The 42nd Street Special was the brainchild of Charles Einfeld, the irrepressible head of publicity for Warner Brothers, and its scale and success set the standard for Hollywood junkets ever after. “What a layout!” a reporter for Variety effused. “The dream of every publicity man come true. $1,000,000 worth of some of the grandest exploitation that ever flashed across the horizon of show business laid out right in your lap and nothing to do but sit back and take it—and like it.” Einfeld not only saw the possibility of tying together the inauguration and the movie—a New Deal in entertainment!—but also went after and got the sponsorship of General Electric for the train. GE, in turn, made the train a rolling metaphor for a bright new tomorrow, illuminating it with wreaths of lightbulbs and arc lights. The company also promoted its own products in World’s Fair style by making one of the train cars into a model kitchen displaying all the latest GE appliances—including the brand-new electric dishwasher. GE supplied sunlamps for the train’s Malibu Beach Car, a re-created beach complete with sand and palm trees, so the “stars”—they were all billed as stars in the press materials and accounts—could lounge just as though they were in the real Malibu. There were staterooms for all the human performers, and a separate, hay-filled car for Tony the horse. Speakers blared the songs from 42nd Street when the train pulled into a station (“Come and meet those dancing feet / on the Avenue I’m taking you to / Forty-second Street”). “A Cinderella train,” The Washington Post called it. “A flying meteor” that “flashes through the nights,” waxed the Boston Herald.
A herald of hope in desperate times, the 42nd Street Special also represented something new: a recognition that Hollywood and its celebrities carried a cultural power beyond their ability to distract and entertain. “We Americans must find some hat rack to which we can hang our national affection,” wrote one observer. “At this moment celebrities are the number one vote getter. To be sure we haven’t much choice. What with Big Business turning its naughty face in the drawer and turning out to be a boring lead-headed princess, there is nothing left for us to idealize except the clan of pretty boys and girls who live on the rhinestone shore of Hollywood.” As the film historian Lary May writes, both the “train and the film signaled the incorporation of politics and the popular arts into remaking the nation” with a mass culture that would be more “modern and inclusive.”
For Lyle, this journey from the rhinestone shore back into the heartland was an adventure he would treasure all his life. The schedule was certainly all-consuming. On a typical day, he and his fellow performers would arrive in a city about noon, entertain the crowd waiting at the station, and sometimes march in a parade as well. Then they’d attend a luncheon with local dignitaries, do press and radio interviews, and visit a GE showroom where they’d feign deep interest in the wares on display (actually, Lyle, who was kind of a gadget freak and liked to cook, might not have had to feign it). As evening fell, they’d check into a hotel, shower and dress, and head for the local Warners-owned movie palace where they’d sign autographs and appear onstage in a musical revue, then slip out the back door while 42nd Street screened, drop into a nightclub if they were lucky, haul themselves back onto the train, and roll through the night till the next stop.
• • •
EVERYWHERE THEY STOPPED—thirteen cities in seventeen days—the crowds were staggering. In Denver, “the streets around the depot were jammed for blocks,” Variety reported. In Indianapolis, the 42nd Street Special helped avert a bank riot when worried depositors massing to withdraw their money were diverted by the news that Tom Mix had arrived with his horse. In Pittsburgh, police estimated that the parade attracted between 200,000 and 300,000 people, a bigger crowd than the one that had turned out for Charles Lindbergh a few years earlier. (“42nd St. Comes to Pitt,” read the headline in Variety, “and Town Goes Nerts.”) In Boston, despite a driving rain, mounted police had to be brought in to manage a larger-than-expected throng of men, women, and children at the train station. My father remembered a marching band playing at the station there and how the tuba players would stop periodically and turn their instruments upside down to pour the water out. He kept thinking, “Why are all these people getting soaked just to see us?” In Kansas City, 175,000 people greeted the train; in Toledo, 25,000. A Toledo newspaper described the scene: “The crowd massed on the sloping banks that go down to the railroad tracks from Summit Street, occupied the tops of freight and passenger cars standing on sidings, stooped on top of adjacent buildings, on the roofs of the station itself and overflowed onto the tracks.” In New York, when Tom Mix on horseback led a parade on Forty-second Street—“naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-second Street,” as the song had it—20,000 people lined up to watch, and a Goodyear airship accompanied the spectacle. “Bette Davis never knew where we were,” my father said years later. “She’d speak from the platform and say, ‘It’s great to be here in Cleveland,’ and we’d be in Detroit.”
Davis wrote in her autobiography that the 42nd Street Special was where she “learned once and for all how much movies mean to the American people. The reaction of the public in every city convinced me of the miraculous power of the motion picture. There wasn’t the slightest doubt that Hollywood’s stars were America’s royalty and their subjects the most devoted in the world. If in moments of despair I had been uncertain that the world that I had chosen was a sane one, I knew now that my chosen field could be Elysian.” Lyle had a similar reaction, though he focused more on his sheer good luck in being where he was. “Lyle Talbot in the car made over to represent Malibu Beach,” wrote the reporter for Variety. “Talbot is sunning himself under one of those California sun-ray lights and you chew the rag with him about things and stuff. Talbot seems a pretty regular guy. Made a quick jump upward in film circles, but hasn’t let it stampede him. Gives all the credit to lucky breaks.” One of the things about that trip, my father used to say, wonderingly, was that the 42nd Street Special enjoyed the right-of-way over every other train across the country. That impressed him, probably because he was a veteran of cheap train travel and of all the little branch lines on which traveling actors could get stuck. What a luxury to keep forging ahead through the night and the rain, lighting up fallow fields and the rims of little towns, never stopping till you were in a city surging to see you.
In Yuma, Arizona, when the train stopped in the middle of the night for a quick meet-and-greet with the locals, a woman in the crowd handed Joe E. Brown her baby to hold. Standing on the rear car of the train, Brown cradled the baby while the mayor made a speech. When the train took off, Brown was still holding the baby. It turned out that the mother had fainted in all the excitement and didn’t see the train leave. Brown and his pals figured out what happened, and someone alerted the engineer, who backed the train into the station to restore the infant to his overwrought mother.
“Hollywood in those days had a small-town atmosphere,” my father recalled many years later, when he was almost ninety. “You went to a regular barbershop, walked down the street freely, there were no hassles with tourists. Hollywood was like this separate world; it seemed so far from the East Coast, which you could only get to by train, really from anywhere else in the country. We were working six days a week at the studio and we didn’t think much about what we were doing. I thought I was lucky to have a job. It was the Depression and people were broke, but still they were going to the movies. And we were this new phenomena called movie stars—movie stars who talked. So here I was out of Hollywood for the first time since I’d arrived there, and I was amazed that every time we stopped in a city we were mobbed.”
Inside the gleaming train, conditions were deluxe. The studio had hired the head chef from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to cook on board. The menu on one of the first nights featured a choice of entrees: “Filet of Halibut, Sauce Remoulade, Brace of English Lamb Chops, au Cresson, or Roast Jumbo Squab, stuffed with Wild Rice, Guava Jelly.” The side dishes on offer were “Romaine an
d Pineapple Salad,” “Bermuda Potatoes in Cream,” and “Yellow Bantam Corn Sauté.” For dessert, there were “Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream, Petits Fours, and Roquefort Cheese.”
Between cities, Lyle favored the lounge of the Malibu Beach car, where the ceiling was painted like a cloudless Southern California sky and the gaily striped chairs were wide and cushy. He’d hang out smoking, doing the crossword puzzle, and reading the Hollywood trade papers or the local dailies with Mix, Carrillo, and Brown. They were all good company—downright chatty as men go. Brown, a onetime circus tumbler and baseball player turned vaudevillian and Broadway star, was famous for his mile-wide grin and rubbery face. Carrillo, though he’d found a niche in pictures by playing up a ridiculous bandito accent, was in fact a college-educated former political cartoonist, the scion of a prominent old California family, and in time, a pioneering conservationist of the California shoreline. Carrillo had “an intelligent comeback for anything you threw at him,” observed the Variety correspondent. He amused himself and his fellow passengers by sketching caricatures of them. Mix was born in 1880 and had enjoyed most of his success in the silent era. But he was still a popular figure, instantly recognizable to his fans with his comically outsized Stetson hats and elaborately studded or embroidered white suits. Though he grew up in Pennsylvania, not out West, he really was an expert rodeo rider—the “Jackie Chan of cowboys,” Jeanine Basinger calls him, “with his breakneck pace, his action just for the sake of action, and his amazing stunt work.”
Once he made it in Hollywood, Mix lived life large but had a sense of humor about it. He collected fancy guns, cars, and shoes and had his initials embossed on all of them. He married five times. He would die in 1940 in an auto accident while driving eighty miles an hour on a desolate stretch of Arizona road. My father liked Mix very much. He remembered him as the good-natured elder brother of the trip, and appreciated his sentimentality about his horses, past and present. He was a wild guy, no doubt about it. But he also had a touch of what passed for gravitas on the 42nd Street Special. Unlike the rest of the stars, Mix had been to an inauguration before: that of Teddy Roosevelt, where he had ridden his first horse, Tony, in the parade, along with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. This time around, he was the only one who seemed more interested in endorsing Franklin Roosevelt than promoting his own career (perhaps the Warners had chosen him, a folksy, beloved cowboy, to be their designated political spokesman). “You know, without taking any bows, an actor’s a pretty good person to estimate a man in politics,” Mix told a reporter, in what still stands as a sound assessment of Roosevelt’s personal appeal. “Some of them are afraid they’ll be criticized for knowing show people. That type gets stiff as a sprained ankle. The other kind tries to condescend and be ‘natural.’ They remind you of a cub bear handling an alarm clock. Mr. Roosevelt is easy and not condescending, friendly without losing dignity. He’s the real McCoy. He doesn’t need to deliberately simplify his language to make a cowhand understand him.”
If Mix was the Stetson-wearing elder statesman of the trip, then Lyle was its young heartthrob. As a Kansas City paper noted, not only was he “the sole eligible young man onboard,” he was also a “new ‘find’ as a leading man,” “handsome as hell. And as likeable as a collie.” Lyle had pinned his own romantic hopes on Bette Davis. They had just made 20,000 Years in Sing Sing together, and Lyle, unlike the studio execs and directors who downgraded her sex appeal, thought Davis was plenty cute. True, “she wasn’t endowed particularly with the breasts or things like that,” my father would tell a radio host in San Francisco when he was a very old man. But she radiated an almost naively serious-minded approach to her work, an ambitiousness about her craft that Lyle, being made of lighter stuff himself, admired. Not that it didn’t confound him sometimes, too. When they did a movie called Fog over Frisco, a very minor picture that Davis was inexplicably fond of, she would practice her lines off by herself in a sort of trance, Lyle told an interviewer in 1960. It was “as though she’d been handed a Shaw or Shakespeare assignment,” he recalled. “Her absolute dedication was unnerving. Her self-involvement came on to me as a kind of selfishness—true, she worked well with other players, and the crew, but I always felt her mind was solely on herself and the effect she was producing.”
Still, none of that would have been a deal breaker for the Railway Romeo. The presence of a husband he hadn’t known about was another matter. When Bette got on the train in Los Angeles, she brought Harmon “Ham” Nelson, the shy musician she’d known back home in Massachusetts and married six months earlier. Because of her busy work schedule, they’d never had a chance to take a honeymoon, and this was to be it, though as she would say later, “what with waving on the observation car at 2:30 in the morning to wide-eyed movie fans,” and the like, it wasn’t much of one. “Our stateroom,” she recalled, “was only used for lying in state.” Davis, it was clear, was on her way to stardom. On this trip, she could afford to laugh with reporters about how the studio had relegated her to “nice, dowdy little gal” roles. If “the hero was supposed to so much as glance in my direction they insisted that it just wouldn’t do,” she told a reporter in Chicago. No man would be crazy enough to fall for Davis. Now, though, the newspapers agreed, she was having the last laugh, getting the better, sexier roles she deserved. And they singled her out, with loving descriptions of her clothes: bright yellow lounging pajamas and green sandals in Chicago, polka-dot gloves in Kansas City, a brilliant blue tweed suit in Indianapolis.
As for the other ladies on the train, well, Eleanor Holm, the swimmer, liked a good time. Three years later, en route to Berlin, she would be thrown off the U.S. Olympic Team for drinking champagne and breaking curfew with sports reporters. Glenda Farrell was a pal, though much more modulated and ladylike in real life than the brassy gals she played on screen. But she was trying to catch up on sleep the best she could, recovering from a grueling filmmaking schedule over the previous six months. More fun were the game and hardworking chorus girls, with their “hair like spun taffy” and their “long black eyelashes,” as one paper described them, young women who “twinkled back and forth in the crowd, basking in the obvious admiration of the fans.” My father remembered Toby Wing particularly fondly. She was a platinum blond with a soft, round face who was often billed as the most beautiful chorus girl in Hollywood (and who got more fan mail in her prime than the big stars at her studio, Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert). Davis recalled a less glamorous detail about the chorines: they “were always popping into opera hose and tremendous white polka-dot halters and white coats. The poor girls had one costume apiece. They were not the most attractive sight at the end of the tour. White on a train for sixteen days!”
Everybody got a little rambunctious at times. One night, Lyle and a few of the other actors raided and trashed the GE model kitchen. They tried to make waffles on the electric waffle iron, an object none of them had ever seen before. The batter oozed out like lava when they weren’t looking—they were all a little soused to begin with—and everything went kerflooey from there. It was like a kitchen in a cartoon that had turned on its owners. Like penitent children, they stood there in the morning, barefoot but still in evening dress, and took a scolding from their Warner Brothers chaperone. In Pittsburgh, a well-oiled Tom Mix rode his horse onto the dance floor of a nightclub.
When the 42nd Street Special stopped in Chicago, Lyle had an unexpected visitor. His name was Edward “Spike” O’Donnell, and he was a bootlegger and the head of an Irish gang known as the South Side O’Donnells. His deputies were his brothers, and fortunately for him, he had a lot of them, since they had a tendency to get themselves killed. In his history of the Chicago underworld, Herbert Asbury describes him this way: “A criminal since boyhood, Spike O’Donnell had been sneak thief, pickpocket, burglar, footpad, labor slugger, and bank-robber; he had shot half a dozen men, had been twice tried for murder, and had been accused of several other killings. He was also deeply religious, and not
even the prospect of a good murder or a holdup could keep him from attending Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church.” In 1925, in the midst of the so-called Chicago Beer Wars between rival bootlegging gangs, O’Donnell had the distinction of being the intended target of the first machine-gun attack in American history. He was standing in front of the J.J. Weiss drugstore when an open touring car approached. The rival gang leader Frank McErlane shouted out, “Hel-lo, Spike,” then sprayed the storefront with bullets from a Thompson submachine gun, World War I’s gift to gangsters, also known as a tommy gun. McErlane didn’t really know what he was doing, and lucky Spike emerged unscathed. He would survive multiple attempts on his life. As he put it once, “Life with me is just one bullet after another.”
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