The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  With schedules like that, some actors were too busy or intimidated to even read their contracts. “My studio contract was about five inches thick,” my father recalled. “You couldn’t read it if you wanted to. What it said, basically, was that the actor was totally at the mercy of the studio. You couldn’t quit. The only way you could get out of your contract was to be let go by the studio. They had to guarantee you a certain amount of work, but that was never a problem.”

  The studio was such a wraparound world that you could sometimes forget why you might want to have a life outside it. In that sense, the studios of the Hollywood Golden Age anticipated workplaces like Google today; they were cocoons lined with perks that gave you fewer and fewer excuses to leave work. Studios had their own fire and police departments, commissaries where you could eat all your meals if you so desired, dentists, doctors, barbershops, shoe-shine parlors, post offices, health clubs, and stores. Joseph Mankiewicz, the producer and director, recalled that “you never left the studio for anything. When you were at the studio, you were not only safe from the outside world, you could participate in any part of the outside world you wanted to. If you wanted to register to vote or renew your driver’s license, they came to the lot. At Christmastime, the department stores used to bring stuff over to your office to show you.”

  And the studios provided other, more dubious services as well. As my father remembered it, “The studio would protect you. They would even get a traffic ticket okayed for you. There was a guy by the name of Blayney Matthews who was hired to kind of look after Errol Flynn to keep him out of trouble. Errol was inclined to get into a lot of different things,” my father said, with the kind of polite discretion that could sometimes make him sound to us, his kids, a little clueless. “So they hired a special—well, he wasn’t a bodyguard, but if Errol got into a little difficulty, Blayney would see that he got out of it.” Especially in the 1930s, under L.A.’s corrupt mayor Frank Shaw, studio publicity agents pursued cozy relationships with the police, ensuring that they’d be called first, and on the q.t., when a contract player got into a scrape. “Studio cops worked hand in glove with custodians of the law outside the studio gates,” wrote the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in her book The Whole Truth and Nothing But. “Some days the telephones of the top public-relations men like Howard Strickling at Metro and Harry Brand at Fox rang like a four-alarm call in the firehouse, as police dutifully reported that they had this or that star safely locked up for speeding, drinking, or mixing it up in a public brawl.”

  Like any workplace that forestalls dissent through a combination of despotism and flattery, the studios were hard places to organize, especially for actors, who didn’t necessarily see themselves as workers at all. The studios could loan you to another studio without your permission, work you six days a week, twelve or more hours a day, cast you in any role or film they liked, keep you under binding contract for seven years, and blacklist you with all the other studios if you crossed them. They kept close enough tabs on you that you had to pay attention even to the reading material you brought onto the lot: on the days when there was a bad review of a Warner Brothers movie in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, Lyle, who always bought both trade papers, knew to hide his copy of the offending periodical. But in turn, the studio system offered dependable work, a paternalistic bailout if you got yourself in trouble—and, of course, the elixir of potential stardom. All of this made it tough to get an actors’ union started in Hollywood, and brave to do it anyway.

  A union for theatrical actors—Actors’ Equity—had been in existence since 1913. (Broadway producers officially recognized it in 1919.) In the theater anyway, actors had gotten over a reluctance to consider themselves a trade, at least when it came to negotiating with canny producers. For a time, noted a pro-Equity writer for The New Republic, actors had tripped over the very idea of a union. “Are artists,” they asked, “to place themselves on a level with hod-carriers?” But “while they hugged their romantic pride, the managers gave them the short end of every contract.” Eventually they hugged their pride a little less tightly. In the late 1920s, Equity made an attempt to organize film actors as well, but it got nowhere. In part to ward off further such attempts, the movie producers created their own organization for handling labor disputes. It was called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is better known today as the entity that oversees the Academy Awards. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, though, the Academy functioned essentially as a company union.

  It took a new influx of actors from the stage to revive the idea of a real union for actors. They had experience of what a labor organization could do for them. They remembered what it was like to work more reasonable hours. And they tended to value the ensemble spirit.

  In late 1932, an actor named Clay Clement approached Lyle to tell him about a group of fellow actors who were meeting at the private Masquers Club, a wood-paneled, Tudor-style retreat on Sycamore Street, to talk about founding a union. None of them were stars. Clement himself was a Kentucky-born former stage actor a dozen or so years Lyle’s senior, and like him, the son of actors. “Look,” Clement told Lyle, “these hours are crazy. We have no time to ourselves. If we can’t do something about it, to hell with Hollywood, I’m going back to New York.” But going back to New York wouldn’t have been that easy. Compared with the days of thriving local theater, “the stage seemed like this fabulous invalid about to die,” as my father recalled, “and suddenly, we’re out in Hollywood, it’s three thousand miles away from New York, and the only way you could travel was by train, or car, no flying, so it was like another world.” Lyle preferred staying and making a stand.

  Of the twenty-one original Guild members, nineteen men and two women, all but two came from the theater, and several had been active early members of Equity. They were a cultivated, well-spoken lot, mostly past the age when they might have become stars, and they included a generous smattering of Britons. Ralph Morgan had graduated with a law degree from Columbia University before shaking up his wealthy New York family by going on the stage. He became a popular leading man on Broadway, and set an example for his younger brother Frank, who eventually came to Hollywood where he made an indelible impression as the Wizard of Oz. Alan Mowbray was a British character actor whose plummy mannerisms belied his finances; he had $60 in his bank account in July 1933 when he wrote a check for $50 to pay the Guild’s first lawyer. Ivan Simpson was a Scottish-born actor who created the Guild’s altruistic motto “He best serves himself who serves others.” Noel Madison, the son of an actor in the New York Yiddish theater, had been educated in England, where he also played Shakespeare. Claude King, who was known as “the Major” in deference to his rank in the Royal Artillery during World War I, was a pipe-smoking gentleman who brought his dalmatian to every meeting. Lyle was an exception. Though he was from the theater, he was young and still had leading-man potential. He was also the first contract player from Warner Brothers to join the union, and for at least a year, the only one.

  Perhaps the best-known of the founding members was Boris Karloff, who was not a star but who had gained some fame for his horror movies. In fact, it was the peculiar demands of the horror genre that had pushed the courtly London-born Karloff into the union. Karloff generally wore greasy makeup that took hours to apply and remove, often with foul-smelling solvents. While filming Frankenstein in September 1931, he had once worked for twenty-five hours straight wearing thick makeup, layers of collodion-soaked cheesecloth wrapped around his forehead to make it protrude, and his ridiculously heavy costume—a double-quilted suit with steel rods and struts to stiffen his back and legs, and boots that weighed thirteen pounds each. In the heat of a Southern California September, Karloff was nearly always soaked in sweat beneath his quilted suit and outer garments, as though he were tightly wrapped, he said, in “a clammy shroud.”

  The restive thespians decided to call themselves a guild rather than a union. “There was an aesthetic so
rt of feeling about the name,” Lyle recalled. “It wasn’t snobbery, but it did seem a bit classier.” As classy and artistic as they might have felt, they were showing their teeth, and they knew it could get them in trouble. They moved their meetings from the Masquers Club and started gathering in secret at one another’s houses. “We liked Beverly Hills because it had a lot of alleys and you could sneak in,” my father used to say. “You know, you’d go in the front door and out the back way and then on to somebody else’s house. Just to throw the spies off the trail. Because strangely enough, the studio was sending spies out. All they could find out was who was going to the meetings, but that was enough.”

  Robert Young, who became an early member of the union long before he became the father who knew best, remembered meeting “at night, in private homes, in the basement if there was one. It was like a Communist cell for those of us who were involved in the formation of the SAG. We had to be very careful back then because the actors unionizing was verboten as far as the studios were concerned. It was risky for us. They had spies all over the place, so we were very secretive. If we were identified with the Guild, it could cost us our contracts.”

  At Warner Brothers, word was soon out that Lyle was one of the mutineers. Bill Koenig, the studio manager, began taking him aside, alternately wheedling (“What do you need a union for, Lyle? You’ve got everything you need here!”) and threatening (“This isn’t going to sit well with Jack Warner. Not well at all”). “Because stars constituted the most important component of production,” writes the film historian Tino Balio, “the majors waged a vicious public relations battle that ridiculed their demands.”

  Given such pressures, the actors’ union grew slowly at first. Some actors set themselves firmly against it. This was particularly true at MGM, whose head, Louis B. Mayer, was an anti-union Republican and the unofficial kingpin of Hollywood. “All the studio heads were opposed to an actors union, but L. B. Mayer was in particular, and his people, his actors, followed,” my father remembered. “He, as a head of a studio, probably had more influence, personal influence, on his actors than any other studio head. And guys like Wallace Beery—he was a big star at MGM—were fiercely anti-union.”

  But many other actors were just timorous or undecided. Two events pushed them off the fence. In March 1933, shortly after the newly elected FDR declared a bank holiday, the Hollywood producers announced a mandatory 50 percent pay cut for eight weeks. Though the producers eventually backed off the plan, the threatened pay cut added enough insult to injury to impel the gentlemanly crew that had been meeting in secret to launch themselves officially in June 1933. Within months, a handful of more prominent actors—notably James Cagney, the Marx Brothers, and Robert Montgomery—started coming to meetings. Lyle particularly admired Montgomery’s gumption since he was under contract at MGM.

  Lyle and his fellow Guild members began talking about SAG to other actors on the sets where they were working. “I can remember hearing stories of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi recruiting fellow actors on the sets of their Universal horror movies,” said the actress Mary Brian. “You can imagine the persuasive spectacle of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula in full makeup bringing you an application and urging you to ‘Join the Guild now.’” Still, by September 1933, the Guild had only fifty-four members.

  Then that month, the movie producers issued a new body of rules that was meant to govern their industry and to bring them into compliance with the National Industrial Recovery Act. It contained provisions that particularly offended actors—including one that said a studio still had right of first refusal for an actor’s services even after his seven-year contract was up, another that capped actors’ salaries at $100,000 a year, and still another decreeing that performers’ agents had to be licensed by the studios. This last nettlesome condition “would put the actors’ representative completely under the thumb of the producer,” the Guild maintained, “make every contract a one-sided bargain, and in the end reduce compensation.” Hoping to win a victory in the PR war, SAG issued a report showing that the majority of actors were not making anything like the lavish salaries the studio heads were always invoking—and that the producers themselves made. A quarter of employed actors grossed less than $1,000 a year, and one-half made less than $2,000—and this was before the 10 percent that went to their agents and the money of their own they had to spend on clothes.

  SAG called a meeting at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in October, and this time, several hundred actors, including some big stars, turned out. Ralph Morgan had stepped down from the presidency in favor of Eddie Cantor, a goggle-eyed, high-energy singer and comedian who was then quite popular (he recorded the hit songs “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Ma, He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me”). Cantor had the added advantage of a personal friendship with Roosevelt. And when the actors sent FDR a telegram protesting the new Code, the president invited Cantor to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he took his polio treatments, to discuss their grievances. The president found Cantor and his delegation convincing enough to cancel the offending provisions then and there. Lyle was emceeing a dance at the Biltmore Bowl that night, and Cantor called him to tell him the good news and let him announce it to the soigné crowd. It was the first big victory for the fledgling Guild.

  Not that it finished the matter. It would be four years before the movie moguls recognized the actors’ union as a bargaining agent. (They took even longer to recognize the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Directors Guild. Though the writers first organized in 1933, a couple of months before the actors, SAG won recognition first, in 1937, followed by the directors in 1939 and the writers in 1941. The writers’ demands were more fundamental—they had to do with creative control and copyright ownership—and its membership more militant. The actors cared mainly about the daily conditions of their work.) By 1935, SAG’s membership had surpassed five thousand, and extras had been allowed to join. In 1936, the Guild boycotted the Oscars ceremony to protest the Academy’s continued representation of itself as a legitimate voice for actors’ interests.

  It was work to get organized, but it could be kind of a ball, too. There were fund-raisers called Frolics, for instance (one was evidently a little too frolicsome and ended up cleaning out the Guild’s entire treasury). Lyle was a frequent master of ceremonies for the annual SAG balls. At the Third Annual Screen Actors Guild Ball and dinner at the Biltmore, Frank Morgan, Lyle, and Fred Keating shared the duties with the beautiful Mexican-born actress Dolores del Rio. The prima ballerina Maria Gambarelli performed, as did the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. At the Biltmore Bowl on Thanksgiving Eve, 1934, Lyle emceed a big show and fund-raiser for SAG. He sang, along with Dick Powell, Nelson Eddy, and Jeanette MacDonald. The comedians Joe E. Brown, Skeets Gallagher, and Hugh Herbert came out high-kicking in Gay Nineties drag as the “Florodora Girls.” The L.A. Times noted that it was an evening “open to the public—or as many as can get in.” At the World’s Fair in San Diego, SAG put on a hearts-and-minds-winning exhibit about Hollywood. Three or four actors would play a scene while a cameraman pretended to shoot it with an empty camera. Crowds would gather, transfixed by the clean smack of the clapboard, and the sense—this was long before the Universal Studios tour or anything like it—that they were getting a peek inside the machinery of motion picture making. Charlie Chaplin loaned his tramp’s outfit and Mary Pickford her curls to put on display. Bing Crosby sang. Lyle and his SAG stalwart friends took turns heading down to San Diego on Sunday afternoons to volunteer at the exhibit.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE STRANGER INTERLUDES in the history of the Guild involved a fierce struggle with organized crime. The background is familiar but still striking: the extent to which Hollywood consorted with the mob, especially in the 1930s, before Bugsy Siegel and the Capone organization turned their attention to building Las Vegas. The nightclubs, the see-and-be-seen restaurants, were all embedded in a Los Angeles that was spectacul
arly corrupt. You didn’t have to be a civic reformer to notice; you just had to read the newspapers or go out at night, and Lyle did plenty of both. “Hollywood was wide open when I came here,” he recalled. “There was prostitution, gambling. A man named Frank Shaw was the mayor of Los Angeles, and he was a real crook.” Shaw, who was mayor from 1933 till he was recalled in 1938, ran a rich spoils system that rewarded cronies and skimmed money from gamblers, brothels, and bootleggers in exchange for protection from law enforcement. People used to say that the crooked cops who manned Shaw’s protection racket got a dime for every towel used in every brothel in the city.

  But it wasn’t just the invitingly rotten power structure in L.A. that attracted gangsters like Bugsy Siegel and Johnny Roselli in the 1930s. Gangsters were also drawn to Hollywood by the prospects of investing in movies and making quick money, by the gorgeous women there, and like the Irish mobster Spike O’Donnell who’d been so taken with Lyle, by the flattering versions of themselves the film industry was pumping out. The bootlegger Abner “Longie” Zwillman kept a room at the Garden of Allah apartments mainly so he could indulge his obsession with Jean Harlow, whom he briefly dated. Bugsy Siegel—though busy conducting affairs with Dorothy di Frasso and his partner in crime, Virginia Hill—found time to date the actresses Wendy Barrie and Marie “The Body” McDonald. Johnny Roselli—the gangster who’d later be known for his role in the CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro—dated my father’s girlfriend Lina Basquette. Hollywood had made gangsters look glamorous, and they were grateful for it. When G-men gunned down John Dillinger, aka Public Enemy No. 1, in the summer of 1934, he was coming out of a movie theater where he’d been watching Clark Gable in the gangster film Manhattan Melodrama. There was, in the words of the Hollywood historians Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz, something of a “cultural exchange program between the studios and the underworld.” Actors imitated gangsters who imitated them right back. Screenwriters incorporated street argot and made it snappier—and then it filtered back to the street, new and improved. By the late 1940s, Las Vegas had partly replaced Los Angeles as the mecca for mobsters, but before then, as Finch and Rosenkrantz write, “they flourished at all levels—from the neurotic gunmen, crooked club owners and slick-haired blackmailers who inhabit Raymond Chandler’s stories, up to the big-time mobsters like . . . Bugsy Siegel.”