Americanization: A Speculation on The Diary of Anne Frank

5/26/2023

We’ve begun to consider the intersection of American pop culture and empire in our discussion of Captain America’s shield, below. A crucial dimension of this intersection is the reach and influence of American culture abroad, a complicated phenomenon often thought of as “Americanization.” Here is one of my favorite Americanization teasers:

The first diary bought as a present for Anne Frank by her parents. Courtesy of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam.

We know Anne Frank, young as she was, as a thoughtful and talented diarist. Readers may not be quite as aware that she also tried her hand at short stories. One of those short stories was a fanciful tale, “Delusions of Stardom,” in which Anne’s first-person dramatis persona “Anne Franklin” strikes up a correspondence with the real-life movie star Priscilla Lane. In the story, at Priscilla’s invitation, Anne Franklin is whisked off to Hollywood for her first trip to America. She lives for two months with Priscilla, is invited to audition for films, and briefly becomes a model for a tennis equipment company. Quickly souring on endless make-up touch-ups and constrictive posing, and yearning for her family, Anne Franklin quits her contract and flies back to Amsterdam. “Delusions of Stardom” ends too abruptly, but Anne Frank’s escapism would always come back to earth with a hard crash.

As her diary reveals, Anne Frank fantasized about a life of glamor and freedom denied in her hiding place behind the pectin factory. On the wall in her shared bedroom in the family’s secret annex, Anne taped cut-out photos of Hollywood movie stars: Ginger Rogers, Sonja Heine, Greta Garbo, Deanna Durbin, Ray Milland, and others. The Lane Sisters were there. She had other photos as well: the Dutch and English royal families, the great German star Heinz Rühmann, and photos of models and other personalities. The stars remain on Anne’s wall to this day. One notices the preponderance of émigré beauties who had found their own liberation in America.

Photograph of Anne Frank's bedroom wall in the secret annex as currently exhibited. Hollywood star Norma Shearer is prominently featured. Other walls show other Hollywood stars. Anne replaced some of the photographs over the months she spent in hiding.

Rosemary, Lola, and the youngest, the vivacious blonde Priscilla Lane are not as well known today as in their heyday in the 1940s, but for a brief time corresponding precisely to Anne Frank’s young girlhood they were as bright as any star in the Hollywood firmament. Priscilla enjoyed the longest career, and would work with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and Frank Capra. She quit the business in the late forties, misused as were so many others by the unforgiving studio system. Anne Frank would not bear witness to Priscilla’s later professional disappointments.

Rosemary, Lola, and Priscilla Lane

The Lane Sisters’ first significant role was in director Michael Curtiz’s 1938 romantic comedy, Four Daughters, a gauzy romance polished to the highest gloss Warner Bros. could give it, bristling with the rituals of idealized womanhood that adolescent Anne Frank would have found irresistible. The gossamer thin plot has patriarch Claude Reins presiding over the precocious four “Lemp” daughters as they wooed and romanced their way to independent womanhood. Priscilla played the youngest Lemp, “Ann,” a charismatic blonde of high energy and whimsical humor, not unlike Anne Frank herself. Besides Priscilla and her sisters, Four Daughters also gave birth to major Hollywood star John Garfield, in his first major vehicle. It is Garfield’s bad-boy “Mickey Borden” who is pursued and won by Priscilla’s Ann.

I don’t know whether Four Daughters made its way to pre-invasion Amsterdam in the darkening days of 1938 or 1939. But it is entirely plausible, and easy to imagine a young Anne of 8 or 10 years of age pestering her parents to take her to the local cinema before the film closed, much like she pleaded with them to buy her first diary for her 13th birthday. We’ll never know fully what sort of hold the Lane Sisters, Priscilla in particular, may have had over the adolescent Anne Frank. But one tantalizing fact: in Four Daughters, Priscilla Lane’s captivating “Ann Lemp,” whom Anne Frank so clearly idolized, very prominently kept a diary: