The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  In the end, when it all turns out to have been a dream induced by her anesthetic, Nora wakes, comes to her feminine senses, and tells Stephen she’ll marry him right away. But Nora’s nightmare is a lathered-up version of an understandable anxiety, a potboiler vision of a real trap for women. Nora is a convincingly intelligent woman who hopes to accomplish something in science. Her bad dream reveals that however confident she appears on the surface, subconsciously she fears that her professional ambitions will make her repellent and lonely. And the film agrees with her subconscious; unlike Mary Stevens, M.D., almost twenty years earlier, Nora Goodrich, research scientist, has to be shut down. Marshall is quite good in it, and in its sleazy little way, Strange Impersonation is a haunting movie.

  The same cannot be said for “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” aka Wild Weed, a screechy cheapo about the marijuana menace, in which Lyle did another turn as a glowering cop. “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” was your basic exploitation movie. Eric Schaefer, a film scholar who has written the definitive history of such films, notes that they “often played in grindhouses, theaters located in that physical space between the commercial areas and the skid row districts of many major cities” or else in “neighborhood or small-town theaters in between runs of regular Hollywood pictures.” The producers and distributors of these “ragged little films” liked to present them as though they were educational quasi-documentaries—cautionary tales that wallowed in the lurid behavior they were cautioning against with their doom-laden, pedantic voice-overs. (“This is the story of tea, or tomatoes, the kind millions, through ignorance, have been induced to smoke.”) Exploitation producers evaded the Production Code, distributing their movies in theaters that were not owned by the major studios, and turning the lack of a PCA seal of approval into an explicit selling point. If you saw a movie made between 1934 and about 1965 that dealt with birth control, childbirth, venereal disease, or illegal drugs, or that showed any kind of nudity, then you were most likely seeing an exploitation film. It was probably shoddily made and hysterically acted, but it would at least offer some acknowledgment that these realms of human experience existed.

  “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” was an exploitation film with an interesting backstory. Very early one morning in September 1948, at a cottage in Laurel Canyon, the actor Robert Mitchum was arrested for smoking marijuana. Also arrested were Lila Leeds, an actress he’d been hanging around with while his wife and he were taking a break, and two friends. Pot was not widely known at the time. Back in the 1930s, there had been a brief gust of public concern about it, much of it preoccupied with the concern that marijuana smoking would promote the mingling of races in “sensuous” environments like jazz clubs. Still, when Cab Calloway sang “Reefer Man,” and Sidney Bechet did “Viper Mad Blues,” most Americans had no idea what they were on about. The classic exploitation film Reefer Madness was released in 1936, one of a triumvirate of movies that emerged from this early law-enforcement concern with marijuana. But it disappeared for decades until it was rediscovered by pot-smoking college students in the 1970s, who liked to giggle their way through midnight showings. In 1948, as Otto Friedrich points out, Time magazine’s editors felt it necessary to explain the following, in the magazine’s report on Mitchum’s arrest: “Marijuana, a drug made from Indian hemp, is . . . said to produce a state of exhilaration.”

  When Mitchum was booked, he gave his occupation as “Former Actor.” But he actually survived the scandal nicely. Mitchum served sixty days in jail, and he worked it for a certain street cred. When trailers for his upcoming movie, Rachel and the Stranger, started showing in theaters after his arrest, audiences cheered, and when the movie came out, it became the number-one box-office hit in the country. Maybe not enough people were worried about marijuana—which, whatever the dire voice-over of “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” might be saying, did not seem to be cutting a wide swath through the malt shop or the sock hop. It seemed too exotic to pose a threat to middle-class youngsters. Besides, Mitchum was a star—and a new hep-cat, cynical-type star, at that. He didn’t have to keep his image soapy clean to retain his fans. He was doing just fine as a heavy-lidded bad boy.

  For Lila Leeds, it was another story. Leeds was a runaway from Iola, Kansas, by way of Clovis, New Mexico. In L.A. she’d gotten work as a carhop and then as a hatcheck girl at Ciro’s, though she was always getting groped there and forgetting the names of producers who were big stuff or thought they were. She was blond and gorgeous—people kept telling her she could be the next Lana Turner, and it wasn’t always to get her in the sack. She liked her reefer, a habit she’d picked up hanging out with jazz musicians, but she had some ambition, too. She left Ciro’s, started studying acting, and landed some bit parts in decent movies, one of them Green Dolphin Street, with Lana Turner herself. But the only role she found when she got out of jail was in “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!”—a movie crudely designed to cash in on her arrest, something she was really hoping to put behind her. She must have found the movie’s depiction of the effects of dope smoking pretty ridiculous. As she said, marijuana made her feel dreamy and sleepy, not much else—it was relaxing. But the marijuana smokers in “She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” get very seriously whack—they dance with conveniently licentious abandon, hallucinate like subjects in a poorly managed LSD experiment, let loose with gales of crazed laughter, and generally divest themselves of any shreds of personal dignity. When Leeds’s college-kid brother in the movie discovers she’s been smoking and selling marijuana sticks, he wastes no time in hanging himself.

  Yet strangely, Leeds’s own story unfolded much like a cautionary tale in an exploitation movie. Life, it seems, sometimes imitates schlock. After she made the movie, Leeds drifted around the Midwest, working in nightclubs, doing jail time, getting addicted to heroin. When she finally got clean, in the mid-1960s, she returned to California, as Mitchum’s biographer Lee Server documents, “sick [and] penniless.” She eventually became a lay minister at a storefront church in Hollywood that was known by the acronym SMILE, helping runaways and addicts.

  • • •

  LYLE’S OWN LIFE AFTER THE WAR had begun to seem like something out of one of the B noirs—a stumble down a long, dark alley. He was drinking a lot. His favored drinking companion was a man named Philip Van Zandt, a mustachioed Dutch-born character actor who was often cast as a Nazi, though he also turned up in Citizen Kane and a clutch of Three Stooges shorts. Van Zandt had a compulsion for gambling and a tendency to depression, but like Lyle, he loved to work, and he, too, managed to pull himself together when he had an acting job. Lyle was not a depressive. But he was vulnerable, on occasion, to a certain vaporous despair. In my experience—I saw it a few times later—this fleeting melancholy did not express itself as a disappointment with himself or his life, professional or personal, though perhaps that was the well-hidden trigger. It was more like an existential sadness: about mortality, the state of the world, human limits. He treated that feeling successfully by working—hence the willingness, the eagerness, to take any role that came along. When he was working, the essential sprightliness of his nature came to the fore. When people needed him to entertain them, he became entertaining. But if roles were sparse, as they were in the late 1940s, he drank to keep the melancholy at bay.

  I think he must have been lonely, too. He was, fundamentally, a very loving person, and yet he’d never been able to sustain a romantic relationship for long. Some of it must have been his choice; he liked women and he liked to play around. Some of it, particularly as he was reaching his late forties, was not. Some of it was finding himself attracted to much younger women who were vital, stubborn, and sometimes troubled and mercurial as well, and who quickly grew restive. And some of it, of course, was his drinking, which played havoc with his natural charm and his judgment.

  In 1944, Lyle was acting in a touring production of A Doll’s House, along with Jane Darwell, a fine character actress he was very fond of, who had played Ma
Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. The cast also included a young woman named Keven McClure, a dark-haired beauty with wide-set green eyes and strong, sensual features. Though she was only twenty, and Lyle was forty-four, they quickly fell into a romance. In August 1946, Lyle and Keven were married in Tijuana.

  McClure was, by all accounts, a rather remarkable person—intelligent, artistic, resourceful, an endurance swimmer and a speaker of several languages. The daughter of a theatrical producer, she had grown up in Berkeley and attended the University of California, where she wrote a thesis about Ibsen before joining the cast of A Doll’s House. An article about her in the Berkeley Gazette described her as speaking in a “low voice, firm and distinct,” saying that she’d wanted to be “a dramatic actress as long as I can remember.”

  Before Lyle, McClure had been married to another older man. His name was John Carr. His age was varyingly given in newspaper accounts as either forty-one or fifty, and he was a self-described writer, actor, and director with a small financial stake in the show. One night during the run of A Doll’s House, in Los Angeles, he showed up at the stage entrance of the Biltmore Theater, waving a revolver and shouting, “I’m going to let you all have it.” He socked McClure, then aimed a heavy blow at Lyle, and was subdued with a punch from the play’s producer, according to an account in the Los Angeles Times. That didn’t keep him down for long. When McClure took off on foot, Carr jumped on the running board of a passing car, broke its windshield, and brandished shards of glass “to terrify bystanders” the article said. Eventually he chased his wife into the Biltmore lobby, where she “ran screaming into the women’s lounge, locking the door.” Carr explained himself this way to a reporter: “I just saw red when I saw Keven walking out of the theater arm-in-arm with Lyle Talbot. I blew my top.” He said Keven wanted a divorce so she could marry Lyle; Keven denied it to the press, but on that score, Carr was right. Lyle and other members of the cast took her to the hospital to be treated for her black eye. Still, she went onstage the next night with makeup covering it. Carr granted her a divorce soon after, saying, “I must have been nuts to think a guy my age could make a go of it with a beautiful young girl.”

  Lyle and Keven separated after five months of marriage and divorced soon after. In McClure’s complaint, she said Lyle “drank excessively, swore at her in public, and struck her at home.” And that he’d once forced her out of the car at four a.m. in the rain. The part about striking her is particularly hard for me to believe, since it would have been so out of character for Lyle. None of his four children ever saw my father strike anybody, let alone my mother. Of course, we didn’t know him as an alcoholic. But my mother’s brother, who knew him well in these darker years, and was inclined to regard him with suspicion on his sister’s account, said he never saw Lyle behave violently even at his drunkest. He remembers him as gallant up to the point when he’d pass out. To establish a claim of “intolerable cruelty” in the era before no-fault divorce, women certainly had incentive to make their spouse’s faults sound more egregious than they were. Still, I’ll never know for certain: improbable as it seems to me, it’s possible that at his lowest, he did slap McClure.

  The truth is I know almost nothing about what his relationships with his wives before my mother were like. Almost everything I write here about the women themselves I found out in the course of researching this book. My parents tacitly declared those former marriages irrelevant to our family story, and mostly, I think they were. But that doesn’t make the women uninteresting.

  After her divorce from Lyle, McClure, who was by then using the first name Eve, would go on to marry the writer Henry Miller, and to make a life and a community for herself in the bohemian precincts of Big Sur. She drew and painted and was an excellent cook. She tolerated Miller’s faults and eccentricities, relishing the role of muse to genius. Miller told friends that she reminded him of his old friend and lover Anaïs Nin, in that she “brings with her the feeling of ease and abundance.” She was especially kind and loving to Miller’s two young children from his third marriage, Valentine and Tony. Valentine remembers her putting on crafts classes every summer in their home, where she taught them and other local kids Indian beading, pottery, and marionette making, and helped them put on shows for their families. McClure acted in the local Big Sur Revue and made costumes for all the children, sewing beautifully with long fingers that were stained with nicotine.

  McClure had a drinking problem, though. Eventually it would kill her. And the combination with Lyle’s own alcohol addiction was combustible. Moreover, McClure seemed to have a knack for attracting man trouble. Miller praised her for her tolerance and capacity for silence—living with her was “like living on velour,” he wrote to a friend. But perhaps that was partly in comparison with extreme cases like his former wife June Mansfield Miller, an emotionally unstable coke-using quasi-prostitute who had moved her lesbian lover into their household.

  In any case, whatever soured Lyle’s marriage to McClure did so very quickly. Just as I was launching into the research for this book, a commercial photographer in Omaha serendipitously tracked me down through the Internet. He’d been at a yard sale and found a few photo albums that he’d bought because he admired the photographs in them—mostly black-and-white head shots and studio publicity stills from the 1930s and 1940s. After a while, he realized that many of the glamorous, rather haunting pictures were of an actor named Lyle Talbot and his friends, and after doing a little research, concluded that the albums had probably belonged to Lyle’s father and stepmother, who had died in Omaha in the 1960s. Eventually, the photographer from Omaha began to think that someone in our family ought to have the albums instead of him, which was kind, and he got in touch with us. I met him in the lobby of the Magnolia Hotel in Omaha one gray afternoon in March 2010, and after he gave me the albums, I sat in the dwindling light and pored through them.

  Many of the photos inside were duplicates of ones we had at home, but many—such as a lovely one of Mock Sad Alli, the magician Lyle had traveled with so long ago—were not. One of the pictures was of Keven McClure. On the back, she had written, in a girlish script and green ink, an inscription to Lyle’s parents, Ed and Anna: “darlins’, may I make a good addition to a wonderful family—and may your grandchildren be as nice as their grandparents are—I love you two so much—’ya know?” She signed herself “Mac.” It struck me that nobody marries without hope—no matter how soon it goes. And here was Keven McClure’s hope, distilled and sweet, the dregs at the bottom of a wineglass from a long-forgotten party.

  Keven, aka Eve, McClure.

  McClure was married to Henry Miller from 1953 to 1960. Toward the end, he was having an affair with his German translator, and McClure could no longer put up with his straying. She left him for a sculptor who also lived in Big Sur. But she and Miller maintained a friendship and a correspondence. She even remained friendly with two of his former wives, June Miller and Janina Martha Lepska, the mother of Tony and Valentine. Once or twice Eve sent a couple of her drawings of female nudes to my father. She was only forty-one when she died, in her beloved Big Sur, from complications of alcoholism.

  At least she lived a longer and seemingly more fulfilled life than Abigail “Tommye” Adams, the woman Lyle had been married to just before her. In L.A. in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Adams had become a notorious party girl. She’d been arrested once, for hit-and-run driving, though the charges were dismissed, and once, along with the actor Broderick Crawford, for public drunkenness. She’d been the mistress of the comedian George Jessel, and that relationship seemed to leave her floundering. She floundered a lot in public, and with a certain angry energy that seemed like it might be keeping her alive for a while. After the police were called when neighbors complained about a loud argument between Jessel and Adams, she gave an interview to reporters, the Los Angeles Times said, “while curled up on a divan in her den,” wearing pajamas and a bright red robe. “She looked quite efferves
cent for a young woman accused of waking up the neighborhood in the early morning hours.” Adams declared that the argument was nothing compared with many they’d had; it was just that Jessel was tired after a twenty-one-day tour he’d been on to benefit the United Jewish Appeal and he wanted to stay home that night while she wanted to go out. “Incidentally,” she said brightly, “I’m going to have George put on a benefit for Baby—and Baby, you know, is me.” Adams went on: “We’ll stop going together and stop arguing when one kills the other. I didn’t throw anything at George last night but I’ve thrown a lot of things at him in my day.” She found excuses to let reporters know that Jessel had once given her a diamond ring. In the meantime, Jessel’s penchant for getting involved with much younger women made him the butt of fellow comedians’ jokes. (That at least was a fate you could avoid if you were Henry Miller, or even Lyle.) George couldn’t make it tonight: He had to pick his wife up after school. Or: His wife is ill—she’s teething. Adams got so incensed about a young female singer who was billing herself as “George Jessel’s discovery” that she headed over to the Sherman Oaks nightspot where the woman was singing, and apparently tore the singer’s sequined gown, tried to punch her, and later drove her car into the side of the nightclub. Her acting career, meanwhile, had fizzled. Adams had started out in the early 1940s with roles billed as “College Girl” or “Pretty Girl,” but her brief scenes were often deleted or uncredited, and by the late 1940s, she wasn’t getting any work at all.