At the Cocoanut Grove, showing off a date, Peggy Watters.
Even my father, definitely a lover not a fighter, nearly went at it with Clark Gable one January evening in 1936. The occasion was the White Mayfair Ball at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Beverly Hills. The evening was hosted by Carole Lombard, and all the guests were supposed to wear white. (The imperious Norma Shearer famously spoiled the effect by wearing a scarlet dress.) It was the evening that ignited Gable and Lombard’s affair, an unhappy turn of events for Lyle. He had a major crush on Lombard, with whom he had starred in a movie called No More Orchids a few years earlier when she’d been married to William Powell. Not only was she gorgeous, she was one of those sassy, potty-mouthed women he so appreciated. And unlike the versions of those he dated in the 1930s—the Lina Basquettes and Estelle Taylors—Lombard was good-hearted as well. He could see that, and he liked it. Lombard was a practical joker and a natural democrat who palled around with all kinds of people working on a set, no matter how humble their jobs, and who was beloved in return. When Gable left the party for a drive with Lombard that night, according to the couple’s biographer, he tried to get her to come up to his apartment at the Beverly Wilshire. She blew him off with the line “Who do you think you are—Clark Gable?” Gable tore back to the Mayfair Ball and headed for the bar. There he ran into Lyle, who couldn’t resist making a snide remark about his quick return. They were squaring off for a fight when Lombard intervened.
Though fights broke out at all the Hollywood watering holes, the Cocoanut Grove was unusual and perhaps unique in that it actually worked the slugfests into its publicity. By 1937, sixteen years after it had opened, the club’s management was claiming that it had been the scene of 136 major fights.
One of Lyle’s favorite hangouts—because he loved the music there—was the Cotton Club, a West Coast version of the Harlem institution. Like its East Coast counterpart, the Cotton Club in Culver City showcased black entertainers but rarely admitted black patrons—a depressing irony that was not lost on Lyle. At least the Cotton Club gave black musicians and entertainers steady work. The owner of the club was a genial fellow named Frank Sebastian who aimed to make the place feel posh but relaxed. On New Year’s Eve, he always threw an all-night party, with dancing till dawn, and a ham-and-egg breakfast for as many as two thousand. It was a good gig: the dressing rooms for star performers were plush and private; the bandstand and acoustics were tip-top. In 1930, Louis Armstrong moved from New York to Los Angeles, and took a seven-month stint at the club. Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, and Les Hite all played there, under a vast ceiling draped with vivid silks, like a sumptuous Bedouin tent. Once, when Duke Ellington was performing at the Cotton Club, Lyle invited the musician to a party at his house. He used to tell us that, to his keen embarrassment, Ellington asked if he should come to the back door.
Lyle and Carole Lombard, romantic leads in No More Orchids.
The Cotton Club was a mellower scene than other L.A. nightspots, maybe because you went there as much for the music as for the preening, and maybe because the intoxicant of choice at the club, at least for some of the performers, was marijuana rather than alcohol. In November 1930, Armstrong was arrested, along with his white drummer, Vic Berton, for smoking reefer in the parking lot of the Cotton Club, and they spent a night in the Los Angeles County jail. But Armstrong got off lightly in the end, probably with the intervention of Sebastian, who, like most successful L.A. club owners, knew how to make arrests that interfered with business go away. Besides, the cop who interviewed Armstrong and Berton at headquarters was a fan. “The judge gave me a suspended sentence and I went back to work that night—wailed like nothing happened,” Armstrong said later. “What struck me funny, though—I laughed real loud—when several movie stars came up to the bandstand while we played a dance set and told me when they heard about me getting caught with marijuana, they thought marijuana was a chick. Woo boy—that really fractured me.” Lyle could have been one of those; marijuana was not in his ken.
Sometimes the Hollywood crowd took its more uncouth entertainments straight up. In September 1932, the Los Angeles Times ran an article with the headline “Stars Turn Rubbernecks to Relieve Humdrum Life,” in which the writer tried to shed some light on the attractions of slumming and blood sport for Hollywood celebrities. “When they step off the stage or set, the excitement generated during the acting period must be continued. So these people seek out events that fill this need, including trips to the fights, wrestling matches, auto races, flying, horse races and dance marathons.”
Lyle was never a gambler, but he liked the Friday-night fights. Hollywood enjoyed a romance with boxing on screen and off. The boxing picture was a recognizable genre, even in the early 1930s; Lyle had already played in one such picture, The Life of Jimmy Dolan, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Loretta Young. On Friday nights, just after dinner, the Brown Derby reliably emptied out as a mob of picture people headed for the Hollywood Legion Stadium to see the fights. The actress Lupe Vélez was famous for championing the Mexican boxers. Sometimes the only thing stopping her “from climbing into the ring and socking her favorite’s opponent,” according to the Los Angeles Times, was “her escort or the ropes around the squared circle.”
The dance marathons enjoyed a shorter but weirder vogue in Hollywood. Dance marathons had started in the 1920s as part of the national craze for endurance contests of all kind—flagpole sitting, hand holding, gum chewing. The endurance fads of the 1920s offered a comparatively easy shot at fame. Like the clown who does his own version of the acrobat’s stunts, endurance contestants were performing wacky, democratized versions of the record-breaking athletic feats people followed so closely then, such as Channel swimming and long-distance airplane flights. In the early years of the Depression, though, dance marathons hung on after flagpole sitting and its ilk had lost their appeal. And they had become a much darker spectacle than they had been earlier. Now many of the contestants were joining less for a lark or a chance at celebrity than for food and shelter. For six to twelve weeks, twenty-four hours a day, with typically fifteen minutes of rest per hour, contestants shuffled around on leaden feet, dragged each other across the dance floor, kicked and slapped each other awake, propped each other up—it was often the women who did the propping—in the skein-thin hope of being the last couple on the floor and the winners of a couple of hundred dollars. A marathon might start with a hundred couples, but within a few days the numbers would usually be winnowed down to twenty or so. Spectators tossed coins at the contestants they liked. Every once in a while, to stir things up, marathon judges would put the dancers through sudden, brutal elimination rounds—heel-and-toe races, sprints in which a man and a woman would be taped together, or something called “zombie treadmills,” in which couples were blindfolded. Judges might declare a “cot night,” when the contestants would have to take their brief naps in full view of the audience, instead of backstage.
The appeal of the marathon for most spectators was visceral and emotional but often practical, too. The price of admission—usually forty cents or less—could buy an out-of-work person a warm place to sit all day and indeed all night. For another thing, it was a spectacle of grueling endurance, punctuated by moments of pain and humiliation and, less often, of affection and pleasure, which served as a kind of microcosm of Depression life. “For forty cents, if you are cold and lonely and out of a job on a raw winter’s night,” a chronicler of the marathons noted in Esquire magazine, “you join an audience composed of people who appear to have every right to feel as wretched as yourself, and with them you get the thrill of being able to feel sorry for someone.”
But what about the movie stars? They flocked to the marathons at the Santa Monica Pier, and they weren’t out of work or wretched. In an article in the December 1932 edition of Modern Screen, the columnist Jimmie Fidler described the scene: “Row upon row of benches pyramided away from the dance flo
or, almost disappearing into an obscure background. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke, the eyes of thousands occupying the seats were bleary from watching, and the faces of the four dancers were haggard, almost like skulls.” After 1,200 hours—more than seven weeks—two couples remained, who “struggled around and around that dismally small floor—two mad females clinging hopefully to their males, two wild-eyed men supporting the tired bodies of their weaker partners.” The dancers’ faces were “raw and red from hard slaps and iced towels,” their mouths hung open.
Fidler’s article said that the directors William Beaudine and Tod Browning were probably “the first Hollywoodites to notice the marathons”—maybe because they lived “at the beach, conveniently near the ballroom.” (Or maybe because Browning, the director of the movie Freaks, had a fascination with people in extreme states.) “They invited their friends, who in turn invited others, and very abruptly, and for no reason at all, Hollywood went marathon-mad. Everybody of consequence appeared at the ring-side. An entire section was roped off by the promoters who hung overhead a huge sign ‘CELEBRITIES.’”
In 1935, a writer named Horace McCoy published a novel based on his experiences working as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier during the marathon craze. Today, people are more likely to know the 1969 movie version of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? But the novel, a grim work of hard-boiled existentialism, is still a compelling read. “The marathon dance was held at the amusement pier at the beach in an enormous old building that once had been a public dance hall. It was built over the ocean on pilings, and beneath our feet, beneath the floor, the ocean pounded night and day. I could feel it surging through the balls of my feet, as if they had been stethoscopes.” Like The Day of the Locust, it’s a chronicle of the darkness lurking at the edges of the Hollywood dream. In McCoy’s evocation of the marathons, the arrival of a celebrity contingent each night is all irony. It’s an echoey whoosh of applause in the recesses of an exhausted dancer’s consciousness, a coruscating hologram from a Los Angeles as inaccessible as the Emerald City. Gloria, the desperately unhappy partner of the blank, boyish narrator, bristles with jealousy of the Hollywood crowd. She’s one of the dancers who’s actually trying to break into pictures, but the reader knows from the start she never will. “You’re goddamn right I’m jealous. As long as I’m a failure I’m jealous of anyone who’s a success, aren’t you?” Lyle was one of those people who used to arrive in a big, laughing crowd of people, bearing their own flasks of booze to swig while they watched since it was still Prohibition.
To be fair, the picture folk didn’t only gawk. One night, director Robert Z. Leonard offered to donate $5 to the contestants fund if Polly Moran sang “Sonny Boy,” and Groucho Marx promptly offered double the amount if she didn’t. The Hollywood crowd amused itself, callously sometimes, but at least the contestants made some money from it—more than $100 a week, according to Fidler. They even contributed to the entertainment. The comedian Andy Devine entered the marathon one night, but quickly pretended to faint, and was carried off the dance floor to the tune of the funeral march, wearing a dunce cap. Mary Pickford showed up—to the surprise of fans who considered her above such a spectacle—and left with tears in her eyes, having made a large contribution. “Charlie Chaplin sat for an entire evening, seldom taking his staring eyes from the four humans who stumbled over the floor,” Fidler wrote. “When he departed, he left plain white envelopes for each dancer.”
The truth was that some of the celebrities probably identified with the dancers; some of the stars watching knew it was only the scrim of luck that separated them from the men and women drooping like storm-bent stalks of grass on the dance floor. The contestants were putting on a show, too, for much of what they did up there was contrived: there were staged fights and staged marriages. On the other hand, for some of the stars this was as close to the privations of the Depression as they could really get, and they studied it with fascination and dismay.
One evening, William Beaudine, Tod Browning, the beautiful silent-screen star Ruth Roland, and her husband, Ben Bard, spontaneously reenacted the making of a movie. The dancers, shuffling past, lifted their heavy heads to watch. Bard, playing the director, shouted instructions to Roland and Beaudine: “Now you’re on Hollywood Boulevard, walking towards each other, and you’ve never met.” Roland and Beaudine fell into each other’s arms for a swoony embrace. A few of the dancers hooted appreciatively. “Good old Hollywood,” cried Bard. Roland would die of cancer five years later, at age forty-five. Browning, whose intense and disturbing Freaks fatally damaged his career as a director, would by the end of the decade become a recluse, living Norma Desmond–like until his death in 1962. Surely some of the dancers, desperate though they might have been that night, led happier lives.
When he was in his late eighties, my father was interviewed by a film historian and in-law of ours named Don Peri. Lyle brought up the business about the marathons. He’d actually never mentioned them to us, though I can remember watching the movie of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? on TV with him once. “When you think about it, what peasants we were!” he told Don. “It was like watching the Romans throw the slaves to the lions. In modern times, it really was. They were awful, really. But we’d go to these things and the big stars would have their boxes with their names on them. We’d go out there at about eleven at night and sit there for two or three hours watching these people just dance falling over, and holding one another up. When I think about it, I hate to admit that I went to those things.”
Like a lot of people of his era, I think my father had a mild streak of sadism in his humor. When life is harsher, as it was during the Depression, senses of humor tend to be correspondingly darker. In some people who grew up in small towns on the prairies in the early years of the twentieth century, places where you saw a lot of rough business and learned to move on, that streak was much more pronounced. My father was gentle and sympathetic in most ways—softhearted toward animals and children, respectful of women. His views on race were tolerant and unfussy. He had black friends in the entertainment business whom he greatly admired, and I never heard him make a racist remark. When it came to gay people, he was a bit less enlightened. He had gay friends, but he preferred not to think about them as gay, and if he suspected you did, he’d insist before you could say anything that so-and-so was “a very manly man.” Over the years, my siblings and I met several manly men who sang and danced in the chorus of various musicals with our dad and who looked for all the world like flaming queens. My dad was one of the few men I’ve known who praised other men as “sweet.” “Such a sweet man,” was one of the things he said about kind people like Arthur Landau, his first agent in Hollywood, or Mock Sad Alli, the magician he’d worked for as a teenager.
Still, he did retain his fondness for spectacles like boxing and dance marathons and for pranks, when he was young. His early experiences with carnivals and sideshows stuck with him. Lyle was a lifelong lover of cartoons, clowns, and circuses, but his fascination with them was not deep or dark. Their slapstick humor with a crust of meanness was funny to him somehow. Maybe he just realized that such entertainments, with their glimpses of people knocked down by life who stagger up again, got at something about what it is to be human, and that it was better to laugh ruefully at it than to suffer over it.
I remember a story he used to tell about a Borscht Belt stand-up comic he’d known in the 1960s. Harvey was his name, and he had married a much younger, much more attractive woman named Lois. Harvey was crazy about her—he even praised her cooking to the skies, though my father said the onion-soup-mix casserole she once made him was the worst thing he’d ever tasted. Lois, it was clear, had married Harvey for his money—which was not a lot, but more than she had. Still, both got what they wanted, till one day, while entertaining on a cruise ship, Harvey dropped dead of a heart attack. Lois solemnly declared that what Harvey had always wanted was to be buried at sea—a wish that Harvey’s friends had
never heard and which they found highly implausible, suspecting that Lois was really trying to avoid the additional cost of bringing his body home and having him buried in New York. To my father this was a rueful but very funny story. He felt for Harvey, but being a vain man himself, and susceptible to the charms of younger women, he saw the ridiculous places these tendencies could take you, and he laughed about them.
This sort of sensibility—fatalistic, willing to be amused by a certain amount of cheerful vulgarity, though you were too gentlemanly to generate it yourself—made Lyle feel quite at home when he hung out with what he called the Irish crowd in Hollywood. Spencer Tracy was the first of those he knew. They had met in Chicago when they were doing plays in adjacent theaters, and they used to go to a club there owned by Al Capone. “It was a very unimposing two-story building that looked like it needed a paint job. You went up what I seem to remember as rickety steps and you opened the door. And here was this nightclub that wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t that fancy, but it was huge and it had a big bar. You’d see the cops and detectives there. Spencer was a pretty good drinker and there were some Irishmen in the company, so we went there a lot. One night he’d gotten a telegram to come out to Hollywood; they’d picked up his contract. We were staying at the Sherman Hotel, and some of his pals had the baker, for a joke, bake a big loaf of bread in the shape of a penis and testicles.
The Entertainer Page 25
