The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  The sound movie Lyle made in Brooklyn was actually a narrative, though it did highlight the singing of the chanteuse at its center. It was a gangster-loves-nightclub-singer two-reeler called The Nightingale, which Pat O’Brien remembered as “a two-day stint in a rapid celluloid adventure, shot with the speed of an Indian arrow.” They were paid $25 a day. The microphones were hidden in vases and behind curtains. Mikes suspended on long arms, or booms, were not in use till about 1930. So the actors on The Nightingale, as on other early sound films, had to project their voices toward the hidden microphones, getting near enough to them without seeming to be talking into a vase.

  In any case, Lyle was still feeling so committed to a future onstage that in 1929 he started his own theater company, The Talbot Players, in Memphis, a city where he had enjoyed previous success in stock. The local press was enthusiastic about the venture—Lyle’s youth, his ambition to bring the latest Broadway fare to Memphis, his astuteness in picking his actresses “with an eye towards masculine appeal”—all boded well. The Memphis Commercial Appeal boasted that Lyle had toured 6,200 miles, looking at twelve companies and thirty-two plays before hiring his players. He may indeed have cast his net that far and wide, but several of the players he ended up with were people he knew well—his former leading lady and fellow aviation enthusiast Marion Sterley and his own parents, Ed and Anna Henderson. (Anna was delighted to be working with Ed and Lyle again: “They’re as alike as two peas—both overgrown boys with a penchant for teasing,” she told a reporter, “but I don’t mind a bit.”) There would be a ten-piece orchestra, Homer Guenette and his Syncopators, playing between acts. Audiences in those days still expected full scenery changes, complete with rotations of heavy furniture (minimalist sets that merely suggested a locale were a long way off) that took a while, so you needed something to entertain people while they waited. And Lyle put out an earnest, folksy-sounding pledge in his programs: “I’m mighty happy to be back with you again. Really, it’s just like being home. . . . Please remember we are here for one purpose: to please and entertain you. Will appreciate helpful suggestions and constructive criticism.”

  His timing, though, was lousy. The Talbot Players opened Labor Day weekend with a zippy romantic comedy, This Thing Called Love. But it was an especially hot late summer in Memphis, and the theater was sticky and airless. Then the company had to move venues in the middle of the run after some of the financial backing fell through; my father’s business sense was never too keen. The stagehands went on strike for three days, during which time the actors shifted scenery, and when the stagehands returned, they demanded and got the full salary for the days they’d missed. Laff That Off was the next play on the schedule, and “that title surely does strike home,” Lyle told a reporter. The actors stayed loyal—and Lyle and his parents split a single salary—but it wasn’t enough.

  The company poses in front of the Lyceum Theatre in Memphis. Lyle is at the center. His stepmother, Anna, is in the checked coat, and his father, Ed, looking dapper, is second from right.

  By then, live theater was facing unprecedented competition from the new talking pictures. The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with synchronized dialogue, had debuted in New York in 1927 and was still playing two years later. Sound was rough, it was true. When a movie called Glorious Betsy opened in New York and L.A. in 1928, a director who saw it noted that “poor Dolores Costello’s excellent voice came out at times as a deep rich baritone, while Conrad Nagel thundered in a sub-human bass, like immortal love declaiming through the Holland Tunnel. When they whispered together confidentially, the resulting sounds took me back to the old woodshed of my boyhood where the hired man wielded a mean saw.” But audiences were crazy for talkies; it was clear, by then, that Thomas Edison had been wrong and that early sound-booster Sam Warner had been right. And in Memphis, Lyle was feeling the aftershock.

  The Commercial Appeal was sympathetic to The Talbot Players and sniffy about the talkies: “It happens that at this time Memphis is disposed to give its attention to the new vogue, the talking picture. The public’s enthusiasm for the talking picture is not to be construed as evidence that the art of the stage is dead here, however. The talkie must go far in its development to win a name for art. The only conclusion to be drawn is that Mr. Talbot and his company came to Memphis at an unfortunate time.” But this was the very problem: the more theater was seen as art and film as entertainment, the smaller the audience for theater would be. The kinds of plays that Lyle had been doing were not art, and until the talkies, people seemed to know that. The theater they saw in their hometowns seemed to them like glitzy, racy, less than serious stuff. Now, though, it was gaining the good-for-you label of high art—surely the kiss of death. When another Memphis paper opined that people should be more interested in art such as the Players purveyed and less interested in “epicurean pleasures,” you knew the Players were doomed. The movies did not kill theater, of course, but they did with a few exceptions kill the touring tent theater and local stock companies where my father had learned to act. Regional theater never recovered its former kudzu-like vigor, and from the 1920s on, the undisputed capital of the stage was New York.

  The theater in Memphis went dark October 24 and The Talbot Players disbanded. The stock market crashed one week later, which surely would have dealt the final blow anyway. The players themselves had been loyal to the end. “I’ve never seen such splendid spirit by any manager or any company,” one of the actors wrote in an article for the Actors’ Equity magazine, “and all Memphis agrees it’s a disgrace to permit such a company to disband, but the truth is we can’t offer the amount of entertainment that talkie houses do at their price and still exist.” He went on: “The entire run has been hectic but we’d all go through it again for Lysle,” for “no manager could have treated his players better,” and with such a “perfect spirit of Equity.”

  Lyle in Dallas, but ready for Hollywood.

  Lyle got himself hired as a leading man for brief runs in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Boston, and then in 1930 for a full season in Dallas. Somewhere along the way he married a young actress he’d met in New York; her name was Elaine Melchior, and she had played a small part in The Nightingale. They drove around together and had a lot of laughs—that was how Lyle described the courtship later—and were married two months after they met. “We somehow just drifted into it,” he told a fan magazine in the early 1930s—and evidently out of it more or less the same way. “There was nothing dramatic about it. We never quarreled and are excellent friends even today. Maybe if we’d had more money or our respective stage jobs had not continually separated us, we might have made a go of it. I’m quite sure ours was one of the politest marriages on record.” They were married in August 1930, divorced less than two years later, and scarcely lived together in between.

  In Dallas, the theater company went belly-up and the owner absconded, leaving Lyle with $5. But as he would say later, “In my life, just when I have been on the verge of giving up, a telegram arrived,” and this time it was from an agent named Arthur Landau, asking if he could come to Hollywood for a screen test. A talent scout had seen Lyle on the Dallas stage and sent back a very intriguing report. To his keen embarrassment, Lyle had to tell Landau that he was too broke even to pay the price of a train ticket; Landau wired him the money. The Depression loomed, the theater outside New York was fading from the picture, but Lyle had been saved by a telegram, shoved genially along to the next era of entertainment history and the one place in the country that was making it.

  Chapter 4

  HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

  The trip from Dallas took two days, and on the afternoon of the second day, as the train wound down through the San Gabriel Mountains, Hollywood was still a winking gem too far away to get the measure of. From the train window, Lyle gazed out at miles of sagebrush and yucca. In the distance, pine trees clung to serried ranks of brown mountains stippled with snow. Then, as the train descende
d toward Los Angeles, and shaggy date palms replaced pine trees, he began to notice what people always noticed about the fringes of L.A. in those days: its raffish, cockeyed air, its sinuous neon signs and motley collection of billboards. “On the main highways leading into Los Angeles,” Carey McWilliams would write of the 1930s, “the roadside signs tell the story of the city’s improvised economy: canary farms, artificial pools for trout fishing, rabbit fryers, dogs at stud, grass-shack eating huts, psychic mediums, real-estate offices, filling stations, vacant-lot circuses, more rabbit farms, roadside peddlers, hobby shops, hemstitching storefront evangelists, bicycles to rent, and frogs for sale.” And Lyle noticed—how could anybody from Nebraska not—that the sky in early February was a bright enameled blue, that the streets, even the dingy ones down near the La Grande train station, were festooned with pepper trees and acacias, that the empty lots were vibrant with poppies and wild mustard, birds-of-paradise and red bottlebrush.

  When Lyle arrived in L.A. at seven-thirty in the evening, his new agent, Arthur Landau, met him at the station. To Lyle’s chagrin, he had to confess that he didn’t have the money for a hotel, just as he was thanking the older man for the price of the train ticket. But Landau was ready for that. He told Lyle he’d stake him a place to stay, and sent him over to the Ravenswood Apartments on North Rossmore, an Art Deco monolith where you could rent by the week. In a day or so, the agency would send him to Warner Brothers Studios for a screen test. In the meantime, he could have a look around.

  In some ways, Hollywood in the early 1930s was still a small town. It had first been settled in the 1880s by a wealthy couple from Topeka, Kansas, Harvey and Daeida Wilcox. The Wilcoxes had purchased 160 acres of land, where they tended fig and apricot orchards and attracted a community of God-fearing teetotalers like themselves. In 1903, when Hollywood officially became a city, it was a sleepy, dusty, pious little burg that prohibited both alcohol and factories. One industry its city fathers could not keep out—could hardly have anticipated, in fact—was the movies. In 1907, the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago had started producing movies in nearby Edendale (now Silver Lake). In 1909, D. W. Griffith began coming to Los Angeles from New York every winter with his company. The new arrivals built open-air wooden platforms to film on; and when interiors were needed—a parlor, or a police precinct, or an artists’ garret—they draped canvas over the tops to block the telltale natural light. In 1911, the first studio opened in Hollywood itself, and three years later, Cecil B. DeMille, who had set up shop in an old livery stable on Vine Street, filmed The Squaw Man, the first feature-length movie made in Hollywood.

  Southern California’s attractions for the moviemakers were obvious: year-round sunshine, without the tropical cloudbursts of a climate such as Florida’s, and a rich variety of outdoor settings from mountains and deserts to trolley-filled downtown streets and empty beaches. But these were not the only advantages. Unions had made no headway in Los Angeles and labor was cheap. Moreover, the independent studios, including those of DeMille, Griffith, and Samuel Goldwyn, were eager to put a country’s length between themselves and Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. In New York and New Jersey, in the very early days of the film industry, private detectives and process servers rendered moviemaking a risky business for anyone who didn’t use cameras under Edison’s license. Hired toughs were known to shoot holes in cameras, break equipment, and hijack cars from filmmakers who resisted the Edison Trust’s monopoly.

  To its new transplants, Los Angeles felt remote—from the patent’s trust enforcers, from their own and the country’s past, from the towns and cities they’d grown up in that would take them days, maybe weeks, in that era before passenger airplanes to get back to. The locals began calling the picture people a “colony,” and that was fitting. Like colonists, they stuck together, and impressed the native population as peculiar and threatening. If the locals were sometimes amused by how the picture people took over a street for a Keystone Kops chase or a romantic rescue on horseback, that didn’t mean they wanted anything to do with the wastrels. Signs for rooms to rent in Hollywood often specified: “No actors or dogs.”

  By the time my father arrived there in 1932, the movies had effectively taken over Hollywood, turned it into a company town, spun it into a word that stood simultaneously for a place (perhaps its least significant meaning), an industry, and a state of mind. Yet its small-town soul had not entirely disappeared. Coyote and deer no longer wandered down from the mountains into the streets, nor did goats and pigs occupy the muddy streets as they had in the 1910s. But there were no buildings more than four stories high, and the streets that surrounded Hollywood Boulevard were packed with modest frame houses and little stucco bungalows painted in the pastel shades of candy hearts. Hollywood Boulevard was a kind of main street with regular stops, where movie people ran into one another—the tailor where my father once had to wait outside while Greta Garbo was being fitted for a man’s suit; the Pickwick Bookshop, whose Russian immigrant owner had named it in honor of the Dickens character; the ice cream parlor C.C. Brown’s, which served, in chilled tin bowls, the hot fudge sundaes invented there; the restaurant Musso & Frank, where actors and writers ate flannel cakes for breakfast, Welsh rarebit or smelts or a simple chop, the kind Philip Marlowe liked, for dinner; the wide front porch of the old Hollywood Hotel, where once upon a time in the silent era nearly all the actors had lived.

  The business of the movies and the people it attracted made Hollywood a uniquely fanciful and sensual place. Even on a first, quick visit, the feeling was hard to miss. The seductive weather lured people outside, and so did the impulse for self-display that had impelled many of them to Hollywood in the first place. One visiting writer noted that if you drove on Sunset Boulevard near Gower, where the so-called Poverty Row studios turned out B movies, you’d often spot “cowboys in chaps and sombreros and extra girls in the traditional slacks and dark glasses, bright kerchiefs protecting their freshly waved hair, lunch[ing] at corner hot dog stands or gossip[ing] and talk[ing] shop.” The young hero of Aldous Huxley’s Hollywood novel from the late 1930s, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, is transfixed on his first car ride through Los Angeles by the “enormous” “dark-green and gold” citrus groves, by the mountains “trac[ing] their uninterpretable graph of boom and slump,” by the welter of billboards (“CLASSY EATS. MILE HIGH CONES / JESUS SAVES / HAMBURGERS”), but also by the fleeting glimpse of a young woman “doing her shopping in a hydrangea-blue strapless bathing suit, platinum curls, and a black fur jacket.”

  Visitors were struck by the abundance of good-looking people and the casual display of bare shoulders, arms, legs. Lillian Symes, a writer for Harper’s Monthly, tartly analyzed the anthropology of beauty in a 1931 dispatch from Los Angeles. “For nearly twenty years,” Symes wrote, “the motion picture industry has been attracting to the section a goodly portion of the world’s most beautiful human specimens. A symmetrical, wide-planed face and a perfect figure, or a clean-cut arrow-collar chin were for many years the prime requisites of the industry. Their possessors flocked to the Southwest by the thousands. Many achieved places for themselves in the films. Many more failed to do so, but stayed anyway; for there are few places in the world more comfortable to live in. Natural selection did the rest. The sunbronzed, half-nude babies playing upon the steps of stucco bungalows or on wide green lawns, the bare-headed, bare-limbed children dashing about the streets—a trifle too permanently waved, too briefly French-frocked perhaps—all tell the tale. And to keep up the adult quota of perfection, a fresh supply of pulchritude arriving on every train.”

  The movies left a mark on architecture as well as bodies. There were the palace-like movie theaters—magnificent fantasias on exotic themes like Sid Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian theaters, both built in the 1920s. But, after all, movie palaces could be found in other big cities as well. What Los Angeles had that other cities did not was, first, a fantastical mélange of houses built for its
stars—imitation French châteaus, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas, columned replicas of stately plantation homes, Moorish castles with pointed arches, stone courtyards made musical by splashing fountains, and terraced gardens punctuated by topiary. In its commercial buildings, Los Angeles had a penchant for stores and restaurants in the shape of coffeepots, puppies, ice cream freezers, zeppelins, windmills, and owls, as though the city were one big rebus poem. The original Brown Derby restaurant, that much beloved Hollywood institution, was, of course, a very large brown derby. “EAT IN THE HAT,” read the modest afterthought of a neon sign that sat atop it. A chain of cafeterias called Clifton’s designed its restaurants to look like South Seas paradises or redwood groves; one had a re-creation of the Garden of Gethsemane in the basement, where patrons could go to pray and where they might see the owner’s standard poodle kneeling as though praying, as he’d been trained to do. “Imagination,” noted the California writer Frank Fenton, “had run around this city like an artistic child. Somewhere it showed a pure and lovely talent. Somewhere it was crude and humorously grotesque.” Actually, the city’s examples of playfully literal architecture, its giant doughnuts and derbies and dragons, probably served a purpose. In a new city full of new arrivals, they helped people navigate, establish places to meet. Come to Los Angeles and it would quickly offer you a treasure map. Thanks to the pioneering work of a Danish immigrant, Otto K. Olesen, who called himself the “King of Illumination,” it became a city crisscrossed at night by klieg lights—brilliant arrows to toyland. Their silvery beams swept the skies over Hollywood to announce movie premieres, yes, but also just regular stuff: the opening of hamburger joints, Spanish dance schools, Maytag appliance shops, or a revival rally led by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. By day, a city that was essentially a desert kept its lawns green with the novel swish-swish of sprinklers.