Interviewed about the prospects for marriage, he said he saw so many separations around him in Hollywood that it was beginning to make him nervous. But he took heart from a few couples he’d known when he was younger—including his father and stepmother. “My father and mother married when they were both in their teens,” he recalled, “and my mother died when I was two months old. When I was two . . . my father married again and he and my stepmother are ideally happy. They’re congenial, they’re really suited to one another and absolutely satisfied with their bargain.” Another union that encouraged him was that of two actors he’d known from his tent show days. “Oddly enough,” theirs was “a combination we’re often told is fatal—the wife is 20 years older than the husband,” he remarked to the reporter. “Yet they are so completely happy that you can’t be with them for ten minutes without feeling something of their pleasure in each other. They’ve always worked together, first on the stage and then in the hotel business, and if anything happens to break up their family, I’ll be a cynic for life.”
Often, these articles elicited letters from women who offered to marry him. When he mentioned in one such piece that he sought a wife who would make people feel comfortable in their home, he received a letter from a young woman who told him, “I love my home, love to have friends in it, and I am a good cook. Please do not think I am taking advantage of your offer because you happen to be a movie star. It doesn’t make any difference to me how much you have. Even if you were broke and placed an ad in the paper stating your ideals and requirements as they are, I would welcome the chance to tell you they are mine also. Just give me a chance and I’ll make you happy.” Lyle’s views on marriage, wrote another, “make me feel as if life is worth struggling through after all, for there must be some men who still think there is a right and wrong.” Another was surprised that a Hollywood actor could sound so “sane and delightful” on the subject of men and women. Lyle felt guilty when he got these letters from women he could only disappoint: his declarations on marriage were heartfelt but theoretical. While some part of him liked the idea of marrying a sweet, small-town girl who knew nothing of acting, increasingly he felt he could never do that. The marriages he most admired were those of the old troupers he’d traveled with—including his father and stepmother—and they were grounded in the camaraderie of a shared love for show business.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, which was less sane than it was delightful, some of the women Lyle went out with were just for show—they were dates to go dancing with, illuminated by the flashbulbs of roving photographers. Some were genuine flings. Loretta Young, the preternaturally beautiful actress, was in that category. She was sweet and elegant and hardworking, but her life was complicated. In 1935, she’d had a baby daughter out of wedlock with Clark Gable, given her up to an orphanage, then adopted her when the child was a little over a year old. Yet Young was an ardent Catholic and so averse to swearing on the set that she made her coworkers pay a fine each time they let a profanity slip. One day when the naturally profane William Wellman was anticipating a particularly rough day on the set, he told Young he’d need to pay upfront.
Lyle enjoyed hanging out with both Loretta and her sister Sally Blane at their home. He was also quite taken with Alice Faye for a while. She was a platinum-blond band singer who was breaking into the movies, and he loved her voice, a soothing, toffee-smooth alto.
But there were three women he had more serious relationships with in the first half of the 1930s. All three were what he would call characters, and you or I might call them pieces of work. Estelle Taylor was the first. When my mother was alive, my father never talked about any of these women—not around us anyway. But after she died, and people interviewed him about his past, he was a bit more forthcoming. Taylor had been a star in the silent era, and had been married from 1925 to 1930 to the world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. She was born Estelle Boylan, in Wilmington, Delaware, to a working-class family that was mostly Irish and partly Jewish. At fourteen, she won a beauty contest and left home to marry a banker. Four years later, Estelle ditched the husband and moved to New York, where she enrolled in drama school, modeled nude for artists, and danced in the chorus of a couple of Broadway musicals. Transplanted to Hollywood, she also forged a successful acting career, with a special line in wanton exotics. In Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, she played Miriam, the sister of Moses, whose most memorable scene involves a lot of heated stroking of the golden calf just before Moses breaks up the orgy. In the 1926 Don Juan, the first movie to feature a synchronized score and sound effects, she played Lucrezia Borgia. As my father said, she “wasn’t much of an actress,” but she was “beautiful, sexy, attractive.”
There are actresses from the silent era whose appeal is hard to see today: Theda Bara with her chubby cheeks and masklike aura of sexual menace, for instance. There are those who have a classic beauty that would be admired in any era, such as Greta Garbo. And then there are those in between, like Taylor. In photographs today, Taylor has a dated look about her: her lips are bow-shaped and very dark, her eyes are ultra-smoky in that 1920s way, and her eyebrows are plucked to sinuous threads. But you can also see her allure. Her dark hair is lush and wavy; she seems sensual and very comfortable sidling up to her costars, draping herself on them, running her hands over their chests and shoulders and arms.
Taylor actually made a creditable transition to talkies, turning in a poignant performance in the surprisingly fine 1931 film of the Elmer Rice play Street Scene, about two dramatic days in the life of a New York tenement. Taylor plays an emotionally neglected wife and mother (the moments with her sympathetic grown-up daughter, played by an irresistible Sylvia Sidney, are especially tender) who takes up with another man and is killed by her husband. Taylor didn’t stay long in the movie business after that; her heyday was over and she wasn’t the type to be content playing mothers.
As a person, she was, in the word of Dempsey’s biographer, Roger Kahn, “a driving, ambitious, sexually charged woman of the world.” Or, as the champ’s manager said on reading the detective’s report he’d ordered up on her, “Dempsey wasn’t getting no maiden.”
If Dempsey wasn’t, then Lyle, who came next in line and was eight years younger than Taylor, certainly wasn’t. But Lyle got a kick out of Estelle and relied on her savvy about the business. He regarded her as “a fabulous character.” He was drawn to women who would say the kind of outrageous things other people, including himself, were too polite or modest to say. And Taylor had a knack for commanding respect, even obeisance, from men. Dempsey lived with her in a bedroom swathed in silk and taffeta and decorated with dolls. When the sportswriter Paul Gallico saw the champ ensconced in it, he was reminded of a circus tiger “dressed up for the show in strange and humiliating clothes.” She talked Dempsey, who had a good-looking if somewhat rough-hewn profile, into getting a nose job from the same Hollywood surgeon who’d bobbed hers. When Dempsey’s fortunes soured at the beginning of the Depression, she left him in a hurry and ended up with their grand house on Los Feliz Boulevard, plus three of their cars and $40,000 in cash.
In later years, Dempsey mostly referred to her, respectfully, as Miss Taylor. And he sounded wistful about her in his interviews with his biographer, though she’d pretty well cleaned him out. Miss Taylor, on the other hand, enjoyed recounting stories about how she had played Dempsey, how easily she’d tamed the champion of the world. She told Lyle, for example, about a time when Dempsey was courting her and far more smitten with her than she ever would be with him. She had invited him over for supper and had ordered her cook to go out and buy the toughest piece of steak he could find to serve the champ, while she had a tender piece of filet mignon on her plate. Dempsey was chewing and chewing and couldn’t talk for long stretches, while she nibbled delicately at her food and looked at him in feigned puzzlement. She liked putting people off balance like that. You get the impression that she was avenging herself on men. When she ran away
from home in her early teens, perhaps she was fleeing an ugly home life, or sexual abuse. In any case, she relished her ability to make strong men weep—and to tell less strong men, like Lyle, all about it.
Not surprisingly, the liaison didn’t last more than a year. One month, Walter Winchell was proclaiming that “Lyle Talbot and Estelle Taylor were plenty goona-goona,” and the next month their boldfaced names were no longer linked. There was a new woman at Lyle’s side, a countess no less. Dorothy di Frasso was a woman of large appetites and the resources to satisfy them. Flamboyant, fabulously rich, ridiculously well connected in both society and Hollywood circles, di Frasso was in between her most notorious affairs—with Gary Cooper and the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—when she amused herself with Lyle. She had grown up privileged in Watertown, New York, Manhattan, and Palm Beach, a frequent ornament to the society pages. Her father was a wealthy leather merchant turned financier from whom she would one day inherit millions of dollars; her brother became the youngest governor of the New York Stock Exchange.
As a young woman, Dorothy had married and divorced a swashbuckling British aviator, and at thirty-five, she made a marriage of mutual convenience to a much older Italian count, Carlo Dentice di Frasso. It was an old story: he wanted the money; she wanted the title. All very amiable, she always told my father, and it did seem to be. With part of her inheritance, she and the count bought and restored an extraordinary sixteenth-century property called the Villa Madama, which had been built by Pope Clement VII and designed by Raphael. The count stayed there, with occasional visits from his wife, until the villa was seized by Mussolini. No thanks, alas, to any anti-Fascist resistance on the part of the merrily amoral di Frassos; they had entertained the dictator and his minions more than once, and indeed “seized” may be a bit of a postwar exaggeration. They may have given Il Duce the villa, just because he expressed an interest. The di Frassos’ friends in Italy were the sort of people who when they woke up and noticed there was a war on were annoyed that their footmen had been called to military service.
On the set of the pre-Code movie Registered Nurse: Lyle with the actress Bebe Daniels (wearing a fur coat over her nurse’s uniform), and the Countess di Frasso.
In 1931, when Gary Cooper made a visit to Europe, he met the Countess di Frasso, who immediately sized up his possibilities. She slept with him, bought him a new wardrobe, introduced him to society, and followed him back to Hollywood. Di Frasso was no beauty—in photographs she looks gimlet-eyed and a bit jowly, like a more matronly Wallis Simpson. But her wealth and generosity endeared her to good-looking men—as, to be fair to them, did her adventurousness and sense of style. When Cooper seemed to be straying—as he would often, and soon definitively—di Frasso arranged to take him on safari to Africa, with stops in Rome and Milan first to buy some new outfits for the cowboy actor turned big-game hunter. (Said one Hollywood wag: “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe on the Countess di Frasso.”)
In Beverly Hills, the countess lived in a house done up by the society decorator Elsie de Wolfe, in a fantasia of chinoiserie, mirrored paneling, and trompe l’oeil bamboo molding, all rendered in a palette rich with jade and aquamarine. There she hosted a who’s who of Hollywood guests. “In spite of her unconventional tastes and overgrown sense of humor,” the writer Adela Rogers St. John observed of her, in the early 1950s, “Dorothy di Frasso was—and is—the most popular of all Hollywood favorites who don’t actually belong in The Movies.” With a gleam in her eye, she amused her many friends with stories about Cooper, and his implacable simplicity. Once, on safari, she said, “The sun was setting. Gary was sitting by himself with an elbow on his knee . . . looking down on the ground. It was one of the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen. ‘Oh darling,’ I said. ‘What are you thinking?’ He looked at me for a minute and said, ‘I’ve been wonderin’ whether I should change my brand of shoe polish.’”
Given how much she liked to spend money, especially on her men, di Frasso was always finagling to turn her $12 million fortune into an even bigger pile. During her stint as the mistress of Bugsy Siegel, the ruthless blue-eyed gangster who charmed Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, di Frasso was especially drawn to bizarre get-richer-quick schemes. In September 1938, she and Siegel set sail on a wooden schooner called the Metha Nelson, headed for the Pacific coast of Central America. They were in search of treasure—rubies, diamonds, and gold doubloons—that was supposed to be buried on an uninhabited island off Costa Rica. The FBI suspected that Siegel was also trying to pick up a fugitive mobster who’d been hiding out somewhere in the vicinity, and may have planted the captain aboard to keep an eye on the proceedings. It was an expedition worthy of The Maltese Falcon, and it ended even more ignominiously for the dramatic personae, with the schooner’s destruction in a gale, a mutiny by two of the crew members who claimed the captain was an anti-Semite who abused them, and no treasure.
Then there was the time that di Frasso and Siegel tried to peddle a new kind of explosive to the Italian military. Siegel had met a couple of chemists who’d developed something they called Atomite, which Siegel was convinced would replace dynamite and make him a fortune. Di Frasso arranged to have the stuff demonstrated at the Villa Madama for a contingent from the Italian military. As it happened, her husband’s other guests at the villa that weekend included Josef Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, and Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe. Siegel evidently had no problem consorting with Italian Fascists, but he did bristle at the Nazi bigwigs. In fact, he told Dorothy he was going to kill “that fat bastard Göring” and “that “dirty Goebbels,” too. “It’s an easy setup the way they’re walking around here.” Di Frasso talked him out of it, fearing what would happen to her count if his Nazi houseguests ended up dead. The explosive test was a bust, and di Frasso and her mug headed for the French Riviera. Thanks to the countess, Siegel had missed out on making the one defensible hit he’d ever have committed.
Di Frasso died in 1954, at sixty-six, in her compartment on a train from Las Vegas. She was found by the actor Clifton Webb, one of a group of friends with whom she was traveling. She was alone, and probably died of a heart attack, but Dorothy being Dorothy, she was wearing a black dress, a mink coat, and several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, including a diamond necklace. None of her schemes had panned out, but she had kept her fortune and lived large.
For Lyle, as for Gary Cooper, she was an odd sort of mother hen—fourteen years his senior, worldlier and wealthier than anyone he’d ever known. A few days before they were to spend vacation together at Hearst Castle, the countess sent him a set of calfskin luggage, buttery-soft and monogrammed. On the appointed day, she picked him up in her Rolls-Royce, with a chauffeur, and a bar in the back. But when they arrived, there was a telegram waiting for Lyle from Warner Brothers ordering him back to the lot. “They told me I had two weeks off,” he complained to Dorothy. “Well,” she said, “nuts to them. You’re not going to go back.” Dorothy urged him to tell Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress and their hostess, to send a message to Warners that the couple hadn’t arrived yet. The studio reps sent a telegram back saying to inform them when they did arrive. This went on for five days or so. The powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons was also at Hearst Castle that week, and di Frasso, who was a friend of hers, said, “Now look, Louella, you haven’t seen him.” “Certainly not,” Parsons assured her, “neither hide nor hair.” The role the studio wanted him back for was completely unsuited to him—a cop, and much older. So Lyle figured he was right to duck out, but normally he’d be too well behaved to do so, and too worried, as many actors are, about never working again. The studio did suspend him without pay for two weeks. Di Frasso complained to The Hollywood Reporter, which obliged her by printing an editorial about studios’ oppressing their contract players. Lyle found it thrilling to be in the hands of a woman too rich and too gutsy to worry much about anything.
She c
ould be kind in a breezy, imperious style. When Lyle’s father, Ed Henderson, and stepmother, Anna, were visiting from Omaha, the countess made sure that her friend Mary Pickford gave a tea in their honor. Pickford invited them back the next day for dinner, and the Hendersons of Omaha were surprised to find themselves hobnobbing with assorted European aristocrats, including a Swedish baroness and a count of some sort. After the meal, cigarettes were passed around on little silver trays, and Ed accepted one to be sociable even though he never smoked. He took a couple of puffs, then set the cigarette down and forgot about it, till he noticed a big hole in the tablecloth. He put an ashtray on top of it, and on the way home confessed to di Frasso, saying he hoped that since there had been no place cards, his hostess wouldn’t know who had done it. Well, she couldn’t set his mind at ease on that front. The truth was that though the seating arrangement looked spontaneous, the guests had all been maneuvered into place according to a seating chart in the kitchen. But it didn’t really matter, she went on: the tablecloth was insured for $1,000. Every morning of the Hendersons’ twenty-six-day visit, di Frasso sent Anna white gardenias, one more for each day.
The Entertainer Page 23