The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Lyle crowding in with chorus girls on the 42nd Street Special, offering “a New Deal in Entertainment!”

  Lyle had met Spike O’Donnell once before, when the bootlegger was visiting the Warners lot and stopped by to watch the filming of the bank robbery sequence in the movie Ladies They Talk About. Maybe he was feeling homesick. In any case, he liked what he saw. Lyle was the lead robber and Spike told him he admired how he’d pulled it off—with style, he said. In the heist scene, Lyle says things like “First one that sets off the alarm, I’ll blow your insides all over the wall” (a line that censorship boards in New York and Pennsylvania, among other regions, tried to have removed). He tells his cohort to go for the big bucks, “never mind the chicken feed.” And he looks sharp; he’s chewing gum in a self-possessed sort of way, and he’s wearing a well-cut suit. Spike liked to project that kind of an image himself. He was a natty dresser, with a penchant for spats and homburgs and polka-dotted bow ties. He was a good-looking guy, too, who prided himself on his gallantry to women and children. He liked to pal around with actors of Irish lineage—like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney—who either didn’t know about or politely overlooked his sociopathic side. In 1931, he even claimed that he himself would be pursuing an acting career in London and that his first role would be a Chicago gangster or else Robin Hood. No acting career materialized, but O’Donnell’s fondness for actors was undiminished.

  As far as Spike O’Donnell was concerned, Lyle, bless his Irish soul, had shown the world what a stylish gangster looked like. O’Donnell approved of him in Ladies They Talk About and had nice things to say about his turn as a dapper bootlegger in an earlier movie, The Purchase Price.

  So when he arrived in Chicago, O’Donnell wanted to do the actor a favor. He turned up unbidden at his hotel room, trailing a couple of bodyguards he introduced as Dingy and Babe. Dingy, O’Donnell told Lyle with a flourish, would be his escort while he was in Chicago. Dingy would take Lyle anywhere he wanted and wouldn’t let anyone bother him. Lyle did not particularly want an escort—if he did, she’d be more along the lines of the chorus girl Toby Wing. He felt he didn’t have much choice in the matter, though. “I got along with Spike fine,” my father told me once, “but being with him was always a little nerve-racking since I knew his brother had been gunned down standing next to him.” As he left, O’Donnell gave my father a little token: a pearl-handled derringer, loaded. A few hours later, he brought his wife and children to the premiere of 42nd Street.

  That night, Glenda Farrell drove with Lyle in the studio car when they went out on the town. Farrell may have “played all sorts of tough dames in gangster movies,” as my father would recall, but that night, “she took one look at Dingy and the gun he had in his pocket and she nearly peed in her pants.” They rode in the car to O’Donnell’s gambling joint, which was whimsically designed to look like the New York Stock Exchange, complete with ticker tape. When the 42nd Street Special left Chicago at midnight, Dingy and Babe were there on the platform, waving good-bye. Lyle unlocked his compartment, relieved that his escorts would soon be back to protecting real gangsters. When he opened his luggage, he found, nestled among his clothes, twenty-four pints of bootleg whiskey wrapped in burlap—a going-away present from his admirer, Spike. He never knew how Spike and Dingy had gotten into the locked compartment, and if the porter knew, he wasn’t telling. Lyle never saw Spike again—though he would have had the possibility, at least, of doing so. O’Donnell was one of the few gangsters of the Capone era to live a long life, make money in legitimate business, and die of natural causes.

  Maybe, in the contrast between the luxury on the train and the penury outside, there was something a little eighteenth-century, a little obscene. Bette Davis thought so in retrospect. “Factories were closed, millions jobless,” she wrote, “and we really should have been publicizing the musical Let ’Em Eat Cake.” But the entertainers were not entirely immune from the ravages of the Depression. In New York, they learned that all studio employees were to take a 50 percent pay cut. And the bank holiday FDR declared on March 5, 1933, meant they couldn’t cash the checks they had.

  My father would not have had the reaction Davis did: he was essentially apolitical at that time and not subtly attuned to historical ironies. Even much later in life, when he had emerged under my mother’s and his children’s influence as a liberal Democrat, he probably wouldn’t have seen the experience in class terms. Then again, with that sort of temperament and outlook, he took the bank holiday and the pay cut in stride, too. “Lyle Talbot, who is young enough to take things as they come, and good-natured enough to laugh when they don’t come,” wrote a reporter for Cinema Digest, “got plenty of laughs out of the experience.” Lyle told the reporter, “There’s plenty of precedent for being stranded. But the orthodox way for an actor to go broke is to sit on his trunk on the station platform. I’ll bet we were the first troupe in history to be stranded in a gold train. If my screen career is ended I think I can do pretty well going through life as a moocher. I’ve had experience. With no checks accepted by the banks, we mooched free entertainment and free meals at all the stops east of Washington. I must have been good. In one hotel, they gave me the plate for a souvenir. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of the waiters tipping the diners.”

  If he did not take the Depression itself as seriously as he might have, he did take seriously his duty to entertain people during it—to look the part for the crowds who came out to catch a glimpse of glamorous show folk. In a film clip of the 42nd Street Special’s send-off from Los Angeles, Lyle comes out on the platform of the train to say a few words. He is wearing a black shawl-collared coat and a white silk scarf. He tells the crowd this is going to be a “grand trip,” and then says, with conspiratorial charm, that he can’t talk too long because actually he’s a stowaway. The Indianapolis News declared him “smooth and nonchalant, the perfect movie man-about-town.”

  At the inauguration, FDR told Americans, “If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other, that we cannot merely take, but we must give as well, that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline, no progress can be made, no leadership become effective.”

  That speech may not have resonated with Lyle all that much. He and the other entertainers aboard the 42nd Street Special were so tired by the time they got to D.C. that several of them slept through long stretches of the inauguration ceremony. Unlike my mother, who was just five at the time but who would remember that speech, admire Roosevelt all her life, and tell her children time and again that there was nothing to fear but fear itself, my father heard more to inspire him in the speech given by the producer in the movie 42nd Street than the one he witnessed in Washington, D.C., that cloudy day in March. He’d heard the 42nd Street speech many times, while hanging around the set, providing the overheated narration for the trailer, watching the movie at premiere after premiere. In it, the producer, Julian Marsh, is exhorting Peggy Sawyer, the young chorus girl who must step in for the injured leading lady:

  “Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend on you. It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can’t fall down. You can’t because your future’s in it, my future’s in it, and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I’m through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.”

  Now these for Lyle were words to live by, words to stir himself up with as he brushed his long black coat, polished his wingtip shoes with a chamois clot
h, stared at the rivulets of rain shimmying down the train windows, caught a glimpse of the crowd outside that seemed to be shivering in unison, with cold and anticipation both. Yes, he thought. Yes. And out he sallied to give and give and give.

  Chapter 6

  MAN ABOUT TOWN

  When Lyle arrived in Hollywood, nobody made him over. He did not get his hairline altered, his nose refashioned, his teeth capped, or his ears pinned back. Hollywood was a pioneer in plastic surgery, and by the early 1930s, it was not uncommon for actors and actresses to undergo some sort of corrective procedure, often on studio orders. The theater world Lyle had grown up in would never have made such demands, but the close-up and the plastic surgeon were natural allies. “Would you like a new nose?” asked a headline in the August 1930 edition of Photoplay magazine. “Over 2,000 of our stars and near-stars have had their faces shuffled and re-assembled.” An article in the September 1932 issue of Modern Screen confided, “In Hollywood today, features are subject to change without notice. For there is a group of reputable and skilled surgeons, who are able to and do perform miracles for the sake of the camera.” Ten years earlier, they couldn’t or wouldn’t have. Now, articles like these even named names, accomplishing the seemingly contradictory task of glorifying Hollywood beauty while demystifying it—yes, these gods and goddesses of the screen were extraordinary, but they weren’t necessarily born that way. If you weren’t, either, maybe there was hope for you yet—or, conversely, some consolation in knowing that extraordinarily good-looking performers had been given artificial advantages you had not. “You’d be surprised,” claimed Photoplay, “at the famous names whose screen beauty is synthetic, who have had nose corrections, new chins, pinned-back ears, facelifts”—a concept the article had to define—“deep acid peels, fat removal and other operations at the hands of these specialists in putting beauty where it isn’t.” Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller was “physically perfect” and “could swing from tree to tree,” but “a screen test revealed a defective lump in his nose,” Modern Screen explained. “Did he give up in despair? No, he went home, talked it over with his wife, and decided to go to Dr. Josef Ginsberg, who has performed over 1,000 operations on the film famous in the last two years.” George Raft had his ears pinned back; Clark Gable, despite the rumors, did not, although he used adhesive for close-ups. Rita Hayworth had her hair dyed and her hairline, which sat a bit low on her forehead, raised with electrolysis.

  Some performers were unveiled as is. They looked about as good as they needed to look. Lyle was one of those.

  True, he wore makeup on screen—everybody did in those days. His was applied most mornings at the studio by Percy Westmore, one of the dynasty of makeup artists who dominated Hollywood. (The patriarch, George Westmore, was a barber from the Isle of Wight, who had immigrated to California and founded the first movie makeup department at Selig studios in 1917. George Westmore fathered twenty children; the six sons who survived to adulthood, an inventive, mercurial, rivalrous bunch, all became Hollywood makeup artists, each at one time heading the department of a major studio.) But that was it, and unlike today’s stars, Lyle did not spend hours with a personal trainer resculpting what nature had given him. Aside from Tarzan and the well-oiled sybarites in biblical epics, male actors didn’t usually appear bare-chested in movies. When Clark Gable took his shirt off in It Happened One Night, and revealed—yowza—no undershirt, it caused a national sensation and a serious dip in undershirt sales. But bare-chestedness being the exception, and gym-wrought fitness not yet the beau ideal, a six-pack was not required. A slim guy who looked good in a suit would do just fine. If he was on the tall side, which my father, at five-feet-eleven, was considered to be (then, as now, the average American male was about five-feet-nine), he got extra credit.

  These aesthetic standards served my father well, since he was no athlete. In those days he golfed if dragooned into it, and played handball occasionally because it was a popular pastime with the Hollywood crowd in the 1930s. He played tennis, but only if summoned by the likes of William Randolph Hearst on weekends at San Simeon, and in that case, you were supposed to let the old man win. Not a problem for Lyle. He bicycled, but in a sort of European city-dweller way—it was just how he got around sometimes, especially on the Warner Brothers lot. We grew up with a good-sized backyard pool, but in all my life, I never saw my father dip so much as a toe in it. He had never learned to swim.

  When Warners launched Lyle, it didn’t even give him a new name. Those were the days of rampant name changes. Ever since the silent era, when Theodosia Goodman, a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati, became Theda Bara, an anagram for “Arab Death,” Hollywood had been rechristening its performers with names that were sexier, classier, less ethnic, or differently ethnic. Exotic and hard-to-trace worked; Ellis Island–ordinary and hard-to-pronounce did not. Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford. Another Lucile—this one with the double-barreled last name of Vasconcellos Langhanke—acted under the much tonier and more concise Mary Astor. Archibald Leach was reborn as Cary Grant. Greta Gustafsson launched her acting career as Greta Garbo. Emanuel Goldenberg, who had been born to a Yiddish-speaking family in Bucharest, achieved fame as the solidly WASPish Edward G. Robinson (even if the role that made his career was Rico, the Italian mobster in Little Caesar).

  But Lyle, like James Cagney and, more surprisingly, Humphrey Bogart, got to keep his own name. It was a name that did the trick. “Lyle” was soft and caressing and a little bit different. French, perhaps? “Talbot” was firm and aristocratic; it started and then snapped shut with the same consonant, like a bedroom door clicking closed. Of course, they had to drop that silly s from “Lysle,” the spelling he sometimes used during his theatrical career. But it was silent anyway, so Lyle could hardly have missed it. In fact, what happened to Lyle’s name was almost the opposite of what usually happened to actors’ names: he kept his real one, but studio publicity and the resulting press claimed he had not. That was because they preferred the story that was almost true—which was that his real name was Lyle Hollywood. Convinced that no one in Hollywood would believe it, the young actor had changed it. Of course, Hollywood was a family name. It had been his grandmother’s maiden name—and it was his grandmother, after all, who had raised him. But Talbot was her married name, and though she was widowed when she kidnapped and adopted Lyle, Talbot was the last name she gave him. (Henderson, his father’s last name, was never an option while his grandmother was around.) His young parents had not bothered to give Lyle a middle name, but now, if someone asked him for one, Lyle took to using Florence, or just the letter F, after the mother he had never known.

  As it did for any new actor deemed to have star potential, the studio publicity department set out to craft a persona for Lyle—a collection of alluring biographical details that accreted into a story the public would, with any luck, respond to. A persona worked best if it borrowed liberally from the facts, just as lies are usually easier to stick to if they’re plausible. Newly signed performers were always asked to fill out a questionnaire about where they’d been raised and what they did for fun, about their fathers and mothers, their first jobs, their phobias, and—this was a popular one during the Depression—their “pet economies” (cheap socks, bologna sandwiches). Then the studio PR department would write up a biography based—though sometimes quite loosely—on the answers, and these sketches would go out to the fan magazines, the wire services, the newspapers, and the trade press. “The studio bio was all a game,” writes the film scholar Jeanine Basinger, “a story-telling game, a shrewd tool that helped suggest to fans how to see the star.” It was never comprehensive, it burnished and embellished with impunity, but it had a relationship with the truth.

  The 1930s marked a peculiar era in the history of movie publicity because it combined old-fashioned, shameless ballyhoo that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Walter Savidge carnival with more subtle attempts at lodging particular movies and their stars in the pu
blic’s mind. A film yearbook aimed at theater owners proposed that for showings of horror movies like Dracula and Frankenstein, they should have a nurse conspicuously in attendance, supposedly to attend to any viewers who might be overcome, along with a shill in the audience who would faint and have to be taken away by ambulance. The promotional materials that studios sent out to film exhibitors were often full of such brash, corny-sounding ideas, some of which were put into practice. For a movie called Murder in the Clouds, an aviation-themed thriller in which Lyle starred as a daredevil pilot opposite Ann Dvorak, the glossy promotional guide produced by the studio suggested that theater managers could: organize a parade of kids lofting model airplanes; hide a PA system somewhere in the lobby from which a mysterious voice would issue saying, “Watch it, folks! Look up! There’s been a murder in the clouds!”; pay for a plane to hover overhead, since people still “look up at an airplane” circling; hire two small boys with “leather-lungs” to yell across the street at each other about the swell movie they’re going to see that night. “The lads take a trip around the block, and start same spiel again for new passersby. Stunt doesn’t look like a plant”—if they say so—“and the exhibitor who used it swears by it.” But in the same years, studio publicity people were also crafting more subtle stories about actors and actresses, incorporating calculated glimpses of their divorces and other private sorrows, their surprising hobbies, their physical flaws, and their “secrets” for correcting them.

  In Lyle’s case, the bones of his story, like those of his face, were good. He’d been a magician and a hypnotist’s assistant—the PR guys loved the story about how he’d had rocks broken on his chest. He’d been a theater actor, which was a favorable calling card in the early 1930s, when the advent of talkies led to a vogue for stage actors. What one film historian calls “Hollywood’s raid on Broadway” began in 1928, and by 1934, Variety was reporting that “Hollywood is now 70% dependent on the stage for its film acting talent in those brackets where performers get screen credit.” Silent actors, many of whom had done their first acting for the cameras, were thought to lack the voice training and requisite timbre to make it in talkies. They’d have to study voice or give up. Even a middle American newspaper like the Wayne, Nebraska, Herald had gotten with the program, noting in an article about Lyle, “The days of picking a nicely profiled youngster off the streets and training him or her to register a few emotions are at an end—voice control and stage experience are necessary.” This didn’t turn out to be strictly true. Lots of silent actors did make the transition successfully, but those who failed to do so, like the heartthrob John Gilbert, became legendary for it. Stage actors were definitely garnering more than their share of love in the Hollywood of the early 1930s. One of the studio bios that Warner Brothers compounded for Lyle boasted that “Talbot is a product of the stage. He was practically born on it, his mother and father both being on the stage. He has never known anything else.”