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"Hiya, Dollface!" Betty's all-out assault on an audience is a trademark that she carries into every appearance, public or private, that might conceivably make the world more Hutton-conscious and thus advance her career. Her clarionlike entrance into a restaurant ("Hiya, dollface! Hey, got my table?") is one of the digestive hazards of eating out in Hollywood. During a wartime bond tour, she stole the headlines in most of 20 cities from a trainload of more prominent stars by rushing to kiss the mayor on arrival; in one city she had to leap onto a police motorcycle to beat the rest of the troupe to City Hall.
When she is working on a picture, Betty makes it a point to be in bed by 9 p.m., turns out before 6. On the rare occasions when she is not playing to the crowd, she is likely to be quiet, moody, tortured by self-doubt. During the filming of Annie, she would telephone Director George Sidney at night: "Were you really satisfied with that take? . . . But you didn't smile at me very much. Are you sure you aren't mad at me?" Or she would telephone Sidney's wife to ask fretfully if the boss had come home in a good mood. Betty cries easily, suffers insomnia, confesses at times that her success has not brought her happiness. Once, with the candor that makes her pressagents tremble, she-blurted to an interviewer: "You know what I think I've done? I think I've loused up my life."
A Real Bad Hurt. Betty's life began on Feb. 26, 1921, in Battle Creek, Mich., "by the railroad tracks between Postum and Kellogg." She was two when her father, a railroad brakeman named Percy Thornburg, drifted off to California with another woman. Soon after, the mother took Betty and Marion to Lansing. They did not hear of Thornburg again until 1937, when he killed himself in a Los Angeles suburb and left the two girls $100 each.
"Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start," says her mother, who has since remarried and lives in Hollywood not far from Betty. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister." As the girls grew up, Betty envied Marion her more luxuriant hair and her pretty face.
When she was five, an older boy playfully threw Betty off the end of a pier. She hit a nail in one of the pilings and snagged her left cheek, near the eye; the scar is still faintly noticeable. "It made my inferiority complex worse," says Betty. "The kids called me 'Bad-eye Bodie' and nicknames like that, that hurt real bad. So I acted fresh and tomboyish, as if I was tougher than anybody on the block."