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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Talbot
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talbot, Margaret, date.
The entertainer : movies, magic, and my father’s twentieth century / Margaret Talbot.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-59705-7
1. Talbot, Lyle—Travel—United States. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287. Tl39T35 2012 2012026309
791.4302'8092—dc23
[B]
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
In loving memory of Paula Talbot
And for her grandchildren: Dash, Caitlin, Joe, Nat, Gabriel, Grace, Eva, Ike, and Lucy,
who would have made her heart sing
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1.LEARNING TO CRY
Chapter 2.THE HYPNOTIST’S BOY
Chapter 3.FOOTLIGHTS ON THE PRAIRIE
Chapter 4.HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
Chapter 5.GANGSTERS, GRIFTERS, AND GOLD DIGGERS
Chapter 6.MAN ABOUT TOWN
Chapter 7.EMPTY BOTTLES
Chapter 8.UNIONIZING ACTORS, UNITING FANS
Chapter 9.BROADWAY AND B MOVIES
Chapter 10.FROM ED WOOD TO OZZIE AND HARRIET
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
PREFACE
A lot of smart women I’ve known over the years have told me they were Daddy’s girls. That was especially true if they had grown up, as I did, in the 1960s or 1970s, when, if one of your parents had a career you wanted to emulate, it was likely to be your father’s. I was not a Daddy’s girl. Strange to say, I suppose, since you are holding a book I have written about my father. I loved both my parents, but if anything, I was a Mama’s girl.
My father was not a listener. He was a talker. A storyteller. While he talked, he was often doing things for me—driving me to school or lessons or friends’ houses, cooking tasty meals for us and composing them elegantly on plates. Those stories were artifacts of self-involvement, but they came nestled in the cotton batting of affection, and that made them hard to resist. Besides, they were good stories.
When my father was out of town, traveling with a show, I liked to talk to him on the phone, but mostly what I did when I missed him, what made me feel closer to him, was to go sit on the floor of his meticulously arranged closet and breathe in the autumn-leaf scent of his pipe tobacco. I felt cozy amid the evidence of his tender and particular aesthetics, the rituals of his self-regard. If my mother had ever gone out of town alone when I was growing up, on the other hand, I would have wanted to call her and tell her everything that had happened that day, and how I felt about it, and how my friends felt about it.
Both my parents told stories about our family, the romance that was our origin story, the way my mother had saved my father, and how their children had given them both a new life. But my father told other stories, too, about his own long-running picaresque adventures in entertainment. They were also, I came to realize, stories about the history of show business, and how Americans had responded to it and sometimes remade themselves in its image.
When I was growing up, my father was older than all the other fathers I knew: born in 1902, he had been close to sixty when I was born, nearly eighty when I graduated from high school. His direct connection to the sepia-toned, history-book past—before electricity, before talking pictures—struck me as strange and alienating sometimes. All parents have childless pasts, and most children have difficulty imagining their parents as much younger people, but older parents have many pasts, layer upon layer of remote and peculiar experiences, and their youth is not only implausible but a kind of costume drama, too. As a kid you allow your grandparents their magic-lantern memories, but you want your parents to belong more firmly to the here and now. Yet my father’s turn-of-the-century origins also gave me an intimacy with the past that I came to treasure, and a yearning not just to know about history but to feel what it was like.
Luckily, my talkative father was very obliging. He had been an entertainer all his life: a hypnotist’s assistant and a magician in traveling tent shows in his, and the century’s, teens; a matinee idol in repertory theater in the small towns and cities of the Midwest in the 1920s; a star-in-the-making in 1930s Hollywood; a near has-been who carved out a life as a working actor in B movies and the new medium of television in the ’40s and ’50s.
• • •
STILL, though I grew up to become a magazine writer—a kind of storyteller myself—I’d never thought of writing about my father till the late ’90s, a few years after he died. Then, one October afternoon, on a road trip in rural Pennsylvania with my husband and little son, we got lost. Somehow, we ended up at a roadside attraction that was like a figment of my father’s past: a small-time circus show with women in slightly tattered spangles, miniature horses in feathery headdresses, an air of hard-won gaiety. It was a long way from the commercial mass entertainment that I, and even my little boy, were used to, and I was delighted by it. I thought about my father’s early years in showbiz, when the relationship between audiences and performers was more of a fleeting secret, when performers shimmered into isolated small towns and entranced the locals and moved on. And I began, not long after, to think that I could tell my father’s story as a way of telling the story of American entertainment in the twentieth century. Zelig-like, he’d been present at so many of its transformative moments. I could tell his story, and do what I’d always wanted to do: try to capture the texture of the past.
In the 1920s and 1930s, my father came of age
in, and contributed to, a new, more sensual culture of abundance, a new era of mass communication, and eventually mass entertainment. Because the signature media of that era—film—let people experience pictures and voices, and therefore feelings or their facsimiles, from places they had never been and people they would never know, it transformed the sense of self, too. The historian Warren Susman calls this a “shift to the culture of sight and sound,” by which he means sight and sound on a new scale, and of a greater variety than Americans could have imagined when most of what they saw and heard were their own families and their own towns. How to distinguish oneself in a crowd, on the stage of the modern city, and in the eye of a camera was the new challenge. That meant unprecedented attention to personal presentation. The body—its care, its appearance—took on a new importance in a world where some people would make a living displaying themselves on screen, and others would want to emulate them. And it meant the arrival of formal advice and new products that encouraged people to cultivate individual, attention-getting personalities more than character. Personality, writes Susman, was the “quality of being somebody,” and the early twentieth century saw the advent of a self-improvement industry that instructed readers in how they could be, or at least look like, somebody.
My father was born in the old order, in which character was predominant. But he grew up, was shaped by, and in turn helped shape the new one, in which personality, charisma, and good looks mattered more and more. As a result he was a little of both—a suave and playful twentieth-century entertainer who found a sense of meaning and mission in the work of entertaining.
This book is not a memoir, though my own memories are woven throughout, and it’s not a biography of my father, either, though his memories are the brightest fiber in it. It’s an idiosyncratic history of how entertainment evolved in the twentieth century, and how ideas about character and personality—about what made a person interesting, attractive, worthwhile—changed along with it. The way I tell that story is through my father and his life. So it’s also a book about being a working actor—what it took, what he gave—to make a life in twentieth-century show business. I’ll always be grateful to my father for showing me that you could make a life—and even a living—doing what you loved, and that it was almost your duty to try. Even if what you loved was some feckless, creative pursuit that more practical people with better heads for money would try to talk you out of. Even if what you loved was a business that made stars—and you never were one.
Chapter 1
LEARNING TO CRY
The boy grew up in a hotel for traveling salesmen across the street from the train station in a very small town. The hotel was white clapboard, two stories tall, plain and neat, set about by trees that in the summer grew over the windows and cloaked the downstairs in thick shade. The boy liked to lie on the front-parlor carpet, tracing its wreaths of faded roses and listening for the train whistle, then for the traveling men as they alit, swinging their creaking leather sample cases, then for the smack of their wingtip shoes as they stepped up to the front door. The traveling salesmen wore bowler hats and houndstooth vests and watch fobs. They sat downstairs at the long cherrywood table, packing away the gravy-soaked meals his grandmother and the hired girls cooked for them, holding their sides and laughing. They’d been to Omaha and Kansas City and Chicago. They’d seen skylines ablaze with electric lights and gone to plays—oh, plenty of ’em, and sure, there were pretty girls even in a little burg like this one, they’d tell one another, but, oh brother, how about those gals on the stage? The traveling men never stayed long in Brainard—a night, maybe two. They gave the boy peppermint candies and distracted pats on the head. They hummed little snatches of ragtime while they trimmed their magnificent mustaches.
The boy did not have his own room. His grandmother wanted to keep most of the rooms available for the commercial men, and the few left over for the hired girls, whose fathers sent them to work in the hotel so they could learn how to cook from Mrs. Talbot. The girls were seventeen, eighteen years old, farm girls, from Czech families, though this was before there was a country of Czechoslovakia, so they were called Bohemians or, less kindly, Bohunks. At night, the boy crawled in with whichever of them would have him, snuggling down under their white comforters, listening to their soft snores and the words they muttered in Czech, smelling the faint whiff of onion and caraway on their curled fingers. In the summer, the breeze from the open windows stirred the lace curtains and the tendrils of hair pasted against their necks. In the winter, he pressed as close as he could to their warm backs. He knew only a few words of Czech, but the phrase he remembered all his life was “Hezká holka, dej mi hubička.” “Pretty girl, give me a kiss.”
The hired girls woke in the smudgy light before dawn—Mrs. Talbot was a strict employer—but he scrunched down under the covers, hoping he wouldn’t be ejected. At night, the girls laughed, and let him watch as they brushed out their long hair, heavy and glistening as horses’ tails, but in the morning they were snappish and yawning, and told him to run along. He did little jigs, sang them a stirring Irish song about a boy and a girl with an ocean between them, told them about how he tried to ride the Jersey cow and how she’d tossed him. At night, the hired girls listened and sometimes clapped their hands with delight, but in the morning, he could try the same routine and they only sighed, stony-eyed, and shoved him out the door. None of them was his mother, after all.
His mother, he knew, was dead. He knew this because his grandmother told him so, and because every so often she called him to her side and took from a small velvet-lined box a lock of his mother’s hair. It was pale gold and feathery, like a butterfly’s wing. The first time he saw it, he felt nothing in particular, except confusion, because when his grandmother looked at it, she wept, and she was not generally a weeping woman. But the boy, whose name was Lyle, did not remember his mother; he had been just a baby when she died. When he did not cry, his grandmother told him he would get a beating unless he did—“Think,” she said, “of your poor mama”—and then she took him over her knees and paddled him. The next time she brought out the velvet-lined box, he thought of the beating and how his bottom had stung, and he managed to squeeze out a tear. It wasn’t quite good enough for his grandmother, but it was a start. The time after that, he screwed his eyes shut as tightly as he could and thought not so much of his poor mama as of his poor self, facing another paddling and unable to feel what his grandmother so urgently wanted him to feel. He produced a choking sob, and then, to his surprise, an increasingly persuasive crescendo of them. His grandmother sat back in her chair, exhausted. “That’s my boy, Lyle,” she said, and then closed her eyes.
The boy grew up to be my father, and when he told me this story, it was without apparent rancor or shock, so matter-of-factly that it was years before I realized what a cruelly perfect apprenticeship it was for acting. He was born in 1902, and grew up in a time and a place—small-town Nebraska—that was in some sense pre-psychological, a time in which people did not yet customarily explain one another’s actions and motives with the kinds of concepts—repression and projection, anxieties and drives—that would become so familiar to people a couple of decades later. The language of child development—of children’s distinct emotional needs—was not common parlance. A mother could die and a bereaved child be told she had gone away to a better place, without a good-bye, or else be told the truth but also not to speak of her; it was better that way. In his remarkable autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the writer William Maxwell describes his mother’s death during the influenza epidemic of 1918 when he was ten and growing up in a small Illinois town. His father would walk from room to room and he would follow him, hoping they could talk to each other, but they never did. “When my father was an old man,” Maxwell writes, “he surprised me by remarking that he understood what my mother’s death meant to me but had no idea what to do about it. I think it would have been something if he had just said this.” A
child could be adopted and never be told—that was common practice until the 1960s. A son or daughter could be written off as a loss and shame, and that writing-off announced in the local paper, as this father did in the David City, Nebraska, newspaper in 1907: “Owing to the disobedience and incorrigibility of my son, Benjamin Wertz, I hereby notify the public that I have given him his time, and I will not be responsible for any of his acts or deeds and will not assume any of his obligations or liabilities hereafter.” And a mother whom a child had never known could die and that child be expected to counterfeit the sentiment thought proper, or else endure a beating.
Much of what was done to children without regard to its lasting impact was irredeemable and indefensible, but sometimes there were surprising comforts to be wrung from a pre-psychological innocence. To our minds, for instance, the idea of sending a boy of six or eight to sleep in the beds of unrelated teenage girls seems deeply peculiar—arousing, perhaps, and therefore confusing. Yet my father remembered the girls fondly; they did not abuse him; they were kind to him; some were lovely to gaze at; his memories of them were the wellspring in him of a lifelong love of women. (His favorite book to read aloud to me when I was a kid was My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s nostalgic masterpiece about a Nebraska boy’s chaste love for the older Czech hired girl who was his childhood playmate.) Why his grandmother didn’t take him into her own room, I don’t know, but bedding down with the hired girls undoubtedly helped him sleep through the raw Nebraska nights as a motherless little boy. As an adult, he saw that his childhood bed-sharing was something one would no longer do—but he was amused and matter-of-fact about it, not ashamed.
And my father would lead a resolutely unexamined life ever after. He did not speculate about what his grandmother could possibly have been thinking when she brandished that lock of hair or how it was that he could call her “a great old gal,” which he did, and still vividly remember the tears she blackmailed out of him. The story he told about his growing up was not one of surviving childhood damage—the death of his young mother, the forced separation from his father, the alienating rituals of his grief-stricken grandmother. The story he told, always, was about becoming an actor. It was about the privilege, the thrill, the sensual benediction of holding people, for an hour or two, in thrall. It was about how a handsome face and an ingratiating disposition could propel a boy from Brainard, Nebraska, to Hollywood in the hectic, shimmery heyday of the movie industry. It was about vaulting from a life hunkered down in a cold climate among hardworking Czech and Irish immigrants—farmers, grocers, brakemen—to a life of gin parties in rented villas in Beverly Hills, starlets in creamy satin dresses, weekends at Hearst Castle, days spent impersonating bootleggers and gangsters and society swells, all amid the orange-scented Mediterranean lushness of Hollywood in the 1930s.
The Entertainer Page 1