The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Theatergoers, on the other hand, relished the chance to see Sunkist movie actors in three dimensions, even if some of those actors were trying to jumpstart moribund Hollywood careers. As a writer for Gotham Life magazine noted, Separate Rooms had the distinction of being a virtually all-Hollywood cast. (Dinehart was a character actor in the movies, as was Jack Smart, the funny big man who played the butler in the play.) Word got out that movie people were going to see the play. “Every visiting screenite heads first for Separate Rooms,” claimed Gotham Life, “to chin about the play and about mutual friends.” The actresses Mary Brian, Constance Bennett, and Simone Simon had all been to see it and to hang out backstage. Celebrities drew more celebrities from different fields. Mayor La Guardia was in the audience one night, as were former mayor Jimmy Walker and young Winthrop Rockefeller. If you bought a ticket, there was always a chance you might be sitting next to a star or a scion.

  On August 18, 1940, Separate Rooms played its 171st show (generally, a Broadway show was considered a success if it made the one-hundred-show mark), an occasion The New York Times marked with a hat-tipping, head-shaking article called “Saga of a Play That Was Brave Under Fire.” The show’s “peculiar elixir of life” consisted of “a public which finds the show immensely funny even if critics did not,” and “the superior showmanship” through which the production reached that public. Separate Rooms would go on to play 613 performances, during which none of the three principals missed a show, and would not close till September 1941.

  It was a lively and eventful run. One night, Farrell sprained her ankle backstage between acts and the stage manager made the proverbial call for a doctor in the house. The man who answered it was Henry Ross, a West Point–educated staff surgeon at New York’s Polyclinic Hospital. He was a bachelor. Farrell was thirty-six and had been a single mother, raising her son from a youthful first marriage, for more than a decade. Doctor and patient took an immediate liking to each other, began dating, and married in January 1941 (in the afternoon so she could do the play that night). They would remain together till Farrell died in 1971.

  One evening in August 1940, a man who tried to hold up a store on Eighth Avenue fled on foot, exchanging shots with a policeman and pursued by a crowd. The fugitive, described by The New York Times as a “slender, sallow man with a small mustache,” dodged between taxicabs, and at one point tried to commandeer one. The cabdriver shoved him out and drove off at high speed. Waving his pistol, the man dashed down Forty-fifth Street between Eighth and Broadway till he got to the Plymouth Theatre and tried to muscle his way through the stage door a few minutes before the curtain rose on Act One of Separate Rooms. James Mitchell, whom the Times referred to as the “Negro porter at the Plymouth,” managed to block the gunman but took a bullet in the foot. The fugitive, who was later identified as Julio Lima, the son of a Cuban army officer, shot himself in the temple after being shot in the leg by a policeman. Lima fell dead across the threshold of the stage door. The show went on that night, and the cast took up a collection to pay for the porter’s medical expenses.

  Though Dinehart was a cowriter of the play, he and the other stars knew they weren’t exactly doing Kaufman and Hart. (They weren’t even doing Abbott and Costello.) Given that Separate Rooms wasn’t likely to enter the canon and the words weren’t indelible, they figured they might as well have some fun ad-libbing. The Broadway audiences would be savvy enough to see what they were doing and get a kick out of it, and they would keep themselves from getting bored. Lyle, in particular, liked puns, and deployed them merrily. Moreover, even if the audience didn’t want serious war-related material, they responded to topical references. “Dinehart had no shame and I didn’t have any shame about getting a laugh,” Lyle would recall years later. “We did not moon the audience, but we did just about everything else, and we would try to top each other. . . . We did ridiculous things that worked.” They made jokes about the small privations of war preparedness. Gas stations were now open only limited hours, so when Jack Smart was called upon to run across the stage in one scene, Lyle ad-libbed. “He has to get to the gas station by eight o’clock.” The audience laughed, more out of a collective sense of recognition than anything else. “We had a matinee on the Fourth of July and somebody shot a firecracker out on Forty-fifth Street, and Glenda had just made an exit. I said, ‘She left with a bang,’ and they howled. We’d do shameless things, really awful.”

  For the year-and-a-half run of the play, Lyle lived at the Royalton on West Forty-fourth Street. It was then a residential hotel, built in 1898, and rather grand in an understated way, with a red-and-yellow-striped awning at the entrance and a handsome brick facade adorned with Romanesque arches. The Royalton was the longtime home to a number of actors, actresses, and theater reviewers, including George Jean Nathan, the dean of New York drama critics. When Nathan panned Separate Rooms, Lyle tore the offending page from the newspaper, scrawled “You stink, too!” on it and stuck it under the critic’s door. But—and this was typical of Lyle—by the next day, sober again no doubt, he thought better of it. He’d been childish, the man was entitled to his opinions, and besides, why antagonize him? So Lyle threw on his dressing gown and dashed downstairs to retrieve the message. Luckily the maid was there. She’d found the message first, and she liked Mr. Talbot. He was so kind and so well turned out, and he’d learned her name right away. Mr. Nathan wasn’t in—he was traveling, in fact—and she was happy to restore the defaced review to its sheepish defacer. Not that the caustic and urbane Nathan would have given a second thought to an insult of the caliber “You stink, too!” Imagine the theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, a character based on Nathan, reacting to such an outburst, and you get the picture. “I drink,” Nathan once said, “to make other people interesting.”

  Lyle, meanwhile, was loving life. In a column titled “Broadway Stage Proving Life Saver for Film Stars,” Louella Parsons wrote that she’d caught up with him and that he kept saying, “Isn’t New York wonderful?” Who could blame him? There he was, living at the elegant Royalton, with his extensive collection of jazz and swing records, and his two dogs, a cocker spaniel and a German shepherd. A reporter for Gotham Life magazine who interviewed him over frozen daiquiris one night at the Circus Bar, noted that Lyle cut short the interview, saying, “My gosh, I have a few friends at home waiting to go for a walk with me. They’ve been home since before tonight’s performance and I’m pretty sure they are anxious to go for a little walk by now. Excuse me, I must hurry. Even thoroughbreds can’t hold on forever.”

  In the evenings, he made the short walk to the theater, sometimes stopping for a frankfurter or a warm jacket potato from one of the vendors. He loved the blue velvet of dusk as it settled over the city but did nothing to muffle its symphonic din. He loved the candy-apple red of the neon signs, the sunflower yellow of the cabs, and the unexpected privacy of walking under a black umbrella in the rain on a busy New York street. He loved the way the porter greeted him every night at the stage door, with an ironic bow, and how Glenda, looking chic and radiant, gave him her soft, powdered cheek for a kiss, and he loved knowing that when the show was over that night, the night would really only just have begun.

  Lyle was certainly making himself at home in the stylish nightclubs and eateries of New York. Now close to forty, he had put on weight, but he dressed, as always, with great care, and the New York papers often ran squibs about his look for the night. (“Style flash: Lyle Talbot at Bill Bertolotti’s, in a gray sharkskin suit striped with green and red, blue shirt with white collar, and blue and silver figured tie.”) He was seen at La Conga, the Rainbow Room, the Stork Club, El Morocco, and Ben Marden’s Riviera, the nightclub perched high above the Hudson River, just across the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The Riviera was a splendid place, with an Art Deco design reminiscent of an ocean liner, portholes and all. It had a terraced ballroom, a serpentine bar, and a revolving stage. The carpets were plush, the lea
ther smoking chairs were the latest in comfort, and the walls glowed with brilliantly colored murals by the painter Arshile Gorky. It had its own barbershop, masseur, and shoe-shine stand. And best of all, the Riviera’s domed roof retracted to reveal the night sky and splash the revelers with moonlight.

  At Manny Wolf’s Chop House, the restaurant’s newsletter reported, “Lyle Talbot [could] go four fast rounds with anything from a set of pork chops to breast of baby pheasant.” For late nights, he liked the brash and noisy Leon and Eddie’s on Fifty-second Street, an establishment that was less exclusive than some of the swanker clubs—it catered to out-of-town businessmen and even families as well as celebs—but also less likely to attract the gangster element. The show at Leon and Eddie’s was like The Ed Sullivan Show with a burlesque component and no rock ’n’ roll. It featured troupes of midgets, jugglers, hoofers, ventriloquists, harmonica duos, stand-up comics, and blue patter and songs from the club’s host, Eddie Davis (“Myrtle Isn’t Fertile Anymore” was a perennial favorite), who always got the crowd to sing along. Leon and Eddie’s also employed two rather special resident strippers. Sherry Britton had broken into the business with a gimmick in which she balanced a glass of water on each breast. She was well spoken and kind of elegant—she favored chiffon evening gowns and a Tchaikovsky score for her act, and had a remarkable eighteen-inch waist. “I used to strip down to an itsy-bitsy G-string and nothing else,” Britton recalled years later. “Not even pasties. I did this in the evening during the dinner hour when lots of children were in the audience. Please remember that this was March 1941. But my body was so perfect and I did it with such good taste that no one ever thought of complaining—quite the opposite!” (She was sometimes billed as “Great Britton—the stripteuse with brains.”) Then there was Lois De Fee, who was six feet tall and had started out as a bouncer at the club, where she would later be known as the “Queen of the Glamazons” or the “Eiffel Eyeful.” Sunday nights were celebrity nights, and you never knew who would stand up to do a spiel—it might be Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Danny Kaye, or Jerry Lewis. There were four shows a night, the first starting at eight p.m. The last, which started at three a.m., was popular with actors like Lyle who had been working in the evening, then eating a late supper at some quieter spot (though he liked the “Boston Caviar”—otherwise known as baked beans—at Leon and Eddie’s).

  Of course, being Lyle, he did not go to these places alone. During his stay in New York, Lyle squired around a beautiful blond showgirl from the Riviera named Ann Staunton, a twenty-one-year-old actress named Linda Brent, and the comedienne Judy Canova, among others. Dorothy Kilgallen, the journalist who was then writing a column about Broadway for the Hearst papers, dubbed him “the dream prince,” and kept her eye trained on him. In one column she observed that “Lyle Talbot sat on the ringside with a new blonde (are there any new blondes left?), but I would say from the number of times he was called to the telephone that quite a few of the old blondes were trying to get in touch with him.” In another, Kilgallen suggested that “some feature writer with a lot of time and patience really ought to follow Lyle around for a week and do a play-by-play piece on him. . . . The whole town—at least the gossip-oriented section of the town—seems more interested in his romances than in anything else in life.” When Lyle was seen on the town with Canova, Kilgallen professed a bit of confusion. Canova was plain-looking, with a line of comedy that ran to cornpone dorkiness. She had started her career as part of a vaudeville singing trio, the Three Georgia Crackers, with her siblings Annie and Zeke. She yodeled. She frequently wore her hair in braids, often performed barefoot, and had, as Kilgallen noted, “short, straight eyelashes.” But there she was at Leon and Eddie’s, with her hair bobbed and waved, “charming the playboy who’s been charmed by the experts.” What Kilgallen didn’t realize was that Lyle really appreciated a funny girl.

  Another newspaper columnist reported that Lyle Talbot must have been running out of dates, because he’d been seen “march[ing] into the Royalton around 4 a.m. one Saturday, accompanied by a midget, a bearded lady, a 550-pound fat man, and an 8´6˝ foot giant” (surely not that tall!), whereupon he announced that they must all stay and meet Robert Benchley, the New Yorker humorist who lived at the Algonquin, across the street. True? Some version of it, perhaps. He’d come of age around sideshow types, he loved the circus, and he might have gone one night, made some friends, and invited them for (more) drinks. Maybe hanging out with them took him back to his days with the Walter Savidge Amusement Co.

  On the afternoons when he didn’t have a matinee, Lyle and some of his cast mates would head over to the World’s Fair. It had opened in 1939 in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and was still going strong in its second season. With its slogan “Dawn of a New Day,” the 1939 World’s Fair was the first expo with a futuristic theme. The fair’s two iconic structures—the enormous round Perisphere and the triangular spire known as the Trylon—were gleaming white and boldly geometric. The fair itself offered a vision of the near future transformed by innovation and brimming with technological wonders. The portentous optimism with which this vision was unrolled must have been especially welcome in the aftermath of the Depression. Forty-five million people came to Queens over the fair’s two seasons to see such marvels as the first displays of television (“the technical term for seeing as well as hearing radio”), efficient new electric dishwashers (one exhibit featured a dishwashing contest between “Mrs. Drudge,” who was still scrubbing hers by hand, and “Mrs. Modern,” who stood idly by while the machine handled hers), and a seven-foot robot named Elektro, the Moto-Man, endowed with a regular-guy sense of humor and an eye for the ladies.

  The most popular of all the dawn-of-a-new-day exhibits, though, was Futurama, the GM-sponsored model of an America circa 1960, crisscrossed by motorways and populated by contented car owners who glided home from their streamlined office buildings to houses set in impossibly neat and clean suburbs. The cars-and-highways part of this vision mostly came true—in part because it was in the interest of GM and the other car companies that had made it look so marvelous. In 1939, there were only 237 vehicles per 1,000 Americans; by 1960, the figure was 410, and the United States had a national system of highways. Futurama spectators could take an aerial trip over this “Wonderworld of 1960” in seats that moved along a track Disneyland style (though Disneyland itself would not be with us for nearly two decades).

  The World’s Fair had exhibits with a more basic and eternal appeal, as well. There were carny-style rides and sideshows, and dazzling lighting on the midway described as “flashing pinwheels.” When the fair opened for its second season in 1940, its board chairman sounded a homey note: “The World’s Fair of 1940 is simply a great big edition of the county fairs and State fairs that are as much a part of our tradition as fried chicken and ice cream and cake.” And let’s not forget the tradition of displaying women who were naked or nearly so! The fair’s planners certainly had not. Interest in a replica of a Buddhist temple had been lackluster till the second season, when it was reconfigured as “Forbidden Tibet,” a girlie show in which a Tibetan lama was “tempted by a symbol of desire” but saved in time by a ballet representing the “Triumph of Good over Evil.” The fair’s first season also offered, bizarrely, a surrealist fun house designed by Salvador Dalí called “Dream of Venus.” Life magazine assayed a puzzled description: “Girls swim under water, milk a bandaged-up cow, tap typewriter keys which float like seaweed. . . . A sleeping Venus reclines in a 36-foot bed, covered with white and red satin, flowers and leaves. Scattered about the bed are lobsters frying on a bed of hot coals and bottles of champagne. . . . All this is very interesting and amusing.” You didn’t need to be a connoisseur of Surrealism to take an interest in the Dalí installation of the “living liquid ladies” swimming languorously, bare-breasted, in a big tank. The underwater exhibit was just as popular, if not more so, when “Dream of Venus” was replaced by “Twenty Thousand Legs Under the Sea,” feat
uring Oscar the Obscene Octopus. Dalí had nothing to do with Oscar, a man in a rubber octopus suit who pulled the bathing suits off women with his tentacles.

  Lyle’s favorite stops at the fair were Billy Rose’s Aquacade and the RCA Hall of Television. (Oh, and the smorgasbord at the Swedish Pavilion. He always liked a new word and a nice spread of cold cuts.) For pure showmanship, the Aquacade was the most spectacular thing going at the fair. It starred champion swimmers like the Olympians Eleanor Holm, who had been on the 42nd Street Special with Lyle, and Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan in the movies and had an amazing physique, of which he was exceedingly proud. Against a curtain of water forty feet high, in a gorgeous Deco amphitheater and pool built for the occasion, the performers undertook feats of diving and of elaborate, Busby Berkeley–like synchronized swimming. In the late 1940s, this kind of chlorinated extravaganza would become the basis for the hugely popular movies of Esther Williams, “the million-dollar mermaid,” but in 1939 they were a dizzying novelty.

  Lyle also took an interest in the new phenomenon of television—in part because in 1936, he’d starred with Mary Astor in a movie called Trapped by Television. It’s a little surprising to watch this very slight caper movie today and see that its premise is the competition among broadcasting companies trying to put out the first “television machine.” (The executives and inventors all take for granted that companies that fall behind will be out of business altogether—this at a time when there were only about two hundred televisions in the whole country.) Lyle, who’d played an eager young inventor, remained intrigued by the possibilities of television—and hey, they’d need people to act for it, wouldn’t they?