The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  He led a life of surfaces, and there is, of course, a great loss in that. There were things he never understood—about himself, his wives, his children. He was a great raconteur with a diamond-sharp memory, but the stories he told were all plot. The psychological why of what people had done—left Hollywood in a hurry, abandoned a beautiful wife, drank to excess—was left vague, even the question unasked. When I was a kid, I used to press him for the why, and then eventually I got frustrated and stopped.

  The thing about living as a pre-psychological, non-introspective person, though, is that when you make a success of yourself, it tends to confirm a belief in luck and magic. When combined with an innate sweetness of temperament, which my father had, the belief that you have been well served by luck makes you a gracious person. And my father was that. All of his life he felt lucky. Lucky to have been plucked from obscurity, lucky to be an entertainer. The mantra in our family was that our father was a great success—my mother always told us he was, and we believed it, even when he was out of work or acting in B- and C-grade dreck—because unlike so many actors, he had never had to take a job that wasn’t in showbiz. He’d been on unemployment. (He always called the government office on Vine Street where he went to pick up the checks “the club” because he ran into so many old friends and picked up so much Hollywood gossip there. For years, I thought it was a club, and imagined it as some manly, plaid-wallpapered redoubt.) He’d been in Ed Wood movies, for God’s sake. But he’d never sold life insurance or shares in dubious Southern California land schemes, never as a young man had to wait on tables to make ends meet. Sure, he would have liked to have been a star, not just a contract player around whom rumors of incipient stardom swirled like fairy dust for a while. But he was also one of that generation of actors that did not expect to live like royalty, that came here with a sense that talkies might not even last. The actor Wallace Ford used to tell my dad, “Don’t buy anything you can’t put on the Chief,” the train that went between L.A. and Chicago. So he felt lucky when, in fact, he did stay in California for the rest of his life, and fantastically lucky to have found my mother to save him just when he was nearly lost. Lucky to have a whole second life, complete with children he never thought he’d have. Not blessed—he wasn’t really a religious man. Not rewarded—he was humble and intelligent enough to know that life didn’t really work that way. And while he was a hard worker, proud of never once having turned down an acting job, the truth was that he loved the work. Lucky. And luck made him charming. Why not? He was charmed.

  Not that at the very beginning it looked that way. My father always told us that his grandmother had kidnapped him. “My grandmother kidnapped me from my father when I was a baby. She wouldn’t let my father see me or even be near me.” What this meant, what traumatic emotion the story might contain and conceal I didn’t know, but I knew it had to go back to his grandmother Mary’s own story. What had driven her to snatch a baby from his own father, a kind and decent man?

  Mary Hollywood was an uncommonly tenacious, independent woman—an Irish immigrant as a child, a frontier homesteader as a young woman, and ultimately, a mother and a businesswoman at a time when few women tried to combine those pursuits. When my father wasn’t calling her a great old gal, he called her a tough old gal. She was born in 1857 in County Cork, Ireland, on the ultimate Irish birthday, March 17. Her parents, Patrick and Maggie, had the propitious last name of Hollywood. Years later, that fact would make studio PR teams and fan magazine writers giddy—so much so that they would often get carried away and say it was actually my father’s real name, not just his grandmother’s maiden name. He was really “Mr. Hollywood,” only he was too modest or too canny to use the name, sure that no one would ever believe it. That was the one gift of glamour Mary gave my father—that and the remarkable seaglass-blue eyes that shone out of all the Hollywood family’s faces.

  When Mary was twelve, her parents immigrated to the United States with their thirteen children, of whom she was the eldest. In Ireland, the men of the family had supported themselves by gathering peat, the spongy material formed by decomposing plants on top of bogs and swamps and burned for fuel. “They called themselves miners,” my father said, “but what they did was just scrape the peat off top, they didn’t go down in the ground for coal or anything. And they thought they could do that here, so they went to Pennsylvania, where they knew there was a lot of mining. Of course, nobody wanted peat for the steel mills in Pittsburgh.” Patrick Hollywood and his sons, Patrick Jr., Barney, Oney, and Jack, managed to find work in the coal mines of Allegheny County, but either because the work was spotty or because they’d had enough of it and gotten restless again, the Hollywoods moved to Iowa, and later to Wyoming.

  In Thermopolis, Wyoming, Jack Hollywood opened a saloon, where he developed active sidelines in skirt chasing, cardsharping, and mayhem. Like his sister Mary, Jack Hollywood was blue-eyed, stubborn, and hardy, but unlike her, he seems to have been scantly endowed with loving or dutiful instincts. Any he had would not likely have been nurtured in the lawless atmosphere of Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin around the turn of the century. Thermopolis in particular was a hangout for outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and gunfights were nearly as common as jaywalking might be in a more orderly place. Still, Jack Hollywood seems to have stood out for sheer malignancy. “Jack Hollywood first came to the attention of law enforcement authorities in 1893,” writes a modern historian of frontier criminality, “but he would reappear time and again, a bad penny turning up well into the 20th century.” In 1893, Hollywood was charged with beating a woman, and in 1895 with rape (when he was not convicted, the woman set fire to his saloon). In 1899, he killed a local cattle foreman he had argued with over the man’s saloon bill, striking him over the head with a pistol and again getting away with it. In 1909, he was arrested for shooting another man in a dispute over a card game or a woman, or both, and this time he was convicted of manslaughter and ultimately served time in the penitentiary. (First, he appealed his conviction to the state Supreme Court, nervily claiming that the man he did not deny shooting had actually died of pneumonia.)

  • • •

  THOUGH MARY NEVER SEEMS to have cut off ties with Jack or her other brothers who settled in Wyoming, she did choose to make her home far from them. On the trip west, the Hollywood family had stopped in Wahoo, Nebraska, to visit some friends from Ireland. Mary, who was then a handsome young woman of twenty-two, met a man named August Talbot there. They married on Christmas Day, 1878, and the couple homesteaded near Brainard for four years. August does not seem to have been much of a farmer, though. There was drought to contend with, and their crops failed.

  In Brainard, a brand-new, raw-looking town on the prairie where they soon moved, August and Mary had a better time of it. The town had been founded in 1878, after the Union Pacific Railroad completed a branch line through Butler County. Soon it was filling up with the newest pioneers to the Midwest, Czech immigrants who’d come to Nebraska to farm the rich, loamy soil. There were plenty of jobs to do in a town that was making itself up as it went along, and August Talbot, whom the local paper described as a “genial, upright man . . . respected and admired by all who knew him,” became first the postmaster, then the mayor. But in 1895, August died at the age of forty-five—or, as the headline in the Butler county newspaper put it: “After a lingering illness, Mayor Augustus Talbot breaks the slender thread and crosses the silent river.” This was the era when newspaper obituaries still upholstered their news in flowery, Victorian sentiment: “A thick gloom seemed to have settled over Brainard last Sunday which the rest of the Sabbath did not seem able to break but which pervaded the air on Monday morning and every one walked softly, and indeed, it was an hour of sadness, something deeper than that caused by hard times or crop failure.”

  August’s widow, Mary Hollywood Talbot, was then thirty-eight years old, with three young children—two daughters, Pearl and Florence, and a son, Fay. Anoth
er son, August, had died in infancy. But Mary was flinty and resourceful. Within a year of her husband’s death, she had opened her own business—a two-story hotel with a full dining room and her name etched in gold on one of the downstairs windows. She had never gone to school and could barely read or write. Yet she was the only woman to own a business in town, and one of the few non-Czechs. And she made a success of the Talbot Hotel, running it from 1896 till a few years before she died in 1937, and even after she married her second husband, at the age of sixty-five. Her only real hiatus was the four years from 1915 to 1919 when she and my father lived in Omaha with two bachelor Princeton graduates who after eating at the hotel became so enamored of her cooking that they begged her to come keep house for them. Mary Talbot was celebrated for her cooking. I have my doubts—Ireland meets Nebraska is not exactly a culinary matchup to lick your lips over—but by the standards of the time and place, she must have been pretty artful. Those Princeton men snatched her up, the traveling salesmen kept coming back, and farmers sent their daughters to her in part so they would learn how to make her roast chicken and creamed potatoes, her pot roast and brown gravy, and her apple and cherry pies.

  Mary had been smart to set up her hotel across from the train tracks and to cater to commercial men. At the turn of the century, there were thousands of them traveling the newly completed railroads of the Midwest, riding the dusty little lines to the dusty little towns to drum up sales (hence their nickname, “drummers”) for everything from toothpaste to farm implements to corsets. By the early 1920s, modern advertising would increasingly replace the face-to-face sales pitch; smoothly crafted ad copy transmitted via radio waves to small-town America was more reliable for most companies than the armies of blustery drummers they once dispatched. But for now, the commercial men were the fast-talking purveyors of the latest thing, fanning the whiff of the city that clung to them—and there were plenty of them. As the Brainard newspaper proudly asked in 1909, “Who says Brainard isn’t a busy burg when the Talbot Hotel Register shows 22 traveling salesmen in town at one time?” The locals gave Mary Talbot all due credit for knowing a market when she saw one. “To the popularity of this estimable landlady,” noted an item in The Brainard Clipper in 1902, “and the excellent manner in which the Brainard hotel is conducted is due the high and extensive reputation this hotel bears among the traveling public, and especially with commercial travelers, who are the most critical and perhaps the best judges of houses of this character. Mrs. Talbot spares no pains nor effort to please her customers and meet all the requirements of a first-class and up-to-date hotel. The rooms are clean, comfortable and inviting, and this pleases those who have occasion to stop at public houses. The tables are always supplied with the best the market affords in the way of substantials and delicacies. This is a $2.00 a day hotel and well worth the rate.” By 1910 or so, Mary Hollywood was prospering sufficiently to have Talbot Hotel stationery printed up boasting of her establishment’s “Steam Heat” and “Electric Lights.” Never mind that for most of Lyle’s youth, Brainard’s electricity was available only in the evenings, from sunset till ten p.m.

  The Talbot Hotel in Brainard, Nebraska, where Lyle was raised.

  But if Mary devoted most of her time and formidable energy to pleasing the traveling public, there were still the children to think about. Pearl, the eldest, was outwardly dutiful but yearned to get away from Brainard. The youngest, happy-go-lucky Fay, had a passel of friends among the Czech boys and was off playing baseball with them every chance he got, his Boston terriers, Dinty and Jigs, yapping alongside him. And then there was Florence, the middle child. There is a photograph of the five of them taken when August was still alive. They all wear the grave expressions that nineteenth-century photographic portraiture seemed to elicit. Even energetic little Fay, with his long luxurious mane of curls, like a mini George Custer’s, looks somber. Florence, who is maybe eight or nine in the picture, has her arms around her mother and sister, her fingers curled protectively around her mother’s shoulder, and though she, too, is unsmiling, her gaze is bright and intent beneath a crescent of bangs. She has an aquiline nose, a delicate, elfin little face with the promise of a strong chin, and her mother’s clear blue eyes. I see her somehow not as the child her mother loved the best—for in Mary’s fierce way I imagine she loved them all—but as the one who brought her the most pleasure. Florence was the one she watched skipping home down main street and allowed herself to feel vain about, the one whose pale, thoughtful face suddenly flushed with happiness actually made Mary look up from her work for a moment or two to drink the girl in.

  Florence got older, and prettier. Unlike other girls born blond, she seemed to grow fairer as she got older, her hair more wheaten, her skin more alabaster. She had a light step, a dreamy air, and a pretty tremolo when she sang. She attracted attention without even noticing it or seeming, at first, to care. One day in town she met a young man named Ed Henderson, a farmer’s son who didn’t care much for farming. He’d gotten a job in Brainard as a barber, or as the local paper called it, a “tonsorial artist,” a job for which his twinkly sociability suited him. “If you need a Hair-cut, singe, shampoo, Dye, tonic, or anything else in the tonsorial line,” his ads promised genially, “just drop into my shop and see if I can’t please you. Yours, to please, J. E. Henderson.” Ed was funny, but unlike some of the salesmen at the hotel, he didn’t laugh at his own jokes. He was skinny and jug-eared with deep brown eyes and a sweetly mischievous way about him. (He kept that temperament till he died. When my brother was a little boy and visited him in Omaha, they used to ride around town in Ed’s old car, which he’d christened “Goldie.” My brother would say, “This is a Chevrolet, right, Grandpa?” And Ed would say, “Oh, yes, but you have to whisper when you say so. Goldie thinks she’s a Cadillac.”)

  Mary Talbot, née Hollywood (right), with her husband, August Talbot, and children Fay (foreground), Pearl, and Florence (behind her mother).

  Florence and Ed fell in love, and on November 11, 1901, they got married. He was twenty-two and she was a year younger. The wedding had taken place not in or near Brainard, which was odd for two Brainard kids, but in Pittsburgh. The notice in The Brainard Clipper was cheerful enough, though it included a coy note that the news had come by “grapevine telegram” from Pennsylvania, not from Mary Talbot. “Both young people are well-known here, having grown up from childhood in our midst, and their host of friends all join with the Clipper in extending congratulations and wishing the young couple abundant success and happiness.” Still, when I followed the little trail of local newspaper items about them in the months leading up to that announcement, I could see that the Talbots and the Hendersons had been in some sort of disarray. Florence had been abruptly packed off to Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, by herself to visit an aunt for “a few months.” Ed Henderson seemed to be on the verge of leaving town for good but kept changing his mind about where and when he was going. He and his brother were planning to sell their barbershop and then they didn’t and then they did; Ed was going to move to Keokuk, Iowa, or maybe it was David City, Nebraska.

  As I spun through the microfilms of the old Brainard newspapers, searching for keys to my father’s childhood, I think I found why Mary Talbot so resented Ed Henderson. He and Florence had married in November, and my father was born in early February. Florence, then, would have been well into her second trimester of pregnancy when she and Ed married. Perhaps Ed hadn’t known his girl was pregnant, and her mother had sent Florence to her aunt in Pennsylvania with the idea that she would have the baby there and give it up for adoption. Perhaps Ed, thinking she had left him willingly, was unhappy enough that he’d been making halfhearted attempts to start over somewhere else. That seems more likely, given his character, than another scenario: that he planned to abandon her. Perhaps Ed and Florence, frantic upon realizing she was pregnant, had snuck off together without telling her mother she was pregnant—though they could hardly have kept it from
Mary Talbot forever. In any case, Florence’s pregnancy would have been a crisis for them all.

  Ed Henderson (left, with guitar) and a friend, probably around the time he met Florence.

  It wasn’t that premarital sex was quite as rare in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America as we might imagine. Historians have pointed to the turn of the century as an important pivot for sexual behavior, especially among women. A study conducted by the social scientist Lewis M. Terman found that 90 percent of women born before 1890 were virgins when they married, but only 74 percent of those born between 1890 and 1899 were, and 51 percent of those born in the first decade of the new century. The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey observed a similar trend: women born around 1900, who came of sexual age around 1916, were two to three times more likely to have had intercourse before marriage (and were more likely to have experienced orgasm). As for men, the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg point out, the chances of their having premarital sexual experiences did not increase, but the chances of their having them with women who were not prostitutes did. For the first time, large numbers of young women were moving alone to cities like Chicago and New York, taking jobs as stenographers or factory girls, leading the kind of unchaperoned lives that social reformers worried about. They gathered in amusement parks and dance halls and nickelodeons and, like Sister Carrie, sometimes took up with seductive, unsuitable men whom their families would never meet.