Betty Hutton Laid to Rest

03/14/2007 6:46 AM, E! Online


Betty Hutton was just doin' what comes naturally.

The singer and actor, perhaps best known for playing spunky sharpshooter Annie Oakley in the 1950 film adaptation of Annie Get Your Gun, was laid to rest Tuesday during a small funeral at Forest Lawn in Cathedral City, California.

Hutton died Sunday night at her Palm Springs home from complications of colon cancer, but her longtime friend and executor of her estate, Carl Bruno, held off on announcing her death until after she was buried. Hutton was 86.

"She wanted anonymity as far as being buried," Bruno told the Associated Press, adding that he had in his possession boxes full of letters and gifts that Hutton received from fans over the years. "She didn't want that to be turned into a circus."

While the multitalented platinum blonde will always be remembered for wielding Oakley's rifle and vowing to do anything better than paramour Buffalo Bill, Hutton also had a starring role as a trapeze artist in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 epic The Greatest Show on Earth and gave memorable turns in nearly two dozen big-screen musicals and comedies.

Hutton, born Elizabeth June Thornburg, started performing when she was a little girl at a speakeasy her family ran during Prohibition. The Battle Creek, Michigan, native dropped out of high school to go to work, eventually landing a gig at a Detroit nightclub when she was 15. It was bandleader Vincent Lopez who hired her and gave her the name Hutton.

After starring in a few musical shorts for Warner Bros., Hutton made her film debut at the age of 21 in The Fleet's In, costarring William Holden and Dorothy Lamour.

She proved she had the chops to carry a film in Preston Sturges' screwball comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, in which she starred as a girl who wakes up after a night of partying to find herself married and pregnant, and went on to make several biopics—Incendiary Blonde, about '20s-era performer Texas Guinan; The Perils of Paulene, about silent screen star Pearl White; and Somebody Loves Me, about singer Blossom Seeley.

Hutton scored the lead in Annie Get Your Gun after Judy Garland dropped out of the project, unwittingly giving Hutton what turned out to be her trademark role.

After making Somebody Loves Me in 1952, Hutton unceremoniously parted ways with Paramount after the studio refused to let her new husband, dance director Charles O'Curran, direct her in a film. She didn't work for five years and her next film, 1957's Spring Reunion, turned out to be her last. A television series, The Betty Hutton Show, aired in 1959 but only lasted one year.

Hutton battled addictions to pills and alcohol for the better part of two decades before seeking solace in religion in the mid-1970s, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism.

In the '80s, she returned to school and earned a master's degree in psychology, as well as an honorary bachelor's degree, from Salve Regina in Rhode Island. Hutton went on to teach comedy and oral interpretation at Emerson College in Boston.

Hutton, who was married four times, is survived by daughters Candy, Lindsay and Caroline, as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.