The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Other tidbits about Lyle in the studio bios and the press combined the true with the ought-to-be-true. He’d grown up in a little town that was almost all Bohemian (that was true) and spoke fluent Czech (that wasn’t). He was bright and liked to read (that was true) and had attended the University of Nebraska for two years (that wasn’t). He was so sentimental about animals that once when he was playing golf in South Dakota, and his ball had conked a sheep on the head, he had driven the sheep seventeen miles to the nearest vet, delaying the start of the play he was appearing in that night. (That was true-ish; he had gone to the aid of the downed sheep, but once he saw it back on its feet and tottering off, he headed for the theater. He would never have been late for curtain.)

  The persona devised for him fit him in many ways. The studio did not, for instance, try to turn him into a man’s man or a rugged outdoors type—not seriously anyway. There is one unfortunate batch of publicity stills that show him fly-fishing, standing in a stream in waders and grinning madly. It wasn’t repeated. Clark Gable had not grown up as an outdoorsman, but he wished he had, so when the studio biographies made him over in that mold, he took to it. He started actually hunting and fishing, just as he was supposed to have been doing all his life. His was, as Jeanine Basinger notes, “a bio success—life imitating art.” Lyle, on the other hand, had grown up in a small town and remained fond of it all his life—from a distance. He was an urban creature, really. He liked going to restaurants and the theater, to movies and clubs. And when he was older and more domestic, he liked to read a good daily newspaper first thing in the morning and save the crossword puzzle for the evening, to shop for and cook ambitious meals. Hunting? Not for the man who hovered tenderly over a sheep he’d beaned. Camping? Not with his grooming habits and fondness for well-ironed sheets.

  A number of articles in the early 1930s declared Lyle a star-in-the-making. A spread in Motion Picture magazine named Katharine Hepburn the female star of tomorrow and Lyle Talbot the male star. And many of those articles identified him as a Clark Gable type—skilled at playing what was known as “light heavies,” like the gangster who was also a playboy. But the bios took, wisely perhaps, a different tack. “Really, he’s nothing at all like any of the roles he’s played. He’s tall and well set up, with straight brown hair and well-cut features—good looking enough to play with anyone from Garbo down,” one of his studio bios enthused. “He’s not a tough—I’ve already said he’s no Gable. His interest is in the stage and books, and he’s a collector of the latter. He’s modest, lives simply, and works hard. He could perhaps be compared to Fredric March for knowledge, ability and application to his job.”

  Lyle in a publicity photo, playing up his image as a clotheshorse, or in this case shoehorse.

  His persona was that of a sophisticated yet boyish and playful indoorsman, a collector of first editions, which he liked to have specially bound, an enthusiast of games like charades and concentration, a “devotee,” according to one profile, of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Carleton Beals. (Well, that was a bit of a stretch—he did always have a lot of books and he read. But he preferred newspapers and magazines, and he was never a “devotee” of literature.) He liked the idea of Esperanto and thought he might learn it in case there was ever an international theater. He disapproved of Prohibition—no kidding, the way he drank—took little interest in politics, wanted to live in London someday because people seemed to enjoy life more there, and preferred to buy his clothes in Hollywood. He liked children but didn’t have any. He liked pets and did: a black Scottie, and a couple of cocker spaniels, one of them a gift from the actress Fifi D’Orsay. He drove his own car, because he liked to drive, but as for pet economies, he had none. He was fond of ballroom dancing, filet of sole, and silk pajamas. He entertained frequently, and when he did, he mixed the drinks for his guests himself. A squib in one of the L.A. papers said he had developed his own cocktail for the spring months that he called the Peacherino—a ripe peach mashed with powdered sugar, “a drink of dry gin,” and a “half drink of cream,” mixed with shaved ice and seltzer in a highball glass. He scrambled eggs for his guests if they found, in the wee hours, that they’d drunk too much and needed something in their stomachs. He sang and whistled in the car and forgot to stop when he was waiting at an intersection.

  He liked to give theme parties—a Christmas Eve gathering where the guests, who included the actors Dick Powell, Mary Brian, and Wallace Ford, had to bring one another presents they’d purchased at Woolworth’s; come-as-you-are parties, a fad of the 1930s, at which invitees had to appear in whatever they were wearing when they received a summons (with any luck, some of the invitees might have been in the shower); parties that involved activities that looked a lot like what actors did all day, the sorts of things you might expect they’d be weary of—but, like children, they were not.

  Charades were big with Lyle and his friends. So were elaborate memory games. “Concentration, favorite parlor game, took a heavy toll of participants at a party at Helen Ferguson’s home,” a 1935 item in the L.A. Times noted, “with Glenda Farrell, Lyle Talbot, Mae Clark, the Johnny Mack Browns, Addison Randall, Alden Chase, and various others demonstrating their phenomenal memories. . . . The game proceeds along this line: ‘I am going to Europe and I am going to take with me a hatrack, a Schnauzer pup, a lumberyard, athlete’s foot, a Chinese pagoda etc. etc.,’ each person contributing some new and generally fantastic exhibit to the traveler’s impedimenta and each being required to recite the growing list from beginning to end.”

  Lyle moved often—the habits of the road were hard to shake, and he felt for many years that Hollywood and his film career were as fragile as soap bubbles, kept aloft mainly by pure but fickle luck. Still, he picked lovely homes to rent while the luck lasted, and his progression reflected the migration trends of the movie crowd, many of whom settled first in Hollywood, then Beverly Hills or Malibu, and still later, the San Fernando Valley.

  The first place he moved after he got his Warner Brothers contract and left the Ravenswood Apartments was the actors’ enclave of Whitley Heights. The neighborhood was nestled in the pine and eucalyptus-clad foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, across Highland Avenue from the Hollywood Bowl. In the 1910s, its developer, a Canadian named Hobart Johnstone Whitley, had sent an architect to Italy for inspiration. The result was a picturesque cluster of houses in that Mediterranean style that would become so influential in Southern California—big, arched windows, wrought-iron gates and balconies, sunken living rooms with terra-cotta floors, walls of ocher or dusty pink or whitewashed stucco. The streets of Whitley Heights were narrow and winding, lush with trailing bougainvillea and heavy swags of wisteria, with cedar and lemon and olive trees. The houses, with their red-tiled roofs, were banked on top of one another, and flights of stairs connected the different levels of streets. “From my second-story veranda,” recalled the actress Marie Dressler of her house there, “I could see acre upon acre of green California grass and bright-hued California flowers. I could watch whole regiments of royal palms march down white avenues.” The L.A. Times once dubbed Whitley Heights “the Palatine Hill of the Golden Age of Hollywood.”

  Lyle and his father and stepmother, Ed and Anna, in Whitley Heights.

  Whitley Heights was close to the studios, but it seemed secluded, and the combination made it popular with silent-era actors. Besides Dressler, its residents included Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Wallace Reid. Rudolph Valentino had a house there, and “could often be spotted, clad in riding togs, walking his two mastiffs and his Dobermans along the narrow road,” says the Hollywood historian David Wallace. By the time my father moved to Whitley Heights, to a house on Wedgewood Place, many actors had switched their allegiance to the newly chic Beverly Hills. But there were still those who preferred the supposedly fresher air of Whitley Heights—Bette Davis, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Harlow, and Carole Lombard all lived there at one time, as did William Faulkne
r. In the mid 1950s, about a third of Whitley Heights was razed and the neighborhood bisected to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. But even today, if you walk around what’s left of it, you feel something of what Southern California must have felt like before the postwar development boom. You can see how somebody had the idea to build a replica of an Italian hill town in the middle of Hollywood.

  There is a photograph of my father at his Whitley Heights house that I have always been very fond of. He is sitting, in profile and partly in silhouette, on the iron railing of a wide window. He’s wearing a white dress shirt and a tie, and his gaze is pensive. Behind him, tile roofs, palm and cypress trees, and sepia-colored hills recede into the distance. He might be in Tuscany. Except that you can also, though just barely, make out a sign in the far hills: the white letters, shivery like a heat mirage, that spell out “Hollywoodland.” There’s an Expressionist elegance to his pose, and looking at the landscape behind him, you get an elegiac sense of a lost and smogless L.A.

  After a year or so, Lyle decamped for Beverly Hills. There he rented a little house that he loved, a Tudor-style cottage with a rustic wooden gate and shuttered windows, on Rexford Drive. We used to drive past it sometimes on our way to Beverly Hills, to Nate ’n Al’s deli or to my orthodontist, and my dad would always point it out. That house was the one that got away, the bargain investment he could have landed if only he’d been smart like some of the actors. Guys like Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, and Bob Hope, he’d say, had seen not only that the movie industry in Southern California was going to last, but that buying up land and media outlets there was the way to go. Then he’d sigh a little and change the subject. His attitude about money-making was fatalistic and insouciant at once. Sure, there’d been chances to invest, sure, he’d been dumb about them, but money wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that you kept working; what mattered was that you had fun and shared the fun with people less fun than yourself.

  The Mediterranean splendor of the Whitley Heights house.

  He rented the house on Rexford Drive for $125 a month, which included furniture, dishes, silverware, even the gardener’s fee. There was a Filipino man who had worked for the previous resident as cook and valet, and though my father liked to cook, he was happy enough to keep the man on: he wore a neat white coat and a black tie at all times on the job, and taught my father how to make perfect rice. The monthly rent counted toward purchase of the house; my father had that in mind for a while, but he eventually transferred to a friend the Rexford Drive house and the down payment he’d made thus far, and made nothing on the deal. “I didn’t think about making money that way,” he said, looking back. “I didn’t think of a house as an investment. I bought a lot of clothes and I lived high and all that sort of thing.”

  His grandmother came to visit when he lived in that house. Mary Talbot was still running the hotel in Brainard, and would do so until shortly before she died in 1937. She was still fierce, still hardworking, but she could not conceal her pride in her grandson. While staying with Lyle in Beverly Hills, she made her own way to Hollywood Boulevard. It was December, and the studios had decorated the lampposts with silver wreaths holding tinted portraits of their actors and actresses. Mary found Lyle’s and sat herself down on a bench under it. Wearing a long black dress and a hat that marked her as a visitor from somewhere colder and older, Mary would return to that same bench each day of her visit. Perhaps some of the passersby who saw her thought she was an extra from a movie, some period piece set on the frontier. All afternoon, to anyone who listened, Mary would point to Lyle’s picture and say, “That’s my grandson.”

  In 1936, Lyle decided he wanted a bigger place, and moved to Toluca Lake, a bucolic corner of the San Fernando Valley that Amelia Earhart had helped to make fashionable when she moved there to be close to the Lockheed airplane plant in Burbank. Lyle picked the particular house he did, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune, because it had a living room big enough for all his games. “Parlor games are Talbot’s weakness. He has installed a ping-pong table, three marble games, and endless tables for checkers, chess, backgammon, and cards in the living room. He has room for a miniature archery set. The garage houses his three bicycles and the patio he turned into a court for playing badminton.”

  Lyle and his grandmother Mary Hollywood Talbot.

  When Lyle arrived in L.A. to take up this life in a series of rented houses, he was freshly divorced from his first wife, Elaine Melchior, who’d elected to stay behind in New York. Lyle explained to a fan magazine that there had been “nothing dramatic” about his divorce. It was just that they were both busy and ambitious; they didn’t get to see each other often, since they were each traveling with shows, and when they did manage to get back to New York at the same time, they stayed with her mother in a rather crowded setup. Theirs was a story that would have resonated with a lot of Americans. Between the turn of the century and 1928, the nation’s divorce rate had climbed from about one in fourteen marriages to about one in six. The divorces of actors and actresses were often discussed in those years, less as examples of scandalous excess than as experiences like those of many young people—unfortunate, perhaps, but not scarring or shameful. Stories of Hollywood divorces in which actors and actresses appeared to be speaking frankly and with feeling helped normalize the idea of divorce, just as the articles about the stars’ cosmetic interventions did for plastic surgery. By the 1930s, an early divorce—especially one that could be attributed not to adultery but to the divergent paths of a childless young couple like Lyle and Elaine—no longer carried the stigma that all divorce once had. Hollywood had helped make it so.

  It didn’t take long for the single Lyle to suss out his excellent dating prospects in Hollywood. He was thirty when he arrived (though studio publicity shaved two years off), handsome, and in line for stardom. He loved the company of women, relied on their judgment and taste, and particularly appreciated those who showed spark, intelligence, and a strong will. The studios themselves were like dating agencies. By day, they threw beautiful young people together for long hours. By night, they prodded their contract players to go out on dates with head-turning actors or actresses from the home lot and others (and sent studio photographers along to snap so-called candid pictures, which the studios provided to the newspapers).

  In a period of a little over a year, gossip items in the columns of Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell, among others, linked him with a veritable chorus line of actresses. “Lyle Talbot with a pretty blonde at the Club Ballyhoo.” “Lyle Talbot, new and very good-looking leading man, chatting with Wynne Gibson at the Garden Room at the Biltmore.” “Jayne Shadduck is heaving big sighs over Lyle Talbot at the moment.” “Estelle Taylor and Lyle Talbot, the newest screen Apollo, are very much ‘that way.’” “Fifi D’Orsay is the latest to go night-clubbing with the ubiquitous Lyle Talbot.” “Loretta Young and Lyle Talbot at the opening of the play ‘The Devil Passes,’ at the Pasadena Community Playhouse.” Wynne Gibson and Lyle Talbot, “seen everywhere together. They were dancing again the other night to Stanley Smith’s music at the Biltmore Garden Room.” “Hollywood romance rumorers now say Lyle Talbot can’t decide between Loretta Young and her sister Sally Blane. Lyle seems to be getting over in the city of shadows that talk.” “Devoted twosome at the Derby: Estelle Taylor and her latest admirer, Lyle Talbot. Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson telling stories at the dinner table.” “Alice Faye and Lyle Talbot—you can’t keep that fellow away from a gal long—went to the Cotton Club Sunday night.” “Lola Lane and Lyle Talbot, no less, watching the moon from Mulholland Drive.” “Lyle (Don Juan) Talbot is putting on the rush act with Helen Mann, a pie catcher from one of the comedy lots.”

  An article in the Illustrated Daily News made a show of mining his childhood in Brainard, which it insisted on referring to as the “village” to account for his charms: “He was a favorite, almost from the beginning with the Bohemian girls in the village, who came to vi
sit him and showed him their bright scarves and let him cut his teeth on their ear-rings and necklaces and bracelets. This popularity seemed to presage a similar happy affinity with their kind in his later life in Hollywood, where he has squired most of the available girls to the town’s social and theatrical gatherings, at one time or another—and sometimes oftener.”

  When the publicity machine wasn’t humming about Lyle’s Don Juanish dating habits, it was promoting him as a man who really wanted a wife. That was always an attractive notion for fans: the man-about-town who threw himself into a frenetic round of dating was, underneath it all, a romantic who longed for just one good woman. And the thing is, there was a glimmer of truth to that in my father’s case. When he talked wistfully about the woman he was looking for, some of what he says sounds as though it was massaged by deft studio hands, but some of it sounds a lot like a description of what he did eventually find in my mother. The two qualities he looked for above all in a woman, he said in one article, were intelligence and a sense of humor. The latter quality was “more precious than beauty, wealth or talent put together,” and more likely to keep a couple out of divorce court. You want a girl you can “sit and talk with and exchange ideas with and have for a companion. No man wants the choice between taking a girl to a nightclub or theater every night and being bored.” He was attracted to a girl “who gets a kick out of life, is musically inclined and likes to read because I like to read a good deal myself.” She “didn’t necessarily have to be a raving beauty”—charm was better and “beautiful girls are not always the most interesting.” He wasn’t wild about athletic girls: if they were awfully serious about their sport, they were too cliquey and talked only about it, he claimed. He did not believe that men should dominate in relationships: a “girl with some give-and-take, the spirit of fifty-fifty, would please me more than a submissive person.” And, he concluded, “if I’m going to marry her, I hope she’ll be fond of children.”