Movie Stars: Trailblazing Women of Hollywood’s Golden Age

By Brian Wise | From the November/December 2024 issue of Strings

Call up any movie from the 1930s through the 1950s on a streaming service these days and chances are, you’ll encounter a ravishing string melody composed by the likes of Erich Korngold, Alex North, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, or Bernard Herrmann. Though the composers of these golden-age soundtracks were virtually all men, the performers, in many cases, included a pioneering group of women in the principal violin, viola, and cello roles. 

The work of violinist Eudice Shapiro, for example, serving as concertmaster of the RKO Studio Orchestra, can be heard on For Whom the Bell Tolls, Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, Rear Window, Around the World in 80 Days, and hundreds of other films. There was also Eleanor Aller, principal cello of the Warner Bros. and, later, 20th Century Fox orchestras, whose credits ranged from The Sea Hawk, The Miracle, and House of Usher to John Williams vehicles including E.T., Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the latter of which featured a solo composed especially for her. And then there was Virginia Majewski, principal viola of the MGM Studio Orchestra, who played in Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, The Dirty Dozen, A Raisin in the Sun, and All the President’s Men. Herrmann insisted that she receive a spot in the opening credits of the 1951 film On Dangerous Ground because she played an important viola d’amore solo in his score.

Hollywood orchestras were overwhelmingly male sanctums when these women arrived in the late 1930s and early ’40s, though not to the extent of traditional symphony orchestras, and studio rosters revealed a handful of female names in their string sections. Outside of the studio system, major American orchestras were all but closed to women, and most did not see women ascend to principal string posts until the 1980s.

And though Los Angeles freelancers were always effectively “on call” for the studios, their association with Tinseltown also did not prevent them from pursuing multifaceted careers as teachers, soloists, and chamber musicians, says Nathan Platte, who studies the history of film music and serves as a professor of musicology at the University of Iowa. “While there was a little bit of a perceived stain for composers who worked regularly in Hollywood—that’s certainly how Korngold started to feel about it—I don’t get the sense that this carried over to performers, because they could move in and out of those circles more easily,” he adds. “I’m guessing they felt, ‘This is steady work, I can teach, and I’m well known within this community as one of its leaders.’” 

A Forward-Looking Industry 

How Shapiro, Aller, and Majewski landed Hollywood studio jobs after being frustrated elsewhere partly reflects the progressive attitudes of the burgeoning industry but also their unique talents and relationships. A native of Buffalo, New York, Eudice Shapiro was the only female student of the Russian pedagogue Efrem Zimbalist at the Curtis Institute of Music in the mid-1930s. She soloed with the Philadelphia Orchestra and won the $1,000 first prize in a contest hosted by the National Federation of Music Clubs, which led to many recital dates. But with artist managers reluctant to sign women soloists, in 1941, Shapiro and her husband, cellist Victor Gottlieb, moved to Los Angeles, where they had several colleagues. She endured a one-year residency requirement before freelancing for Paramount, RKO, Universal, United Artists, and other studio orchestras.

Shapiro’s break came when RKO music director Constantin Bakaleinikoff named her his concertmaster, making her the first woman to hold such a position in Hollywood. She reportedly earned $10,000 a year (equivalent to nearly $200,000 today), twice the earnings of average section players. But if there was any resentment from male colleagues, “I didn’t feel it,” she told KUSC’s Gail Eichenthal in 2006. “I came with a kind of reputation, and it worked.” She added, “It was a good place for me. Behind the microphone in the studios, they didn’t know if I was a woman or a man, and it was easier for me to be busy here.”

The work was stressful. Charts were usually delivered on the day of a recording session, a fact that put a premium on efficiency and sight-reading skills. ShihLan Lavner, a violin faculty member at the Colburn School and a former student of Shapiro’s, recalls one revealing story: Jascha Heifetz once tried to test Shapiro’s sight-reading abilities by leaving the stage to listen from the recording booth. “He’d say, ‘Eudi, would you mind just playing my solo part for me, please?’ He did that on purpose: She’d never played it before,” Lavner recalls. “She said, ‘What could I do? It was a male-dominated society, and I’m the concertmaster. If I want to keep my seat I have to play.’”

Shapiro played the solo from the conductor’s score without any errors. “Heifetz did that purposefully to make fun of her and to test her too. Because she sight-read very well and played beautifully, she kept her position there.”

Over at Warner Bros., Eleanor Aller also faced sight-reading trials. “Everything was sight-read,” she told KUSC in a 1995 interview. “When you come in in the morning, and you sit down, you open the book, and you have never seen that music. Never.” She added that Korngold’s scores were particularly complex, despite her connection to his Cello Concerto, which she introduced in the 1946 film Deception (Warner executives initially sought out Gregor Piatigorsky but experienced sticker shock when learning of his rate).  

Thriving on Toughness 

Aller was primed for Hollywood’s exacting, sometimes sharp-elbowed ways, having grown up in both Los Angeles and New York, where she studied first with her Russian cellist father, and later at the Juilliard School with Felix Salmond, a taskmaster known for leaving students in tears. Shortly before she married Felix Slatkin in 1939, he introduced her to Ray Heindorf, the contractor for Warner Bros. A week later, she played her first recording session, launching what would be a nearly 30-year affiliation with the studio.

Aller and Slatkin routinely shuttled between film, TV, and advertising sessions, according to accounts by their children, the late cellist Frederick Zlotkin and the conductor Leonard Slatkin. “Well, I started out this morning doing a film date at [Twentieth Century] Fox,” she once told Zlotkin, “then went over to CBS to play footballs [whole notes] for source music for Gunsmoke, and then went over to United and did a record date with Ella [Fitzgerald].” With her husband, Aller anchored the celebrated Hollywood String Quartet, which collaborated with Schoenberg on his Transfigured Night and with Frank Sinatra on Close to You, an album of Nelson Riddle arrangements.

Majewski came to Hollywood in 1939, after studying with violist Louis Bailly at Curtis and securing a recommendation letter from conductor Leopold Stokowski. She had been a member of the Marianne Kneisel String Quartet, but chamber music was then a largely avocational pursuit, and symphony orchestras mainly did not admit women. Majewski’s hiring at MGM was “a total surprise, with no advance notice or awareness that the first viola chair was up for grabs,” writes studio musician Don Christlieb in his memoir Recollections of a First-Chair Bassoonist.

“She had come from the East, so she was unknown in L.A.,” he continues. “Her first studio date was her tryout, and the rest of the orchestra was unaware, because tryouts were usually nonexistent. She drew a big sound, as though we might think that her being a girl, which was rare in the musical world at the time, might preclude it. However, she had good sound and intonation.”

Majewski played on hundreds of film and television scores, accompanied legendary singers (Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole), and played chamber music with the likes of Heifetz, Piatigorsky, and pianist Vladimir Horowitz. In the 1950s, she could be seen leading the MGM Symphony Orchestra viola section in a handful of film shorts, featuring Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture, and other light classics. Some are available on YouTube and offer a compelling glimpse of musicians who were normally invisible to audiences.

But the ’50s marked a crossroads for studio musicians. Fear of communism led to the film industry’s blacklist era. Television was on the rise. After a musicians strike in 1958, players went from being full-time employees to freelancers. “The ’40s were the heyday of the studio orchestra in terms of how much they were working and getting paid,” says Platte, the film music historian. “That continues until about the mid-’50s and then after this strike, there are still scores to be recorded and musicians around, but maybe they are less busy or are supplementing it with television work.”

Of the three section leaders, Aller and Majewski were active with various studios well into the 1980s, even as the soundtracks became increasingly laden with electronics (Majewski’s final sessions included Michael Kamen’s scores for Die Hard and Lethal Weapon). They both passed away in 1995. Shapiro’s Hollywood career had ended by the early 1960s, with some reports suggesting that she ran afoul of Paramount after refusing to inform on musician friends before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But her career was taking off in other directions, whether she was collaborating with Stravinsky and Copland or teaching violin at the University of Southern California, a post she held from 1956 until just before her death in 2007.

Fortunately, for these and other trailblazers, their work is not hidden away in the archives. What was once believed to be an ephemeral cultural pursuit—even soundtrack albums were rare until the 1950s—is preserved through DVDs, streaming services, and channels like TCM. As Platte notes, it is easier to access their music in 2024 than it was in its original form.

Aller, whose first impressions of Hollywood musicians were hardly positive (“I never met such a lousy bunch of people”), had a change of heart by late in life. “I loved it,” she told KUSC in 1995. “I worked with the cream of the crop. Those were the golden years. It doesn’t exist now.”