A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration by Ronald Haver

sends her off to Hollywood with a speech that gives Esther's background
and states the moral of the film: "If you're my granddaughter, you'll go to
your Hollywood. . . . You've got the blood of pioneers in your veins.
... Your grandfather and I came across the prairies in wagons because we
wanted to make something out of our lives.... You go to your Hollywood ... but remember, Esther, for every dream of yours that comes true, you
pay the price in heartbreak." You knew exactly where this Esther came
from and what she wanted. And as sweet and tearful as she occasionally
was, there was an air of invulnerability and indestructibility about her.
Because her grandmother doesn't want her to be "a quitter," she gives up
her own identity and becomes "Mrs. Norman Maine"-and a star is born.

    Hart's description of his Esther/Vicki is deceptively similar (except for
the age) to the original: "Middle twenties, petite, not really wide-eyed, but
bordering on the naive. Sincere. Easily roused if her principles are questioned. The sort of person of whom people always say, when the occasion
warrants, they knew she'd make it." But the similarities end there. His
Esther/Vicki is a dreamer, but without goals, imagination, or ambition. She
has a vague hope that "someday a big record agent will let me make a
record, and it'll become a hit and I'll be made." But even that she laughingly shrugs off with a "but that'll never happen." She is shocked that
Maine would think she was wasting her time singing with the band: "I'm
doing fine, Mr. Maine, just fine.... Do you know how long it takes singers
like me to get a job like this?" She has no parents, no family. She sketches
her life thus: "I remember my first job singing with a band . . . then
one-night stands clear across the country by bus . . . putting on nail polish
in the ladies' room of a gas station ... waiting on tables. That was a low
point-I'll never forget it, and I'll never, ever do that again." She is a
creature of urban rootlessness; she lives for only one thing: "I had to sing
... somehow I feel most alive when I'm singing"-a sentiment that could
easily have come from Garland herself. The song titles and the lyrics were
all carefully fashioned by Gershwin to work with Hart's dialogue in explaining and illuminating Esther/Vicki's psychology: "Gotta Have Me Go with
You," "The Man That Got Away," "Someone at Last," "It's a New
World." They chart the emotional development of the character as surely
as the speeches and the action advance the surface manifestations of the
story.
    This Esther is completely vulnerable, lacking in self-confidence, uncertain of her own talent, convinced that without Maine she is nothing. At
the end she overcomes her insecurities, her need for Norman as the mainspring of her life; in freeing herself of him, even as she becomes "Mrs.
Norman Maine," and in finally recognizing her own talent and her worth
as a human being, a star is born.
    As for Norman Maine, with his sturdy, rock-bound name, he is one of the more complex and completely tragic heroes of the American cinema:
an amalgam of Sydney Carton, William Wellman, and silent-film director
Marshall ("Mickey") Neilan. The Sydney Carton came from David 0.
Selznick, who had been under his spell since reading A Tale of Two Cities
as a preteen. Wellman, of course, included elements of himself as well as
incidents that had happened to him: the night court sequence, wherein
Maine is verbally assaulted by a judge, happened to Wellman almost word
for word. Marshall Neilan, one of the biggest and the best directors of the
late teens and the twenties; an alcoholic, he had been brought down by his
arrogance, outspokenness, pugnacity, and undependability. Neilan was the
inspiration for the character of Max Carey, the director in Cukor's 1932
What Price Hollywood?

    When Carey metamorphosed into Norman Maine, it was with overtones and shadings from the John Gilbert/John Barrymore