The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Neither a diamond in the rough like Cooper nor a rough with diamonds like Siegel, Lyle couldn’t have lasted long as a di Frasso project. Perhaps she tired of him first; perhaps it was the other way around. In any case, they both got busy quickly—she with Siegel and he with a number of young actresses, most especially Lina Basquette.

  Like Estelle Taylor, Basquette was dark-haired, dark-eyed, pint-sized, and sexy—a look that tended to get her cast as Gypsy girls and Egyptian temptresses. And like Taylor, too, she was a narcissistic live wire, only with even more voltage. Basquette grew up in San Mateo, California, and discovered a talent for holding people’s attention while dancing in her father’s drugstore to music from the new Victrola that he was the first in town to demonstrate. Her beloved father committed suicide when Lina was nine, and the precocious girl was left to her mother, with whom she did not get along, and a budding career as a dancer—first in her own series of filmed featurettes. Admirers were saying she was the next Anna Pavlova. But Lina went a different direction: at sixteen, she became a featured dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies. One night Sam Warner was in the audience for a Ziegfeld extravaganza called Louie the 14th and fell in love with Lina over the footlights. He sent an orchid corsage backstage, along with an invitation to the girl and her mother to dine with him. Sam was almost twice her age, and the eighteen-year-old Lina had no interest in marrying him, but her ambitious mother insisted she accept his offer when he proposed.

  It wasn’t as bad a deal as it first appeared to the fun-loving, young Lina. Sam was the nicest of the Warners—especially compared with his boorish, hard-nosed brother Jack. By most accounts he was the smartest, too. When the family was living in Youngstown, Ohio, in the early part of the century, and scraping by in the shoe-repair and grocery businesses, it was Sam who first saw a primitive movie projector and excitedly urged his brothers to get into the movie business. Sam was also the first Warner to become enamored of sound, and to push the studio to experiment with it. Harry was famous for saying, “Who wants to hear actors talk?” (Actors like my father used to repeat that line to one another for years afterward in Harry’s blustering cadences.)

  Basquette was a showgirl, and a Catholic to boot, and the Warner family did not approve of her. But despite their inauspicious start, she and Sam were surprisingly happy together, she told Lyle. Lina was a virgin on their wedding night but found Sam to be a gentle and patient lover. Moreover, he had no problem with her continuing her acting career in Hollywood while he stayed in New York producing the first Vitaphone movies—shorts featuring vaudeville, opera, and other musical acts with sound. In October 1926, Lina and Sam had a baby girl, Lita.

  Sam was working intensely in those years, overseeing the production of the Vitaphone shorts, then of the feature-length Don Juan, and finally of The Jazz Singer. He was also suffering from frequent, debilitating headaches. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer was set to debut. But Sam Warner, the man who had done the most to make it happen, was in the hospital. The headaches had been the sign of a chronic sinus infection that eventually spread to his brain. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on October 5, 1927, at forty years old.

  Basquette was shocked by Sam’s sudden death, and she missed him. But she was also young and almost alarmingly resilient. She liked to work and she liked to play, and she was soon doing both with her usual tigerish enthusiasm. In January 1928, she started work on a film called The Godless Girl, Cecil B. DeMille’s strange and fervid saga of young atheists on the rampage—or “rebels throwing spitballs at the Rock of Ages,” as the intertitles have it—then spectacularly brought to heel. Basquette starred as the teenage leader of the atheist society at her Los Angeles high school—a dishy firebrand who has her followers pledge their allegiance on the head of her pet monkey. (It was an era when you could always count on anti-evolutionists deploying a monkey to make their point.) The Atheists, led by Lina’s character, and the Christians, led by a handsome boy, square off in a Sharks-and-Jets-like gang rivalry, complete with a riot that lands both the sexy godless girl and her devout rival in the reformatory. In the final reel, they reconcile and are rewarded by a message from God: as they clasp hands through the fence that separates the girls’ and boys’ sides of the reformatory, their palms are burned with the sign of the cross. The movie was not a success in the United States—the theme was peculiar, it was a movie about teenagers at a time before teenagers were recognized as a demographic, and it was silent (though DeMille did tack on a few sound sequences) at a moment when talkies were the talk of Hollywood. But The Godless Girl became a sensation in the Soviet Union—where the last reel was cut, and it played as a celebration of atheism and a denunciation of the American criminal justice system. (DeMille visited the Soviet Union in 1931 and, to his chagrin, was treated “something like a national hero for having produced” the movie.) It, and Lina herself, also made a positive impression on Adolf Hitler, who, according to Basquette, sent her a fan letter in 1930.

  While filming The Godless Girl, Lina fell into a passionate love affair with DeMille’s cinematographer. She ran around town with Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, and Jean Harlow—a threesome who called themselves The Bad Girls. When baby Lita was three, the Warners decided that Lina was an unsuitable mother, and essentially bought Lita from her—offering her a $100,000 settlement and a $300,000 trust fund for her daughter, who would henceforth be raised by Harry Warner and his wife, with their three children, in Mount Vernon, New York. Lina was excoriated in the tabloid press as a heartless hussy who traded her baby for “thirty pieces of silver.” In later years, she would say that she had been devastated by the decision. The newspapers reported that a year or so after she gave Lita to the Warners, she attempted suicide by taking poison.

  When he dated her, my father took her part and felt she couldn’t be blamed for succumbing to the Warner onslaught. But it’s fair to say that Lina was not an especially nurturing person, and never would be. “She’s a character, and I can see why the family didn’t want me to live with her,” her grown-up daughter once said. “With Lina I would have had a wild life. It wouldn’t have been the greatest thing in the world to have been brought up by her.”

  “Wild” seems a fair word. Lina got married a total of eight times, twice to the same man, Jack Dempsey’s trainer, Teddy Hayes. (She divorced him the first time because he was already married, the second time because he had become abusive.) She had affairs with Nelson Eddy, the Metropolitan Opera singer Lawrence Tibbetts, the gangster Johnny Roselli, and Jack Dempsey himself. (With Dempsey she appeared in a touring show, “Jack Dempsey’s Knockout Revue,” along with a thirty-piece, all female orchestra.) To Barry Paris, a writer who profiled her in The New Yorker in 1989, she described herself in those years as a bitch, and in her present incarnation, as “a recovering nymphomaniac.” She also told Paris, and my father, that Hitler had tried to seduce her during a visit she made to Berchtesgaden in 1936 in the company of a German baron she had met. She said that Goebbels and Hitler had wanted to make her a star in German movies, and that she had been tempted since her career in Hollywood was suffering, in part because she was on the outs with the Warners. It’s hard to say how much of this was true. There is no independent corroboration of the Berchtesgaden episode. Still, her stories do tend to check out, even if they’ve been filigreed. In any case, Lina maintained that when the Führer made his move during an evening stroll in the garden, she kneed him in the groin. When that wasn’t sufficient to repel him, she told him, truthfully, that her grandfather had been Jewish. That did the job.

  Before the misadventure with Hitler, Basquette and my father had a stormy romance. My father remembered feeling very protective of her and of her young son by Teddy Hayes, Eddie. He felt she had gotten a raw deal from the Warners and felt sorry for any mother who’d had to give up her child. And Basquette was lovely to look at and full of energy and sass. “At first the main bond between us was our mutual hatred of Jack Warner and the brass-knucklin
g tactics that pervaded the Burbank studio,” Basquette writes in her autobiography. “However, in short order, our bond escalated into a full-blown romance.” Still, they were happy together in a household that was probably a little too domestic for Basquette’s taste. They maintained separate residences for appearances’ sake, but essentially lived together. When he wasn’t drinking too much, “Lyle was an intelligent gentleman with impeccable manners.” He and Eddie “adored each other,” Lina’s judgmental German maid approved of him, and “for a while, life could not have been sweeter nor more amiable or domestically stabilized. We were a nice young couple, going steady, with the fragrance of orange blossoms in the offing.”

  One night on a date they stopped off at Warner Brothers, and Lina waited in the car while Lyle ran in to do an errand. When he came back to the car, he was “grim-faced, with fists clenched” after an encounter with Jack Warner in which the studio executive had derided Lina and told Lyle to steer clear of her. He drove in a fury for a while, then Lina pleaded, “Stop this car. You’ll kill us both.” Lyle pulled over. “He was in tears, his handsome face mottled with emotion. He turned to me and grabbed my hands. ‘I won’t give you up, angel. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.’” Seeing how upset he was, Lina talked Lyle into letting her drive, with the practical argument that neither of them could afford “to be disfigured or arrested.” Lyle insisted, though, on stopping at Travaglini’s, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard known for its “thick steaks” and “generous sized drinks.” It was “a masculine haven where dirty stories were swapped along with telephone numbers.” As Basquette tells it, Lyle got so drunk at the Travaglini’s bar that evening that he was muttering darkly and close to passing out. A suave, well-spoken—and sober—British actor named Henry Mollison was also at the masculine haven that night. When he approached Basquette, she asked him to help her pour Lyle into the car and drive him home. Mollison obliged, then set to seducing Lina, pronouncing sagely that “marriage and alcoholism make a wretched combination” and cold-cocking Lyle when he stumbled down to the living room to see what was going on. It never took much to convince Basquette there was a more intriguing man in the wings, and this time Mollison was it.

  Many, many years later, when my father was ninety and Basquette was in her mid-eighties, she turned up in his life again. She had made her last movie in Hollywood in 1943, and had launched a second career as, according to The New York Times, “one of the best-known breeders and handlers of champion Great Danes in American dog-show history,” and as the author of several books on dog breeding. She was still a good-looking woman, silver-haired and trim. Our father mentioned casually to my siblings and me that Basquette would be coming from West Virginia, where she lived, to San Francisco, where he then lived, alone, for a visit. We wondered, with a little trepidation, whether they would resume a romance. To Barry Paris, she had described herself this way: “I never thought I’d reach this advanced threshold in one healthy piece of mortality. But I have managed to stay ahead of the grim reaper and I’m damned lucky to retain blooming health, a perverted sense of humor, a fair amount of facial pulchritude. Arms, legs, and thighs a bit scraggly, the boobs not as firm as they once were, but what-the-hell. I’m spry, alert, working, fiercely independent, live alone and like it, still smoke but never have inhaled. I stay away from doctors, except my dentist and veterinarian, drive an average of 30,000 miles per year, still can read without glasses, and have not had anything uplifted, tucked-up or sliced off.” Paris had dubbed her “the last of the red-hot mamas.” My father was still a handsome man with an active memory and an affectionate temperament. They were both lively conversationalists—even if most of the conversation was about themselves. That could be a problem, we figured—dueling vanities. Who would listen raptly to whom? Paris had said in his profile that Basquette could easily talk about herself for eight hours. Well, so could Lyle if it came to that.

  But that didn’t turn out to be the stumbling block. What doomed their romantic revival was a teakettle. My father had always been tidy and a little compulsive—especially in the kitchen, his special domain. In his dotage, he was even more so. He still liked to cook for us when we visited—especially breakfasts, which he looked forward to every morning of his life with undiminished enthusiasm. But frankly, he’d rather you didn’t enter his kitchen if you weren’t going to put things back where you found them. Lina Basquette made the fatal mistake of leaving the teakettle on and letting the water run out, scalding it beyond repair. We felt kind of sorry for her when we heard. Lyle endured the rest of the red-hot mama’s visit with a polite, put-upon aloofness. And he never saw her again.

  Chapter 7

  EMPTY BOTTLES

  As far as I can tell, my father didn’t drink much before he arrived in Hollywood. Acting on the stage kept him occupied at least part of every evening, and the people he looked to as examples, his own father and stepmother and some of the surrogate parents he met in the theater troupes, were teetotalers or close to it. But in Hollywood, he developed the habit of going out most nights, or staying in and entertaining generously. There was always plenty of alcohol around, and he turned out to be very, very susceptible to the bonhomie it enveloped him in, the lift it imparted to the end of a long and tiring day on the set. Lyle was not an anxious person, so he wouldn’t have been using liquor to soothe jitters. But he did like to be in fine form when he went out, to be jolly company always, and I imagine that he became dependent on the help alcohol gave him with that. He may have been genetically vulnerable to alcoholism as well. His father, Ed, was never a drinker. But his grandmother’s brother, “Happy Jack” Hollywood, the saloon keeper and killer, certainly drank to excess. Perhaps the other Hollywood brothers had as well.

  In any case, the sheer surfeit of liquor in his new milieu would have been hard for anyone with his inclinations to resist. Hollywood in the 1930s was a little like Pottersville in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Pottersville, you may recall, was the town that wholesome Bedford Falls would have become if evil Mr. Potter had been allowed to run everything. It was still a small town, where everybody knew everybody, but it was also full of jivey, jazzy music, honky-tonk bars, and winking neon. Hollywood was like that, too—simultaneously cozy and debauched. If you were an actor like Lyle, you went out on a regular basis and with a regular crowd to pretty much the same round of nightspots (the Cocoanut Grove, the Cotton Club, the Biltmore Bowl) and the same restaurants (both Brown Derbys, Musso & Frank, Victor Hugo). On Friday nights, you attended the fights at the Hollywood (American) Legion Stadium and then often headed to the dance marathons out at the Santa Monica Pier. On Sunday nights, the place to swing by was the Trocadero, an elegant nightclub on Sunset Boulevard owned by Billy Wilkerson, an inveterate gambler who also owned The Hollywood Reporter. That was the night when newcomers could audition in front of Hollywood insiders, one of whom would serve as emcee for the evening’s entertainment. The moguls would come out on Sundays at the Troc, too; Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers all had their regular tables. Antiquated blue laws prohibited dancing within the city of Los Angeles on the Sabbath, but the Troc, like many of the Sunset clubs, was in the county, which made it extra appealing on Sundays.

  However elegant, these places still held a flicker of danger that alcohol fanned. The Cocoanut Grove—the splendid ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel—was the site, for instance, of frequent liquor-sparked fights. The Grove had opened in 1921 as the first really swanky place for the stars to hobnob on a grand scale. It was a big room with a hardwood dance floor rendered exotic by the several hundred prop palms that adorned it, leftovers from the Rudolph Valentino movie The Sheik. Chinese lanterns bobbed between the palms, and fake monkeys clung to them. In the 1920s, the Grove was famous for Charleston contests at which Joan Crawford and Carole Lombard shimmied for trophies and attention. By the 1930s, the Grove had an elaborate new Moorish décor and a floor show that featured crooners like Bing Crosby and showgirls arrayed on fl
oats that looked like giant wedding cakes. One evening’s entertainment included a fashion show of ancient Egyptian costume. Another night the Grove displayed a nude girl encased in what appeared to be a solid block of ice. (Luckily for the girl, the center of the giant ice cube was in fact hollow and heated.) As my father recalled, “The Cocoanut Grove was just the place to go. You saw everyone you knew there, especially on Tuesday nights. It had all the name bands with all the name singers. And that was a whole evening. You really dressed up in Hollywood then. You almost put on a tuxedo automatically. And for a premiere, tails! With a top hat! I still have my top hat—the kind that folds up so you can put it under the seat in your car. And topcoats! I can’t believe it ever got cold enough in L.A. for us to wear them, but we did. We needed coats long enough to cover the tails.”

  For all its twinkly trappings, the Grove was also something of an informal boxing ring. It was not alone among Hollywood nightspots in that respect. Something about the alchemy of free-flowing booze, revved-up hormones, distended egos, and youthful impetuosity made actors—and even actresses—peculiarly prone to fisticuffs. Actors decked their ex-girlfriends’ dates or columnists they thought had been insufficiently admiring. Bands struck up frenetic fox-trots to cover the noise and get people back on the dance floor. You didn’t have to worry as much about paparazzi in that era—and not at all, of course, about embarrassing photos winging around the Internet. Most of the photographers at the nightclubs were semi-official: either on the payroll of the studios or working for newspapers and magazines that depended on the studios for access. So maybe actors in the 1930s and 1940s felt freer than celebrities today to booze and brawl with impunity.