The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Meanwhile, by helping to banish Bioff and the mob from Hollywood—it was true they were not gone entirely, but henceforth they were more interested in Las Vegas—the actors had shown themselves tougher than anyone would have predicted. As my father put it, “If we could survive Willie Bioff, that nasty little putz, we could survive just about anybody.”

  “Five years ago,” declared the Nation magazine in 1938, “a gag about a Hollywood actor being a union man would have been good for a ripple of horror in Hollywood’s drawing-rooms and for a derisive laugh along the embattled labor fronts of Eastern and Midwestern America. Stars were artists. Featured players were artists. The least conspicuous extra was an artist. The hem of Hollywood’s epicene skirt was lifted gingerly and superciliously as Hollywood walked over the mud puddles of its labor problems.

  “But Hollywood is a town where the least likely things happen. The incredible has now become commonplace. The Screen Actors Guild rules the roost. . . . The stars have stepped down into the ranks to fight for the extras, the bit players, the masses. . . . The result has been a startling betterment of working conditions, somewhat increased pay, and the discovery that the iron heel of the studios is still a heel, but that it is not iron and that it is not, in fact, any more impressive than any other heel.”

  While the Guild did improve working conditions, it did not transform the relationship between a studio and the actors signed to it. If the hours were more humane, and the treatment of the rank-and-file performer less exploitative, it was still the case that a studio essentially owned an actor for seven years at a stretch, during which time it could drop him entirely at its own discretion. Actors of scrappier temperament and more exalted ambition than Lyle fought the system for better roles and more freedom to craft their own careers. Bette Davis got so fed up with the lackluster parts and forgettable projects Warner Brothers was assigning her to that she left the country to make a movie in England in 1936. Warner Brothers sued her for breach of contract and won. James Cagney, who had grown weary of his typecasting as a “dese-dem-dose” gangster, had better luck with his lawsuit. It was never settled, but the studio did try to accommodate him with roles more to his liking in the late 1930s. It wasn’t until 1944, when Olivia de Havilland, backed by the Screen Actors Guild, won her own lawsuit against Warners that a legal ruling reduced some of the dominion studios had over their performers. The so-called De Havilland Law established that seven years means seven calendar years, so an actor was free to leave a studio at that point. It seems like an obvious point, but until then, when an actor was suspended for any reason (refusal to take a lousy part, uppityness over pay), the studio started the clock on the contract all over again; so time off to serve in the military, as many actors did during World War II, restarted the clock as well. The effect was to extend an actor’s service to the studio indefinitely, whether he wanted it or not.

  In Lyle’s career, the big fight had been for the union itself. Beyond that, he was content to take the roles the studio gave him, as a story he used to tell about Humphrey Bogart and himself makes clear. In 1932, both he and Bogart were newly hired contract actors at Warners. They acted together in Three on a Match and in Big City Blues, both minor roles for Bogart, who snarled convincingly but had not yet latched on to the melancholy tough-guy persona that would make him unforgettable. When the time came for the studio executives to renew Bogart’s option, they declined. Lyle was baffled, but “Bogart didn’t care,” my father said. “He seemed happy.” In 1930, he’d come out from New York where he’d been on the stage, “and a lot of the theater guys didn’t like it in Hollywood. They wanted to get the hell out of there. Me, I liked the security, and I liked to work. Bogart went back to New York and I never heard anything much about him. New York was so far away and I wasn’t reading the New York papers then.”

  Then one day in the late summer of 1935, Lyle was cast in an upcoming movie called The Petrified Forest. “So I read the script and it’s a good part—Duke Mantee—and a good script. And regardless, I’m going to play the thing. You’re under contract and you do what they tell you to do. Several weeks later the casting director says, ‘No, Lyle, you’re not going to play it after all.’ I wasn’t upset; I’d still be working, still getting paid, just in something else.” But Lyle did ask why and was told that Leslie Howard, who had played the lead in the New York stage production of The Petrified Forest, had insisted on bringing his costar from the play out to Hollywood with him. “‘Guy’s name is Humphrey Bogart.’ I say, ‘Bogart’s back?’ And the casting director says, ‘What do you mean, back? He’s a new actor—Jack Warner just told me so—Warners just signed him.’ I say, ‘Well, go up and look at the stills from a couple of pictures three years back. Don’t embarrass yourselves.’” Bogart, of all people, had failed to make a lasting impression on the studio execs. “So he arrives on the set and I see him walking towards me, and he’s holding up the middle finger. ‘That’s not for you, Talbot. That’s for Warner Brothers. Did I let ’em have it. I didn’t want to come back here, you know that. And when it’s over, I’m going back to New York.’” An actress who worked with Bogart on Broadway once said that he reversed the usual order of things: he was kind when he was on top of the world and “an absolute son of a bitch” when he was on the bottom. There was a bitterness about him when Lyle knew him as a drinking companion in the early 1930s. From his first days in Hollywood, Bogart had a proud sense of deserving better that Lyle did not. Lyle felt he’d struck it big just being where he was—and he never forgot it.

  Still, my father sometimes used to say, late in his life, that he thought he’d paid a price in his career for having been one of the founders of the Guild. He didn’t regret it, but he thought it might have held him back. That may have been true, but only in part. It was true that his union activism did not make him popular at the studio. He was the twenty-first of the initial twenty-four SAG members, and the first actor at Warners to join. He was just starting out in pictures, so he had no star stature to protect him. There were plenty of ways a studio could be vindictive: casting an actor in lesser or manifestly unsuitable parts, loaning him out to other studios against his will, or, conversely, blacklisting him with other studios. But Lyle’s romance with Lina Basquette, Sam Warner’s scandalous little widow, probably didn’t help, either. Basquette recalled how angry Lyle had been over the Warner family’s treatment of her—he was particularly incensed that they had taken her baby to raise—and how hard he found it, in his misguided (and sometimes drunken) gallantry, to keep his anger to himself. My father felt that he’d been blacklisted at Warners, and in fact, he never did work there again as a freelancer after his contract was canceled.

  It would be difficult to prove any of this, and the fact is that there were other reasons why Lyle did not become a star. There was, for example, his lack of pickiness about parts. By his own account, he never turned down a job. Ever. That’s not quite true; he did refuse to come back from Hearst Castle that time to play a Brooklyn cop—a ridiculous piece of casting—in a picture. But that was less out of professional vanity than an inclination to hang out at Hearst Castle for a while longer (who can blame him?). Even so, he still needed the urging of his steely girlfriend, Dorothy di Frasso, to ignore the studio’s telegrams.

  There was a lovely aspect to his approach—an affable graciousness about slipping into smaller roles, a game enthusiasm about working in an ensemble cast. In 1935, when a reporter asked him how he felt about playing featured roles more than leading ones, he said, “Well, it bothered me at first. I had always played leads in stock, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t let me do them in pictures. Now I don’t mind anymore. I feel that I’ve become essentially a character actor. And as long as they keep on giving me nice meaty parts—even though they don’t carry the whole picture—I’m satisfied. As a matter of fact, I’d rather jog along this way than become one of those overnight stars whose years in pictures are numbered. I’ve seen too much un
happiness on this account, right here on my home lot.”

  You can see this attitude buoying Lyle’s supporting role in a Mae West movie he made in 1936. Go West Young Man isn’t her best movie. More than any other performer in Hollywood, West had had her wings clipped by the enforcement of the Code. But the movie is still quite funny. West plays Mavis Arden, a zaftig, ultraconfident star who scoops up most of the good-looking men in her path and shamelessly ogles the rest. (“My, what large and sinewy”—she pronounces it “sinoo-ey”—“muscles,” she purrs when she gets a glimpse of one farm boy. “Ooh, Sitting Bull,” she enthuses, peering at beefcake pictures in a little stereoscope viewer. “Not bad for a guy who’s been sittin’ all his life.”) Warren William, as the manager who loves her, is tasked with putting a crimp in her style—ostensibly because her contract says she’s not supposed to marry for seven years, but really, we get the feeling, because her sexual appetites are a little too anarchic. Lyle had a smallish role as a politician, Francis X. Harrigan, who is an old flame of Mavis’s, a stuffy young man who goes weak in the knees for her.

  For Lyle, it was pure fun. He was no longer afraid of West as he had been when he tried out for her play Sex years before. Now he found himself admiring her command of the picture—West was the only actress in Hollywood who wrote her own jokes and took a powerful role in shaping her movies—and delighting in the ease with which she could crack him up. Yes, she was ridiculously infatuated with herself, but she was also creative and endlessly amusing, and she liked him. Her current boyfriend and personal trainer, Johnny Indrisano, played a role in the movie (Mavis Arden’s chauffeur), so for Lyle there was no thought of turning his friendly banter with Miss West into anything more, even if he’d been so inclined. One afternoon when they were waiting for a romantic scene to be set up and lit, Lyle told West the story of how he’d auditioned for Sex and been so scared when he’d gotten the part that he fled town. “She thought it was the funniest thing she ever heard. She said, ‘You don’t feel that way about me now, do you?’ And I said, ‘Of course I’m not afraid of you. You’re terrific!’”

  In the scene they were shooting, she and Lyle’s character are meant to be canoodling in the moonlight on her balcony. “She said, ‘I tell you what. In this scene we’ve got, to hell with the dialogue we have. Let’s you and I just look at each other and mumble our lines. Let them imagine what we’re saying.’ So they were getting ready to shoot and the soundman said, ‘I can’t understand what they’re saying!’ And she said the hell with it! Henry Hathaway was the director. He was a tough guy, but he never got tough with Miss West. She was the boss; it was her picture and whatever she said went. . . . So she said, ‘Roll ’em!’ And that’s the way the scene is in the picture.”

  After the movie, West had plans to take a little play based on the movie on tour, and she picked Lyle to play the part of her manager and chief love interest. “I had a line where I come up to her room, and I say, ‘Miss West, there are about twenty-five newsmen down in the lobby waiting to see you.’ And she would look at me and do this thing, and it would just break me up. And she’d get angry. She’d say, ‘Now look, Talbot, you’re not supposed to laugh there.’ And I’d say, ‘Miss West, when I look at you and you say that line—“Send ’em up.” Long pause. “One at a time”—I can’t help it.’ And she really talked that way. She’d say, in that voice, ‘Where are you gonna have lunch? I think I’ll have a hamburger,’ and she’d sound, you know, like Mae West.”

  Not all of West’s young male costars felt as affectionate toward her as Lyle did. Cary Grant, who had played opposite her in She Done Him Wrong a few years earlier, thought that the actress one contemporary called “the greatest female impersonator of all time,” used all the male actors around her as “feeders.” As he told a writer for the Los Angeles Times, “With Mae West, that word ‘chattel’ about which the suffragettes of yore would snort does sort of creep into the picture, what?” Grant was not yet a big star and he acknowledged that being in a Mae West picture gave an actor a “magnificent break,” but still. “Haven’t you ever met a man that can make you happy?” his besotted character asks West’s Lady Lou. “Sure. Lots of times,” was the famous reply. That sort of said it all about West and her persona.

  Lyle canoodling with Mae West in Go West Young Man, 1936.

  WHAT ELSE HELD LYLE BACK? Well, there was charisma, the ineffable star quality. It’s a cliché, but we all know there’s something to it. And he didn’t have it—not the screen-commanding you-know-you-can’t-stop-watching-me kind. When he first came to Hollywood, fan magazines and newspaper columnists quickly anointed him the next Clark Gable. His bosses at the studio had that comparison in mind, too. In 1934, after Jack Warner watched It Happened One Night, the big hit from rival studio Columbia, he dashed off a memo to Hal B. Wallis saying that Lyle “should grow a mustache just like [Gable’s]. It gives him a sort of flash and good looks.”

  Lyle with a dubious Shirley Temple in a scene from Our Little Girl, 1936.

  Lyle dutifully grew a mustache, but it didn’t endow him with Gable’s he-man sexiness. (And it soon disappeared.) Instead, Lyle often conveyed a bit of foppishness, a juvenile quality, with a faint trace of the feminine in it, that sometimes played as inadvertently goofy. He seemed like an urban type, but he was not one of the edgy new city boys like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney or John Garfield. Then, too, he lacked the paradoxical quality that often makes a star—the elegant beauty who can show an earthy sensuality or the “Aw, shucks” all-American with an angry streak. Nor did he have the adorable imperfection—jug ears, a crooked smile—that will often seal the deal with fans. He did not project a large and distinctive personality that surrounded him like an aura from role to role. He possessed neither the soaring ambition nor the bottomless desire to be loved by the crowd that propels many stars. He had a small amount of both, because all performers need some, but he did not have them in the quantities of somebody, like, for example, Joan Crawford, who could declare that she remembered “every one of my important roles the way I remember a part of my life because at the time I did them, I was the role and it was my life for fourteen hours a day.”

  In retrospect, he thought he would have fared better at a studio other than Warners, one like Paramount or Columbia, which turned out a lot of light romances. In 1932, on loan to Columbia, he’d starred in No More Orchids opposite Carole Lombard; that was the sort of amusing lover’s role he felt he had a flair for, and the genre in which he’d made the best impression onstage. But the truth is, though he’s capable in that role, he’s also a little stiff. His best movies, actually, are the early Warner Brothers pre-Code pictures, with their crowded casts of stock players in small, vivid roles, and fidgety pacing. In those, he did particularly well playing weak-willed malefactors, not hard-ass ones: a dissolute actor who hangs himself after accidentally killing his party-girl date in Big City Blues, the oleaginous freeloader turned reluctant thug in Three on a Match, the preening, skirt-chasing football player in College Coach. All three movies are tight little exercises in cynicism and urban verve, as bright and winking as polished spoons.

  Starting in the mid-thirties, and even after Warner Brothers dropped his contract in 1936, Lyle worked steadily, often in the Other Man role. Sometimes he was the husband whom the heroine married on the rebound from the right guy who briefly looked wrong to her (Second Honeymoon, with Tyrone Power and Loretta Young). Sometimes he was the hometown boyfriend left behind (Second Fiddle, with the ice-skating champion Sonja Henie—whose dimples do most of her acting for her—and Tyrone Power again) or One Night of Love (with the Metropolitan Opera star Grace Moore). Sometimes he was the tempting, but ultimately resistible, alternative to an importantly distracted husband (Our Little Girl, where we know he will never really take Rosemary Ames away from husband Joel McCrea—not only because the Code would not allow it, or because his character has the Euro-trashy name “Rolfe” to go with his idle habits, but be
cause Ames and McCrea play the parents of Shirley Temple, for goodness’ sake). He was attractive enough to be a plausible rival and funny enough to squeeze some amusing moments out of his befuddlement when he’s thrown over (the audiences have seen it coming for miles; the Other Man never does).

  On the Twentieth Century–Fox lot, in 1936: from left, Marjorie Weaver, J. Edward Bromberg, Claire Trevor, Lyle, Loretta Young, Tyrone Power. Lyle looks like he’s still striding into a starry future here.

  One Night of Love, in particular, did very well—surprisingly, given its generous dollops of actual opera. Serious music lovers allowed themselves to hope—in vain, as it turned out—that the movies were launching a long and respectful romance with classical music. Lyle did not care for Moore. The blond Tennessee native was a “beautiful girl with a glorious soprano voice,” my father recalled. For a diva in that era, she was slim, too; her studio contract held her to a weight of 135 pounds and required weighings—which, reasonably enough, she refused. “But she wasn’t much of an actress; she was so used to projecting outward,” my father said. “Victor Schertzinger, the director, would say ‘You’re supposed to love this man! How about looking at him?’ Or he’d have to tell her, ‘Don’t worry: I’ll get the camera around to you.’” Besides that, Moore, it was rumored, refused to appear on any bill that included a black performer, which disturbed Lyle. Neither Tullio Carminati, her other costar, nor Schertzinger found her at all easy to work with. Still, they were all delighted when One Night of Love became an unlikely box-office hit—in Australia, it played at one theater for a full year—that was also nominated for four Oscars and created a short-lived fad for importing opera singers to Hollywood.