰

The star of comedies such as
His Girl Friday
(1940), Russell was becoming tired of being typecast as a comic career woman and saw the role of Sister Kenny as a way to boost her career.
³¹
She had received an Academy Award nomination for the comedy
My Sister Eileen
(1942), but felt she needed a leading dramatic role to win an Oscar.
³²