Imagine, if you will, what would happen today if word got around town that a famous young heartthrob actor — say, Zac Efron or Corbin Bleu or Daniel Radcliffe — was secretly staying at a Waco hotel. What do you think would happen when this hot news reached local grade schools?

I think most of us could imagine the consequences. Many teenage girls would become very excited very quickly, and a good number of those same girls would drop everything and go searching for their hunky hero, moving heaven and earth to manage at least a sighting, and hopefully a personal meeting.

Well, some behavior hasn’t changed much over the generations, because that same scenario actually played itself out in Waco almost 65 years ago.

Van Johnson in a 1940s-style beefcake pose.

It was around Thanksgiving 1945, a giddy time to be alive in America. World War II had been over for about three months, and the country was still celebrating a return to peacetime as soldiers returned home and the economy slowly moved toward producing the consumer goods and services enjoyed before the war. Movie attendance was at an all-time high, and one of the most popular up-and-coming movie stars was an incredibly handsome 29-year-old actor named Van Johnson, whose short career in films had already brought him starring roles as one of the romantic leads in war movies such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and The White Cliffs of Dover and musical comedies such as Two Girls and a Sailor. Johnson’s good looks and well-mannered, nice-guy persona had earned him a reputation as the man second only to Frank Sinatra in the hearts of enthusiastic young female fans known as bobby soxers.

Somehow word began circulating in Waco on a Tuesday night — Nov. 20, 1945 — that Van Johnson had quietly slipped into town and was staying at one of the two fanciest hotels in the city, either the Raleigh or Roosevelt. The origin of the rumor never was determined. There were numerous reasons given as to why Johnson had chosen to visit Waco. One story said he was in the company of another film star en route to a Texas rodeo somewhere. Another story said Johnson was touring theaters around the state to see how his movies were doing.

It really didn’t matter what had supposedly brought Van Johnson to town. By class time on Wednesday, the mere news that he was here hit Waco High School like an atom bomb. As the Waco Times-Herald reported, “The rumors caused a commotion ... The girl students ran all the way from school to town looking for the star. They swarmed into both hotels and settled themselves in the lobbies to await his appearance.”

The hotel staff, of course, at first didn’t know what was going on with the hordes of young girls demanding to know star’s whereabouts. At first they simply denied that he was in town, but then a few bell boys and elevator girls decided to “get into the spirit of the thing,” as the newspaper put it, by responding that, yes, Van Johnson was in town, but he had just left the hotel so that Waco Mayor Frank Wilcox could present him a key to the city.

Some girls decided they weren’t going to sit around hotel lobbies and wait. They ignored desk clerks who claimed the star was not registered there and organized room-to-room search parties, looking for any signs of Johnson.

Johnson and frequent co-star Esther Williams.

Six intrepid girls at the Roosevelt Hotel were discovered climbing the stairs to the building’s 12th floor. When asked what they were doing, they replied that they believed the elevator operators had been ordered not to take them upstairs, so they were using the stairway as a means to continue their search. They would walk the halls of each floor, on the lookout for their prey, and each time they heard the elevator stop on that particular floor they would run and hide in a linen closet or empty room. “We don’t care if we don’t get his autograph, we just want to see him,” one of the flustered group members said.

An unwitting victim of the Van Johnson hysteria was innocent bystander F.L. Widenhouse, the national representative of the United Rubber Workers union who happened to be staying at one of the Waco hotels for several weeks. Somehow, in the vacuum caused by frustration of no sightings, the rumor began that the distinguished Mr. Widenhouse was not a labor official at all, but was instead Johnson’s publicity agent, the man who knew where the elusive heartthrob was hiding. Out of nowhere, frenzied teenage girls pounced on poor Mr. Widenhouse, demanding that he tell them the star’s whereabouts. As the Times-Herald reported, “Although he denied it persistently, [Widenhouse] could not make anyone believe that he wasn’t hiding the star in his room.”

The lunacy kept up a good while — before it was all over someone even managed to have actress Betty Grable paged three times at the Roosevelt Hotel, probably just to liven things up — but by Wednesday afternoon the management of at least one hotel had enough. Officials at the Raleigh evicted their frustrated young fans about 4 o’clock, even though the girls continued to hang around the entrance hoping against hope to catch a glimpse.

The teenagers all went home eventually, but their passionate longing to gaze on Van Johnson would not go unsated for long. About a week later, on Nov. 29, the 25th Street Theatre, billed as “Waco’s first suburban theatre,” held its grand opening with lots of lights and fanfare. The film chosen to inaugurate the historic theatre was the latest Esther Williams release, Thrill of a Romance, featuring as the male lead — you guessed it — that exemplar of evasiveness, that captain of coed concealment, Van Johnson.

Source: Waco Times-Herald, Nov. 22, 1945