The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  A male college junior offers this frank and charming assessment: “As this is a confidential paper I can say that the movies have done much to influence my behavior toward the opposite sex at the present. The hot love scenes in the pictures now get under my skin and I have the urge to re-enact them. Clara Bow is extremely attractive. Expressing my sentiments in Anglo-Saxon ‘She could put her shoes under my bed any time and be welcome.’ Her pep and life seem to overwhelm me and I have a desire to be with her even though I know that is impossible.” Young people had learned through the movies, they said, how to feel disappointed by their own looks, gazing in the mirror with dissatisfaction after an evening spent staring at the magical faces of Garbo or Valentino. They had learned how to behave in restaurants and nightclubs, how to deploy their sex appeal, how to pet. “The technique of making love to a girl received considerable of my attention,” writes one earnest young man. “It was directly through the movies that I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on her mouth, in a close cuddle.”

  One of the plays about modern marriage that Lyle starred in was showing at this theater in St. Louis in 1930. Note that a movie called Free Love was playing next door. Just as on Broadway, which acquired the nickname the Great White Way because its theater marquees were lit with so many electric bulbs, theaters in smaller cities bejeweled themselves with thousands of lights.

  In the 1920s, plays of the sort my father was doing in the small towns and cities of the Midwest made an impression, too. They brought news of the modern. Sometimes the titles—Up in Mabel’s Room, Why Wives Go Wrong, Compromising Sally—made the plays sound racier than they were. Tent show managers might put a play with such a title on for just one night—the last night of the run—allowing them to promote it all week and, as the theater historian William Slout notes, giving “the audience a year to get over the disappointment of finding nothing in the play to equal the shocking title.” Still, even that was something new: the idea that small-town theatergoers of both sexes would pride themselves on seeing a show with a risqué title. And though the plays may not have been great—comparatively few survive in published form to judge—contemporary reviews make it clear that some did give a brisk airing to questions of love, sex, and the new morality.

  A number of them, for instance, dealt forthrightly with the challenges of marriage for young couples—a subject of considerable interest, given the rash of young marriages. Jazz babies, many commentators worried, and with some reason, made difficult transitions to married life. They had been accustomed to a level of fun and freedom in their lives before marriage that previous generations, particularly of young women, had not. Wives often expected a higher standard of living than their husbands, and like the flapper wife in the popular novel of that name, longed for expensive face creams and beaded bags and speedy little roadsters when their husbands wanted them saving their pennies for a rump roast on Sundays. Moreover, expectations of marriage itself were higher. Marriage was alluring in theory, but in reality it could also be trying, especially for the young. Sex was now supposed to be a rewarding part of marriage for both partners; and movies had raised the stakes on erotic bliss. At the same time, husbands and wives were supposed to be friends, sharing an idealized intimacy as equals.

  So a play like New Toys, which Lyle acted in with Bessie Robbins, struck a chord. New Toys was about “marriageitis,” according to the Sheridan, Wyoming, Post-Enterprise. And “despite its domesticity, its aroma of cooking meals and crumbs on the carpet,” it was “swift-moving and vivid,” because it was “a cross-section of the turbulent second year of any young couple’s married life. Will and Ruth have reached the stage where the rose of their romance is showing pale gray edges, where she sighs for a career, and he for adventure. His untidiness has begun to annoy her while he has a husbandly intolerance of cosmetics and ambition.” The idea of newlyweds whose love is put to the test by money woes and the wife’s ambition for the finer, funner things was a recurrent theme in these marriage plays, with the frequent motif of the wife “vamping” her husband or deploying baby talk to exact more cash or shimmy out of housework duties.

  Some of the most popular touring plays punctured religious sanctimony and double standards. They both reflected and promoted the distaste for moral righteousness that characterized the liberal politics of the era, especially among the otherwise fairly apolitical young. Take a play like Saintly Hypocrites and Honest Sinners, which Lyle performed in several times with different companies, for it was widely and frequently produced. The play tells the story of a young minister newly ensconced at a church that is dominated by a man named Deacon Stromberg, who bullies the congregation with his supposed righteousness but turns out to be a double-crossing mortgage lender and a lecher. Saintly Hypocrites and Honest Sinners played, wrote one newspaper reviewer, like “an illustrated sermon against narrow-mindedness and bigotry. You sit in the audience and place the characters portrayed in your own church or your own neighborhood. You’ll say to yourself, that’s the way so-and-so acts.” Reviewers and audiences loved this particular sermon. It was bracing to see the young minister’s happy-go-lucky brother, “who carried his religion in his heart rather than on the lapel of his coat,” treated as the hero of the piece, and to see young people portrayed as more humane and authentic in their misbehavior than their elders were in their sanctimony. A decade or two earlier, that would have been an unacceptable message for small-town American audiences, but by the early 1920s, they were lapping it up.

  Then there were plays like Flaming Youth and Our Dancing Mothers that specifically offered audiences a glimpse of life among the gin-splashed fast set, “up-to-the-minute” stories about “the jazzy proclivities of the so-called best people,” as an ad for a play Lyle did in Oklahoma City promised. There was Charm, which introduced the audiences to the vogue of learning charisma by means of a self-help book. There were crime stories that schooled audiences in the slang they’d need to know for all the gangster movies to come. (Reviewers of these plays would carefully set words like “inside job” and “moll” in quotation marks or italics.) There was a big crop of plays, many of which Lyle acted in, centered on women who gave birth outside marriage or, almost as naughty, toyed with the idea. It’s a Wise Child was about a young woman who feigns pregnancy by an unknown lover to get out of her engagement to a respectable elderly man. (According to a paper in Buffalo, where Lyle starred in the play, “It made no concessions whatever to the stork myth.”) Cradle Call was a Hollywood satire cum eugenic comedy about a well-brought-up young woman who decides to help advance the race by arranging to have a baby with a handsome movie actor she has picked out for the purpose: her intelligence plus his looks equal the perfect offspring. The dialogue, claimed the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, was “saturated with suggestiveness, spice, and sexy innuendo.” Little Accident, written by the Greenwich Village bohemian Floyd Dell, ended with the marriage of its erstwhile young lovers and new parents, but got its laughs along the way from knowing references to what one reviewer referred to as “the human gestation period.”

  In some ways, stage actors were more effective ambassadors for the new sophistication than screen actors because they were so much more accessible—glamorous but close at hand. This was particularly true when they were performing with stock companies as Lyle did in the late 1920s in Sioux Falls, Oklahoma City, Oakland, Columbus, Buffalo, Portland (Maine), Memphis, Lincoln, and Dallas—staying anywhere from a few weeks to a few months at a time. Under those circumstances you got to know the locals a bit—at least the matinee girls and stage-door Johnnies who came to all your performances. Lyle would model clothes for local department stores, turn up for charity events, accept invitations to join local lodges. “There’s something homey and neighborly about a stock company,” a writer for The Buffalo News observed. “The actors’ dressing rooms are stampeded after a performance by admiring friends who ‘knew them when’ or come to welcome favorites of a forme
r season. Here to stay several weeks, the players are as eager to make friends as is the audience to peer into the mysteries of the world backstage.”

  But stock actors were also like local representatives for modern, urban values and styles. Lyle’s leading ladies, for instance, were mostly pert flapper types. There was Marion Sterley, who had short dark hair, a formidable nose, and a magnetic gaze. She excelled in roles like Patsy in Patsy Steps Out—“the go-and-get-him flapper in this joyous story of a girl who insists that ‘no’ is not an answer,” as one reviewer enthused. Then there was Mary Kay Bell, a dainty ingenue with a madcap way about her that local papers played up. (She was probably the same Mary Bell who’d adorned her knees with references to the Scopes trial.) They loved it when she was seen “dashing about town in a recently acquired automobile she has christened Sappho.” There was a Kentucky-born actress with the unlikely name Alney Alba who wowed audiences with her leopard coat, her brand-new bob, and her “slender, boyish figure.” (Apparently she wowed Lyle, too, because he asked her to marry him. “I had a marrying complex” back then, he would tell a fan magazine a few years later. “I think I invited more women to marry me than any unattached male in the United States.”) And there was Ione Hutaine, whom the newspapers portrayed as a carefree, bohemian type, a girl who was making up her own identity as she went along, in a way that seemed delightfully strange and new at the time. She’d been born Ione Hull, but she “just couldn’t vibrate to it,” as a reporter for a Buffalo paper put it. Then she took up the study of numerology. “She’d go about through the streets in the trolleys, trying to pick a name that would suit her personality. She went to bed exhausted one night, and in the morning Hutaine frolicked through her mind. Hutaine. It was perfect. Then she took her numerological chart and sure enough it clicked.”

  Lyle, too, promoted some cutting-edge tastes. His favorite reading matter, he told interviewers, was The American Mercury, the satirical magazine edited by H. L. Mencken. His favorite expression was “Hi, kid.” His “favorite pet” was “an animal cracker.” When he was asked to choose the winner of a beauty contest in Oklahoma City, he said, he went with the one whose photograph showed her to be of what he called “the modern type of beauty,” a young woman with a simple, boyish coiffure and a small frame. “All the girls are queens, however,” he added gallantly.

  He frequently pronounced himself a great fan of long-distance motoring and of aviation. In the summer of 1927, he was invited by a high school French teacher he’d been seeing to accompany her and her class on a trip to Europe, where he hoped to find work on the London stage. The London stage had no use for an actor from the American Midwest at that moment; it had plenty of actors of its own. But Lyle wasn’t due to sail home on the Leviathan till August, so he found a room in London (at a hotel that charged extra for “dogs, electric lights and electric iron”), and went to plays at the Palladium, the London Hippodrome, and the Haymarket. One afternoon he made the trip from London to Paris on Imperial Airways, the first commercial aviation company in Britain, then only three years old. Regularly scheduled commercial flights for passengers were still a novelty in the late 1920s and would remain so until after World War II. The Imperial Airways brochure promised that “air stewards”—short young men or teenagers, since the confines were tight on these biplanes—would “point out places of interest en route, attend to the comfort of passengers and serve light refreshments from the buffet.” Lyle kept the buffet menu, which offered a choice of “whiskey, brandy, soda, lager, ginger ale, lemonade or lemon squash,” along with “plain or cheese biscuits.” The cloud cover had been thick over the Channel and the pilot had flown below it, so low that Lyle could see people walking about on the decks of ships. Though he stayed in Paris long enough to sample the delights of the Folies Bergère, the Moulin Rouge, and the Opéra, the flight thrilled him more than any of them. “Despite Lindbergh,” a newspaper interviewer quoted Lyle a few years later, “he believes Europe is outstripping us in passenger planes and safety flying.” He is “an ardent believer in aviation.” In Memphis, he told one of the local papers, he and his leading lady Marion Sterley liked to “sneak away to an airport and enjoy a spin in the clouds,” courtesy of a local pilot. Lyle was photographed in a white suit with goggles and leather aviator cap atop his head, Marion standing nearby in a sporty knee-length skirt and high-heeled T-strap shoes. “Nothing beats an airplane ride for thrills, for an outing to take one’s mind off his or her cares and to freshen the body and mind,” was the composite answer of the two.

  But Lyle was not quite as sophisticated as he sometimes sounded. In 1929, he had a chance to try out in New York for the unsubtly named play Sex, which had landed its author, producer, and star, Mae West, in jail for ten days on an obscenity charge two years earlier. Sex was the story of a madam in Montreal’s red-light district, and its raunchy, burlesque-style humor and working-class slang, combined with its star’s decidedly unflapperesque surfeit of curves, had created a furor among critics, who generally despised it. As one reviewer chided, “West cavorts her own sex about the stage in one of the most reviling exhibits allowed public display.” Still, West biographer Marybeth Hamilton writes, the play was a success with a certain kind of audience. It “became what we would term a ‘cult’ hit, drawing young, self-conscious patrons—Variety called them ‘jaded weisenheimers’—who were bemused by the novelty of real ‘dirt’ on Broadway.” West had made the most of the publicity that came with her jailing—boasting to reporters, for instance, that she had worn silk underpants each day of her incarceration—and two years later, she had enough financial backing to take the show on a road tour, opening in Chicago. That was what Lyle was auditioning for.

  “There was still a lot of corn in me, even though I’d been in the business in little midwestern plays for years,” Lyle would recall many years later. “My agent sent me over to audition. Mae was sitting out in the audience watching us; there were about ten of us up for it—all young guys auditioning for the role of a sailor.” West was sitting with Jim Timony, the Irish Catholic lawyer who had been her lover, became her business manager, and would be her friend all her life—a beefy, big-hearted guy with a cane, as my father remembered him. “She also had a stage manager whom she picked up in England. He had a cockney accent and he knew all Mae’s lines. I was very serious, I needed a job, and there was this guy playing Mae West’s part with a cockney accent! And it’s a seduction scene! I was holding the script, reading the lines, and he had his arm around me because that’s the way it was in the scene. Finally it was down to four or five guys and I was one of them, and I had to play the scene with the great Mae West. Well, it was too much for a guy from Nebraska. I could hardly wait to get the hell out of there!” West was overwhelming, in a way that none of his younger, less powerful, more lithesome leading ladies had been. She ran the show, and she radiated sexual aggression. “My agent wanted to know what happened and I lied to him. I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think she liked me, Mr. Brown. Besides, I gotta go back home to Nebraska; my mother is very sick.’ So I hid out for about a week or so and then I called and said, ‘Well, I’m back in town, Mr. Brown.’ And he said, ‘Oh, gee, you’re too late. Miss West wanted you for the play, but they’re already headed for Chicago.’” Some years later, Lyle would be playing what he called a “seductee” of West’s again, but by then he’d shed enough corn to handle it.

  Hollywood in the 1920s, though, seemed too distant and capricious a prospect for him to take much interest in. Movies were all well and good, but he loved a live audience. When Lyle was twenty, the distinguished silent film actor Henry B. Walthall, who had played big roles in a number of D. W. Griffith movies, including The Birth of a Nation, had come to Omaha to do a show. Ed Henderson and Lyle went to meet him backstage, and they played a round of golf together. Walthall took a shine to Lyle, and insisted on writing him a letter of introduction to the producer Louis B. Mayer. “I have a keen interest in his trying the motion picture field of act
ing,” Walthall wrote of Lyle. “He has had considerable stage experience with stock companies throughout the middle west, is wholesome, and unspoiled by ego.” Lyle did meet with Mayer on a trip to Los Angeles that he took with his grandmother, but nothing came of it.

  In 1928, though, when Lyle was visiting New York, he and the actor Pat O’Brien were hired to do an early sound movie shot on a Warner Brothers soundstage in Brooklyn. Warner Brothers, the pioneering studio when it came to sound, had started producing short movies using a system called Vitaphone, in which records were made to accompany the films, then played on phonographs hooked up to movie projectors in the theaters. There were plenty of skeptics, including the father of motion pictures himself, Thomas Edison: “No, I don’t think the talking moving picture will ever be successful in the United States,” he declared in 1927. “Americans prefer silent drama. They are accustomed to the moving picture as it is and they will never get enthusiastic over any voices being mingled in. Yes, there will be a novelty to it for a little while, but the glitter will soon wear off and the movie fans will cry for silence or a little orchestra music.” The Warner brothers, especially Sam, disagreed. The studio actually made hundreds of Vitaphone shorts between 1926 and 1930, most of them depicting vaudeville acts and jazz and classical concerts.