Writing in the magazine Films of the Golden Age, Laura Wagner summed up Lyle’s appeal and his liabilities in those years: “He played everything well. His leads were marked by an affable nature that made him valuable . . . he lightened the heaviest productions. Lyle Talbot’s sure-footed, but light handling could brighten anything.” And again: “His style was likeable, easy-going when needed, menacing when called for, but he did not possess the larger-than-life presence of the big stars.”
Then there was his drinking. Drinking itself—even heavy drinking—didn’t disqualify you for much in Hollywood. Not as long as you showed up for work, which Lyle, always the professional, did unfailingly. He might have been hungover, but he was always sharply dressed and finely groomed, always had his lines secure in his head. If your star was already on the wane, though, public drinking and its consequences could muddy your ledger.
And Lyle was getting into car accidents that were obviously the results of drunk driving. One night in October 1933, he totaled his car in a crash that also bashed in a corner of a house on one of the narrow, winding streets in Whitley Heights. He ended up in the hospital with a concussion, a possible skull fracture, and lacerations. In the papers, he credited the derby hat he’d been wearing with saving him from worse injury. He and Dorothy di Frasso had attended a costume party with a Gay Nineties theme, Lyle as a Bowery dandy and di Frasso as a barroom girl. His hat, he said, had served him like “an iron lid.” In March 1935, he pled guilty to charges of having been “drunk on the highway,” and was fined $150 and ordered “not to take a drink of liquor for 90 days.” A columnist in the Los Angeles Times crowed that the “lowdown on the arrest of Lyle Talbot in Beverly Hills is too tempting a morsel not to print. A member of a nightclubbing party, Talbot was advised strongly against attempting to drive in his own car home. In fact, taxicabs were ordered for him several times by well-meaning friends. One of them, fearful for the worst, sneaked out and took the keys from his auto. And so it was that when he was nabbed by traffic officers the engine of Talbot’s machine wasn’t functioning. Lyle had persuaded a member of his party to push him home with another automobile.”
Certainly there were Hollywood partyers who did far worse damage while drunk. In September 1935, for example, Busby Berkeley was driving one of the cars in an accident that killed two people and seriously injured five. The Breathalyzer test would not be adopted by law enforcement until the mid-1950s, and even its more primitive precursor, a contraption called the Drunkometer, was used only sporadically starting around 1938. Without that kind of proof, it was easier to fudge whether someone was actually intoxicated—though cops and witnesses would often report smelling liquor on a reckless driver, and that observation would sometimes make it into the papers. That was the case with Berkeley, who was nonetheless acquitted of second-degree murder charges after three trials (the first two ended with hung juries), and even managed to make a successful return to pictures.
Savvy studio PR people could sometimes perpetuate an ambiguous interpretation of what caused an accident. In the absence of blood-alcohol content or Breathalyzer tests, they could often prevent rumors of an actor’s drunkenness from hardening into something more like moral sanction. Sometimes, they could even create a spin for our sympathy. When Lyle was recovering from the accident in October 1933, he was photographed looking wan and vulnerable, his head fetchingly swathed in bandages like a doomed doughboy in a World War I melodrama. Lyle confessed to a reporter that he’d thought the accident would end his career because he’d sustained scars that would rule out even character parts. He found himself wondering what he could do instead, and thinking he could go back to Memphis where an old friend would give him a job in his drugstore or else to Omaha where he could be a night clerk in a hotel. Poor guy! Surely there were fans weeping into their Wheaties over that prospect.
Meanwhile, the papers were reporting that Lyle had received more “wires from more different girls than any patient ever” hospitalized at Cedars of Lebanon. The Countess di Frasso, whom he had dropped off at home just before the accident, was sending flowers and calling daily. And he was receiving regular visits from Judith Allen, a toothsome actress and former model with whom he had not previously been linked. Allen was the recently divorced wife of a football player turned professional wrestler named Gus Sonnenberg, and Sonnenberg was telling reporters that he was still in love with her but could not compete with “professional lovers” like Lyle. Allen didn’t seem to harbor any such tender regard for her ex: she had divorced him after four months of marriage while he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. When it came to ministering to ailing men, she evidently preferred them in Lyle’s barely, and rather rakishly, unsound condition. “That statement of [Sonnenberg’s] about professional lovers makes me angry,” she sniffed to a reporter. “It was most unkind but I can’t do anything about it. Lovers are born not made anyway. Perhaps if some were more considerate, they might get farther.” Ouch. Lyle, she proclaimed, “is the nicest boy I know.”
In October 1938, a fire broke out at Lyle’s Beverly Hills home and gave him a chance to show just how nice he could be. It’s not clear what started the blaze, but Lyle was at the house with his drinking buddy Franklin Parker, an actor he’d known in Nebraska who was struggling to make it in Hollywood. Parker had been too soused to go home and was the only guest still there after a late-night party that had trickled into the early-morning hours. And Lyle, it seemed, had rescued him. “Lyle Talbot played a real hero’s role today which may blight his screen career,” said the AP account of the fire. “His hands, neck, arms and head were burned so severely in a $50,000 fire that he may never again appear before a camera. Witnesses saw Mr. Talbot, trapped on the second floor by flames that started at ground level, trying desperately to drag Mr. Parker, who was unconscious, out on a porch roof from a bedroom. Choking with smoke, his pajamas aflame, he finally got Mr. Parker to safety and then leaped twenty feet to the ground.” Lyle was hospitalized again, but his burns turned out to be less severe than originally reported, and certainly did not blight his screen career.
One person who was not so impressed with Lyle’s actions that night was his wife of just under two years. On March 28, 1937, Lyle had married for the second time. The new Mrs. Talbot was a petite, dark-haired New York socialite named Marguerite Cramer, whom he had known for only three months when they married. My father never said anything about her. Not to his children—though that was a given, because his previous marriages were never spoken of in our household. But apparently not to anyone else, either. In articles and interviews in the 1930s and early 1940s, Lyle did occasionally mention his first wife, Elaine Melchior. Later in life, he talked about Lina Basquette, Estelle Taylor, and the Countess di Frasso; sometimes he referred to them, delicately, as “friends,” but he clearly got a kick out of his memories of these formidable women and of others he’d flirted with but never gotten into bed—like Carole Lombard. But he never spoke about Marguerite Cramer. Maybe the habit of discretion about his former wives was too ingrained, and maybe in her case, he didn’t trust himself to say anything kind.
Cramer did “rush to his bedside” in the hospital after the fire, but she had been staying elsewhere that night and she wasn’t at all happy about the loss of some of her furs and jewels in the conflagration. (One thing the couple apparently had in common was a passion for clothes. The AP reported that firemen had managed to save “scores of her costly gowns,” along with “forty suits, 100 shirts and about 400 neckties” of Lyle’s.) When Cramer sued for divorce, she cited her husband’s reputation as “a nightclub Romeo.” Cramer told a Los Angeles judge that Lyle “didn’t seem to care about me or our home. He liked to go out to nightclubs without me. Frequently I heard reports about his attending these clubs in the company of other women.”
The fact was that whatever the combination of forces working against stardom for Lyle—the drinking, the early union agitation, a certain something lac
king in the animal magnetism department, a failure to be cast more often in the romantic comedy roles he thought he was best at—the odds for all actors were against a successful leap into the stratosphere. It was extremely rare to get noticed and signed by a studio; it was almost as rare, once you were signed, to become a star. An article that appeared in Motion Picture Daily in January 1934 gives a good idea of the chances. Of the one hundred newcomers signed by eight studios that year, seven went on to become stars: Ida Lupino, Fred Astaire, Claude Rains, Nelson Eddy, Ethel Merman, Charles Boyer, and Margaret Sullavan. About the same number worked steadily, though not usually in leading roles: Mona Barrie, Claire Trevor, Gail Patrick, Alice Faye, Buster Crabbe, and Frances Lederer. The rest are names that an Internet search will turn up very little for: Neysa Nourse, Chick Chandler, Earl Oxford, Ellalee Ruby, Dean Benton—the list goes on. Some of them continued to play bit roles in movies for years to come, and to be fair, they may have been signed to do supporting roles in the first place. Some disappeared from the business altogether.
Probably Lyle knew, by the late 1930s, that he wasn’t going to be a star. He must have been disappointed, but he wasn’t saying so. And maybe his disappointment wasn’t deep; what he’d always wanted, after all, was to be a lifelong working actor, and at that he still had a chance.
One group that did not accept this concession to reality—and for whom Lyle always kept up a gamely glamorous face—was the Lyle Talbot Fan Club. He may have been a nightclub Romeo to his wife, a fading commodity to his studio, and a danger to himself and anyone else on the road at the same time, but to his fans, Lyle was still a star-in-the-making.
Fan culture had changed a great deal since the earliest days of film, when viewers successfully pressured the studios to release the names of the actors and actresses who were initially uncredited and anonymous. People had been watching performers on screen since 1898, but at first they knew the leading ones only by the names of their studios. Soon moviegoers were writing letters addressed to “the Biograph girl” or “the Vitagraph girl.” Producers had been unprepared for the intense curiosity about the people in pictures, but they quickly saw its worth. In 1910, the producer Carl Laemmle revealed the name of his new leading actress, Florence Lawrence—and then cooked up a bit of publicity for her by spreading a phony report that she’d been killed in a streetcar accident—and the reign of namelessness was over for good. Fans were free to adore the actors and actresses they set their hearts on, to imagine lives for them beyond the screen, and to find out as much about those lives as they could.
For a while, that wasn’t much. The first movie magazine, Motion Picture Story, came out in 1911, but it was, for several years, a comparatively staid affair, devoted to running story adaptations of films. Later in 1911 it was joined by Photoplay, which became the most famous of the fan magazines. By the early 1920s, there were perhaps a dozen others, catering to what was by then a familiar term and phenomenon: movie fans. The word fan, short for fanatic and connoting an enthusiast of some popular spectacle, came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, applied mostly to male baseball lovers. By the 1910s, it was at least as commonly deployed to describe ardent moviegoers, who were more often female than male. Not only Motion Picture Story itself but virtually all of its successors had adapted to new readers and new desires, running more of what we’ve come to expect from the fan genre: squibs about forthcoming movies, articles about the stars’ childhoods, love lives, and tastes in interior decorating, along with Hollywood-tested beauty, fashion, and grooming tips.
Over time, some fans found these sources suspect, or at least unsatisfying. The articles, they soon figured out, were based on biographical material furnished and sometimes manufactured by press agents and studio publicity departments. They distrusted “bunk” and “ballyhoo” and wanted to know more about their favorite actors’ actual lives, to assess for themselves the distance between the roles they played or the personae they represented and their non-acting selves. Like Reformation Protestants seeking a direct relationship with God, these fans wanted a conduit to their favorite performer that was unmediated by another entity.
The 1930s saw the growth of fan clubs that arose from the grass roots, independent of the studios and often devoted to one particular actor or actress. Younger performers and those who sang as well as acted—Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Bing Crosby—were particularly popular magnets for fan clubs, which linked fervent and knowledgeable moviegoers within neighborhoods and cities and across the country. They saw themselves as lobbyists—or boosters—for the performer of their choice, since a big part of what club members did, in addition to socializing and often publishing a newsletter, was to write letters to the studios demanding better or more suitable parts for him or her.
They also sought, and often achieved, a relationship of some kind with their admired performer: exchanging letters and presents, and in some cases being invited to meet the star on a studio tour in Hollywood or when the star visited a club president’s hometown. In America at the Movies, a 1939 study of movie audiences, the anthropologist Margaret Thorp made special note of the new fan club phenomenon. Thorp described what she said was a common scene, but one that is almost impossible to imagine today, when the scale of celebrity and the coverage of it have become so much bigger and more unwieldy. “When the star visits New York or some other city,” wrote Thorp, “the local fan club members make it their duty to act as her bodyguard. They follow her about the streets and into shops, attracting as much attention as they can from a populace who might otherwise remain in ignorance of the glory passing in their midst.”
The fan clubbers were often quite opinionated and not so awestruck by the Hollywood glamour machine that they withheld pointed commentary. An article in the Los Angeles Times in 1934 drew attention to a new boldness on the part of the more savvy fans. “Back in those dear, dead days of the silent screen, nine out of every ten fans’ letters would read: I think you are swell. Please send me your picture.” But now, the article went on, letter writers were just as likely to be critiquing a star’s new hairstyle or offering advice on the roles she should take: “People write a much more critical epistle now.” Whereas fan mail had once gone almost exclusively to actors and actresses, now it was often addressed to studio executives as well. Fans chided executives for miscasting or neglecting their favorite performers, or suggested books and news stories that ought to be adapted for the movies. The article even offered the (somewhat suspiciously precise) claim that “last year alone, forty-two productions were made because fans requested or suggested them.”
Moreover, while fan clubbers were intoxicated by their chosen honoree, they could snap out of their reveries if he or she let them down. They gave themselves credit for supporting and promoting performers, and expected some respect and attention in return or they would switch their allegiances. Thorp tells an anecdote about the 150 members of a Jane Withers fan club who showed up at the actress’s studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, and were barred at the gates. When Warner Brothers PR people heard the tale, “they hurried down to capture the delegation and entertain them on their own lot.” The club decided on the spot to rechristen itself after a Warner Brothers actress.
One big reason these more insistent and knowing fans were coming to the fore was that conditions of spectatorship had changed and given movie viewers a greater feeling of command and intimacy. Hearing performers speak fostered a new connection: however beautiful and glamorous, the performers on screen seemed more human, less hieratic and distant, than they had when they beamed their charisma at audiences in mysterious silence. All the more so if they had Brooklyn accents or cracked their gum or squeaked a little when they talked.
Movie theaters in the 1930s were different, too. The silent era and particularly the 1920s had been the apotheosis of the movie palace: the grand, imposing theater with the vast lobby and sweeping staircase, often designed in an exotic or self-consciously histo
rical style—Moorish or Gothic or “Oriental.” The ostentatious architecture had been an answer to moviemakers’ anxieties about whether their product was an art form, one that could attract viewers beyond the mostly working-class patrons of the early nickelodeons. (If you watched your movies in a palace, then surely they were art.) By the 1930s, that particular anxiety was largely laid to rest. People of all classes were going to the movies, whether the movies were art or not.
The movie theaters of the 1930s reflected a new architectural and social vision, one best articulated by the young architect Ben Schlanger, who designed theaters all over the country. (His first was the Thalia, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which opened in 1931.) These theaters were smaller, with 500 to 800 seats, as opposed to the 1,500 to 3,000 of the movie palaces. They were being built in suburbs and neighborhoods, not just downtowns, where most of the movie palaces had been. In design, they were often Art Moderne—or in any case, simpler, more streamlined, and more likely to feature industrial materials like chrome and aluminum. Instead of offering box and loge seats that cost more, as the movie palaces had, in imitation of legitimate theaters, the new theaters sold tickets at a uniform price and provided seating on the same level.
What they sacrificed in luxury, the new theaters made up for in comfort. In the early 1930s, theaters started selling popcorn (candy came next, and soft drinks in the 1940s)—a practice that had been thought too déclassé for the movie palaces. By the late 1930s, most movie theaters had air-conditioning, too—they were among the first public spaces you could count on for a blast of cool air on a hot day. There’s a great Ben Shahn photograph that shows a movie theater in a small Ohio town in 1938. The passersby are formally dressed in that 1930s way—suits, ties, and hats on the men, dresses and stockings for the women—though it must be hot outside. The marquee of the theater advertises the movie One Wild Night and its stars: Lyle Talbot and June Lang. But beneath the marquee and in much bigger letters is one intoxicating word—COOL—that clearly refers to the temperature inside, not the film being shown.
The Entertainer Page 31
