Together, the advent of talking pictures and the new theaters made for a more intimate, relaxed, and democratic moviegoing experience, and it probably gave spectators more of a sense that they could talk back. In any case, it was certainly good for moviegoing. In 1939, 85 million people a week were going to the movies, out of an American population of 130 million. Some of those people may have been repeat viewers, so that, in Margaret Thorp’s estimation, perhaps “not more than” 40 million people were seeing movies twice a week. But “not more than” seems the wrong phrase here. The numbers had been climbing since 1912, when 16 million Americans went to the movies each week, reaching 40 million in the early 1920s, and taking a dip, as we saw, only in 1933. Most people could get to a movie theater fairly easily—with the notable exception of black Americans, who were still banned from many theaters, and not only in the South. With 17,000 cinemas in the United States, in small towns as well as big cities, movie-going was no longer chiefly an urban pursuit. As Thorp wrote, “It is not surprising to find theaters, big and little, in the cities, but there are more than three thousand small towns, numbering their citizens by hundreds, which have moving picture theaters.” These were the towns where my father had once entertained in tent shows and theater troupes, and movies had largely replaced those. Along with radio, the movies had created a national market for entertainment, a mass culture. You were as likely to know about Shirley Temple or Mae West—or Lyle Talbot, for that matter—if you lived in Walla Walla, Washington; Enid, Oklahoma; or New York City.
Lyle’s fan club and his relationship with it were emblematic of the new fan culture. The Talbot club had members all over the country—from Bangor, Maine, to Oakland, California, but its executive officers were two sisters, Lillian and Frances Kerzner, who lived in Malverne, on Long Island. The Kerzners published a newsletter called The Talbot Tabloid, with articles written by club members, and the tone of it was wry, chatty, and modern. The members were mostly women, many, it seemed, in their twenties and thirties. (The Motion Picture Herald said a typical fan club member fit this profile: a woman between the ages of sixteen and forty-five.) There were fewer teenagers than you might think, and they come across as more levelheaded than you’d expect them to be. They’re smitten with Lyle, but they poke a bit of fun at themselves for it. Three on a Match was such a sordid picture it gave club member Helen Raether “the orks” to think of; she liked Lyle “slightly tough, but in a perfectly nice way you understand.”
The women who wrote for the newsletter remind me of the kind of wisecracking, self-respecting best friends who would be played in the movies by Eve Arden or Celeste Holm. In almost every issue, one of the members writes a profile of another of the members, appropriating the style of fan-magazine star profiles. They had clearly learned the lessons about the self that Hollywood taught: that people were an accretion of piquant details to be sifted through and selected for public presentation, that those details should be particular but not bizarre or eccentric, that apparent paradoxes made for a more intriguing persona, that it was important to project youthfulness and vivacity and that these could help make up for deficiencies in natural beauty, and that we all express something vital about ourselves through our shopping habits.
Though they were to some extent imitating a new formula—the superficial celebrity profile—there is also genuine, teasing warmth in what they say about one another. They write admiringly about each other’s slim figures and natural curls and surprising talents. They make note of one another’s pet likes and dislikes. There was Irene Lubkeman, whose father ran a delicatessen in Brooklyn where she sometimes helped out—and happily noshed on everything in sight—when she wasn’t taking a typing course at business school. Irene played basketball “like a professional,” her fellow fan club member effused, and loved to “dance and dance and dance.” Alice Walls of New York City was the young mother of three sons, but she was still awfully fond of “jazz, candy and clothes” and couldn’t stand to sit still, even under the hair dryer. Lillian Kerzner, said her sister, had “more pep, energy and vitality than any other six persons I know. Her pet likes are Chow Mein and Chocolate Layer Cake—at different times, you dumbbells!!” Frances Kerzner, a beautician, hated Long Island and spent “a good part of the day reading. One day it will be the works of Shakespeare or Tolstoi and the next day it will be a ten cent love story magazine.” In some ways, these squibs anticipate Facebook posts—except that in these, the women are writing about their friends, not themselves. In fact, the Talbot Tabloid writers devoted about as much space to touting one another and securing their friendships as they did to saluting Lyle, and it’s touching to see how these ordinary but game women built one another up.
When they weren’t writing brightly about their daily activities, or reminding one another how delightful the namesake who’d brought them together was, fan club members were bemoaning the lack of good roles for Lyle. “Seriously,” wrote one, “hasn’t it been hard to see Lyle in such poor roles, knowing his capabilities? Most of his parts, until his work with Universal, didn’t have anything desirable. I’m not in favor of having him continually cast, from now on, as a toothpaste-ad hero; far from it. I only mean that he should have varied roles. A villainish part that provides a chance for characterization is every bit as good a role as that of a hero.” They had a healthy sense of their own importance as fans: “I wonder if you ever stopped to realize just how much you owe to your fans?” Violet M. Platzer wrote in an open letter to Lyle. “We all realize you have what it takes to get across, but how many others have that and yet get nowhere. The answer is plenty, and the reason is that they have no fans.” They crafted funny little tributes to Lyle like this one: “To you and Only you: on his birthday. The wishes we’re wishing / The thoughts that we think / would blister the paper / and sizzle the ink: So out in the open / all that we dare say is Many More Happy Returns of the DAY.”
In return, Lyle wrote them regularly, telling them how “clever” they were and how “grand” their writing was: “The new Tabloid just came and it’s perfectly swelegant.” When they sent him gifts, he was delighted: “I am very happy with my cigarette case and lighter. I had several cases but none that I could wear with evening clothes, so it’s just what I needed.” He was “tickled to death” when they sent an album of snapshots of all the members: “I feel as though I know each and every one so much better now.” When Warner Brothers declined to renew his contract, he wrote the club members about it right away, sounding and perhaps truly feeling hopeful: “It was all quite amicable, but anyway I’m free now. It’s a grand feeling after all these years.” Like many clubs devoted to one performer, the Lyle Talbot Fan Club enlisted the endorsements of other celebrities. Joan Crawford was the honorary vice president and Warren William the honorary secretary. Crawford wrote to the Talbot club, sending personal updates on what she was working on and wearing. (In an upcoming movie: “My clothes are all of an extreme tailored design—even the evening clothes—and I think you will be interested in seeing them.”)
One memorable afternoon in June 1935, Lyle himself showed up to visit the Kerzner sisters. He called from the train station in Long Island, with his father in tow, and Mrs. Kerzner went to pick them up. When they got to the house, Lillian Kerzner wrote, in the most sensational Talbot Tabloid dispatch ever, “we were all jabbering away as fast as we could and Mother flew to the kitchen to get the good ole coffee pot a-percolating. Evelyn made highballs, in which she forgot to put the ice. But still n’ all, she knows how to mix ’em.” Ed Henderson “came into the kitchen and kept us busy laughing while we were getting together a light repast. I dimly recall cutting up some delicious pickles and then going to work on a cake. But I came into my senses again when I missed the cake and cut my finger. After the proper amount of sympathy from Mother, which was ‘Forget it!’ I got busy again.
“While we were eating, I was sitting across from Lyle and I wish you all could have seen what I saw. He has the largest,
clear blue eyes I’ve ever seen. They are the kind that seem to see right through you, if you know what I mean. A more handsome man you wouldn’t want to meet, and girls, don’t you love that tiny widow’s peak that you can’t help but notice whenever you look at his picture?”
And Lyle put his keyed-up fans at ease, too. He ambled over to the piano, noticed a framed picture of himself sitting atop it, and said, “Who’s this guy?” He got down on hands and knees and played with the Kerzner family hound dog, Spunky. He told the gals about his and his father’s brush with Greta Garbo on the train, how he’d been foolish enough to think the reporters gathered on the platform were there for him, and how Miss Garbo had asked him to go ahead and act as though they were to protect her. He warned the ladies to watch out for his father; he seemed like a nice old gentleman, but he liked to crawl under the table and nip people’s legs.
By that time, two other fan club members, Della Feil and Gladys Hiltonsmith, had heard the rumor that Lyle was in their midst and hurried over to take a peek. “I wonder if Gladys has gotten over it yet,” Lillian Kerzner wrote, and you can practically hear her chuckling to herself. “While Mr. Henderson was having a second cup of coffee with Mother, Della and Gladys, Gladys was stretching her neck to see Lyle, who was in the living room with the girls, and saying such things as ‘Isn’t he grand? So handsome too, etc.’ Poor Lyle blushed all over the place. I wonder if he realizes that he did. Then Grace Wilson came down the block and I’m surprised she wasn’t running after the way she pushed her boyfriend out of the car when she heard Lyle was here. Her boyfriend was peeved and said, ‘What’s he got that I haven’t got?’ Grace didn’t even stop to answer.”
• • •
GRACE AND THE KERZNERS and their friends were at once harbingers of the future and relics of the past. In the decades to come, it would be less and less likely that a well-known actor would drop by a fan’s house or encourage a pack of fans to trail her on a shopping expedition. The connection between celebrities and their audiences would become more distant, more mediated. (One could argue that celebrities who tweet are creating a more direct line of communication with their fans—but many of their tweets are written by staff, and they go out to thousands or millions.) They were also learning to be modern media consumers—to be charmed by movie stars but not overwhelmed by them, to live in the world of celebrity without either turning their back on it or becoming unstrung by the fact that they themselves were not celebrities. As the film historian Samantha Barbas writes, in Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity: “Fans joined clubs and wrote fan letters not only to praise their idols but to become individually involved in what seemed like a distant, impersonal form of mass entertainment. Fans barraged studios with advice and suggestions not merely out of selfishness but from a firm conviction that they were valued Hollywood consumers whose opinions deserved to be acknowledged. Hard workers and great dreamers, fans tried diligently to create a democracy of entertainment in which audiences, as much as studios, had a say in the filmmaking process.” Sometimes producers did pay attention—and tailor publicity campaigns or consider casting choices in the light of fans’ comments. But generally, “the story of film fandom is the story of an education: how fans learned to exert their power as activists and consumers, but also how to accept the limitations of their influence.” In the end it was a matter of conceding the territory to the glamour specialists, while retaining an upbeat willingness to be entertained, combining delight with a sense of irony and critical perspective. That, it turns out, was how to live in the world of celebrity and mass entertainment, and fans like the Talbot club members, fond of Lyle as they were, seemed to be learning it.
Chapter 9
BROADWAY AND B MOVIES
The critics were not impressed with Separate Rooms, a new play that opened on Broadway in March 1940. In one of the kinder notices, The Hollywood Reporter called it “a lightweight bit of farcical risgayety.” The New Yorker, meanwhile, predicted a quick demise. Separate Rooms packed in “more gags than you would think possible”—a definite strike against it, according to the magazine’s sophisticated correspondent, especially since “a good average one” was “‘Butlers should be seen, not obscene.’ If you’re still interested, you’d better hurry.” The play was a brittle bauble that told the story of a spoiled actress; the clueless, besotted playwright she marries when he writes her a hit, only to ban him from the bedroom after the vows; and the playwright’s brother, a Walter Winchell–like columnist who threatens to expose the actress’s past indiscretions unless she becomes a real wife to her frustrated husband. It was, said Billboard, “the sort of thing that the stage tossed upon the Flushing dump about 20 years ago—a little farce that is utterly meaningless and discouragingly unfunny” except for some “genuinely amusing lines” in the last act “that must have crept in in disguise.” The New York Times concluded disdainfully that if you were the sort who liked “the joke the boys are telling,” then you would get a “nice dirty laugh.”
Most reviewers did pay grudging tribute to the show’s stars—Lyle, Glenda Farrell, and Alan Dinehart. Farrell was nice to look at, the Times magnanimously pointed out, and as for Lyle, even the appalled Billboard reviewer allowed that “saddled with the terrible role of the playwright, [he] really tries hard and does surprisingly well with it.” Still, things did not look at all auspicious for Separate Rooms. Glenda Farrell, Lyle’s old pal from Warner Brothers, had been playing a motor-mouthed reporter named Torchy Blane in a seven-movie series back in Hollywood. Farrell certainly had the fast-talking thing down pat—in one of the Torchy movies, she delivered a four-hundred-word speech in forty seconds—but she had been hoping that the New York stage would let her show she “could do more than talk out of the corner of my mouth.” Now she figured she wouldn’t be in New York long enough to change anybody’s mind about her. Lyle was tired of playing heavies and cops in forgettable movies—the latest was Parole Fixer, a film made by Universal with the cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover, part of a series based on FBI files. It earned him the slightly creepy admiration of Hoover (who sent him a highly flattering portrait of himself in charcoal) and a trip to Washington to try out the FBI firing range, but not much in the way of better roles. Lyle had escaped from Hollywood hoping to stay for a while in the quickening air of Manhattan, energized by the crowds and the clamor and the smart talk, thrilled to be acting in front of a live audience again. Then the reviews came in for Separate Rooms and he assumed he’d soon be heading back to the West Coast, and not in style.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Flushing dump. Separate Rooms began selling out the theater. At first, it managed this feat through gimmickry. The show’s desperate press agent gave out two-for-one tickets all over town. He booked the three leads on every radio show he could find, had them doing ads for toothpaste, cold cream, sheer silk stockings, and Melofelt hats. A few weeks into the show’s run at a Thirty-ninth Street theater, the audiences were coming on their own, paying full price, and laughing uproariously, especially in the busy last act. Soon after that, the show moved to a bigger, more prestigious Broadway venue, the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street.
This was the spring of 1940. Hitler and Stalin had signed their cooperation pact; the Nazis had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and occupied Poland; in June, they would be marching down the Champs-Élysées. However reluctantly, Americans were gearing up for war. But Broadway offered comparatively few plays dealing with themes of war or fascism. And of those, hardly any were successes. “With the exception of a few noble failures, such as Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind, which attempted to damn isolationists for all time, and modest successes such as John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano,” writes home-front historian Richard Lingeman, “Broadway failed to mirror the larger real-life drama convulsing the world. . . . Indeed, it appeared that Broadway, becoming increasingly prosperous as war money flowed into the box office, became more and more escapist as the war
went on.” The plays that did particularly well just before and during the war were comedies and musicals; one of them, Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, was about military life, but only in the most lighthearted and rollicking way. (“This is the Army, Mr. Jones! / No private rooms or telephones!”) Oklahoma! debuted in 1943 and became an immediate and understandable sensation. Harder to credit was the popularity of Harvey, a play about a man and his outsized imaginary rabbit that did boffo box office, as Variety would say, in the 1942–1943 season.
A play like Separate Rooms may have been devoid of meaningful, socially engaged themes, but it probably reminded audiences of some of the pre-Code movies that had distracted them during the Depression. They liked the Deco penthouse set, the beautiful, form-fitting gowns, the barrage of cheerful double entendres. And they liked seeing actors from the screen on the stage. It was a relative novelty then for movie actors to make the trek to New York to act in a play, even though many of them had started there. Critics were often dismissive of these “Hollywood refugees.” Actors in Hollywood might “moon, pant and sigh for the legitimate stage,” the critic of one Chicago newspaper complained in an article headlined “Sunkist Actors: A Bit Overripe,” but “too few of them bother either to equip themselves for it or to pick plays that justify their leaving the Coast, which cans salmon and films with equal facility.” When Leslie Howard appeared in Hamlet and Katharine Hepburn in Jane Eyre, “each drew to the theater crowds of movie-goers, eager to see their gods in person,” but neither had chosen a suitable vehicle. “Miss Hepburn was wooden” and “did little more than impress critics with her determination to be an actress someday.”
The Entertainer Page 32
