The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  On the opening day of the fair, RCA broadcast a speech by FDR—the first televised presidential speech in history, though it could be watched only on sets within a fifty-five-mile radius of the Empire State Building. Lyle missed that, but like hundreds of thousands of other fairgoers, he stood transfixed in front of the small sets in the RCA Hall of Television that broadcast live shots of the fair itself. It was neat, all right, though a lot of people who saw those first demonstrations of broadcast TV were not persuaded that television would become a staple of everyday life in the future. “The problem with television,” wrote Orrin E. Dunlap in The New York Times the month the fair opened, “is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen: the average American family hasn’t time for it. . . . Radio can flow on like a brook, while people listen and go about their household duties and routine. Television, on the other hand is no brook; it is more of a Niagara, a spectacle for the eyes.” He was wrong, of course—as off base in his skepticism about the new technology as the cock-eyed futurists sometimes were in their optimism. But Dunlap also had a point: the qualities he attributes to radio listening—its compatibility with other activities, such as driving or cooking—are a big reason that radio is still alive today despite television, the Internet, and other blandishments.

  • • •

  LYLE HAD PLENTY OF STAMINA, and he loved to work, so when he wasn’t onstage at the Plymouth or at play in some nightspot or at the fairground, he kept himself busy with personal appearances. He got his own radio show, Hollywood Footlights, on WHN. Three times a week, he played songs by Judy Garland and Cab Calloway and Jimmy Dorsey in between Hollywood gossip and interviews with visiting movie people. (It all went smoothly—he had a breezy, enthusiastic, still boyish style—except for the time he embarrassed himself when he was handed a bit of war news that he described as a “late-breaking communique,” pronouncing it without the accent, so that it rhymed with “mystique.” For some reason, he was still mortified by that flub years later.) He did benefits for the Stage Relief Fund, which helped indigent actors; the Milk Fund, which supplied milk for poor children; and the Red Cross War Relief Fund. He visited the Botany Worsted Mills in Passaic, New Jersey, where, snappily dressed in a double-breasted suit and two-tone wingtips, he listened with what I’m sure was genuine fascination—he loved clothes and he loved gadgets—while two factory workers named Sophie Sonowski and Helen Dukich explained how they made ties. (“Lyle Talbot Thrills Girls at Botany” read the headline in the Passaic Herald News.) He visited a twenty-one-year-old “crippled girl,” as the papers called her, who had written him a letter saying she longed to see him in Separate Rooms but was confined at home. He did a dramatic reading of the Bill of Rights to commemorate the state of New Jersey’s Bill of Rights week. He appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, on a bill with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, and Jack Benny and Rochester, in a “benefit for the needy.” He joined Gene Autry and the boxer Max Baer in a rally to raise money for the British Ambulance Corps. Kids turned out, said one of the newspaper accounts, “in aid of their schoolmates across the ocean whose entertainment consists chiefly of fleeing death-dealing bombs.”

  Somehow Lyle managed, amid this rather taxing whirl, to find himself a third wife. Abigail “Tommye” Adams was a twenty-one-year-old brunette model and aspiring actress from Greensboro, North Carolina. As a student at the University of North Carolina, she’d been picked as the “Typical American Girl” by a modeling agency scout; the prize was a trip to New York and a two-week gig as a decorative asset at the Stork Club, where Lyle presumably met her. In January 1942, Adams left her first job, in the chorus of a musical called Sons o’ Fun, and joined Lyle in Kansas City. They were married there by a justice of the peace, with only Lyle’s parents and the leading lady from the touring company of Separate Rooms in attendance. Lyle had picked out a ring for his bride, but she’d lost it, so she had to borrow his stepmother’s for the ceremony. Three months later, they separated, and in September 1942, Adams asked for either a divorce or an annulment on the grounds that her consent to the marriage ceremony had been obtained by fraud. What that fraud would be is a little hard to imagine; Adams didn’t say, and my father, obeying the unwritten law in our household of never even alluding to his former marriages, certainly never explained the breakup of this one—a quickie even by his standards. Adams did ask that he financially support her henceforth.

  With nobody at home to attend to, no particular desire to pay a big chunk of his salary to an ex-wife he’d been with for less than three months, and no great film prospects, Lyle was visited by an unexpected wave of patriotism. Two days after Adams asked for an annulment, he enlisted as a private in the air force. It is a testament to the mood in the country, and especially in Hollywood, that somebody like Lyle, a less-than-fit forty-year-old bon vivant with a decidedly non-martial temperament, would feel he had something to offer the U.S. military, and that offer it he must. The movie industry had signed up relatively early for the war effort, producing films about the Fascist threat in Europe such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, and in 1940, The Mortal Storm, Foreign Correspondent, and in a different vein, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. By 1941, Hollywood’s premature anti-Fascism was proving such an irritant to isolationists in Congress that they launched a Senate investigation to determine whether the motion picture studios were improperly using their influence to push America into intervening in Europe. The problem, said Senator Gerald P. Nye (R-North Dakota), was that Hollywood was “swarm[ing] with refugees,”—he singled out British actors and Russian, Hungarian, German, and Balkan directors—“who were susceptible to . . . national and racial emotions,” and were giving vent to them in anti-Nazi, pro-intervention movies.

  Though the likes of Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner were called to testify, the hearings fizzled out without much impact. The industry stepped up its war-related production and public opinion softened toward intervention. By mid-1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, “about one-third of the features in production dealt directly with the war,” writes the film historian Thomas Schatz, while “a much higher proportion treated [it] indirectly as a given set of social, political and economic circumstances.” Hollywood turned out propaganda films and documentaries at the direct behest of the government, but it also quickly retrofitted familiar genres for wartime. “Spy, detective and crime thrillers, for instance, were easily reformulated (perhaps too easily) into espionage thrillers or underground resistance dramas in the early war years. The musical and woman’s picture were recycled for war production as well and remained enormously effective throughout the war. The backstage musical was recast to depict groups of entertainers putting on military shows ‘for the boys,’ while working girl sagas and melodramas of maternal or marital sacrifice were ideally suited to war conditions.”

  But there was more to Hollywood’s enlistment in the war effort than making movies. On the home front, Bette Davis ran the Hollywood Canteen, where soldiers about to be shipped off could come to get a hot meal and dance with actresses like Hedy Lamarr, Deanna Durbin, Betty Grable, Lana Turner, and Marlene Dietrich to the music of the Xavier Cugat orchestra and Jimmy Durante, among others. Actresses also sold war bonds—the lushly beautiful, onyx-haired Lamarr once sold $7 million in a single day, offering a kiss from her for $50,000.

  Among the actors, a remarkable number volunteered for active duty. Henry Fonda, who said he “didn’t want to be in fake war in a studio,” served for three years, first as a quartermaster on a destroyer, then in combat intelligence in the Pacific. Jimmy Stewart got rejected twice for being too skinny, then gained enough weight to be drafted into the army as a private. He eventually piloted bombers over Germany, rose to the rank of colonel, and received a Distinguished Flying Cross. Tyrone Power became a transport pilot in the South Pacific. Clark Gable, whose beloved wife, Carole Lombard, had just been killed in a plane crash on her way home from a tour selling wa
r bonds, joined the air force and operated machine guns and a newsreel camera in bombing missions over Germany. “By October of 1942,” notes the historian Otto Friedrich, “some 2,700 Hollywood people—12 percent of the total number employed in the movie business—had joined the armed forces.”

  By contrast to Montgomery’s or Stewart’s service, Lyle’s was more like the future president Ronald Reagan’s. Reagan had helped make army training films in Culver City. And Lyle was assigned to the Army Air Corps flying school near Merced, in the flat Central Valley of California, where he organized entertainment for the troops. To be fair, even if he’d been the heroic type, he really wouldn’t have been fit for combat duty. Lyle came from a line of Scotch and Irish immigrants, coal miners and farmers who’d reinvented themselves in the United States as saloon and inn keepers, traveling actors and acrobats—a raffish bunch with no military service to show among them. Unlike, say, Bogart (who was rejected from service because he was too old), he was not a veteran of World War I. He knew next to nothing about firearms. The base had him listed as a “bicycle mechanic,” because he happened to mention that he liked riding a bike, but it didn’t take long for somebody in charge to realize that Private Talbot would serve his country better if he was in charge of entertainment for the base. From then on, Lyle, who was quickly elevated to sergeant then staff sergeant, put on variety shows and plays at Merced, flying down to L.A. to bring back whatever talent he could rustle up.

  “We’d fly over the Tehachapi Mountains in basic trainers down to Hollywood,” he recalled. “They had the open pits, and you’d sit behind the pilot—they only fit two people. You were supposed to wear headphones and a parachute. But one time, I had a hangover and a headache, so I took my headphones off. Well, apparently the pilot lost rudder control. He’s saying so, and saying May Day! May Day! over the headphones, but I can’t hear a thing. He managed to put the plane down anyway, and the next day there are these headlines in the paper: ‘Heroic Landing by Actor.’ I didn’t even know! No idea!” He would always remember the enthusiastic reaction of one young soldier from a small town in the Central Valley who saw a play for the first time on the base: “Sarge, I’ve never been round actors before.”

  • • •

  BUT BACK IN HOLLYWOOD after the war, Lyle felt “like nobody knew me. It was like a different town.” He’d been away since 1940, first in New York, then touring with Separate Rooms, then in the air force. A new wave of younger actors had arrived, as a new wave always does, and for the first time, Lyle was having a tough time getting a job. Danny Kaye, whom he had known in New York, helped him get a role as a blustery sergeant in the first movie Kaye starred in, Up in Arms, a patriotic musical that generously showcased Kaye’s gawky, frenetic comedic style and featured a charming Dinah Shore. The producer Samuel Goldwyn had plucked Danny Kaye from the nightclub circuit, but worried that in screen tests, Kaye’s long schnoz made him look too Jewish for Middle America. According to Goldwyn’s biographer A. Scott Berg, the producer decided the former Borscht Belt comic would be more palatable if he dyed his red hair blond, and Kaye did as he was told. The movie was distributed to troops overseas, and at home turned into a commercial and critical hit, earning $3.3 million for the studio and making Kaye a film star. But Up in Arms didn’t open any big doors for Lyle. When he did get offers, most of them were schlock, but he said yes anyway—to Saturday-morning cliffhanger serials, B-grade noir, and exploitation films about the menace of marijuana or, ironically, of alcohol.

  In some ways the westerns were the biggest challenge for him—mainly because he was a lousy horseman and convinced that horses knew it. “I got thrown one time. It was one of those scenes where there’s a big posse and the posse is supposed to go one way, and I’m supposed to go another on my horse. And my horse wouldn’t go. These horses that work in westerns, they know whether you’re a good horseman or not the minute you start to mount. If you have to call for a stool to step on, they know. But the moment they hear those clappers, they take off, and if you’re not ready, you’re left behind on the ground. Well, I wasn’t ready.” He usually wasn’t ready. When Lyle had to ride a horse, the scene would start with him, as he put it, “pre-mounted.” Or better yet, they’d cast him “as the banker, in the stage coach, which was great.”

  Lyle found work, too, in the two new comic book–based serials that came out after the war: as Commissioner Gordon in Batman and Robin and as Lex Luthor in Atom Man vs. Superman—the first actor to enact a screen version of Superman’s mortal enemy. These were cheap productions, heavily reliant on stock footage, on not-so-special effects, and on ill-fitting, goofy costumes (Robin’s had a big R sewn on the vest). But Lyle didn’t mind doing them, and tried as always to give audiences their money’s worth—especially since these audiences were mainly kids who went to the movie theater on Saturday mornings, gobbled up the serial chapters, and came back the next Saturday and the next to see whether the villain was ruling the world yet or Superman had managed to get ahold of whatever that atomic-cyclonic gizmo was. Ken Weiss and Ed Goodgold, fans who wrote a book about serials called To Be Continued . . . , remembered going to a movie theater in the Bronx at nine-thirty on Saturday mornings, and for a dime, getting a comic book and a candy bar, then watching five or so cartoons, the morning’s feature (usually a western), and finally their favorite: the serial. It might be Flash Gordon or Captain America, Congo Bill or Son of Zorro. That would mean it was nearly noon, and at that point, “the theatre would begin to take on the aroma of salami and cream cheese and jelly as sandwiches were taken from brown paper bags and removed from wax paper wrappers.” You could stay to watch another feature film, if you liked, usually a classic like King Kong or The Thief of Bagdad, and then the serial would be repeated again, and after that, at about three-thirty, the show was over, your dime about as well spent as a dime could be.

  “The serials were a world of their own,” wrote Weiss and Goodgold. “For approximately twenty minutes, you were totally involved in a series of hair-raising escapes, spectacular battles, mile-a-minute chases, hidden treasures, secret plans, and diabolical scientific devices, all being held together by a plot that was at once highly tenuous and at the same time complicated almost beyond comprehension.” You could always count on the “consistent stupidity of both the hero and the villain. Deep down in his heart of hearts, every kid sitting in the movie theatre knew that he was smarter than the hero. Each kid could anticipate the villain’s moves and knew when the hero was walking into a trap. How come the hero never seemed to learn? . . . And the villain was no smarter. There he was, supposedly the cream of the villainous crop, and it was obvious that he couldn’t organize a game of hide-and-seek, no less dominate the world.”

  Lyle as Commissioner Gordon in Batman and Robin.

  Though serials had been around since the early 1930s, telling stories that stretched over a dozen or more chapters, and mostly produced by the smaller independent studios like Republic and Universal, they relied more on comic books for material after the war. During the war, the popularity of superheroes and all comics had mushroomed. “Sales rose from twelve million copies a month in 1942,” notes historian Allan M. Winkler, “to over sixty million a month in 1946. Eighty percent of the population aged six to seventeen read comic books during the war; a third of people from eighteen to thirty years of age did the same.” Many cartoon characters were shown in combat, but Superman was not. His creators worried that if Superman went to war he would make it look too easy, misleading or demoralizing real soldiers. So reporter Clark Kent was 4-F: his X-ray vision caused him to fail the vision test when he read the chart in the next room. After the war, though, the Man of Steel’s fans were happy to see him scoping out technological advances that had fallen into enemy hands: radiation, for instance.

  I don’t think Lyle made a great Lex Luthor. He played him too rationally; there wasn’t enough of the unhinged in his performance. But some Superman fans give him more credit than
that. “Wearing an uncomfortable plastic bald cap, Talbot made an impressively stern Luthor as he fiddled with a laboratory full of futuristic equipment,” writes Les Daniels, an authoritative historian of Superman. Lyle said later that he always tried to play Luthor with “total conviction, as if he really existed.” He didn’t think it was fair to kids in the audience to camp it up or play the part with a knowing wink.

  “Oh, all the dials we had in that one set there!” he remembered. “Those were just things that they’d gotten from the phone company or somewhere, and they put them on the wall with a lot of lights behind them. You had a sense of humor, and you’d laugh about certain things, but our approach was never to kid it. This had to be for real.” Between takes, Lyle and Kirk Alyn, the broad-shouldered former dancer who played Superman, exchanged recipes. Each was delighted to find another man who liked to cook. Lyle thought Alyn was a “wonderful, quiet fellow” and a good actor, but after the serials died out—they couldn’t last long after TV—Alyn found he’d been typecast as Superman and couldn’t get other roles.

  Some of the schlocky movies Lyle did in the 1940s are of sociological interest today. They’re lurid and marginal, but they reflect larger social concerns. A movie he turned up in called Are These Our Parents? was part of a small wave of immediate postwar movies that fretted about juvenile delinquency. (There would be more and better movies about teen trouble in the 1950s; this wavelet anticipated them.) A movie called Strange Impersonation, a B noir that was an early effort by the director Anthony Mann, gives a creepy twist to the postwar push to discourage career women. Brenda Marshall plays a research chemist named Nora Goodrich who’s working on a new anesthetic. Nora is in love with a fellow scientist, Stephen Lindstrom (William Gargan), but also destabilizingly dedicated to her work: Stephen wants to marry her, but she keeps putting him off till her experiment is complete. (“Enough science,” he admonishes her when they’re alone together.) On the night when Nora administers the anesthetic to herself at home—sure, why not?—her jealous lab assistant, Arline (Hillary Brooke), engineers an explosion that leaves Nora’s face horribly scarred. While poor Nora is recovering in the hospital, Arline inveigles Stephen away. Eventually, Nora steals the identity of a dead woman and gets plastic surgery. (Like Humphrey Bogart’s facial reconstruction in Dark Passage, another film noir of the period, this one is rendered by an elderly solo practitioner, with implausibly excellent results.) Her new face—which actually looks just like her old face since she’s played by the same actress, but never mind—allows her to insinuate herself back into the lives of the now married Stephen and Arline, who think Nora is dead and, unlike everyone in the audience, don’t recognize her. Things get even weirder from there, and Nora finds herself in a very noirish catch-22: under interrogation as the lead suspect in her own murder. Lyle plays the cop, with a pencil mustache and a world-weary relentlessness.